Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [223]
He was an American folk hero, a man who had lived first the dream then the nightmare—in that sense, perhaps the single most representative American of the twentieth century. But upon his death he had become so loathsome and scandalous a figure that no national leader noted his passing. None of the politicians he had funded said a word. Not Richard Nixon, not Hubert Humphrey, not Larry O’Brien, not even Paul Laxalt.
Only one powerful man stepped forward to praise him, a man who almost never spoke publicly, a man himself so secretive that his name had never appeared in print until just a year earlier, when he was ousted amid scandal from the lofty position he had held for three decades—chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. James Jesus Angleton.
It was entirely fitting that Angleton, the CIA’s purest product, the spook’s spook, should alone deliver his epitaph:
“Howard Hughes! Where his country’s interests were concerned, no man knew his target better. We were fortunate to have him.
“He was a great patriot.”
*In fact, Cox had no personal involvement with the Hughes-Rebozo probe. He told his staff not to discuss any Hughes matters with him because Cox himself had a Hughes connection—his brother Maxwell was law partner of Chester Davis.
Authenticity Report
As stated in the Author’s Note, this book is based primarily on nearly ten thousand Hughes documents stolen from his Romaine Street headquarters on June 5, 1974.
The authenticity of these documents was conclusively established by proof of their origins—clear evidence that the handwritten and typewritten originals I personally photographed and photocopied were the same documents removed from Hughes’s penthouse in Las Vegas, taken to Romaine, and finally stolen in the break-in.
Their authenticity was further confirmed by seven years of research—extensive cross-checking of the content against information never made public as well as known facts—and finally through a series of handwriting, typewriting, and other tests performed by the nation’s two leading experts, Ordway Hilton, the man who proved Clifford Irving a fraud on behalf of the Hughes organization, and John J. Harris, the man who proved Melvin Dummar’s “Mormon Will” a forgery on behalf of the Hughes estate. Both independently authenticated the Romaine documents.
Provenance: Shortly after Hughes left Las Vegas on Thanksgiving eve 1970, a team of his aides led by Kay Glenn, managing director of Romaine, cleaned out his penthouse suite on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn, taking all the documents from both his bedroom and his aides’ office in the living room.
“I put everything into transfer cases,” Glenn later testified in a sworn deposition. “All of his communications to people, everybody’s communications to him. I removed them to Romaine Street. Everything was taken to Romaine.”
At the time of the June 5, 1974, break-in, the documents were assembled in a second-floor conference room upon the orders of Hughes’s chief counsel, Chester Davis, who according to both FBI and CIA reports said that they were being indexed there for his review in connection with pending litigation. This was confirmed by a secretary in charge of the indexing.
One of the burglars—my source for the documents, the man identified in the Introduction as the Pro—told me in a series of interviews that he removed the documents from the conference room, took them directly to his home, transferred them into steamer trunks, put the trunks into storage for a few months, and then sealed them into a wall for almost two years. No other person saw, touched, or had custody of the documents from the time they were stolen until my source removed them from the wall and showed them to me.
My source had detailed knowledge of the break-in only one of the burglars could have had, information verified in part by confidential police, FBI and CIA records, as well as facts unknown to the authorities confirmed by my own investigation.
Years after I first saw the stolen papers, which had never been made public in any form,