Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [30]
“They wanted to retype my messages at least, and correct mistakes in composition, and spelling, etc.
“I said no, that there was not time, and that I would ask you to return the messages so they would not get out of my hands in that condition.
“Listen, Bob, in the Senate investigation of me, the material they dredged out of my own files was the only scrap of evidence that permitted them to get their foot in the door,” Hughes concluded, still enraged by that violation twenty years earlier, a triumph that had left him permanently scarred.
“I assure you I learned my lesson from that incident, and I watch what accumulates in the files very carefully.”
Yes, he had to retain absolute control of his secret papers—“the very most confidential, almost sacred information as to my very innermost activities.”
His only real correspondent, Maheu, would have to return them. And Hughes would not even send copies to his other top executives, men he had not seen for a decade and no longer spoke to even by phone. Instead he had his Mormons read them the memos, so that these hallowed documents never left the penthouse.
He carefully trained these trusted attendants to be robot transmitters of his great secrets.
“I have thought of you,” he explained in an oft-repeated catechism, “as non-eavesdroppers, as impersonal, completely loyal, enforced listeners to secret, privileged transmissions—in the same posture as the telegraph operator used to be in, when he was forced to transmit all kinds of highly personal and confidential material.
“I remember when the difference between a small-town nonprofessional operator and a metropolitan, highly trained operator was easily recognizable, because the small-town operator would react to the message as if it were addressed to him, while the good operator would never bat an eye or react in any way, no matter how startling the text of the message might be.
“Your posture in the transmission of messages,” he added, “is as sacred and impersonal as an electronic machine.”
Secure that his secrets were safe with his robots, that his dispatches could not possibly fall into hostile hands, Hughes daily scrawled out his orders on reams of yellow legal-pad paper, scheming through sleepless nights to control a world he feared to face, unleashing a blizzard of memoranda, sometimes more than a hundred pages in a day.
And here they were, all neatly stacked around his bed, in precise piles that had multiplied and grown to perilous heights. Hughes reached out one spindly arm, grabbed a sheaf at random, and began riffling through his papers. The dark secrets of his life were casually mixed in with the dark secrets of America.
Alone in his dimly lit room, leaning back on a couple of pillows, Hughes reread a few memos, leafed through the pile and skimmed a few more, all the while unconsciously crossing his toes, one over the other, starting from the little toe and working his way in, an old habit that now caused his long toenails to click, a constant counterpoint to the sound of the papers he shuffled.
Hughes was oblivious to the discordant sounds, completely caught up in reading his memos. Here was one about bribing a president. There another about buying a new airline. Next a reminder to get more codeine—had it been done? A few pages later, a complaint about taxes. Here his comments on a TV show. Followed by something about buying the network. Hughes continued to rummage through his papers, reliving past terrors and triumphs, chewing over schemes he had hatched the day or the week or the year before.
Suddenly he stopped and stared intently. This was important, and it hadn’t been handled, at least not to his satisfaction. Hughes, who was obsessed with his image, realized it had been sullied badly—“your sponsor is far from the popular idol he once was,” he noted sadly to his Mormon aides.
But he had a plan, and here it was, a whole new way to present