Mad Money in High Places Citizen Hughes

By R Z. SHEPPARD

Once upon a time, Howard Hughes set airspeed records and looked like Indiana Jones. Then came the long, slow tailspin into lunacy. By the time of his death in 1976, the image lodged in the public mind was of an aging billionaire with uncut hair and Fu Manchu fingernails hidden in a darkened Las Vegas hotel room. An unhealthy disregard for reality became synonymous with the recluse's name. A fake autobiography by Clifford Irving and the forged "Mormon" will that brought fame to Melvin Dummar only made matters worse. One could never be sure of anything written by or about Howard Hughes.

This is the gulf of credibility that Michael Drosnin faced when he began work on Citizen Hughes, part biography and part expose, based on thousands of pages of memorandums in Hughes' handwriting. There were added problems: the documents were stolen property, and Drosnin had a source to protect--the burglar who broke into Hughes' Los Angeles office building and took the papers in 1974. Drosnin, a former reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, insists that he never paid a penny for the notes, which were later validated by the two handwriting experts used by the Hughes organization in the Irving and Dummar cases, and by Robert Maheu, the former Hughes executive to whom most of the correspondence was addressed.

Citizen Hughes is mostly about big money in high places, of cash siphoned from Hughes' Nevada gambling casinos and piped to politicians. Wielding the only power he knew, the deranged industrialist reveals a crude cynicism. On Lyndon Johnson: "I have done this kind of business with him before. So, he wears no awe-inspiring robe of virtue with me." On Hubert Humphrey: "A candidate who needs us and wants our help . . . somebody we control sufficiently." On Richard Nixon: "My man. He I know for sure knows the facts of life."

According to Drosnin, it was the facts about $100,000 of Hughes money in Bebe Rebozo's safe-deposit box that set off the Watergate break-in. "I want to hire Bob Kennedy's entire organization," wrote Hughes to Maheu shortly after hearing that the Senator was dead. Maheu managed to get the lobbying services < of Lawrence O'Brien, Kennedy's campaign manager and later Democratic Party chairman. Because of O'Brien's connection with Hughes, Drosnin argues, Nixon feared disclosure of the cash in his friend's bank and ordered the plumbers into O'Brien's Watergate office. The purpose was to dig up enough Democratic dirt to keep O'Brien quiet.

But the author's frequent assertion that Howard Hughes triggered the President's downfall is too broad, his attempt to link cause and effect too narrow. It is hard to believe that disclosure of the Hughes cash was all the White House worried about, or that the gift was the only potential scandal the opposition party was sitting on. A paranoid with bottomless pockets may have indirectly caused Nixon's final political crisis, but he was probably not the main reason. In addition, Drosnin's case is not helped by pop-novel techniques that cheapen his journalistic efforts: "But now aboard Air Force One, the President was gripped by a darker thought. The terrible fear that O'Brien knew --that he had somehow learned from his hidden masters all about the secret Hughes cash in Bebe's little tin box."

Citizen Hughes contains plenty of grist for a Potomac potboiler: the role of Hughes Tool Co. in building the Glomar Explorer, the secret submarine-recovery vessel; Hughes' plans to run Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt for President; Robert Maheu's part in a half-baked CIA plot to poison Fidel Castro. But the book's chief merit is its direct access to the mind of a callous and frightened man. His fears about antitrust suits, Las Vegas competition and staff loyalty pale before his phobias. Dreading germs, he dictated a "Procedures Manual" for handling anything he was to touch: "Wash four distinct and separate times, using lots of lather each time from individual bars of soap . . . The door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of 15 Kleenexes . . . Call Roy and have him come up to the house and awaken HRH at 10:15 a.m. sharp if HRH is not awake by that time. With eight thicknesses of Kleenex he is to pinch HRH's toes until he awakens, increasing the pressure each time."

It is a pathetic irony that Hughes sought refuge in one of the nation's least populous states only to find it too crowded and dangerous (he attempted bribery to stop nuclear testing in Nevada). It is a further mockery by fate that this man who was once given a ticker-tape parade for his aviation exploits grounded himself in a dark cubicle surrounded by crumpled tissues. The conviction that everyone had his price and that he could double it seems to have corrupted Hughes profoundly. His money cut him off from emotional commerce, the give and take of feelings that establishes true value. This book documents the abysmal failure of a man who could buy anything but had nothing to sell.