Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [212]
He flew off to London, where arrangements had been made with the Rothschilds for a penthouse suite at their posh Inn on the Park Hotel, overlooking Buckingham Palace. By four in the morning, an hour and a half after checking into his new hideout, Hughes had settled back into his familiar routine, picking up where he left off before the earthquake, sitting on his Barcalounger watching a movie, The Deserter.
He had been in London less than two weeks, however, when news from the States sent his spirits soaring. On January 10, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in the TWA case. It was a stunning victory for Hughes. Reversing all lower-court findings, the high court dismissed the case he had lost by default when he refused to appear ten years earlier, and threw out the judgment that with interest now totaled $180 million.
Hughes was ecstatic. He decided to celebrate, to break free of his earthbound prison, to relive his past glory—to fly again!
The Mormons were shocked. Hughes had not piloted a plane for a dozen years, had rarely left his bed in the time since, his eyesight was so bad he couldn’t read without a magnifying glass, and of course he didn’t have a valid pilot’s license. No matter. He was going to fly. He sent his aides in search of the proper outfit, a leather flight jacket and a snap-brim Stetson, like the one he had worn back in the 1930s when he had broken all the records. He also started to watch a steady stream of airplane movies—Zeppelin, Helicopter Spies, Doomsday Flight, The Crowded Sky, and Skyjacked.
Months passed while Hughes readied himself for the big event. Finally it was set for Sunday, June 10. The night before he watched Strategic Air Command twice and that morning called in an aide to groom him. It took four hours to cut his hair, trim his beard, clip his long nails, and get him dressed, but shortly before two P.M. he slipped out of the hotel and headed for Hatfield Airport, just north of London.
There a private jet waited. Hughes inspected the Hawker Siddeley 748, settled into the pilot’s seat—and stripped off his clothes. Naked now except for the trademark brown fedora, Hughes gripped the controls and took off.
He spent all that day flying, an experienced English co-pilot who hoped to sell him the plane at his side, and he flew twice more in July, by now quite at home again in the skies.
It was during this time of high adventure that Howard Hughes discovered Watergate. He was looking at a picture of an airplane in the London Express when he noticed a story about the crisis he had unwittingly caused.
“What’s Watergate?” he asked. It was the first time he had seen the word. His Mormons tried to explain, but Hughes didn’t understand and soon lost interest.
A few weeks later, on August 9, Hughes got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, lost his footing, fell to the floor, and fractured his hip.
His flying days were over. He would never get out of bed again.
By the time Hughes discovered Watergate, Nixon’s condition had also taken a sudden turn for the worse. On the morning of March 21, John Dean came into the Oval Office to give the president his bleak diagnosis.
“We have a cancer—within—close to the presidency, that’s growing,” said Dean. The malignancy had spread through the entire White House, and the cover-up was about to blow.
“We’re being blackmailed,” said the shaken young counsel. Already more than $350,000 in hush money had been passed to the burglars, and they were demanding still more.
“It’s going to be a continual blackmail operation by Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans,” warned Dean. “It’ll cost money. It’s dangerous. People around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, things like that.”
Nixon was all business. “How much money do you need?” asked the president.
“I would say these people are going to cost a