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“About a month before this meeting, Hughes had been on Meet the Press. At the very end of the show Larry Spivak said, ‘Senator, there has been some talk about your interest in extrasensory perception and the occult. Would you clarify your beliefs on this?’ Hughes had just started to answer, and then the program got cut off.5

“So when the Washington meeting was just about done I said, ‘Senator, I watched that program about a week ago. If you ever get asked a question like that again, I would suggest that initially, before you even answer, point out to the questioner that there’s a significant difference between ESP and the occult. Don’t let the questioner, by linking those two things, nail you, so that by answering, six months from now they’ll say you talked about the occult when you were really talking about ESP.’

“The floodgates opened. Hughes said, ‘Ten years ago, I woke up in a bathtub in a fine hotel. I didn’t know where I was. Didn’t know where my family was. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there, and I was of no use to anybody. Then on this earth, at that moment, I became aware, and that’s what made me want to feed the hungry.’ Then he said, ‘That experience came from visions that I have.’

“He went on, ‘I believe in precognition. My daughter had a vision of the spots on these kittens before they were born, and she described them to me. And they were born that way. And somebody else had seen a remote vision of a fire that was happening.’

“I said, ‘Now, Senator, if I’m Larry Spivak, the next question I’m going to ask you is this. If your daughter tells you she has a vision of Soviets preparing to launch ICBM missiles at the United States, are you going to order a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union?’

“And he said, ‘I would have to give that serious consideration.’

“I said, ‘Now, Senator, I’m Larry Spivak, and you’re sitting there at that table, and you’ve got that glass of water in front of you, and I say, “Do you believe somebody can make that glass of water move across the desk through the powers of their mind standing some feet away?”’ And he said, ‘Yes, I believe that can be done.’

“There were these people around the room—some of them who had their whole careers invested in the guy, like his chief of staff—and they saw themselves in the White House. And they started denying what they were hearing. They were waving their hands and saying it didn’t mean what it meant. As I kept going, they were just dying. They were bursting in and saying, ‘That isn’t what he’s saying,’ and, ‘Don’t worry about this; it can be taken care of,’ and that Abraham Lincoln had believed some of the same things. Obviously they knew some of this already. The whole thing was going down the tubes. I have never seen anything like it. It was just fascinating because of the years of preparation and these guys who had been dreaming of working for a U.S. President.

“Finally, at one point, Joe said, ‘Senator, tell Warren if he asks another question like that, you’re going to make him disappear.’

“So, I said, ‘Senator, lookit. There are all kinds of phonies in American politics. You know, they profess to believe in God, and they say they go to church every Sunday and everything. They don’t believe a damn word of it, you know. But it works. You, on the other hand, believe something very sincerely, and you’ve got your reasons for it, you know, but I will promise you that there’s ten percent of the normal Democratic vote or some significant percentage of the votes that you can’t have, just because of something you honestly believe, whereas the other guy is getting the vote because of something he doesn’t believe. That’s just a reality.’ Meanwhile, all these guys are saying ‘Don’t pay any attention. What does he know?’ But Hughes said that he would go away and when he came back, he would do something that would end his candidacy.”6

And so it came to pass that ten days later Hughes gave an interview to the Des Moines Register in which he said that he had recently spent an hour