Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [99]
Hughes, however, was not vindictive. He did not wish to impose a Carthaginian peace. Quite the opposite.
“Somebody should start negotiating with the AEC,” he wrote, spelling out his strategy. “Just like buying a hotel. I want somebody to wheel and deal with the AEC and offer them a deal whereby they can continue to enjoy the pleasures of living in Las Vegas and more than ever offer them a graceful way they can give us the 90 day extension without injuring their position, without admitting defeat, without admitting by inference that the bomb they want to detonate would have endangered everyone in the community, and without embarassing themselves.”
Should the peace talks fail, however, Hughes threatened to lead “a real lifetime crusade to stop all bomb explosions large or small anywhere in the U.S. or its possessions or mandates.”
He was even willing to join the “peaceniks.”
“If the AEC does not grant the extension and goes ahead with this blast,” he declared, “I definitely will be forced to line up with the total anti-bomb faction throughout the U.S. This group has only been waiting for a strong leader and I am ready to dedicate the rest of my life and every cent I possess in a complete no quarter fight to outlaw all nuclear testing of every kind and everywhere.
“I prefer that we not be classified as Peaceniks, that is why I am reluctant to go the anti-war, anti-bomb route in the conventional sense.
“However, if that is the only way we can gather support for our cause, I will go to bed with the Devil himself.”
Hughes had, indeed, already picked up some strange bedfellows. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom joined the campaign and, in an unprecedented alliance of labor and capital, so did the maverick liberal United Auto Workers union chief Walter Reuther.
Reuther’s enlistment inspired Hughes to open yet another front, quite literally to strike the enemy in its own camp.
“I understand the union that is striking the Bell Telephone System (200,000 men out) has jurisdiction over the Test Site,” he wrote. “Maybe Reuther can persuade the head of the Communication Workers to strike that test site operation and I am informed all our troubles will be over. The phone operation, unhampered by a strike, is absolutely necessary.”
Yet even as he conspired to cut the enemy’s communication lines, his own campaign began to run into trouble. The AEC’s national-defense claim had hurt Hughes with his more traditional allies, and only days before the scheduled blast vital political support disappeared.
First Nevada’s two United States senators, Howard Cannon and Alan Bible, deserted. Finally, even Governor Laxalt announced his neutrality.
Nothing enraged Hughes quite so much as politicians who refused to stay bought. “I want you to meet with Laxalt, Bible and Cannon,” he instructed Maheu. “They are going to have to make a difficult choice. They are going to have to support our stand in Washington or we will be forced to find someone else to represent us. And that is final.
“I want you to bear down on them immediately demanding that they take a position without another moments delay.
“Bob, when the time comes, and they begin crying on your shoulder for support, and you come to me, and I say OK, as I have in the past, then once more, it will be the same story all over again: Unlimited support, and not one God Damned thing in return for it!”
It was an outrage. Still, perhaps they could be brought around. For the two wayward senators, the usual inducement might do: “Bob, cant you make a promise of support to Cannon and Bible—I mean real support beyond anything to date, and thereby obtain their absolutely undiluted sponsorship?”
As for the normally obliging Laxalt, “if we can truly convince the Governor that his future destiny lies with me,