Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [204]
The press conference over, Hughes settled back to watch another movie, Topaz, shot up four more grains of codeine, then stayed up all night for a fourth and fifth screening of Funeral in Berlin. Finally, at eleven the next morning, he swallowed four blue bombers and fell asleep.
All the while his paranoia over Hughes mounted, the president had been pushing his men to set up a covert intelligence operation for his 1972 reelection campaign.
Nixon already had a secret police force operating out of the White House basement, but that gang, the Plumbers, handled “national security leaks.” What the president now wanted was a team targeted on the Democrats. The failure of his staff to nail Larry O’Brien showed the need for some real professionals.
To lead the new gang, Nixon’s campaign manager, Attorney General John Mitchell, chose a former FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy. A gun fanatic who liked to watch old Nazi propaganda films, Liddy had already made his bones as a Plumber, staging a break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
He reported for work at the Committee for the Re-election of the President on December 8, 1971, the day after Clifford Irving’s book was first announced. And now, as Liddy prepared his espionage plan, the fallout from the Irving caper brought Nixon’s paranoia to full boil.
The billionaire’s bizarre press conference had only focused yet more attention on Irving, on Hughes himself, and on Nixon.
It all came together January 16, 1972, in a headline on the front page of the New York Times: “HUGHES-NIXON TIES DESCRIBED IN BOOK.” The story said that Hughes had told Irving all about his Nixon connection, but gave no details.
A week later the Times revealed that Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general, had secretly investigated the Hughes-Nixon dealings and considered prosecuting Nixon himself, as well as members of his family. That story particularly enraged the president, and he called Bobby “a ruthless little bastard.”
“He wanted to bring criminal charges against my mother!“ exclaimed Nixon, adding that it was typical of the Kennedys.
And that same day, January 24, the equally feared and hated Jack Anderson repeated his allegation that Nixon had received $100,000 from Hughes through Rebozo, this time adding that he had “documentary evidence” to back it up.
Still, nothing happened, and the president maintained his tortured silence about the payoff, waiting once more for the full story to explode. The press and the Kennedys were clearly out to get him again, to ruin him with another Hughes scandal.
And the ammunition they needed might right now be locked inside a huge green safe, sitting in a Las Vegas newspaper office, under an autographed picture of Richard Nixon.
On February 3, the New York Times reported that Maheu’s pal Hank Greenspun—who was also known to be close to Jack Anderson—had two hundred secret Hughes memos, some handwritten by the billionaire himself, giving “precise instructions on approaches to be taken in delicate matters.”
At eleven o’clock the next morning, G. Gordon Liddy presented his espionage plans to John Mitchell in the attorney general’s office. Also at the big meeting were John Dean and Mitchell’s deputy campaign chief, Jeb Stuart Magruder.
They had all been there a week earlier to hear Liddy outline a million-dollar operation code-named “Gemstone,” for which he had already recruited safecrackers, wiremen, call girls, thugs, and professional killers (“twenty-two dead so far,” noted Liddy), a team assembled to carry out his program of kidnapping, blackmail, mugging, bugging, break-ins, and black-bag jobs, all aimed at the president’s political foes.
Mitchell had not approved it. “Gordon, that’s not quite what we had in mind,” said the attorney general. “The money you’re asking for is way out of line. Why don’t you tone it down a little, then we’ll talk again.”
Now Liddy was back. He presented a scaled-down version of the same plan, one that concentrated more on burglaries and wiretaps. It would cost half a million.
Mitchell