Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [207]
The tape of their June 20 Oval Office conversation was later erased, creating the famous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. But according to Haldeman, it was in this talk—the one some “sinister force” was later so desperate to obliterate—that Nixon himself revealed the Hughes connection to Watergate.
The following account of their meeting is Haldeman’s reconstruction.
“On that DNC break-in, have you heard that anyone in the White House is involved?” Nixon asked his chief of staff.
“No one,” replied Haldeman.
“Well, I’m worried about Colson,” confessed Nixon. “Colson can talk about the president, if he cracks. You know I was on Colson’s tail for months to nail Larry O’Brien on the Hughes deal.”
Nixon feared it was Colson who had triggered the break-in. He had been pushing all his men to get to the bottom of O’Brien’s Hughes connection, and now he seemed not to know which of them had actually sent the burglars into O’Brien’s office at the Watergate. He first thought it was Colson, not Mitchell, apparently because he had conspired most directly with his hatchetman.*
“Colson told me he was going to get the information I wanted one way or the other,” said Nixon. “And that was O’Brien’s office they were bugging, wasn’t it? And who’s behind it? Colson’s boy Hunt. Christ.”
Haldeman wasn’t so sure. “Magruder never even mentioned Colson,” he noted.
“He will,” replied Nixon. “Colson called him and got the whole operation started. Right from the goddamn White House. With Hunt and Liddy sitting in his lap.”
The president was scared. “I hate things like this. We’re not in control. Well, we’ll just have to hang tough. In fact, we better go on the attack.”
*Counting the $205,000 “loaned” to Donald, the cost of Maheu’s covert action to crush the “Dump Nixon” movement in 1956, and unreported campaign contributions, including the “all-out support” Hughes secretly gave Nixon in 1960, Irving’s claim of $400,000 was probably just about right. And nobody knew about most of that money. Except Hughes.
*A second phone was also bugged. It belonged to Spencer Oliver, one of O’Brien’s deputies, whose father happened to work for Robert Bennett and was assigned to the Hughes account. A remarkable coincidence, especially given the fact that Hunt also worked for Bennett, but it seems that this phone was picked by pure chance. Transcripts of that wiretap were passed to both Mitchell and Haldeman but revealed only that a secretary in Oliver’s office had an incredibly active sex life.
*In fact, a Colson aide, Ken Clawson, would later tell Haldeman that Colson had secretly recorded phone calls with Nixon both before and after the break-in, and was using his tapes to blackmail the president. “He’s got Nixon on the floor,” said Clawson. “He’s got on tape just what Nixon said all through the whole Watergate mess.” What makes these still hidden Colson tapes special, of course, is that Nixon did not know he was being recorded.
Epilogue II
The Final Days
Howard Hughes awoke at precisely the same moment that Richard Nixon’s nightmare began.
It was still Friday night, July 16, in Vancouver, Canada, when the Watergate bust went down. At 11:30 the naked billionaire got up out of bed in his new penthouse hideaway at the Bayshore Inn. He made his way from the bed to his Barcalounger, reached for his remote-control instrument, turned on his television, and started to watch a late movie, The Brain That Would Not Die.
He soon switched to a western, Billy the Kid Outlawed, and began picking at a piece of chicken that would take him nearly three hours to get down.
Bored with TV, he called for his Mormons to show him a movie on the screen set up in his bedroom. He watched The Mad Room, followed it with The Silencers, and stayed up all that night, all through the next day, and all through the next night, alternating showings of Shanghai Express and Captain Newman, M.D., before finishing his thirty-four-hour weekend film festival with The World of Suzie Wong and falling asleep at 10:30 Sunday morning.
It would be more than