Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [177]
“They truly cannot understand why you will not meet with the President himself.”
But Hughes could not leave his penthouse seclusion.
Perhaps if Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon had been able to meet they could have worked out the president’s “Big Play” and the billionaire’s “Big Caper,” made the big deal their agents could not make for them. Perhaps they could have consummated their long, arm’s-length affair, thus avoiding national cataclysm.
But it was not to be. The Camp David summit died stillborn, and with it the million-dollar deal.
At eleven A.M. on Thursday, March 26, 1970, the day before Good Friday, the Easter bombing went forward, the six hundredth nuclear explosion since the beginning of the atomic age, and one of the biggest. Once more the tremors rippled through Las Vegas and shook the naked old man whose hidden dealings with the president were to be the real fallout of the blast.
Once again Hughes grabbed a yellow legal pad and, in one last futile gesture, scrawled a threat to leave the country, taking all his assets with him.
“Bob,” he wrote, “I dont know where to begin.
“You said the president couldnt care less whether I remain in Nevada.
“This may well be true in the literal sense.
“However, bear in mind that, if I pull up stakes here, I am not going to some neighboring state.
“I am going to move the largest part of all of my activities to some location which will not be in the U.S.
“The president already has the young, the black, and the poor against him. Maybe he will be indifferent if the richest man in the country also finds the situation in the U.S. un-livable, and because of the country’s intense preoccupation with the military.
“I know one thing:
“There is at present a violent feeling in this country against all the experimental activities of the military.…
“So, I just don’t know how the public would react to a frank statement by the wealthiest man in the U.S. that he, also, considered he was being elbowed aside by the military.
“I know one thing: It would, or, at least, it could be a hell of a newspaper story.”
Before the year was out, Hughes would make good on his threat. He would leave the United States forever. And his departure would set in motion a chain of events that would, indeed, become a hell of a newspaper story. One that came under the headline “WATERGATE.”
Richard Nixon, in bombing Howard Hughes, had unwittingly brought about his own destruction as surely as if the White House had been ground zero.
13 Exodus
This was not just another move. It was going to be, it had to be, the Great Escape.
Alone in his darkened bedroom, Howard Hughes plotted each step as if he were about to break out of the most tightly guarded cellblock on Alcatraz rather than his own penthouse at the Desert Inn.
Once more he reread the “Exit Plan.”
“The exit plan is to divert the penthouse security guard, enter the elevator and, by using a key, proceed non-stop to the first floor,” his Mormons had written, refining days of tense scheming to a one-page master plan.
“At a signal from us about 20–30 min. before leaving this floor, Hooper’s men will place a screen across the path that leads from the elevators to the front desk-casino area. We make a left-hand turn and proceed to the side door of the building.”
So far so good. Out of his cell, past the guard, down the elevator, and out the door before anybody suspected a thing. Now for the big getaway.
“We then pass through the side door, walk 50 feet or so towards the west and a limousine or conveyance will be waiting for us there,” the Exit Plan continued. “This is the point at which we have little control over people who are walking from hotel to hotel or are walking from the parking lot to the hotel or from people just windowshopping in front of this building.”
Wait. What was this? Suddenly exposed to the outside world, for fifty unpredictable feet, with “little control.” All the warning signs started to flash