Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

15

THE SENATE INVESTIGATION of me was the biggest post-war circus of its kind. All they wanted to do was make page one of every newspaper in the country, day after day, and they succeeded. Even before the circus started in Washington there were a lot of statements being made to the newspapers, mainly by me, because I figured once they got me in the witness chair, where I didn’t have the right to question the cross-examiners, I’d be not just behind the eight ball, I’d be jammed right into the side pocket and they’d be ramming their senatorial cue sticks up my ass every chance they got. I’d be the donkey, not the lion.

What I was saying, principally, was what everyone who opened his eyes could see that Brewster and Trippe were in partnership and the whole thing was a smear campaign to ruin my reputation and take routes away from TWA, and put the pressure on me to merge with Pan American as the junior partner. And I got in my licks, because I let the world know that while Brewster was screaming about Johnny Meyer and my people entertaining Air Force people during the war, he, Brewster, was freeloading on my TWA planes. That took the wind out of his sails for a little while, but guys like Brewster, any politicians, have an answer for everything: a fountain of doubletalk.

I had to prepare this carefully, because I knew pretty well what was going to happen. I telephoned Homer Ferguson and told him I wasn’t going to jump through the hoop like a trained seal and fly to Washington on twenty-four hours’ notice. I also wrote an article for the papers in which I asked how come an earlier investigation of Pan American – they’d built some airports and socked the government hard for the costs – had been dropped by the committee, and why Brewster lied in public about the committee having no authority to investigate Pan Am because the airports were built outside the United States.

I still boil when I think about all this, and it was over twenty years ago. But my reputation, my personal and professional reputation, was on the line. This committee was like something out of the Spanish Inquisition. Every time you’d try to give them a straight answer, they’d interrupt you. Every time you were giving them answers they didn’t like, they’d call a recess. And every time one of them lied, or got the facts balled up, and I tried to challenge them for playing dirty pool, they’d yell, ‘You’re demeaning the dignity of this committee, Mr. Hughes! You stay at the back of the bus where you belong.’

At first they wouldn’t let me ask a single question. So the only thing to do was turn the tables on them. I decided to treat it like a military operation. Right away, before we got anywhere near the meat of the thing, I demanded the right to cross-examine the senators.

I kept hammering away at that until they were sick of hearing me say it. At the very beginning, before they could get their teeth into me the way they’d done to Johnny Meyer, I told them the story of Brewster propositioning me at the Mayflower. That hit the headlines. Then I said that, considering what had happened, Brewster should disqualify himself as chairman.

They didn’t like all that, and we wound up with a compromise, something I hadn’t foreseen. They agreed to let me submit a list of written questions to Brewster, which he would answer one by one, in the order they were submitted, and Ferguson would take the chair while this was going on.

Now, Claude Pepper, who I mentioned before, was a gentleman, and a Democrat, and he was on the committee. We had two private talks, once before the hearings began and once after the first day of my testimony. We met by the Lincoln Monument in a parked car. I remember some kids were playing softball on the grass there. One of the kids hit a foul ball and the ball rolled under my car. The kid came running over to get the ball, and Senator Pepper ducked his head and tried to hide under the dashboard. He was in such a hurry he hit his head and cut himself. He was afraid of being recognized.

I said, ‘Claude, don’t worry, these kids wouldn’t know a United States senator from the Washington dogcatcher.’

He hadn’t wanted to meet me there in the first place, but I said, ‘A public place is the safest. Nobody thinks of looking for two people like us in front of the Lincoln Monument.’

He gave me all the information he had about Owen Brewster: where Brewster was vulnerable. And when it came time for me to submit my list of questions to Brewster, Pepper told me in advance what sort of questions might put Brewster on the spot, and I told him what I was planning to do, and he said, ‘Yes, that’s good,’ or ‘No, he can slide out of that for such and such a reason.’ This senator, you understand, wasn’t on my payroll, he wasn’t someone I’d helped politically. This was being done out of his sense of fair play.

I was also filled in on some of the favors that Brewster had gotten from Bill McEvoy, who was a vice-president of Pan American and had taken Brewster to football games. I worked that into my questions too. I asked Brewster – Ferguson was asking the questions for me, but they were my questions – about McEvoy and the football games. He muttered around for a while, but he couldn’t very well deny it since he knew that two of the senators on the committee knew, and he wound up saying, ‘Yes, but I bought my own peanuts.’ This was a United States senator telling the world: ‘I bought my own peanuts.’

I personally didn’t have the right to cross-examine, but the system worked – that is, with Ferguson asking questions for me. It worked not so much because of the advice I’d been given, but because of the method I adopted. Each night, as soon as the committee adjourned, I prepared a list of questions for the next session. I never flared up during those hearings. I kept absolutely in control of myself, but Brewster nearly went over the edge. He was yelling and pounding the table.

I went back to the hotel each night and I asked everybody to leave except Tom Slack, my lawyer, and he had to keep quiet unless I specifically asked him something. I worked all night preparing the questions. The point of it was that I didn’t know what Brewster’s answers were going to be. I couldn’t really cross-examine as a courtroom lawyer would. But I could make a pretty educated guess what he might answer. So I geared the next question to what I figured he would answer to the last one, and the results were amazing.

I’ll try to give you a small example. It was a little trap I set, and Brewster walked into it like a tame skunk on a string. In order to fathom the logic of the questioning, you need to know that Brewster was the one who pressed for the hearings to get started early, because he’d set up a timetable with Juan Trippe. There was even some doubt that the hearings would take place at all, but Brewster had his orders. He was pushing, and he bypassed Homer Ferguson when he announced it to the press. So first I asked Brewster a question: ‘Isn’t it true, Senator, that you yourself actually made the decision to start this hearing on July 28, the day it was begun?’

I knew that Brewster was going to deny it, pass the buck to Ferguson, and he was a long-winded son of a bitch and he was bound to get himself all tangled up in the denial. Which is exactly what he did. So then Ferguson read the next question. It was: ‘Then, Senator, if you yourself didn’t make the decision to hold this hearing, and if you left the decision up to Senator Ferguson, how do you explain the fact that Senator Ferguson was totally unaware that the decision to hold this hearing had actually been made until the day following the time when you announced the hearing to the press on July 24?’

Silence in the senate chamber. Brewster looks pale. Then he turns red. Then he looks down, then right, then left – then up – but God wasn’t there to help him and neither was Juan Trippe.

All Brewster could think of to say was, ‘I don’t know.’ He looked like a fool and he looked worse as it went on. A lot of the questions, since I couldn’t cross-examine him, were stuff like, ‘Do you still beat your wife?’ But that’s what they’d been trying to pull on me, and I figured two could play at that game.

The upshot of it was, when I finished with him he dragged his crippled ass out of Washington and whined to the newspapers that he’d been shot full of poison arrows, and Howard Hughes didn’t play fair like a red-blooded American boy should. What he really meant was that he hadn’t seen the color of my blood, which he wanted to spill into buckets and use to paint his campaign posters for the Republican vice presidential nomination, and this sort of irked him – he saw his political star sinking down the drain. He didn’t know the half of it.

After that he made a speech telling what a great upstanding senator he was, and I made a speech and said he had the reputation for being one of the greatest trick-shot artists in Washington. And then I blew my own horn a little because it had pretty much come down to a question that one of us was telling the truth and one of us was lying about the lunch in the Mayflower. I said I was from Texas, where a man’s word is his bond.

The upshot was that once Brewster got caught wetting his pants in this remote control cross-examination, he didn’t have the whip hand anymore. The galleries cheered every time I told him off, told him how much money I’d lost on those contracts and how hard I’d worked.

There was a point where they wanted Johnny Meyer to take the stand again, but or course he couldn’t be found. He was in St. Tropez. They asked me if I would make an effort to get him back to Washington.

I ducked it at first, and they kept badgering me, and when they asked me the last time I was fed up, and I said, ‘No, I don’t think I will.’ I knew it would make them see red, but I didn’t care. The United States Senate wasn’t going to make me jump through the hoop and I wanted them to goddamn well know it.

When I finally got out of Washington, Brewster told the newspapers that he’d only just begun to fight.

I waited a long time before I got in my licks. I couldn’t do anything about it right then, because Brewster had been reelected to the Senate in 1946, just a year before these hearings took place, and it was a six-year term. He didn’t come up for reelection again until 1952. But I gave him warning that I’d get him before he got me. I sent him a letter offering him a job as an actor at double the regular starting salary. I said that was because he’d very clearly demonstrated his acting ability in the Senate. It was a private letter, but it got to the press. The important part of it was my suggestion that he’d be wise to take the offer seriously and not turn down the job, because one of these days, when the people of Maine got wise to him, he was going to be out of work. That was a pretty clear warning, I figured.

I waited. I didn’t forget about him. I kept in touch. I sent him a telegram now and then to remind him that I existed, and I even sent him a birthday cake once from Texas, a fruit cake, to let him know that I hadn’t forgotten him.

And when the time came in 1952, I did what I considered was a patriotic duty. I felt that the man was a disgrace to the state of Maine and to everything that the United States of America stood for, or was supposed to stand for.

I had an agency working for me, the Carl Byoir Agency. They handled my public relations. I got together with them and told them what I wanted. What I wanted, specifically, was the defeat of Senator Brewster in the Maine primary election.

There was a man up in Maine named Frederick Payne, a publisher, and he was one of the two other candidates running against Brewster in the Republican primary. I decided that Payne was the only man who stood a chance against Brewster. Brewster was the favorite, but a favorite can only win when he’s got the right jockey riding him. I decided to ride Frederick Payne, and at the same time trample Owen Brewster into the ground. It was fairly simple. Noah Dietrich helped me a little, and the Byoir agency helped me, but what it took was just plain old cash.

I contributed sufficient sums to Mr. Payne’s campaign, and certain men were hired in Maine to do what had to be done. Mr. Brewster’s record in Congress was put before the general public, including his attempt to boil me in oil in 1947 and his offer to bribe me, and his association with Pan American. I don’t remember how much it cost, but it was under two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I would have spent a million if that’s what was required. However, Maine is not a very populous state, and $250,000 goes a long way.

When you’re dealing with a man like Owen Brewster you just tell the truth. Naturally it looks to the world like a smear campaign. We hired enough men and women to canvas door to door. We had the Girl Scouts out there campaigning against him – paid them off in cookies. No, that’s a joke, we didn’t pay off the Girl Scouts. They were happy to work for us. They knew Brewster for the cur he was.

And Brewster didn’t have a clue until the brick fell on his head. I enjoyed it thoroughly – in silence. An Italian friend of mine once said to me, ‘Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.’

Brewster lost the primary, but not by much, which should show you that if I hadn’t pumped all that money in there, he would have won. He lost by under 2,000 votes.

That ended the career of Senator Owen Brewster. I’m proud to say, after all these years, that I was the man responsible for his exit from public life.