Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [197]
Nixon never got over that 1960 defeat. His narrow loss to JFK still haunted him, and he still blamed that loss on the Hughes “loan” scandal—the never-repaid $205,000 his brother had received from the billionaire. Yet Nixon had taken more Hughes money. A cursed bundle of hundred-dollar bills. And now, with the Hughes empire split by a bitter power struggle, Nixon was certain his terrible guilty secret was about to come spilling out.
That very morning, before leaving the western White House, the president had seen a Los Angeles Times report that Maheu planned to subpoena his former boss for a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit. Even if the recluse himself failed to appear, secret Hughes memos impounded by the Nevada court were likely to surface. Indeed, the dreaded Jack Anderson already claimed to have seen some.
The more Nixon brooded, the more terrified he grew, and the more he focused on Larry O’Brien. He was getting away with it. The hated leader of the Kennedy gang, the man who had beaten him in 1960 by exploiting the Hughes loan scandal, was himself getting $15,000 a month from the billionaire while he served as unpaid chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon wanted revenge. He wanted to unmask O’Brien as a secret Hughes lobbyist. He wanted to make O’Brien pay as he had paid.
But now, aboard Air Force One, the president was gripped by a darker thought. The terrible fear that O’Brien knew—that he had somehow learned from his hidden masters all about the secret Hughes cash in Bebe’s little tin box.
Nixon could not tell that to Haldeman. He could not say to his chief of staff, “My God, O’Brien must know! We’ve got to find out what he’s found out. We’ve got to get him before he gets me.” Nixon could not say that because Haldeman himself didn’t know. None of the president’s men knew. Only Rebozo shared that secret. So, instead, Nixon ordered Haldeman to get O’Brien.
“We’re going to nail O’Brien on this, one way or the other,” the president told him back in Washington the next day. He called Haldeman into the Oval Office and said, “O’Brien’s not going to get away with it, Bob. We’re going to get proof of his relationship with Hughes—and just what he’s doing for the money.”
It was the beginning of a desperate covert campaign. One that would end with Richard Nixon’s burglars caught looking for Howard Hughes’s secrets inside Larry O’Brien’s office—at the Watergate.
Down in the Bahamas, Hughes was oblivious to the high-stakes intrigue he had unwittingly inspired back in Washington. Indeed, he was oblivious to everything outside his new blacked-out bedroom.
He was finally safe. As safe as a prisoner in solitary confinement, with two armed guards on the penthouse floor of his Paradise Island retreat, one at the elevator, the other behind a locked partition, himself sealed off from Hughes by a second locked partition, but keeping watch on the rest of the hotel through closed-circuit TV cameras, while a third guard patrolled the roof with a vicious attack dog.
But Hughes was no longer entirely his own prisoner. With Maheu out of the picture, his Mormon attendants were firmly in control, determined to keep their boss bedridden and befuddled.
Hughes was completely cut off from the world, thousands of miles from all citadels of his empire, now run by virtual strangers. No longer was he sending secret handwritten memos in sealed envelopes to a trusted regent; indeed he rarely wrote any memos at all. The Mormons controlled all lines of communication. Hughes dictated his messages to them and received all replies through them. And he knew only what they wished him to know.