Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [247]
The nuclear test announced on September 10, 1969, and detonated September 16 was code-named “JORUM” and according to AEC reports was “under a megaton.”
Maheu’s reports to Hughes, pilot logs of the Hughes jet, and Danner’s travel records show that Danner and Maheu saw Rebozo in Key Biscayne on September 11 and 12, 1969. The Senate Watergate Committee in its final report called this “the most probable delivery date for the first contribution.”
Danner in his first account of the hundred-thousand-dollar payoff told the IRS that it had taken place in Rebozo’s home at Key Biscayne in September 1969 and that Maheu was present: “We took the de Havilland, flew to Miami, went to Key Biscayne, met Rebozo at his house. Maheu handed him the package and says, ‘Here’s $50,000, first installment.’ Rebozo thanked him.” Maheu also testified that he was present in Key Biscayne when $50,000 was delivered to Rebozo in 1969, but said that Danner handed over the money. Rebozo himself first told the IRS that the initial $50,000 was received from Danner in Key Biscayne in 1969.
Later, all three men gave contradictory accounts. Rebozo, in an effort to explain why some of the hundred-dollar bills he eventually returned to Hughes were issued by the U.S. Treasury after the date he originally said they were delivered, claimed he received all the money late in 1970. Under pressure from Rebozo, Danner changed his account and said he did not recall if the first delivery was in 1969 or 1970, but also testified that it was Rebozo’s insistence that led him to change his mind. The only other reason Danner gave for retracting his original testimony was his recollection that the September 1969 trip related to Hughes’s concern over the dumping of nerve gas. This is clearly wrong, as the nerve-gas dumping actually took place in August 1970.
All details of the delivery of the first $50,000 to Rebozo are based on Danner’s testimony to the IRS and the Senate Watergate Committee, and Maheu’s court testimony and statements in interviews with the Senate staff.
Nixon’s activities and state of mind in September 1969 were established by his own account in his memoirs, and further detailed by Kissinger in The White House Years (Little, Brown & Co., 1979) and interviews with White House and NSC aides. As noted, Kissinger refused repeated interview requests.
Interviews with top White House officials, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson, establish that while Nixon was well aware of Hughes’s opposition to the bomb tests, the president never indicated that he had any idea of the true extent of Hughes’s terror and outrage. Also, Nixon may well have been falsely reassured by the report on Hughes he received from the AEC just weeks earlier, claiming that “Hughes will not object as long as detonations do not exceed a megaton.”
The account of the September 1969 blast is drawn from press reports, AEC records, and after-action reports to Hughes from his aides.
Danner’s meetings with Attorney General Mitchell on the Dunes deal are established by his Senate Watergate Committee testimony, Justice records obtained through Senate staff investigators, and Maheu’s contemporaneous reports to Hughes. In addition, FBI Director Hoover let Nixon and Mitchell know that he knew about the Dunes deal in a March 23, 1970, report sent to Justice: “Information was received by the Las Vegas office of this Bureau that on March 19, 1970, a representative of Howard Hughes … stated that Hughes had received assurance from the Department of Justice that no objection would be interposed to Hughes’s purchasing the Dunes Hotel.”
Maheu described Hughes’s orders to give Nixon a million-dollar