You are here: home > biography
Citizen Hughes
by Michael Drosnin
Driven by phobias, disfunctional genius manipulates the world about him
I admit from the start that I read Michael Drosnin “Citizen Hughes” after watching the movie “The Aviator.” I wanted to read more about such an eccentric genius that amassed one of the largest fortunes of his time. He was rich to begin with but he built on that wealth and in the process gambled his family’s golden goose, Hughes Tool & Die Company on more than one occasion to bankroll business investments that seemed outlandish at the time. The book was first published in 1985, but found renewed interest in the wake of biopic of Hughes portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. Unlike the movie, the book doesn’t provide a biography of Hughes but rather a look inside the mind of the eccentric character through his writings, which were burgled from a Hughes warehouse at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood. The book is heavily illustrated with pictures of Hughes’ handwritten notes.
Drosnin’s book examines the mind of Hughes through these estimated 10,000 documents: the mind of a man living from the late 1960s through to his death in 1976. The book begins with a description of the burglary at the Hughes warehouse and spends a chapter explaining the flight of the papers and how Drosnin came to find the man who possessed them. The mystery behind the burglary is not solved. Who did it: Hughes to keep them from being subpoenaed; the CIA or FBI, fearful of secrets that might be revealed…? Why did the burglar who possessed the documents decide to go public? We’re left with those questions as the chapter 2 begins in the Las Vegas Desert Inn Hotel (now the Winn Las Vegas Resort) on June 6, 1968 with Howard Hughes watching news coverage of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Howard Hughes writes a note to his right hand man, Robert Maheu, who is the go-to guy Hughes uses to get things done that would not normally be done through official channels.
A good deal of Drosnin’s work deals with the relationship between Hughes and Maheu, a Washington, D.C. private investigator who in chapter 2 is described as working for the CIA and occasionally doing jobs for Howard Hughes. He was the guy who cleaned up messes or prevented them from happening in the first place. The relationship between Hughes and Maheu reads on paper like a dysfunctional marriage, which Drosnin compares it to: Hughes to Maheu, “…I would not dream of suggesting that you leave, because I would be afraid you would call my bluff and take me up on it;” Maheu to Hughes in response, “…I have no desire to leave and I would most certainly never think of taking advantage of your obvious desire not to get rid of me.” The dialogue between the two continues in this catty, often vitriolic exchanges riddle page after page of the book. Their arguments were carried out by phone and handwritten notes passed between the two by Hughes inner circle of Mormon handlers. Hughes remains secluded in the top floor of the Desert Inn with little or no human contact for nearly all of the time chronicled in the book. Despite their rocky marriage, however, the two were would not sever the marriage until 1970, a few years before Hughes’s death.
Though the writings, the reader learns a great deal about what Hughes did that was hidden from public view during his lifetime. The portrait of Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt is one of a man beholding to Howard Hughes, who purchased more Las Vegas Casinos than the law allowed and did so without appearing in person or supplying a photograph of himself nor submitting fingerprints or financial records. He owned four casinos and a great deal of real estate along the Las Vegas Strip, most acquired by his appointed surrogate Robert Maheu. The state, long known as a haven for organized crime, was Hughes perceived to be displacing the mob in the state. Unknown to Hughes however, the Las Vegas ventures were not profitable, a fact that would eventually lead to Maheu’s downfall and the public unraveling of a number of Hughes misdeeds, including the Watergate break in.
Drosnin draws a picture of a reclusive hermit driven by phobias that compelled him to make Quixotic demands. He offered Lyndon Baines Johnson a $1 million bribe to move the underground nuclear testing from Nevada, fearing that the invisible radiation—as harmful if not more so than the germs he obsessively-compulsively feared and protected himself from—would not only affect the surrounding atmosphere but would also contaminate the water beneath ground eventually poisoning the water supply. The letter fell on blind eyes as Johnson refused the entreaty. Hughes then sought the help of two presidential candidates that were intent on replacing Johnson: Hubert Horatio Humphrey and Richard Milhous Nixon. In the meantime, a third candidate Robert Francis Kennedy—Hughes held a great dislike of the Kennedy clan— solicited through his emissary Pierre Salinger Hughes’ financial help, which was to be given except for the Senator’s untimely death.
From the handwritten correspondence we learn about the politicians of mid-20th Century. Humphrey comes off as a whipping boy first for LBJ who loved emotionally abusing his vice president to Howard Hughes, who provided a great deal of the funding that helped Humphrey ascend the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August 1968 to accept his party’s nomination for the presidency. Hughes likewise heaped abuse onto the hapless Humphrey. Nevertheless, the Democratic nominee would receive another $50,000 from Hughes at the same time the Texas billionaire was providing an equal amount to the Republican candidate Richard Nixon. What was most shocking to me in reading the revelations in these handwritten correspondence was how cash strapped both Humphrey and Nixon were and their complete dependence on large donors such as Hughes. The donors were compensated handsomely for their contributions. In the Tax Reform Act of 1969 Hughes, through his charitable organization the Howard Hughes Medical Institute would have an amendment that enabled half his entire empire to be a tax-exempt charity, and the other half a tax-exempt small business, tens of millions of dollars in tax savings. Curiously, while Nixon signed the bill, it was Larry O’Brien the Washington insider behind John and Robert Kennedy as well as the man who helped Humphrey get nominated that got the language favorable to Hughes in the bill. The connection between O’Brien and Hughes had not gone unnoticed in the Nixon White House.
Nixon is portrayed as a man anxious to acquire money from Hughes then obsessed that the money he received would one day come back to haunt him, which is what it did. The 37th President of the U.S. was also determined to serve the full eight years allotted to hold the office and this obsession would also come back to haunt him. Hughes backing began in 1946 with Nixon’s first congressional race and would continue in every race including his presidential bid. From the start, however, the taint of Hughes money would dog Nixon. It provided both a burden and curse during Nixon’s first bid for the White House against John Kennedy. The burden came in the form of a $205,000 never-repaid loan to the billionaire. The money was used to bail out Nixon’s brother Donald’s failing fast food business. Hughes never asked for repayment when the venture failed in spite of the capital injection. Nixon caught off guard by media revelations of the loan attempted to lie his way out only to be caught up in the scandal.
What is even more surprising in the Hughes correspondence is the fatal flaw so completely evident in our 37th President. He failed to learn from his first mistake and through the narrative in the billionaire’s correspondence, the reader begins to see the flawed Nixon symptomatically make the very same mistake again. Through his emissary Bebe Rebozo, Nixon reached out to the billionaire and the result was $100,000 found its way into Rebozo’s safety deposit box, after the 37th President’s inauguration. There it would remain waiting to be discovered during the Watergate Scandal. It would be Nixon himself who would force the revelation of the Hughes money, through his obsession with wanting to make public Larry O’Brien being on Hughes’ payroll at $15,000 a month at the same time he was the unpaid head of the Democratic National Committee. The Watergate burglary was launched to find evidence of this connection, Drosnin declares. The result is one of the most memorable political dramas of the 20th Century concluding with Nixon resignation ahead of almost certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and probable conviction in the U.S. Senate.
The paper trail in “Citizen Hughes” also details the drama surrounding the solitary billionaire, locked away in his Desert Inn hotel penthouse isolated from the germs that obsessed him and drove him to extraordinary behavior, most of it documented in the films and accounts of the eccentric recluse. Besides the struggle with Maheu, the reader sees the secretive inner circle of Mormons in the latter years keeping the billionaire sedated and surrounded from outside influences. How much hands on control Hughes exerted on his empire is not clear in the closing chapters of the book, nor can much be gleamed about the man himself from his writings. He comes off as a prisoner of his own paranoia attempting often successfully, more often not, to control the world around him, a world he is only conscious of through the media of television which becomes his only window into life beyond his insular confines.
Though the book provided a great deal of insight into Hughes, I completed the 458-page work—minus the 45-page addendum of notes—with more questions than answers. Still for all those wanting an inside look at the political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, Drosnin’s book delivers.
|
i