Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [79]
And now the hook. How could it fail?
“Then I think O’Brien or Finney should work the conversation around to where he (our man) can gracefully say: ‘What do you think Mr. Hughes should do? I think he would like your counsel.’
“Now, I dont know Humphries, but I can assure you Mr. Johnson would have picked up the ball long before the conversation ever got to this point.
“It seems to me,” he concluded, “that such a meeting would certainly give us an indication of which way the wind blows across the White House lawn.”
It would have been an interesting meeting, indeed. Because Lyndon Johnson, almost as obsessed with television as Hughes himself, with a three-set console in both his office and his bedroom, had come to decide that the TV networks were Communist-controlled. And he had been monitoring the Hughes-ABC deal closely, although avoiding any direct involvement due to his own controversial broadcast interests.
But Hughes, who had had dealings with the president before, never did learn the direction of the wind on the White House lawn. Maheu discouraged the plan. “We must remember,” he argued, “that whatever the Pres. recommends—then we are bound forever. He is not, though, because his advice must be ‘off the record.’ He’ll have an implied obligation but we must remember that he has had a lot of experience in the technique of ‘sliding’ away from implied obligations.”
Hughes was not immediately convinced. What was there to lose?
“If we are going to cancel out tomorrow, I urge we put it right in Johnson’s lap and offer him the opportunity to determine what we do. If we could get a real green light signal from Johnson, I simply dont think the FCC would hold us up in defiance of his wishes, and I doubt very much that Goldenson would pursue the issue in court if it became evident that we had the approval of the Whitehouse.”
Still, Hughes’s remote-control unit balked. Late Sunday evening, Maheu replied with the pessimism of a man who dealt with life’s daily realities: “I know that you don’t like to hear anything you don’t want to hear. As you know, I was selling positive thinking before Peale ever thought of writing a book. But even affirmative thinking must have some foundation in the realm of realism. If you are prepared to tell me that, at a given point, you will make an appearance, I’ll guarantee you that we’ll deliver ABC to you on a silver platter.”
Of course, that was the one thing Hughes could not bring himself to do.
As the three P.M. Monday deadline came near, it hardly seemed to matter. By midday less than 150,000 of the two million shares of ABC stock Hughes was seeking had been tendered.
The network’s final court appeal, heard earlier that day, seemed beside the point. Then, at one P.M., a three-judge panel once more backed Hughes in his bid to buy ABC. And in the next two hours almost a million and a half shares flooded in to the billionaire’s brokers.
When all the paper had been counted, Howard Hughes had 1.6 million shares, more than a third of all the outstanding stock in ABC. It was easily enough to control the network, and it would now be no problem to get more. A naked hermit, eager to mold mass opinion and manipulate national policy, had just been offered the most powerful position in broadcast history.
What made it all the more incredible was that Maheu, on Hughes’s instructions, had been busily working behind the scenes to make sure that the two million shares Hughes was legally bound to buy would not be tendered. To the last, Hughes wanted to preserve his option to drop the deal.
Indeed, Maheu had gone