Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [171]
“So, it must have been in an effort to irritate me. If that was the purpose, you succeeded.”
Having vented his spleen, Hughes got back to the bomb, and once more ordered Maheu to Washington.
“Anyway, Bob, whatever is done, and I have not asked you to tell anybody he was a lyar, whatever is done, I will feel better about it if you do it from Washington,” he insisted. “Please proceed there without delay.”
Further resistance was futile. Maheu had Danner contact Rebozo, who suggested that they work things out at the ambassadorial level, inviting the Hughes emissaries to the compound he shared with the president in Key Biscayne.
By the next morning, as Maheu prepared to leave for the Florida White House, Hughes had discovered the full dimensions of his nuclear peril. This was not merely another blast but a full-blown holocaust.
“Bob,” he wrote in a wildly shaken scrawl, “I have been up all nite and am very anxious to know that you are on the way before I go to sleep.
“This test is a megaton for all practical purposes,” he continued in words writ large with fear, anger, and exhaustion, “so I cannot see how you can view this test as being other than a complete defeat and a complete waste of all your efforts.
“The difference between 900,000 and a million is so slight it simply falls under the heading of the degree of pregnancy. I just cannot see any difference.”
Maheu left Vancouver, stopping in Las Vegas to pick up Danner, and they flew out to Miami together in a private Hughes jet. Danner had with him a zippered case. Inside was a manila envelope, containing $50,000, ten bundles of hundred-dollar bills he had retrieved from the cashier’s cage at the Frontier casino earlier that morning. It was the money Maheu had secured for Nixon back in 1968, now finally to be delivered as the first half of the $100,000 Hughes had promised the president.
Early on the evening of September 11, the two envoys arrived in Miami. Before driving out to Key Biscayne, Maheu checked in with the penthouse. Hughes was in a frenzy.
“I am more grateful than I can tell you that you are there,” he wrote in a memo for his Mormons to read to Maheu.
“Bob, I dont think you have any idea how I feel about this thing,” he continued in a scrawl that made it quite clear.
“When you first told me about it [the blast], God knows I felt bad enough, but I naturally assumed it was in the so-called ‘Low intermediate yield’ range.
“I had no faintest idea that this bomb was a huge unit comparable in every way to the first two large explosions we fought so bitterly.
“I just cannot understand how under the sun the AEC could have imagined that we would be so utterly stupid and naive as to consider this explosion as being within the limits we had requested to be followed, merely because it may technically be under one full megaton.”
The treaty had been broken. And the president was responsible. Hughes wanted that message delivered in no uncertain terms.
“I wish you would tell Mr. Nixon thru Mr. Rebozo that this is the most outrageous and shocking breach of faith and attempted deception I ever heard of any highly reputed government like the United States attempting to perpetrate against one of their own citizens,” he wrote, furious now that the full extent of Nixon’s betrayal hit him.
“If this is the way the U.S. pays off one of its own citizens, who has given a lifetime of service toward the betterment of the defense system, and contributed countless important advances, plus a half billion dollars in taxes, then how can anyone expect foreign governments to believe our promises.
“I have much more to say,” Hughes concluded, “but will let you get started.”
Maheu absorbed the diatribe, then went directly with Danner to see Rebozo. The president’s friend gave his two guests a guided tour of his newly remodeled ranch house, especially eager to show off an ice-making machine that spewed cubes from the refrigerator door.
Danner handed Rebozo the manila envelope, saying, “Here’s the $50,000, first installment.” The Cuban opened the envelope, shook out the bundles