Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [88]
“I say the question goes beyond the matter of purity vs. impurity, on a basis of technical analysis. I say the real question is whether a sophisticated, thoroughly pampered tourist, a tourist who has been exposed to the careful treatment accorded him in the major, highly refined resorts of the world, I repeat the question is whether this tourist is going to feel comfortable in the confidence that the water which he is drinking, and in which he is bathing, is the pure mountain spring water pictured in the Coor’s Beer advertisements, or whether, instead, he is going to have the uneasy, revolting feeling that the water he is forced to drink, the water used to make his drinks at the bar, and the water in which his food is cooked, that this water, in which he is also forced to bathe and wash his hands, that this water is, in truth, nothing more nor less than sewage, with the turds removed by a strainer so it can be pumped through a pipe.
“The name, quote Lake Mead Water unquote, means nothing more or less than sewage!”
Hughes was definitely one of those who had an “uneasy, revolting feeling.” He never let up in his battle to scuttle the state’s entire new eighty-million-dollar water system.
Indeed, all Las Vegas, all Nevada, finally all America fell victim to his endless runaway fears, as Hughes, from his penthouse, conducted search-and-destroy missions to protect himself from all imagined dangers. Among the prime targets were the state’s thirty thousand blacks.
It was still blacks who instilled the most terror. They seemed the visible embodiment of all the invisible threats.
The Great White Hope trauma made that clear. Blacks were potent, mocking his impotence. Blacks were dark, brown, like the poison he could not release from his own bowels, like the sewage in the water. Blacks were not merely dirty. They were Giant Germs.
They had to be kept in “isolation.”
Up in his penthouse, Hughes was seemingly safe from all outsiders, black or white. Yet even there he was constantly tormented by dark intruders. To make matters worse, they entered with the connivance of his own television station.
“Isn’t there any safe way to get rid of this TV academic program on ‘Black Heritage’ which CBS is carrying every morning?” wrote Hughes, in obvious distress.
“As you know, this program was commenced without my permission.
“Since then I have been forced to squirm under the intense displeasure of watching this program every morning—I have to watch and listen every morning while the only academic program on KLAS pours out such propaganda as: ‘Africa is the mother and the father of the world.’ ”
As with that other bane of his existence, “Sunrise Semester,” Hughes apparently never considered the simple expedient of switching off his set. Actually, he had finally escaped the dreaded harbinger of dawn. “Sunrise Semester” was, at long last, off the air. It had been replaced in the 6:30 A.M. time slot by “Black Heritage.” Squirming in displeasure, the billionaire fumed:
“Bob, if KLAS is to broadcast one single academic program and if this program is to be a study of history, why should not this be a program of U.S. history instead of a program of African history.
“If this is so, I cannot see why it should be necessary for a TV station to confine its academic programing to a policy of exclusive, sole negro representation.”
Maheu sympathized, but warned that it might be dangerous to cancel the offensive show. “I, perhaps, am as vehement on this type of subtle propaganda as you are,” he wrote in reply, “but I think we must be expedient in not buying unnecessary problems at this time. Sheriff [Ralph] Lamb and D.A. [George] Franklin have confided to me that we could potentially have a real ‘hot summer’ in Las Vegas this year. My humble recommendation, Howard, would be that we let this particular program run out its time, so that we do not give the black community any opportunity whatsoever to concentrate