Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [219]
The president, however, had little time to worry about the “smoking guns” stolen from Romaine.
It was just past nine on Wednesday morning, July 24, when the telephone rang in Nixon’s bedroom at San Clemente, jolting him awake. Alexander Haig was on the line.
“It’s pretty rough, Mr. President,” said Haig. “The Supreme Court decision came down this morning.”
Nixon had to surrender his White House tapes.
Watergate, which began with Hughes’s dirty secrets spilling out, would now end with Nixon’s own dirty secrets spilling. Incredibly, these two most secretive men had both kept a running record of their crimes.
Nixon was now in the dock. That same night the House Impeachment Committee began its televised hearings. The whole appalling story of Watergate would now come out, the president convicted by his own recorded words, all his men already indicted for the cover-up, his burglars already in jail.
Only one aspect of the crime would remain hidden. The motive.
It was not unknown, but it had been suppressed. Just before the Senate Watergate Committee released its final report earlier that month, the senators cut out forty-six pages. In that deleted section staff investigators concluded that the Hughes connection had triggered Watergate.
It all began, the staff reported, with Nixon’s fears that Larry O’Brien had discovered the $100,000 payoff while serving simultaneously as the billionaire’s Washington lobbyist and chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
None of the senators wanted to publish that. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats. Obviously there was no way to expose Nixon without at the same time exposing O’Brien. But it was more than that. Hughes money exploded in too many directions. Several senators, including at least one on the Watergate committee, Joseph Montoya, had also received contributions from Hughes, and in his lawsuit Maheu had named other prominent political leaders, including Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey. As the committee’s maverick Republican Lowell Weicker put it, “Everybody was feeding at the same trough.”
But beyond that, none of the senators could believe that $100,000 explained Watergate. It just didn’t seem like enough.
Some thought there must be more, that the real payoff, the big bribe that would explain the big risk of the big break-in had not yet been uncovered. Even some in Nixon’s own gang were certain there must be more. “Who knows that that’s the only $100,000?” said Chuck Colson, shortly before he went to prison.
Surely $100,000 could not have brought the president to the brink. But it had. It was not the amount of money. It wasn’t even that it was dirty money. It was the very fact that it was Hughes money, the kind of money Nixon had been caught with before, the kind of money that had once cost him the White House. In a desperate effort to keep it from happening again, he had made it happen again.
Haldeman understood. “To take a risk such as that burglary was absurd,” he later wrote. “But on matters pertaining to Hughes, Nixon sometimes seemed to lose touch with reality. His indirect association with this mystery man may have caused him, in his view, to lose two elections.”
Hughes and Nixon had brought on the cataclysm trying to protect themselves—from each other. Hughes gave Nixon the $100,000 in a desperate effort to stop the bombing, and Nixon brought himself down in a desperate effort to hide the payoff.
Secret money, so central to Watergate, still obsessed Nixon as the end drew near. In one of a series of final phone calls to Haldeman on August 7, the president told his former chief of staff that there was one more unexploded bombshell in the tapes: the secret Rebozo slush fund. At the end, with all his crimes exposed and his soul laid bare, that was still the revelation he most feared.
At nine P.M. the next day, Thursday, August 8, 1974, Richard