Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [90]
But Hughes represented something very real and very ugly in America. Submerged fears. Hidden racism. Feelings no longer respectable to express but still pervasive. All across the country, ordinary people also cringed at shadows in the night. They too wanted blacks kept down or, at least, out of sight. George Wallace brought bigotry out of the closet, and they cheered him. Richard Nixon campaigned with code words like “law-and-order” and “crime in the streets,” and they elected him.
And, all the while, America was burning.
It had started in Watts in 1965—the year before Hughes arrived in Las Vegas—and now it swept through city after city. Riots. Arson. Looting. Summer terror.
Then, at six P.M. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. One moment he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel, chatting with friends in the courtyard below. The next moment he was dead.
Black America took to the streets. White America watched the war on television.
And Howard Hughes saw all his fears come to life on the TV screen. It was the ultimate horror. Blacks were out of control. First in Washington, then in Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago, finally in more than one hundred cities grief turned to outrage and outrage to violence, a swelling firestorm of unprecedented fury that lasted a full week and claimed forty-six lives.
The images were overwhelming. Soldiers defending a nation from itself occupied charred ghettos, battling blacks on streets strewn with broken glass and stained with blood. Troops in full combat gear took up positions on the White House lawn. A machine-gun emplacement guarded the Capitol steps.
Alone in his penthouse, Hughes too rushed to reinforce the barricades. With not a mention of the martyred civil rights leader, with not a note of sorrow, with not a sober second thought, he poured out a diatribe of racist angst on his bedside legal pad:
“I have just finished watching CBS News on TV. The riots, looting, etc. in Washington, Chicago and other cities was terrible. I wonder how close we are to something like that here?”
Memories of Houston 1917 mixed with frontline footage of America 1968, bringing on nightmare visions of a Las Vegas torn by racial turmoil. It only stiffened his resistance to change.
“I know that is your responsibility and also your specialty,” Hughes continued, taking some comfort in Maheu’s FBI background, “but I also know there is tremendous pressure on the strip owners to adopt a more liberal attitude toward integration, open housing, and employment of more negroes.
“Now, Bob, I have never made my views known on this subject. And I certainly would not say these things in public. However, I can summarize my attitude about employing more negroes very simply—I think it is a wonderful idea for somebody else, somewhere else. I know this is not a very praise-worthy point of view, but I feel the negroes have already made enough progress to last the next 100 years, and there is such a thing as overdoing it.
“I just dont want to see you badgered into some concession, because once you do consent to some such concession, you can never cancel it and put things back the way they were.
“I know this is a hot potatoe,” Hughes concluded, “and I am not asking you to form a new chapter of the K.K.K. I dont want to become known as a negroe-hater or anything like that. But I am not running for election and therefore we dont have to curry favor with the NAACP either.”
Outside, far beyond the gaudy strip of gambling casinos and high-rise hotels, far removed from the make-believe world of glittering neon, fabulous showrooms, Olympic-sized swimming pools, hundred-dollar bills and fat cigars, there was another Las Vegas, housing the city’s blacks. They had been kept in a ramshackle ghetto out on the edge of the desert—a grim American reality three miles distant from the great American dream—and that’s where Hughes wanted them