Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [92]
“I understand the necessity of compliance (to the extent absolutely necessary) with the Supreme Court’s decision, at least until such time as it may be modified.
“But I certainly am not very happy about this 800 thousand dollar loan the schools are seeking to make and the rest of the overboard more than necessary compliance with this far-out integration plan.
“Please tell me what can be done about it.”
In fact, nothing could be done that the like-minded city fathers hadn’t already done. A federal judge, explained Maheu, had ordered that $7 million be spent to integrate the schools. The local school district was holding the line at the $800,000 figure that Hughes found so outrageous. It was, Maheu assured his boss, “minimum compliance.”
Two months later, the inevitable finally happened in Las Vegas.
It had been almost a year and a half since Hughes had worried in the aftermath of King’s assassination, “I wonder how close we are to something like that here?”
Despite the horrible conditions, despite the callous indifference, Las Vegas had escaped the riots that raged through most of urban America.
But on Sunday night, October 5, 1969, the ghetto at the edge of the desert exploded. The rampage of looting and arson continued for three days. Two hundred blacks were arrested. Two men died.
The violence never threatened the Strip. In fact, it never went beyond the boundaries of the distant slum. But it left Hughes shaken.
“Howard,” Maheu wrote soothingly, “I can almost guarantee you they would hit other properties long before ours.”
Hughes, it seemed, had a secret ally high up in the enemy camp. “Although there are those who do not believe it, he is truly the most respected and ultimate leader of the colored group,” added Maheu.
And who was this secret protector of the man who killed the open-housing bill, who tried to block school integration, who refused to employ blacks and wouldn’t even allow them to appear on his television station?
Sammy Davis, Jr.
He was the last of the “Rat Pack,” the only one to stay on at the Sands after Sinatra stormed out, and the one black on Hughes’s payroll. Indeed, he had just signed a new five-year contract with Hughes.
“Very recently,” confided Maheu, “he gave me his assurance that no damage would ever come to you from ‘his people.’ ”
But now arose a new danger from which not even Sammy Davis, Jr., could protect him.
6 Armageddon
It was already well into the evening of a very bad day when Howard Hughes finally reached for his afternoon newspaper, carefully extracting the middle copy from a pile of three, thus avoiding contamination from the two exposed editions.
Peering through his “peepstone,” a battery-powered magnifying glass that lit up the page, Hughes prepared to scrutinize the paper, his deep-sunk eyes narrowed to catch every threatening nuance hidden in the small print.
The headline hit him without warning: “HISTORY’S MIGHTIEST A BLAST NEAR VEGAS.” It leaped into focus through his lens, the screaming mass of thirty-six-point type absurdly enlarged, and struck the stunned recluse with full megaton force.
“This is the last straw,” he scribbled in a rush of fear and anger. “I just this minute read that they are going to shoot off the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated in the U.S. And right here at the Vegas Test Site.
“I want you to call the Gov. at once and the Senators and Congressman,” Hughes ordered Maheu. “If they do not cancel this one extra large explosion, I am going direct to the President in a personal appeal and demand that the entire test program be moved.…”
It was war.
A massive hydrogen bomb with an explosive force greater than 1.2 million tons of TNT had been buried deep beneath the Nevada desert, just one hundred miles from Howard Hughes’s bedroom. One hundred times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, big enough to shake four states, and practically right next door.
It was Tuesday, April 16, 1968. The bomb was set to be detonated in ten days. This was the moment Hughes had been