Unadulterated
Magnus Linklater
The Hughes Papers Elaine Davenport and Paul Eddy with Mark Hurwitz (Andre Deutsch 24.95) if You can bear to hear anything more about Howard Hughes who, like the CIA, is beginning to suffer from over-exposure, then the information contained in this book. is stunning. It shows that Hughes, a multimillionaire who combined meanness With grotesque extravagance (and who was also quite clearly insane) set out in the late sixties to bribe just about every politician in the State of Nevada in order to get licences for his gambling joints. His slush fund was composed of winnings from the Silver Slipper casino in Las Vegas which were distributed in brown envelopes and varied in
amount according to the status of the politician.
He also offered enormous sums of money to at least two presidential candidates, one Vice-President, and two Presidents. These Offers were not alway; refused. He bribed compulsively, wastefully, and inefficiently. And he did so, not in pursuit of some sinister master-plan, but merely to screw the enemies, real or imagined, who stood in the Way of his latest business ambition. The book is based largely on evidence given in various courts following the bitter struggle between Hughes and his former lieutenant Robert Maheu whom he fired and berated memorably as a `no-good dishonest sonofabitch who stole me blind' — Which statement may well cost the Hughes organisation a large sum of money when Maheu's libel suit gets through the courts. The authors can claim therefore that their Hughes book avoids much of the mythology surrounding a man who disappeared from Public view in 1956 (not to be seen again until he died last year) and relies solidly on sworn testimony. . Nevertheless, it's difficult to believe all of it. Most of the characters — and there are a 1-eat many of them — are patently strangers I° the truth, whether under oath or not, and even the authors confess themselves on Occasion daunted by the sheer weight of lies. 'It is extremely difficult to reconcile these conflicting stories' they complain at cirie stage, 'because of a lack of solid evidence, making it impossible to say where ,ute truth lies'. One sympathises. Particularly since the case in point is whether Hubert Humphrey (honestly, why bankroll him?) was given $50,000 or $100,000, and Whether he did or didn't pick up a briefcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills from the floor of his limousine where it was placed by a thoughtful Mr Maheu. Or whether, of
course, Mr Maheu might have forgotten to put it there in the first place, in which case, well . . .
More fascinating for us conspiracy theorists is the Nixon-Hughes connection which may or may not lie behind the Watergate break-in. Here, inevitably, the book moves deeper into speculation. We know, for instance, that Hughes once lent Nixon's brother $205,000 to set up a chain of hamburger restaurants (their main speciality being a triple-deeker known as a 'Nixon-burger'): we know that Hughes paid Nixon's friend Bebe Rebozo a princely $100,000 (half of which, says the book, came from the Silver Slipper casino fund) which was supposed to be a campaign contribution but was actually handed over long after Nixon became President in 1968; the authors also reveal that Nixon sanctioned Hughes's dubious purchase of a large airline called Air West. So much for the links.
At the same time Hughes had very close ties with the Democrats. In particular Lawrence O'Brien, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was for a long time employed by Hughes as a public relations adviser. In this capacity he presumably knew much about Hughes and Nixon which, as a Democrat, he could use to advantage. It was, of course, O'Brien's office in the Watergate building which was burgled by the Cubans, thus beginning the chain of events leading to Nixon's downfall.
To go from this set of intriguing circumstances to state, as the authors do, that 'the purpose of the break-in was almost certainly to discover how much O'Brien knew about the financial links between Hughes and Nixon' is to take a dangerous leap from fact into fantasy. There's no hard evidence for it. John Dean, in his recent book about 'Watergate, treats the theory with far greater caution since, as he points out, none of the burglars seems actually to have been aware of it. And the authors themselves, in a perplexing epilogue, move deftly from 'almost certainly' to 'entirely plausible'. That Hughes and Nixon were remarkably similar individuals and that the connection goes deep is, however, a valid claim. They were both wildly suspicious of their opponents and generally thought the worst of them; they both spent much time in the pursuit of minor aims which came to dominate their lives. Nixon's cover-up occupied two years of his Presidency. Hughes's campaign against Meheu became an equal obsession, involving teams of lawyers and detectives working flat-out to prove the most absurd charges against him. Neither succeeded; both men were destroyed by their efforts.
There is, too, a remarkable similarity in the awfulness of their language. I detected more than an echo of the White House tapes in some of the Hughes remarks quoted: 'Apparently you are not aware that the path of true friendship in this case has not been a bilateral affair' . . . 'Bill's total indifference and laxity to my pleas for help in the domestic area have resulted in a complete, I'm afraid irrevocable loss of my wife' . 'I always thought the coloured people had it pretty good around Nassau' . . 'I can summarise my attitude about employing negroes very simply — I think it is a wonderful idea for somebody else somewhere else' . .. and no expletives deleted in a typical Hughes reaction to an idea he didn't like: 'pure ninety-nine proof unadulterated shit'.
In the end I must confess to a renewed fascination with the sheer horror of Hughes' life, particularly the last years: and The Hughes Papers is a riveting chapter in it. The book is also a remarkable piece of research, whose laboriousness is seldom reflected in the writing. Just one plea: could Sunday Times book-writers now drop the habit of thumbing through the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to come up with clever lines to put at the top of every chapter? They're beginning to look just a little on the thin side.
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