Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [200]
Puzzled and a bit nervous, Dean turned to the White House gumshoe, Jack Caulfield. A former New York City police detective hired on to handle jobs too dirty to entrust to government agencies—wiretapping newsmen, spying on Teddy Kennedy, keeping watch over the president’s brother—Caulfield failed to find proof of the O’Brien-Hughes connection.
But the street-wise cop did smell trouble. Big trouble. Digging for dirt on O’Brien, he was coming up instead with dirt on Nixon. He tried to warn Dean off the case.
“The revelation that an O’Brien-Mahew relationship exists poses significant hazards in any attempt to make O’Brien accountable to the Hughes retainer,” cautioned Caulfield. “Mahew’s controversial activities and contacts in both Democratic and Republican circles suggests the possibility that forced embarrassment of O’Brien in this matter might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.
“Mayhew apparently forwarded Hughes’s political contributions, personally, to both parties over the last ten years. Former FBI agent Dick Danner has been an aide to Mayhew. Danner professes a friendship with Bebe Rebozo.
“As one gets closer to Mayhew’s dealings, it becomes evident that his tentacles touch many extremely sensitive areas of government, each one of which is fraught with potential for Jack Anderson-type exposure.
“There is a serious risk here for a counter-scandal if we move precipitously.”
Dean was all but ready to bail out entirely when Chuck Colson arrived with the mysterious Bob Bennett in tow. Colson was not about to be frozen out of this intrigue, and his pal Bennett had the inside story on O’Brien.
Dean reported it to Haldeman: “Bennett informs me that there is no doubt about the fact that Larry O’Brien was retained by Howard Hughes. He felt confident that if it was necessary to document the retainer with O’Brien he could get the information through the Hughes people, but it would be with the understanding that the documentation would not be used in a manner that might embarrass Hughes.”
Urged on by Nixon, afraid that Colson would grab all the credit, Haldeman ignored the danger signs and demanded action.
“Once Bennett gets back to you with his final report,” he ordered Dean, “you and Chuck Colson should get together and come up with a way to leak the appropriate information. Frankly, I can’t see any way to handle this without involving Hughes, so the problem of ‘embarrassing’ him seems to be a matter of degree. However, we should keep Bennett and Bebe out of it at all costs.”
But Bennett’s final report was not what the White House expected. Instead of delivering the goods on O’Brien, he returned to Washington from a meeting with the new Hughes command in Los Angeles to suggest a criminal investigation of Robert Maheu.
The O’Brien deal was “straightforward,” said Bennett, and exposing it would only revive the old Nixon scandals. O’Brien probably knew everything that Maheu knew, and Maheu knew everything. It was Maheu who had handled all of Hughes’s political activity, and now he was involved with notorious gangsters. Maheu, not O’Brien, was the real problem.
Bennett’s convoluted monologue left Dean confused. Was he trying to use the White House to get Maheu on behalf of the Mormons, as it seemed on the surface, or was he subtly playing on Nixon’s paranoia: forget about O’Brien, he knows too much.
But Dean had heard enough. He told Haldeman they were “treading in dangerous waters.” And Haldeman was also ready to let the whole matter drop.
Nixon, however, was not. All the president’s men were now queasy about the Hughes probe—even Rebozo seemed nervous—but the president himself only pushed harder. All his worst fears about O’Brien had been confirmed. If O’Brien indeed knew about the Hughes-Nixon dealings, then he certainly had to be neutralized.
“O’Brien’s not going to get away with it,” Nixon once more told Haldeman. Everybody always went after him over any possible Hughes connection—even taking that “cheap shot” at his poor