Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

25

I’VE MENTIONED RICHARD NIXON’S name several times to you, and this is as good a time as any to tell the story of my involvement with him.

I want to say at the outset that I have nothing against the man personally, and in no sense is it my intention to cut him out of the pack of politicians as a particular target. This just happens to be something that happened in my life, and therefore I feel the obligation to tell the tale.

I’ve often believed that every man has the family he deserves, and Dick Nixon is no exception. He’s got the biggest jerk for a brother that you can imagine. Early in the 1950s Donald Nixon was running a glorified hamburger stand in the Nixons’ home town, Whittier, California. The restaurant featured the Nixonburger. That was nothing more than a hamburger, and not a very good one at that.

Don Nixon would have done better running a soup kitchen for the Salvation Army, or any other nonprofit organization, because, Nixonburger and all, he was up over his ears in debt. His food suppliers were dunning him and he couldn’t even pay his light bills. In 1957, soon after Dick had been elected Vice-President under Eisenhower, Don, with this white elephant of a hamburger joint on his hands, needed $205,000 to bail himself out. And no bank or legitimate loan institution in its right mind was going to lend two hundred and five thousand United States dollars on a corner candy store operation like that.

Dick Nixon would have given his brother the money, I’m sure, but he didn’t have a plugged nickel at that time. Politicians make money after they get elected, not before.

It’s important to understand that I didn’t get wind of his brother being in trouble and make an offer to Nixon. I didn’t know who the hell his brother was, and I cared even less. Nixon specifically asked me for the money. Clark Clifford, my lawyer, the man who had worked for Truman when he was president, called from Washington on a secure phone and spelled out the situation. Dick Nixon needed money to save his brother’s neck and he wanted it from me.

There was no shilly-shallying about this, nothing cute. It was a direct request for a loan, and it was also pretty clearly an indirect request that the loan be a permanent one.

Why did he come to you?

We had met before and he had me on his list for an emergency. This was the emergency. I had a number of things pending before government agencies at the time – I’ll get to those in a minute – and I figured $205,000 worth of juice ought to grease the skids. I agreed to provide the money.

The only security the Nixon family had for the loan was a vacant lot owned by their mother in Whittier, California. They wanted to build a filling station there. As a matter of fact, I own that filling station right now. I had to take it over, much to my annoyance, because it’s a pain in the ass. A filling station has no place in the Hughes Empire. But at least I could gas up my car whenever I went to Whittier, and it didn’t cost me a nickel.

I had to get this money to Donald Nixon sub rosa, because it wouldn’t do, naturally, for the papers to associate a Howard Hughes loan with Dick Nixon’s brother. They might think I was looking for favors from the government, especially since Dick was being widely called ‘Tricky Dick’ and had just barely saved his political skin when he was campaigning with Eisenhower in 1952. You way remember the famous Checkers speech that he made, when he had to explain why these big businessmen in California had him on their payroll at the same time he was a U.S. senator. That’s when he cried on television. I always thought he had an onion in his handkerchief.

Anyhow, Noah Dietrich tried to kill the whole idea of the loan. Noah was a rockribbed Republican but he sensed that Nixon might be a little careless about covering up, and this thing could come out as easily as the campaign-contribution thing and we all would have a hard time explaining it the second time around.

Noah was so firm about it that he convinced me it was a mistake.

I said, ‘All right, but you’d better go talk to Nixon personally. Explain our position. I don’t need him as an enemy.’

Noah went to Washington and saw Nixon. The appointment was in Nixon’s office, the vice-presidential suite. He and Noah had lunch together. Noah began to express his fears, but Nixon said that if any of it came out, well, tough titty, he could handle it. He’d been accused of worse things in his life. He said to Noah, ‘Don needs the money. I put my family ahead of my career.’

He also dropped a little bombshell on me, via Noah. He said he wanted an additional $200,000, so that his brother could go into another business.

Noah asked him what that business might be, and Nixon said, ‘I’ll work that out.’

When Noah told him that he didn’t believe that Mr. Hughes would want to put up any more money than the sum originally agreed on, if even that, Nixon said, ‘Tell Mr. Hughes I’m going to be in U.S. politics for a long time, and there are a great many favors I can do for him over a great many years.’

Noah reported this to me and said, ‘Don’t do it, Howard. He’s slippery.’

‘Yes, and loyal to his idiot brother, and thoroughly dishonest. I can use a man like that. We’ll give him the money.’

We worked it out and eventually resorted to various methods to get the money to Don Nixon. The full four hundred thousand. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the Brits say.

What did Nixon do for you?

The most important thing was a problem with the CAB, the Civil Aeronautics Board. They wouldn’t let TWA deal directly with Toolco, because I owned them both. That squabble had been going on for twelve years and caused me no end of aggravation. A couple of weeks after the loan was made, the CAB lifted that restriction.

Did you specifically ask Nixon to remove the restriction?

I didn’t ask Nixon anything. I just saw that a memo with a short list of my problems appeared on his desk. The other important item was that Toolco was involved in an anti-trust suit from the Justice Department. That was settled by a consent decree. And then we had another domestic route granted to TWA, and also we were allowed to stop in Manila on our Far Eastern flights.

In other words, I got my money’s worth. About that time Hughes Aircraft received a number of defence contracts, but that didn’t really have anything to do with it because the stuff we were turning out was of such superior quality that we would have got those contracts anyhow. Of course, if I’d changed my mind about the loan the way Noah wanted me to – who knows what would have happened? There might have been trouble.

Be that as it may, we covered up pretty well. But when you’re dealing with Nixons, with second-rate minds who haven’t got the brains to hire better than second-rate minds to work for them – there’s no covering up. When someone craps on the table you can’t wipe his ass for him. I mean it’s too late – you can wipe his ass for him but it doesn’t solve the problem. The pile of crap is still there.

We even tried to haul that jerk Don out of the hole he’d dug for himself and show him how to run a restaurant. We set up a committee with Pat DiCicco in charge. Pat had the feeding contract for Hughes Aircraft – brought in box lunches for the guys on the assembly line. He was supposed to know something about the restaurant business.

But Don Nixon didn’t like to deal with committees. I can’t blame him for that, although in this case it might have saved his bacon, or his Nixonburger, because the restaurant went out of business a couple of months after the committee pulled out.

Meanwhile, of course, we had given him the four hundred and five thousand. I hadn’t dared to make it a direct loan. Most of it I passed it to him through a Los Angeles law firm, Waters and Arditto, which I used at the time. It was convenient, because Waters was a friend of Dick Nixon’s – there was some tie-in through their wives. The money was sent to Jim Arditto, who did some work for my companies, and had actually taken care of the arrangements for me to get married to Jean in Nevada. And Arditto turned the four hundred grand over to Don Nixon’s mother, who passed it along to Don. In return for this, Hannah Nixon, the mother, gave us a mortgage on the gas station, as collateral for the loan, and agreed to pay a monthly mortgage payment of a few hundred dollars. But the lot and gas station were worth, at best, about forty thousand dollars.

Someone had to receive that mortgage payment. We didn’t want it to be Toolco, so the mortgage was transferred to an accountant in Waters’ office, a guy named Philip Reiner. He was a dummy. I don’t mean he was stupid. I mean he was a dummy for Toolco – he held the trust deed on the property in Whittier.

Reiner was a registered Democrat. Nobody seemed to think that mattered at the time, and of course I knew nothing about these details. But bear that fact in mind – he was a Democrat, and I don’t think he made any secret of it.

Reiner received the rent checks, and kept them.

One summer day in 1960, three years later, while Nixon was just starting to campaign against Jack Kennedy for the presidency of the United States, an auditor going over the books down at Toolco in Houston found that $205,000 figure standing there all by itself, very lonely, on one page. The other $200,000, fortunately, came from an offshore source, a Mexican corporation that had a bank account in the Cayman Islands. No one in Toolco knew about that.

But the two hundred five thousand had been there on our books for three years and the auditor wanted to know what it was all about. It passed along up the line and it got to Arditto’s office in Los Angeles. Arditto figured that the men in Houston were asking him to account for the rent money. He called in Philip Reiner, who been pocketing the few hundred bucks a month rent – by then the total was about ten thousand dollars. Peanuts. But not peanuts to the auditor at Toolco. And certainly the two hundred and five thousand on the books, which nobody could really account for, wasn’t peanuts.

Arditto said to Reiner, ‘I guess you’d better pay them back the ten thousand.’

Reiner walked out of Arditto’s office in a huff. He walked straight to his lawyer’s office and told the lawyer what had happened, and he mentioned the Hughes Tool Company. The lawyer looked up the mortgage property and found that it belonged to Hannah Nixon, the Vice-President’s mother.

Reiner was a Democrat and his lawyer was a Democrat. Zing, they saw the implications of the whole thing, and the lawyer in Los Angeles sent Reiner to Washington to talk to another lawyer, a guy named McInerney, a close friend of Bobby Kennedy.

McInerney and the Kennedys got together. But they still had a problem. They didn’t have any real evidence, and they knew nothing at all about the additional two hundred grand that had gone through the Cayman Islands. They only had Reiner’s version of the mortgage story, but they didn’t have any actual proof that Reiner was a dummy for Toolco, and Reiner didn’t want his head on any chopping block. There was a notarized paper that spelled it all out, but Reiner didn’t have it. He’d given it to Arditto as part of the so-called security arrangements, and Arditto had locked it in a safe, and for all the Kennedys knew had even destroyed it after the first phone call came from Houston saying, ‘What’s going on?’

Now comes a little ironic twist in this. Jack and Bobby Kennedy wanted Reiner to be as clean as possible in the event they could get the evidence and break the story, so they gave him $10,000 – or whatever the total of the rent money was that Reiner had received for holding the trust deed on the Whittier property – and told him to return it to Arditto. Reiner returned it, and eventually it made its way back to Toolco. The irony, if you boil the money trail down to its simplest elements, is that the Kennedys paid the mortgage on Dick Nixon’s mother’s gas station in Whittier.

And then – well, I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. The stupidity of intelligent, educated people never ceases to amaze me. Quite a while ago Arditto had Xeroxed the Nixon mortgage file, and put a copy in Reiner’s filing cabinet. Why he did that we never found out. Reiner never knew it was there – it was buried in with a lot of junk.

A few days after he got back from Washington to Los Angeles, Reiner called Arditto to make sure the check for $10,000 had been received, and Reiner said, ‘Oh, by the way, I left some papers in your office. Would you mind sending them over to me?’ He was setting up new office space for himself in Santa Monica. So Arditto emptied out the desk and the filing cabinet – didn’t even look what was in it – and sent it to Santa Monica.

Reiner casually looked through it before he put it in a new file cabinet. There was the copy of the Nixon file. Most important, there was the notarized paper setting him up to hold the trust deed.

I know that seems an incredible story, but it’s really not so incredible, not if you accept the fact that intelligence is an ability, not a permanent state of mind. People don’t seem to be able to use their intelligence more than a few minutes a day.

Arditto forgot to plug in his intelligence that day, and he just said, ‘Get these files the hell out of my office and over to this guy’s new office in Santa Monica.’

This was shortly before the elections. Reiner gave all the material to McInerney, who put together a reasonably accurate account of the whole deal and fed it to the newspapers.

But they wouldn’t publish it. They didn’t believe it.

But McInerney and Reiner had proof.

Proof is only proof when you’re in the mood to believe it’s proof. I think the newspapers didn’t want to be accused of a last-minute smear campaign against poor Dick Nixon, who had been knocked from pillar to post already by Jack Kennedy. Maybe they figured it wasn’t dignified. The only guy who would touch it was Drew Pearson, and even he said, ‘Not until after the election.’

I watched from afar. Although Pearson and the newspapers wouldn’t touch the story, they did make a few inquiries to the Nixon people, and Nixon panicked. He must have convinced himself that he’d better scotch the snake before it bites. After all, he was paranoid, and he didn’t know the newspapers didn’t have proof or were reluctant to print it. He knew it was true and he couldn’t be sure the newspapers didn’t know it was true.

Robert Finch, his campaign manager, came roaring out and made a statement to the press that there had been a personal loan to Donald Nixon by his old friend Frank Waters, Arditto’s partner, and Howard Hughes and Toolco had nothing to do with it, and Dick Nixon hadn’t known anything about it, he was pure as the driven snow. They called it a last-minute smear attempt on the part of the Democrats.

Drew Pearson blew his top at this hypocrisy and decided not to wait until after the election, and he broke the story with all the details – in fact, quite a few more details than the accountant and McInerney had supplied him with.

That came about because I had come to the conclusion over the years that Nixon was not very bright. Cunning and wildly ambitious, but not intelligent. Not eccentric. Common. Vulgar. I’d watched him on television and he always looked to me like a vacuum-cleaner salesman who just knocked on your door and is trying to sell you an out-of-date model. I had decided that Jack Kennedy was the better man. I was fond of the Kennedys, especially Bobby, and I thought the country needed a president who didn’t have a brother who made Nixonburgers. So the rest of the details leaked to Drew Pearson. Not all, not everything I’ve told you, but more than the file showed. Someone whispered in Mr. Pearson’s ear where to look. Mr. Pearson looked, and Mr. Pearson found.

Finch tried to deny Pearson’s accusation, but he had to admit, finally, that the money had come from Toolco. However, Richard Nixon hadn’t known anything about it and no favors had been done in return for it, which any human being with even a quarter of a brain could see was a blatant lie.

There was a hell of a fuss. This was a week or two before the election – a touch and go situation, if you recall. Nixon was already in trouble because he hadn’t done well in the TV debates against Kennedy – too much five-o’clock-shadow, they said.

Some people say that loan cost Dick Nixon the presidential election. I never saw myself as a power behind the scenes in Washington, but I did my bit. Every businessman need friends in high places. I did my bit, and I saw to it that Jack Kennedy knew that I did it.

Did you tell Pearson about the second Cayman Island loan?

No one has ever known about that until now.

Can you give me some more details?

I’ve probably told you too much already. If that ever came out, Nixon would probably be impeached. I’m pretty sure that taking a bribe, even though he was only Vice President when he took it, fits the founding fathers’ definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’

But it’s going to come out in your autobiography.

Let the chips fall where they may.