Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [153]
Maheu reported the entire illegal scheme to Hughes:
“As I am sure you know the derivative actions were filed today in Deleware. Tomorrow there will be further actions filed against the 13 Directors in Federal court in New York. The unions will serve notice tomorrow reflecting their complete disgust, and certain machinery has been put into motion to depress the stock so that the Directors who voted against the deal will recognize their individual obligations to the fullest extent.”
The campaign of stock fraud and intimidation was a complete success. The opposition capitulated. And when Hughes finally closed the deal, a loophole in the agreement allowed him to pay not the twenty-two dollars a share promised, but only $8.75.
He had cheated the Air West stockholders of nearly $60 million. And now the airline was finally his, courtesy of Richard Nixon. (As promised July 4 in the message from Rebozo, the CAB approved the takeover July 15, and the president made it final July 21.)
Almost two weeks went by, however, with no response from Nixon on the ABM. Hughes was getting impatient.
“I am disappointed because, since I have no report of the President’s reaction to the paper I wrote, I can only assume he did not ask anybody to read it,” Hughes complained, hardly satisfied with an airline.
“Bob, I have given you unlimited resources financially with which to operate, and I have given you absolute freedom to choose anybody under the sun you might wish to assist you.
“Since I consider I have given you carte blanche, financially, executively. and every other way, I think I am entitled to receive some kind of a report, setting forth in specific terms just what has happened and by whom it was done, and what is being attempted at this time and what is expected to result from same.
“I didn’t spend about 6 hours on that paper just to have it wind up in somebody’s waste basket. If the President could not be bothered to consider this matter, it seems to me it should have been pursued thru somebody else.”
But the president had not forgotten about Hughes. He had asked somebody to read the ABM memo—Henry Kissinger. On July 16, 1969, the same day that the Apollo 11 astronauts blasted off for man’s first walk on the moon, Nixon huddled with his national security adviser. That morning in the Oval Office, just before they shared the historic moment watching the launch together on television, the president told Kissinger to go see Hughes.
Kissinger returned to his White House basement office angry and incredulous. He told his deputy, Alexander Haig, that Nixon had just ordered him to give the billionaire a private top-secret briefing, not only on the ABM but also on the general strategic threat, on the balance of nuclear power—and, as a final outrage, to solicit Hughes’s own views on defense policy.
Although he regularly briefed his own patron, Nelson Rockefeller (who secretly slipped him $50,000 just before he joined the White House staff), Kissinger always bristled at having to service Nixon’s patrons, and he had never before been asked to do anything remotely like this. The Hughes mission really had Kissinger fuming.
“Henry was not particularly impressed with the thought of it,” Haig later recalled. “He was rather cynical about it, somewhat skeptical, wondered whether this sort of activity was the right thing to do.” Others who overheard Kissinger’s tirade say he questioned both the president’s motives and his mental health.
“He’s out of his mind,” yelled Kissinger. “He can’t sell this! I can’t hold private peace talks with Howard Hughes.”
Haig himself seemed to find it all amusing. He emerged from Kissinger’s office waving the Hughes memo in his hand, and told Larry Lynn, a senior aide who handled the ABM, “Guess what’s up now—Howard Hughes is in the act!