The Airline and the Snark

By M.D.

JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY vs. HOWARD HUGHES by DAVID B.TINNIN 462 pages. Doubleday. $10.

They pursued him with subpoenas and summonses, with private dicks and dirty tricks and the costliest battery of lawyers ever assembled. Through twelve incredible years of litigation, Howard Robard Hughes Jr. remained the Great American Snark--invisible, unreachable, unpredictable.

TWA v. Howard Hughes was the longest and most stupefyingly wasteful legal siege ever mounted. The suit was initiated in 1961 by the airline's banker-installed management to wrest control of TWA from Hughes--who owned 78% of its stock--and to compensate the company for huge losses suffered during his erratic rule. The case, played for stakes of half a billion dollars, never even came to trial. Yet it cost the litigants at least $20 million, and filled 694 feet of shelf space with legal documentation. The airline's attorneys prevailed, largely because of Hughes' pathological resistance to taking the witness stand and surrendering documents. In the end, after selling TWA stock (which cost about $90 million when he acquired it) for some $550 million, Hughes was vindicated by the Supreme Court, which overturned the lower courts' $145,448 million antitrust judgment against the eccentric Texan.

A book of this kind, based primarily on the legal records, can a certiorari an insomniac into deep slumber. David Tinnin, a TIME correspondent who spent five years recycling the TWA-Hughes papers, manages a sensible balance between fact and speculation. Tracking the billionaire from crisis to crisis, hideaway to hideaway, Tinnin presents a convincing picture of a driven man who , with all the money in the world, subsists on cookies and suspicion in a sterilized cell.

Hughes was just indicted for stock manipulation of still another airline (TIME, Jan 7). Tinnin's book suggests that he used his investment in TWA mainly as a tax vehicle to offset the profits from his Hughes Tool Co. Most of all, the TWA-Hughes saga is a damning indictment of the legal system that serves the very rich. Indeed, Justice Burger, dissenting from the Supreme Court's 6-2 pro-Hughes decision, referred to the monstrous litigation as a 20th century version of Bleak House, in which Charles Dickens argued that the "grand principle" of the legal profession is to "make money for itself."

sbM.D.

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