Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [180]
Hughes betrayed no fear to Maheu. He saw the chaos Maheu had described as a challenge, an opportunity:
“If this report is even partially accurate, boy, they need a saviour down there like the poor bastards in the Middle East never needed when they were in trouble.”
While Maheu tried to arouse Hughes’s fear of blacks, the Mormons tried to arouse his fears of Maheu.
“It seems to me,” one of his nursemaids suggested, “that asking Bob about leaving here is like a bird asking how to get out of his cage so he can fly away.”
Hughes hardly needed the warning. When the planning for the exodus began, Robert Maheu was already in exile. He did not know why he was in exile. Hughes would not tell him.
He had kept Maheu away from Las Vegas ever since his unauthorized attendance at the Nixon dinner in August by giving him one mission after another that took him from Seattle to Vancouver to Dallas to Washington to New York to Los Angeles. Hughes did not try to conceal his own travel plans. In fact, he conferred with Maheu about the getaway by long-distance all the while. What Hughes did not reveal was that he intended to keep Maheu out of town until after he had made his escape.
After more than a month of this mysterious exile, more than a bit worried about what plot Hughes might be hatching, Maheu threatened to return. With or without Hughes’s permission.
“Howard, now that all the reasons for which I must stay away from Las Vegas have faded into the dust of oblivion, will you please let me return,” he pleaded. “There is an occasion taking place involving my immediate family which makes my presence mandatory. I intend to be there whatever the consequences may be, and however disastrously it may affect my career. It would make it so much more pleasant, therefore, for me to be there with your approval.”
Maheu’s threatened insubordination forced Hughes to take off the wraps. He finally told Maheu why he was in exile. He had been banished before he could wrest control of the empire from Hughes.
“I am very sure you are well aware of the fact that my reason for asking you to remain away from Las Vegas at this time is in some way related to the position of over-powering dominance to which you have climbed in the organizational structure of my business affairs,” he wrote.
“Bob, I have no way of knowing, or even estimating accurately the extent to which you have dominated just about everybody associated with me.
“You have succeeded in achieving a position of such strength that I just dont know how many of my people are afraid to disclose information to me or how much information is being withheld.”
Hughes had long feared that Maheu was secretly seizing control. Now, encouraged in his paranoia by the whispering Mormons, he was certain that Maheu had in fact taken over completely and was actually planning a coup.
“You have built an ‘organization-within-an-organization’ here in Nevada,” he continued, hurling the ultimate accusation, “the very thing you have so vehemently denied, and the very thing that Dietrich did to me, and which you, yourself, so violently criticized.
“In fact, I have been told that the ‘blueprints have already been cut’ for a mass exodus of the guts of this organization exactly along the lines followed by Ramo and Wooldridge.”
Once more his trusted alter ego was about to betray him, as Dietrich had. Once more his key men were about to defect, to set up a rival operation, as had the top scientists of the Hughes Aircraft Company. It was the same story all over again—treachery by trusted insiders, undermining him from within.
“Bob, this capsulized organization-within-an-organization, being easily removable and capable of setting up shop elsewhere, this is a terrifying thing, and it worries me a great deal,” added Hughes with a sick sense of déjà vu.
“I dont say you did it deliberately. I dont even say you were aware of its subtle growth.
“I dont know exactly to what extent it exists. But whatever that extent may be, it is very dangerous to me.
“Under