Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [250]
Maheu sent Davis a telegram on November 6, 1970, firing him from the TWA case. The Hughes Tool Company directors revoked Maheu’s authority over the TWA case on November 12, 1970.
One of the Mormons who was present when Hughes signed the proxy ousting Maheu later described the scene in court testimony.
Several of the aides, in depositions, recounted Hughes’s departure from the Desert Inn, and one gave further details in an interview. The Las Vegas Sun story appeared on December 2, 1970. Two days later Hughes released the proxy, stripping Maheu of power, and on December 7, 1970, at one A.M., Hughes called Governor Laxalt from the Bahamas to confirm that Maheu had been fired.
The White House encounter between Ehrlichman and Rebozo was recounted by Ehrlichman in an interview.
Epilogue I Watergate
The story of the Hughes connection to Watergate told in the epilogue is in many ways more a confirmation than a revelation. An unpublished forty-six-page report by the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee first presented significant evidence that the Hughes-Nixon-O’Brien triangle triggered the break-in, and was a primary source for my account. Several staff investigators also provided testimony, transcripts, and documentary material never made public, and provided further details in interviews. I am also deeply indebted to J. Anthony Lukas, the first journalist to fully explore the Hughes-Watergate link in his book Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Viking, 1976).
Nixon’s message to Haldeman was quoted by John Dean in Blind Ambition (Simon & Schuster, 1976, p. 66) from a copy of the memo Haldeman passed on to him, and its content was confirmed by Haldeman in an interview.
Nixon’s fears that the $100,000 would become public in the aftermath of the Hughes-Maheu split were reflected by Rebozo in his Senate Watergate Committee testimony: “Matters went from bad to worse in the Hughes organization, and I felt that sooner or later this matter would come up and be misunderstood.… The concern was principally any disclosure that the president had received Hughes money … I didn’t want to risk even the remotest embarrassment about any Hughes connection with Nixon. I was convinced that it cost the president the 1960 election.”
An aide who was with Nixon in San Clemente recalled seeing the president reading a Los Angeles Times story about Maheu’s lawsuit against Hughes shortly after Maheu’s ouster, and such a story did run on January 14, 1971. In a column five days earlier Anderson wrote, “Some of the confidential documents impounded by the Nevada court in the Hughes case have been slipped to us.”
Nixon’s orders to “nail O’Brien” were quoted by Haldeman in The Ends of Power (Times Books, 1978, p. 155), and while in the book he placed the conversation aboard Air Force One, in an interview he corrected his account, placing it in the White House. Haldeman also noted that “O’Brien touched a raw nerve: Nixon’s dealings with Howard Hughes, which had cost him two elections” (The Ends of Power, p. 155).
Hughes’s setup and condition in the Bahamas were described by one of his Mormons in an interview and by other aides in depositions. One of them, George Francom, later testified that “control of Mr. Hughes’s communications began to tighten.… I observed many messages to and from Mr. Hughes being held by all the other aides.”
Hughes’s drug use was detailed in a 1978 report of the Drug Enforcement Administration. His activities were recorded for each day from October 1971 through July 1973 in logs kept by his aides. (Logs were also maintained all through the years Hughes spent in Las Vegas and continued until his death, but all these records were destroyed.)
The arrest of Maheu’s men in the Bahamas was confirmed by FBI reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and by an Intertel agent in an interview.
Colson’s memo about Bennett was obtained from Senate Watergate Committee files.