Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [24]
“I am determined to elect a President of our choosing this year, and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness,” the billionaire had declared earlier in 1968, preparing for an orderly transition of power. “Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life.”
He ordered repeated payoffs to presidents, presidential candidates, senators, congressmen, and governors, caring nothing about party labels or political ideologies, not at all caught up in personal charisma or campaign rhetoric, guided only by his own golden rule: “find the right place, and the right people, and buy what we want.”
When his agents approached the government on a businesslike basis, the payoffs often succeeded. But Hughes was driven by his fears and phobias to seek what even his money could not buy and no matter how much power he acquired, he was never satisfied.
“I have given a full lifespan of service to this country, and taken very little for my personal pleasure or glorification,” complained the unappreciated patriot. “If I dont rate better than this shoddy treatment, it is pretty sad.”
Citizen Hughes. He bought politicians but never voted. He railed bitterly against taxes but paid none at all for seventeen consecutive years. His empire produced strategic weapons of the nuclear age, but he fought atomic testing in his own backyard.
Citizen Hughes. He tried to buy the government of the United States but instead helped bring it down.
Neither Hughes nor anyone else could have known it at the time, but the long slide toward Watergate started with the memo he wrote the night that Bobby Kennedy died.
That memo brought Larry O’Brien into the Hughes orbit, and their relationship came to obsess Richard Nixon, who feared that the hated Kennedy gang would discover his own hidden dealings with the billionaire. For years it has been rumored that the Hughes-Nixon-O’Brien triangle triggered Watergate. New information disclosed in this book now makes it clear that Nixon inspired the break-in in a desperate effort to cover up his Hughes connection.
Hughes had so carefully hedged his bets, had channeled so much secret cash to so many rival powers, that such a collision was inevitable.
If others more sophisticated, less paranoid, managed to acquire more actual power, still it was Hughes who became the very symbol of hidden power, it was Hughes who brought down a president, and it was Hughes who forced the eternal question: Is there a Mr. Big?
He was only trying to protect himself.
There were dangers everywhere, and he was so vulnerable. The world was dealing with a façade. The real Howard Hughes lay hidden in a self-made prison, a naked old man in terrible pain and terminal terror, living like an inmate in the back ward of a mental institution, looking like a corpse laid out on a slab in the city morgue.
He was a figure of gothic horror, something ready for or just risen from the grave. Emaciated, practically skeletal with only 120 pounds stretched out over his six-foot-four-inch frame, and hardly a speck of color about him anywhere, not even in his lips, he seemed not merely dead but already in decay. Only the long gray hair that trailed halfway down his back, the thin, scraggly beard that reached midway onto his sunken chest, and the hideously long nails that extended several inches in grotesque yellowed corkscrews from his fingers and toes seemed still to be growing, still showing signs of life. That, and his eyes. Sometimes they looked dead, blank. But other times they gleamed from