Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [220]
Hughes and the government fell together.
As Nixon exited the White House for the last time, Hughes described his own terminal condition in a note scrawled on his bedside legal pad.
“I did not leave the stretcher and prone position from time of surgery until arrival in Freeport,” he wrote, recalling the operation on his fractured hip a year earlier. “I was put in a bed, and I have not left that bed up until and including this moment, not even to attempt to go to the bathroom.”
Yet now, more than ever, even as he went into his final decline, Hughes was seen as the real Mr. Big, the secret center of Watergate, the secret patron of presidents, and the secret partner of the CIA.
Alone in his darkened room atop the Xanadu Princess Hotel, his sixth foreign hideout in four years of exile, the presumed evil genius remained puzzled by events back in the States.
For a moment he thought he had found the key to Watergate. It seemed to be in one White House tape on which the president was heard to say: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up, or anything else if it’ll save it—save the plan.”
“What’s the plan?” asked Hughes. If there was one, he wanted to know about it.
His public relations man in Los Angeles, whose job had long been to refuse all comment, and whose tasks now included keeping Hughes informed on Watergate, sent the answer:
“ ‘The Plan’ apparently refers to an agreement reached by the White House advisors, and accepted by Nixon, that the best method for dealing with the Watergate Committee would be for White House witnesses to refuse to answer questions. The over-all term for this plan was to ‘Stonewall it.’ ”
How disappointing. Hughes had been stonewalling it all his life, and where had it gotten him?
He turned his attention to more immediate concerns, demanding a secret survey of breakfast cereals. “Please have them research the serial field—either in Freeport, Miami or L.A. before I consume any more of that turd-like meat,” he scribbled to his Mormons. “But plse exercise all caution toward security.”
He was equally security-conscious when he closed a deal to buy his Bahamas hotel: “Please send a personal note from me to Mr. Ludwig (just orral—not written—through Mr. Ludwig’s chief representative—but with no other man present—) as follows:
“ ‘It has been a pleasure to do business with you.’ ”
While Hughes carefully guarded such sensitive messages in Freeport, his biggest secret of all escaped back in Los Angeles, a belated fallout of the heist at his unguarded Romaine Street headquarters. On February 7, 1975, the Los Angeles Times broke the Glomar story.
While some now began to wonder whether Hughes was a front for the CIA or the CIA was a front for Hughes, whether it was all in fact one dark empire, the naked emperor himself never even heard that the Glomar secret was out.
Still, on March 18, when the story broke wide open, banner headlines across the country proclaimed Hughes the CIA’s partner in a fantastic three-hundred-fifty million dollar plot to steal a Russian submarine.
And then, at the height of the CIA scandals a few months later, Senate investigators revealed that Robert Maheu had orchestrated a CIA-Mafia conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Many were now certain that Hughes was involved in a cabal of sinister dimensions, a secret axis that lay behind all dark events from Dallas to Watergate. The Senate Intelligence Committee began to explore his links to Nixon, the Mob, and the CIA. The only real question seemed to be whether Hughes was master or pawn. “Indeed, was there even a live man named Hughes at the center of it all,” asked Norman Mailer, “or was there a Special Committee?”
The IRS had similar concerns. Even as Hughes himself repeatedly asked his aides if it was safe to return to the United States, if the IRS was still after him, an agent involved in the big Hughes probe suggested that he was long dead.
“It is my belief,” he reported to headquarters,