Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

14

YOU COULD WRITE a whole book about my battle with Senator Owen Brewster of the Republican Party during the 1947 Senate investigations. I’ve often been tempted to do just that. It was one of the most dramatic things that ever happened to me, because that was the time that I actually met some of those people who were out to get me, face to face, on their home field – and I whipped their ass.

I bumped into Bernard Baruch just before this happened, in Washington. We had a little talk about it and he said, ‘Don’t worry, the bastards tried to do the same thing to me.’ He’d been hauled up before the Senate right after the First World War and accused of war profiteering. Naturally they couldn’t prove anything, and that cheered me up a bit, to think that a man of Baruch’s stature and reputation had to suffer the same mudslinging. He told me not to give an inch to them, admit nothing, not even the slightest mistake, because even if it was an innocent mistake, they’d pyramid it into the fact that I was the Dracula of the aircraft industry, sucking the blood out of innocent senators and generals. And Bernie said, ‘Never get excited. Keep your dignity.’

He also advised me to hit back at them every chance I got, because they were more vulnerable than I was, since they were congressmen, and that meant thieves and hypocrites. That was a fruitful talk and it gave me good ideas on how to handle it, although I’d been hitting back already through the newspapers.

This whole experience – going up before that Senate committee those two times – taught me something I’ve never forgotten. I hadn’t been totally aware of it before, but it stayed with me and was a tremendous revelation. I developed a theory.

You take any given situation in life – from the senate investigation to a business deal – where you have two parties or individuals who want something from each other. In other words, practically every situation in life, because that’s what life is, one person putting the pressure on another person and that person trying to defend or attack or bargain or adjust. This excludes most situations where love is involved, but not all, because what passes for love – I’ve seen this time after time between people who are supposed to love each other – is often combat. Many times love degenerates into the most uncivilized form of combat precisely because the people won’t admit it’s combat.

In any situation such as I described – two parties or individuals who want something from each other – you have what I call a lion and a donkey. You can’t have equality in bargaining, in arguing, or in combat. You may have an apparent equality but it’s only an illusion, a false arrangement. You may get a tie score in a football game, or after thirty-six holes of a pro golf tournament, but if they play long enough someone’s going to win. There are no ties in life except if they’re arranged artificially. People are not equal; that’s a pernicious lie.

This is my lion and donkey theory. It’s not patented and it may not be original, but it’s mine. You always have a need for one person to be the lion and one to be the donkey. Most people aren’t aware of this, but it happens anyway.

Two men sit down to negotiate the price for some airplanes and the conditions of delivery. If one of them is accommodating and humble, and says, ‘Oh, yes, I see your point, you’re right, I understand your situation, your problems’ – then the other one automatically is going to have to play the part of the lion and eat the donkey up alive. He may not be a lion by nature, but if there’s a donkey sitting in front of him, all wobbly-kneed, his lion instincts are going to come out and he’s going to chew up the donkey and spit out the bones. If a man goes into that meeting roaring like a lion and says, ‘This is what I want! This is fair, and don’t fool around with me!’ – then it’s the other man who’s going to play the part of the donkey, like it or not. Has to. Because nature, as in the animal kingdom, demands that these two parts be played – that’s nature’s way.

My point is that if you know this – and I began to realize it when the investigations got under way – you know that it can be up to you whether you’re going to be the lion or the donkey. And you can bet your last chip that if you don’t choose your part first, then the other guy is going to choose his, and if he’s got any brains or experience, or even peasant cunning, he’ll choose to be the lion.

So you can’t give him that opportunity. You can feel around a bit because maybe before you go roaring in you have a moment to see if he’s a natural donkey, or if he thinks you’re a natural lion, in which case he’ll start out as the donkey without your having to do anything, and you can just be a kind of, well…

A friendly lion.

That’s a nice idea.

Are you saying that you were the lion in the Senate investigations?

I’ll tell the story and you be the judge.

This whole thing goes back a long way in time, and it’s involved with politics and big money. The man who was out to pillory me was Owen Brewster, commonly known as the Senator from Pan American Airways. He was a Republican from Maine and he’d been lobbying for Pan American down in Washington for years. He was a close friend of Juan Trippe, president of Pan Am, and Sam Pryor, vice president of Pan Am. Trippe tried to keep his hands clean on this, as much as he could – Sam Pryor did his dirty work and was Brewster’s contact.

The other chief honcho on the investigative committee was Senator Homer Ferguson from Michigan. Ferguson wasn’t as bad as Brewster, but he was bad enough, and he was a longwinded son of a bitch. What he enjoyed most was strutting before the cameras. And there was Senator Joe McCarthy of later fame, although he kept his mouth shut most of the time during these hearings. He was learning his trade. Harry Truman had been the head of that committee and then they gave it to Brewster. There were a few Democrats on the committee, including Claude Pepper from Florida. Pepper was a gentleman. I don’t remember the others’ names, but their faces are etched into my mind in indelible ink.

It all started when Juan Trippe got the bright idea to wipe out the competition. Pan Am was going to be the only airline flying from the United States to Europe and other foreign points. This was going to be a great measure of economy and efficiency, and all it required was for TWA and the other airlines to step down and get merged. It was called then the Community Airline Bill, sponsored by Senator Brewster.

Juan Trippe and Brewster came to tell me this personally, in Palm Springs, California, just before the war. It had been in the wind for several years and was being discussed between the various owners of the major airlines, of which I was one. Trippe came out and put the proposition to me.

But of course my terms were that I’d be right up there on top with Mr. Trippe. That was not acceptable. Mr. Trippe and Senator Brewster didn’t like the idea of playboy Howard Hughes horning in on their monopoly.

So the negotiations fell through.

The other part of the background was that this was 1947 and the committee, which was meant to be investigating the national defense program, had been jogging along, raising a little ruckus here and a little rumpus there, but fundamentally just shooting at clay pigeons. During the war the two major political parties buried the hatchet, decided to fight the Japs and the Germans instead of each other, but after the war they went back to the old business of cutting each other’s throats. Elections were coming up. The best thing the Republican Party could think of to win that election was to discredit the late President of the United States, Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been my friend, by discrediting his son, Elliot Roosevelt, also my friend. Tar the father with the son’s brush.

Senator Brewster had political ambitions as well. Harry Truman had previously been chairman of this committee. He jumped from there to Vice President of the United States, and from there to the presidency. I think Owen Brewster saw himself climbing the same ladder. In fact it came out later that he had been promised the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party by none other than Juan Trippe. Trippe was a shrewd man, with influence, and Senator Brewster would have profited very handsomely. He could have given the old one-two punch to Roosevelt Sr. and Roosevelt Jr., and if he could have decked me at the same time, that really would have put a feather in his cap.

We knew all this beforehand. The committee sent an investigator out to California, a man named Francis Flanagan, to look over our records.

Flanagan was indiscreet. He said to Noah, without batting an eyelash, ‘Don’t kid yourself, the purpose of this committee is to get Elliot Roosevelt.’

‘Mr. Flanagan,’ Noah said, ‘I don’t care whether you get Elliot Roosevelt or not’ – Noah was a Republican – ‘but if Howard Hughes is your whipping boy, then you’re going to be doing an injustice to a man who doesn’t deserve it.’

Flanagan paid no attention, because he had his orders from the top. And pretty soon came the famous incident at the Mayflower Hotel.

Brewster had been thumping the drums for days, weeks, about how he was going to drag me before the committee and prove that not only hadn’t I delivered any planes during the war, but that I’d profited illegally. And also that I’d curried favor with Elliot Roosevelt, who was in the photo reconnaissance division, and that Johnny Meyer, a public-relations man for me, had bribed Colonel Roosevelt and various other important officials with sex and nylon stockings.

His intentions were public knowledge. I knew it, the newspapers knew it, the world knew it. The pressure was on me – because no matter how much I tried to keep in touch with what was going on in my company, I couldn’t know whether the office boys were selling black-market stockings or what the hell was going on in every sphere. And if you dig deep enough in every man’s life, you’ll come up with dirt. Frankly, I felt a little uncomfortable about going before that committee.

That’s when our friend Mr. Brewster came to me at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. I was staying there with Noah Dietrich and my Washington lawyer, Tom Slack.

We had lunch in my suite, and Brewster said, ‘Mr. Hughes, if you’ll go along with Mr. Trippe and the Community Airline Bill’ – in other words, if you’ll bend down in public and kiss Pan Am’s ass, and agree for TWA to suck hind tit – ‘we’ll call off the investigation.’

Don’t think that deals and demands in Washington are subtle things. Maybe that’s the way you’d write about them in a novel, but in real life there’s no beating around the bush. The man comes up and says, ‘I want you to do this, and this is what I’ll give you in return, and you’ve got forty-eight hours to decide.’

It didn’t take me forty-eight hours. I told Brewster to go to hell. Right then and there I made up my mind that I was going to face this committee, that I was going to clear myself, my company, Elliot Roosevelt, and everyone who was associated with me, and that I was going to wipe away the mud that man was flinging at us with both hands.

The first point of truth is that there had been no war profiteering on our part. I had lost a small fortune on my war contracts. I think I’ve mentioned that by 1947, out of my own pocket, I’d laid out $7 million for the construction of the Hercules. That was only the beginning. By 1951 I’d spent another ten million, and the fact is that the government had never put up the whole eighteen million they’d promised me. I had to sue the RFC for the difference. Not that I expected to get it, it was more a point of honor, and to set the record straight.

I had also taken a hell of a loss on the F-11. Both these contracts, which technically speaking I hadn’t delivered on – that is to say, the planes were not finished by the end of the war, and therefore of no immediate combat use to the military – involved a total outlay on the government’s part of about forty to fifty million dollars, which they considered money down the drain.

It wasn’t down the drain, for all the reasons I’ve given you, but that’s how they considered it, and even if they didn’t really believe it that’s what they were saying, loud and clear. Now that so-called forty- or fifty-million-dollar loss represented less than one percent of the entire amount the government lost during the war in unfulfilled military contracts. Less than one percent! And that total included manufacturers like Boeing and Republic and Lockheed, companies that had a Priority One for material. I had a Priority Five, which was the lowest you could get.

The total government loss came to over $6 billion. But there was more fuss made about my supposed fifty million than all the others put together, because they’d singled me out as the scapegoat and also, as I said, this investigation was political in origin, a way to crush Elliott Roosevelt and the Democratic administration.

Republic, for example, was supposed to make a recon ship called the XF-12. I brought this up at the hearings, but of course they didn’t want to hear about it. They just brushed it off, because Pan American had worked with Republic on the XF-12 and Pan American was too delicate to touch. The XF-12 plane cost the government about $30 million and it was never delivered. There was never even a static model. The first test model nosed over and cracked up a minute after it got off the runway. But nobody cared about that because Howard Hughes hadn’t built it. I can’t remember the figures on how much money was put into aircraft that never flew, but you can bet that it came to well over $600 million.

As far as my employee Johnny Meyer was concerned, Johnny had been doing, on a small scale, what representatives of every single company in the United States had been doing throughout the course of the war, and on a much larger scale than Hughes Aircraft and Toolco – which is, specifically, lavishly entertain Army officers and government officials.

These men came out to meet you for an afternoon of business discussion. You couldn’t just throw them out of your office at 5 P.M. and say, ‘See you tomorrow morning, boys. Have a good evening.’ You took them out, you provided for them. It was simple hospitality. The hypocrisy of these senators, who called each other ‘gentlemen’ – ‘will the gentleman from Missouri yield for a minute to the gentleman from Montana?’ – really, that’s exactly how these pompous asses talked to each other when they were mouthing off in the senate chamber – the hypocrisy of these men who were living off lobbyists and accepting favors right and left, money, women, free travel, free vacations, gifts, every week of the year, was beyond belief.

What about Judy Cook?

Judy Cook was a girl who worked for Johnny Meyer. She swam around in a pool. I always think of her as the girl I saw a hundred times. This pool had reflectors, so that it looked like there were a hundred Judy Cooks swimming through the pool.

She was an Olympic swimmer and an actress, and the whole Judy Cook incident was completely innocent. Johnny found her and brought her down to Palm Springs for a couple of parties. What Judy did on her own time was her own business.

Let’s get back to the senate committee. That was the important thing, not what happened or didn’t happen with Judy Cook in Palm Springs.

Before I testified they had a parade of witnesses. By the time I got to the hearings they’d raked everyone over the coals, including Henry Kaiser and Johnny Meyer. They were digging into the entire story of the HK-1 and the F-11. A full transcript of the hearings runs close to 300,000 typed pages. Reading it is enough to make a man want to overthrow the United States government. The verbal inanity of those senators is beyond belief, and the American taxpayer has to foot the bill to have all that garbage put into print in the Congressional Record. The vanity of these boring little men almost passes human understanding.

This committee wanted to know everything – they had nothing better to do. They hauled people away from important jobs, and from their families and their children.

Then Johnny Meyer got on the stand. Johnny was a publicity man: flashy, accommodating, and not very bright. He had a hell of a way with girls, but that’s about as far as his talents went.

I dreaded Johnny’s testifying, because they’d asked to see all of Johnny’s expense account records, and as Johnny admitted to me before he went to Washington, he had a habit of making them up quite a while after the actual event and skimming a few dollars on the side. I didn’t mind that. He had to live.

But what mattered was that these records were not entirely accurate, and Johnny knew it, and I knew it. I’ve always had a kind of soft spot in my heart for Johnny. He was a congenial dope. I heard that at his birthday dinner a few years ago in Los Angeles his three ex-wives came to the party and toasted him. I don’t mean over a slow fire, I mean with champagne. That’s an eloquent tribute.

Before he went to Washington to face the committee I told Johnny, ‘There’s only one thing you can do that’ll work. Go up before those senators and tell them the truth. Tell them that you made up the records long after the actual dinner at the Mocambo, or at ‘21.’ You’re human. They won’t send you to prison for it.’

He tried, but they didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. They flattened him. He was like a jackrabbit on the road, in front of the lights of a truck – he kept running and dodging, but he didn’t have sense enough to get off the road, and they just ran him down like a goddamn dumb jackrabbit.

He testified for days. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it, and I winced when I read reports of the testimony. Every word that came out of that man’s mouth put me further behind the eight ball. He wasn’t just Johnny Meyer sitting up there getting slaughtered, he was Howard Hughes’ right-hand man, the man who was taking Howard Hughes’ stooge, Elliott Roosevelt, out to dinner, and giving Elliot’s wife black market-nylon stockings as a present from Howard Hughes.

The more he babbled, the blacker it looked. They got on to other people, but they told him to stay in town, they wanted him back on the witness stand at a later date.

Johnny called me and said, ‘Howard, what am I going to do? I’m making a mess of this.’

‘You sure are. You’ve got to get out of town, Johnny.’

‘Where can I go?’

‘I’ll take care of that,’ I said.

I got hold of a TWA plane and I put Johnny on it, sent him off to Europe and said, ‘Go to the French Riviera and rent a diving helmet. Go to the bottom of the Mediterranean and stay there until I call you.’

That’s not something I’m ashamed of. It would have been totally unfair for Johnny to have reappeared on the stand until I’d had my say. They were making hamburger out of him. They were chopping him up, without benefit of onion, and cooking him to a fare-thee-well. And it wasn’t getting us any closer to the truth, because the truth lay back there in the Mayflower Hotel in the words of that viper, Senator Brewster.

When we got to Washington the second time, for the hearings, I stayed in the Carlton Hotel with Noah and my lawyers. Noah walked into my room the first day and started to talk to me about what was going on. I said, ‘Noah, shut up. I haven’t even searched the room yet. You can bet your sweet ass they’ve got it bugged.’

Noah said, ‘Then let’s go into the bathroom and talk.’

We went into the bathroom and I sat down on the toilet seat. I looked around and there was a ventilator in the bathroom. I jumped up and said, ‘We can’t talk here, Noah. They’ve probably put a mike in the ventilator shaft.’

Noah probably thought, Howard’s going round the bend again. We took the elevator downstairs. He started to talk in the hotel lobby right by a potted palm. I said, ‘For pete’s sake, Noah, the easiest place in the world to put a microphone is in a potted palm!’

He thought that was all in the movies. I had to explain it happened in real life and every day. So we talked on the streets, which were safer.

Well, this was one of many occasions when Noah had to admit I was right. Because it came out later that the ventilator shaft in the bathroom had been bugged, and there was a microphone hidden in it. Years later some police officer in Washington admitted that he tapped my telephone and installed bugs all over the hotel suite, including the bathroom ventilator shaft, for a thousand bucks, at the instigation of none other than our upstanding senator from Maine, Owen Brewster.

All my life, ever since the telephones were tapped at Romaine street in 1931, I’ve been conscious of people eavesdropping, and since the advent of revolutionary sophisticated electronic devices there isn’t a place in the world that’s completely safe. There’s a type of microphone called a shotgun mike – people can stand a hundred yards away from you and point that microphone at you and hear every word you’re saying. Do you know that they have a microphone that can be fired from a gun? It’s in the shape of a dart. A man can stand 500 yards away, aim his rifle at the side of your house, fire that dart into the wall of your house, and that microphone sits there and picks up everything that’s being said inside. You think you’re talking privately, but they’re broadcasting it in the Hollywood Bowl. Do you know what people would give to listen in to some of my conversation? If they could invent a dart to shoot into my brain and find out what I was thinking, they’d do it, no matter what the damage.

After the incident at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, when I said a place was bugged, Noah believed it was bugged. I can smell a bug in any room, and I’m not talking about cockroaches. Not about cucarachas. You know that song? La Cucaracha. That’s one of my favorite songs.