Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [237]
A Hughes lawyer told an associate he handled a cash contribution to Johnson in 1960, but claimed that he did not recall the amount. The attorney said that LBJ regularly received funds from Hughes. Maheu stated in a deposition that he channeled Hughes money to candidates Johnson designated.
Sawyer’s meeting with the president is confirmed by files at the LBJ Library. The call to Watson about Hughes’s offer to back Humphrey in return for blocking the bomb test is transcribed in a memo dated April 24, 1968. Johnson’s mobilization of his White House staff to deal with Hughes is detailed in numerous documents and was confirmed in interviews with Johnson’s aides. The Rostow and Seaborg reports were obtained from the LBJ Library.
Press aide Tom Johnson recalled the president showing him Hughes’s letter late on the night before the blast. “So many things were coming in to the president, I can’t imagine how many pieces of paper a day, but certainly rarely a day without a hundred or two hundred, but that one really struck the president because of the name on it, Howard Hughes. That set it apart from everything else.”
Hughes’s sleepless vigil is recounted in his own memos and was also recalled by two of his Mormons.
Clark Clifford confirmed in an interview that Hughes personally retained him in 1950. Hughes was mistaken in writing that Clifford had been under retainer for twenty-five years. Clifford denied that he was personally involved in blocking the helicopter probe and lobbying the tax law but admitted that his law firm did assist Hughes on both matters.
Johnson awoke at nine A.M. E.S.T. on April 26 to find the report from Hornig waiting; it was marked “sent for delivery to the president’s bedroom at 8:50 A.M.” and was immediately handed to Johnson by his personal aide Jim Jones.
Hughes’s reaction to the blast was described by an aide who was present. The impact of the explosion in the world beyond was detailed in AEC records and press reports.
Johnson’s letter to Hughes was obtained from the LBJ Library. Files there show that the president had Seaborg draft a reply, then ordered at least three rewrites by his staff, and had the final version reviewed by national security advisor Rostow. Before sending it to Hughes, Johnson had an aide show the letter to Hughes’s lawyer Finney to get his okay.
Maheu’s phone conversations with Hughes just before his meeting with Johnson were recounted by Maheu in a sworn deposition. The president’s March 1967 discovery of the Castro plot was described by one of his aides, recounted in 1975 reports of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and detailed by a staff investigator of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. An April 4, 1967, FBI report by the Bureau’s White House liaison Cartha DeLoach stated: “Marvin Watson called me late last night and stated that the president had told him that he was now convinced that there was a plot in connection with the [Kennedy] assassination. Watson stated the president felt that CIA had had something to do with this plot. Watson requested any further information we could furnish in this connection. I reminded Watson that the director had sent over to the White House some weeks back all the information in our possession in connection with CIA’s attempts to use former agent Robert Maheu in contacts with Sam Giancana and other hoodlums, relative to fostering a plot to assassinate Castro.” Among the reports Hoover had sent Johnson was one that described Maheu as a “shady character” whose detective agency “has business dealings with a number of foreign governments and has frequently been engaged in wiretapping,” and the director also charged