Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [174]
Instead, as the relentless countdown continued, the sleepless recluse pushed frantically to reach Richard Nixon, calling Maheu all night and into the predawn hours with pleas to stave off nuclear devastation.
“Please give me some idea of what you plan to do in a last minute attempt to obtain some kind of a temporary reprieve in order to permit a direct request from me to the President asking for an audience to be granted you,” he scribbled at four A.M. on the morning of the scheduled blast.
“It seems to me that, after 64 years of devotion to this country, I should be entitled to a 10 minute audience before the President.”
At 4:45 A.M., Hughes sent Maheu another message for Nixon.
“I wish you would tell the man that in 64 years as a citizen of this country I have not ever once asked the President to do or not do anything whatsoever,” he wrote, apparently forgetting that just in the last few months he had asked Nixon to scuttle the ABM, submit his cabinet appointments for approval, and move all bomb tests to Alaska.
“I have not even ever sent a message of any kind to any President, except the one plea to Pres. Johnson to stop the other blast here.
“Please say a three day delay will satisfy me, and forget the personal audience. It seems to me that if he grants this and I am satisfied, it would be 3 days well spent. If he will grant the 3 days and his answer is still ‘no’, I will not resist further, and will feel that I have been treated right.”
At 5:15 A.M., in a final appeal, Hughes scrawled numbered points for Maheu to make to Nixon:
“1—Cheap price to pay to satisfy me.
“2—I will be content with the delay, even tho the decision thereafter is still go.
“3—I cannot believe the pres. would be criticized for granting this plea even if it should be established at some later date that the purpose was solely to satisfy one important local citizen and avoid causing him to move elsewhere and destroy all of his extensive plans.
“4—Certainly there can be no real deficit from a few days delay except a small increment of cost which I will gladly bear.”
It was all in vain. None of the desperate pleas Hughes scribbled through the night ever reached Nixon. It is unlikely that the president had any real concept of the billionaire’s terror and outrage, much less that to Hughes the bomb test was the test of their entire relationship.
At 7:30 on the morning of September 16, 1969, the blast went off on schedule. Three distinct shock waves rippled through Las Vegas. The penthouse swayed for a full minute. But the real impact of the explosion would not be felt for years. And then it would shake the entire nation.
Its immediate impact was quite evident as Hughes grabbed his yellow legal pad half an hour later.
“This test produced more ground motion than either of the other two,” he wrote in a hand that still showed the full effect of the blast.
“I want you to contact Nixon-thru-Rebozo and say that I am really disappointed in this matter because I feel I was misled.
“Anyway, Bob, I have had it. I want you to try today, while we are still in the position of having been turned down, to make an all-out effort to get an agreement that they will not test any more megaton, or ‘in name only’ bombs of the same general magnitude.
“If they reject this, I am going to announce publicly my withdrawal from Nevada, and the abandonment of all my future plans here. I am going to state my extreme regret and explain why.”
At the bottom of the page Hughes scrawled, “Rebozo for Nix only.” It was a cryptic warning that the president and his confidant would not comprehend. Not until it was too late.
In the months that followed, Howard Hughes, assured by Maheu that the nuclear nightmare was now over, settled down to the routine business of buying the rest of Las Vegas.
His Monopoly game had been stalled for almost two years, ever since Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark blocked the Stardust deal in April 1968, threatening antitrust action. Hughes