Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [150]
In fact, Hughes was displeased with the entire cabinet selection process. “Not one of the Nixon appointees was given to me for consideration and none such nominee was made in my behalf with my approval,” he continued. “I consider this shocking in view of my involvement and dependency upon this Administration. Now to top it off, a new AEC Commissioner has been appointed without any information to me in advance.”
As if that was not sufficiently outrageous, the president was about to reshape the Supreme Court, again without consulting Hughes. “[T]he new Supreme Court Justice to replace Fortas could be the most urgent item before us with the TWA suit coming up,” Hughes wrote Maheu. “You know I have been disappointed in the very meager voice I have had in the consideration of various opointees for cabinet and other lesser administrative posts.…
“You remember I told you the sky was the limit in campaign contributions and I really expected, as the result, to have some small chance to propose a few people for consideration for these positions in government, all of which were re-selected as a part of the new incoming administration.
“So, please, please, Bob, let us have some small voice in the selection of the new justice.”
Nixon’s failure to clear his government with Hughes should have prepared the recluse for the next blow, but it caught him by surprise.
“Jesus what next!” he wrote in a fevered scrawl. “The news just announced that now Nixon is going to buy $10,000,000,000 (billion) worth of long range conventional manned bombers.
“Bob, that means Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, Lockheed, or Convair—nothing for us at all.”
Part of the new military budget was going to someone other than Hughes, and while he became a top-ten defense contractor for the first time under Nixon, having to share the Pentagon with other corporations left him shaken.
“When Nixon ran for President I told you I wanted to go just as far as necessary to have some voice in the new administration,” he concluded in bleak despair, “but I just have no assurance at all as to what the future holds.”
The new president was turning out to be something of a disappointment. And the real shock was yet to come.
Hughes, in fact, had grown quite disillusioned with Nixon long before most of the nation. Not over Cambodia or Kent State, not over Vietnam or the Christmas bombing, certainly not because he knew that Nixon was, of course, a crook. No, Howard Hughes was appalled by Nixon’s first major act of statesmanship.
In March 1969, less than two months after the inauguration, Hughes expressed his pained disappointment in the new president.
“The news just reported that Nixon will go ahead with the ABM,” he wrote Maheu, full of dismay. “Bob, this is an awful mistake. It would perhaps be to my best interest selfishly to do nothing and let the system proceed, but it is a ghastly mistake for the country and for Nixon, whom I want to grow in stature.”
Hughes voiced his sad disillusion in the high moral tones of a James Reston or a Walter Lippmann, without mentioning his true objection to the antiballistic missile system.
Building the ABM meant big money for Hughes the defense contractor, but it also meant more big bomb blasts in Nevada, the nuclear nightmare Hughes thought had ended with the election of a man who “knows the facts of life.”
One month later, Hughes’s disappointment turned to shocked outrage when White House communications director Herb Klein made a speech in Las Vegas backing the nuclear tests.
“Who is this bastard Klein?” Hughes demanded. “I am really seriously worried about the Nixon administration’s apparent intention of turning loose all the expensive forces of the government publicity machine to bring public opinion into an attitude favoring the test program.
“This is shocking, Bob,” he continued. “I always have assumed that you had the Nixon administration committed to our side. It is urgent that something be done to bring this Nixon Nuclear Test Campaign to your well known screeching