Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [148]
Now, over breakfast, the three middlemen got down to business. Morgan had taken Danner’s request from Nixon and Rebozo to Maheu, and Maheu had taken it to Hughes. Everything was set. Hughes had approved a $100,000 contribution—$50,000 for the campaign, $50,000 for the candidate. Maheu had secured the cash. Morgan was prepared to make the transfer. Rebozo was ready to take delivery. Yet the meeting at Duke Zeibert’s ended unresolved. No money changed hands.
What followed was a clash of fear and greed, a comic opera of missed connections, with confused intermediaries stumbling over each other while the two prime movers remained offstage.
Rebozo instinctively backed away from Morgan. The more he reflected on their encounter and the more he recalled the impact of the earlier Hughes loan scandal, the more concerned he became about Morgan’s ties to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, the very men who had exposed that transaction and kept Nixon out of the White House in 1960. No, Rebozo would not deal with Morgan, and he was having some second thoughts about Hughes.
Morgan, meanwhile, had also decided he wanted no part of this deal. Willing to play the bagman, he was not about to be left holding the bag. All through their meeting, he kept pressing Rebozo for some formal acknowledgment of the transaction. Rebozo instead kept assuring Morgan that he was extremely close to Nixon. An operator whose clients had a tendency to turn up dead in oil drums or disappear into trash compactors must have a sharp instinct for self-preservation. That instinct told Morgan it would be unwise to pass a wad of cash from a man like Hughes to a man like Nixon without getting a receipt. It was the kind of deal that could go sour.
With Morgan out of the picture, Maheu moved to reassure Rebozo that all the old skeletons would remain in the closet. “I can assure you that right now both candidates are very happy with us,” he reported to Hughes. “In addition to material support, we were able last week to kill a recurrence of publicity pertaining to the Don Nixon loan. Humphrey himself issued the instructions to his people not to use this matter and Nixon knows that Humphrey did so at my request.”
But whatever soothing effect Maheu’s coup accomplished was blown when the ubiquitous John Meier appeared with Donald Nixon in tow and announced that they would pass the Hughes money to Rebozo. Called out from a New York meeting with Danner and John Mitchell to take Meier’s call, Rebozo came back apoplectic. Donald was under strict orders to steer clear of campaign money period, not to mention Hughes money. And to make matters worse, Rebozo confused John Meier with Johnny Meyer, the Hughes fixer from an earlier era who became notorious in the “Spruce Goose” Senate hearings.
The potential for another dangerous Hughes scandal seemed to be growing geometrically. Rebozo felt himself surrounded by skeletons. He decided on the spot to wash his hands of the deal.
Maheu was now left with a bundle of cash, but no one to pass it and no one to receive it. He decided to cut through all the confusion and deliver the money himself, directly to Richard Nixon.
He had already made a formal contribution to Nixon’s campaign, $50,000 in checks passed openly through Governor Laxalt a few weeks before the November election. Now, with the election over, Nixon victorious, and the promised secret cash still undelivered, Maheu once more turned to Laxalt. Early in December they flew together in a private Hughes jet to Palm Springs, where Nixon was due to attend a Republican governors’ conference. Laxalt, however, failed to arrange a meeting with the president-elect. Nixon, apparently still