Owen Brewster was born
in Penobscot County, Maine, on 22nd February, 1888. He graduated from
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, in 1909, and from the law department of
Harvard University in 1913. He was admitted
to the bar and worked as a lawyer in Portland, Maine.
A member of the Republican
Party he served as Governor of Maine (1925-1929). An unsuccessful
candidate for election to the Seventy-third Congress in 1932; he was
elected to the Seventy-fourth, Seventy-fifth, and Seventy-sixth Congresses
(January 3, 1935-January 3, 1941). Brewster was elected to the United
States Senate in 1940 and took his seat on 3rd January, 1941.
Brewster was chairman of
the Senate War Investigating Committee. In 1946 Brewster announced
that he was very concerned that the government had given Howard
Hughes
$40m for the development
and production of two aircraft that had never been delivered. Brewster
also pointed out the President Franklin
D. Roosevelt had overruled his military experts in order to hand
out the contracts to Hughes for the F-11 and HK-1 (also known as the
Spruce Goose).
Brewster also pointed out
that Hughes had provided "softening-up parties" for government
officials. Howard paid movie starlets $200 to attend these parties.
Their duties included swimming nude in Hughes's swimming pool. Julius
Krug, the chief of the War Production Board, was someone who often
attended these parties. One congressman who was also a frequent guest
at Hughes's home claimed: "If those girls were paid two hundred
dollars, they were greatly underpaid".
Howard
Hughes, accused of corruption, leaked information to journalists,
Drew Pearson and Jack
Anderson that Brewster was being paid by Pan American Airways
(Pan Am) to cause trouble. According to Hughes, Pan Am was trying
to persuade the United States government to set up an official worldwide
monopoly under its control. Part of this plan was to force all existing
American carriers with overseas operations to close down or merge
with Pan Am. As the owner of Trans World Airlines, Hughes posed a
serious threat to this plan. Hughes claimed that Brewster had approached
him and suggested he merge Trans World with Pan Am. When Hughes refused
Brewster began a smear campaign against him.
Drew
Pearson and Jack Anderson believed
Hughes and began their own campaign against Brewster. They reported
that Pan Am had provided Bewster with free flights to Hobe Sound,
Florida, where he stayed free of charge at the holiday home of Pan
Am Vice President Sam Pryor. These charges were repeated by Hughes
when he appeared before the Senate War Investigating Committee. He
also accused Brewster of trying to blackmail him into merging Trans
World with Pan Am. Brewster denied the charge but it helped divert
attention away from the charge that Hughes had wasted $40m of government
money.
The Senate War Investigating
Committee never completed its report on the non-delivery of the F-11
and the HK-1. The committee stopped meeting and was eventually disbanded.
In 1950 Brewster joined
other right-wing members of Congress, including Joseph
McCarthy, Richard
Nixon, J.
Parnell Thomas,
Harold Velde,
Francis
E. Walter, John
Rankin, John
Wood, and Karl
Mundt in their
campaign to remove "communists" from public life. When McCarthy
claimed that Drew Pearson was a communist
in a speech in the Senate on 15th December, 1950, Brewster had 75,000
copies printed and sent them out to everyone on his mailing list.
Brewster was a strong supporter
of General Douglas MacArthur and urged
President Harry S. Truman to allow American
troops to cross the Chinese border. He also suggested that MacArthur
should be allowed to use atomic bombs in the Korean
War.
Drew
Pearson and Jack Anderson continued
their campaign against Brewster and in the 1952 election he was defeated
by 3,000 votes.
Owen Brewster died
in Boston, Massachusetts, on 25th December,
1961, and was later interned in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Dexter, Maine.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate on Watergate
Namebase: Owen Brewster
(1)
Jack
Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker
(1979)
My
mentor's sympathies, then, lay with (Howard) Hughes, but Drew (Pearson)
felt stranded in an unsatisfying posture. It was his nature to want
to play an important part in the great political brawls of the time,
to put his mark on them, to help shape their outcome toward the benefit
of his causes or the distress of his foes. Yet he would not take Brewster's
side and could not take Hughes's. For though Hughes was probably the
victim of an unsavory gang-up, his own conduct in the matter was too
shabby to defend and he was not even making a fight of it himself.
Grumbling at each day's leaks, Drew held back, watching the thing
spin, looking for a handle to pick it up by.
At this point in his disintegrating
fortunes, Howard Hughes phoned Drew from one of his West Coast redoubts.
He had long considered Pearson to be journalism's leading molder of
public opinion and the man most knowledgeable about the Byzantine
twists of conspiratorial Washington. And since Drew's animus against
Hughes's tormentors was clear, there was a mutuality of interest present
that encouraged him to seek Drew's help and advice.
In the manner of cornered
men whose expense accounts have already been made public, Hughes admitted
to misdemeanors but pled innocent to felonies. He had indeed wined
and wenched government officials and military brass, sometimes to
excess. It was necessary, he said; his competitors did it, and as
a relative newcomer trying to buck long-entrenched interests and liaisons,
he had to play the game in order to get a hearing on his proposals.
He had never looked on aviation as a moneymaker, he insisted; he was
in it because he had a passion for it. He yielded to no man in his
mastery of the dark arts of making money, as the astronomical profits
of his other businesses showed, but in aviation, he had lost $14 million
in thirteen years.
Then he got to the nub:
three months before, Brewster had attempted to lobby him in behalf
of Pan Am, he said, and having failed, they were both out to destroy
him. Pan Am had put great pressure on him to merge Trans World with
Pan Am and co-sponsor the chosen-instrument plan. Brewster himself
had told him at the Mayflower Hotel that the probe would be dropped
if he joined forces with Pan Am.
(2)
Drew
Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round
(18th September, 1950)
Senator Brewster in 1947
was chairman of the powerful Senate War Investigating Committee. He
was also the bosom friend of Pan American Airways. Brewster and Pan
American wanted Howard Hughes's TWA to consolidate its overseas lines
with Pan Am. This Hughes refused to do. Whereupon Brewster investigated
Hughes, and, during the period when he was before Brewster's Senate
committee, Hughes's telephone wire and that of his attorneys were
tapped, apparently under the off-stage direction of Henry Grunewald,
who admits that at various times he checked telephone wires for Pan
American Airways.
Grunewald and others deny
this. Nevertheless this is the conclusion which Senators are forced
to arrive at. No wonder businessmen who come to Washington are worried
about talking over telephones. They never know when some competitor,
perhaps with the cooperation of a Senate committee, is listening in.
Yet this is supposed to be the capital of the USA not Moscow.
(3)
Drew
Pearson, Washington Merry-go-round
(18th September, 1950)
My first encounter with
Hughes was awesome enough, given my limited experience as Drew's resident
expert on the Senate. Hughes wanted my advice, however humble, about
going up against Maine Senator Owen Brewster, a rascal who was preparing
to fire a political broadside against the Hughes industrial empire.
Hughes was supposed to have built two revolutionary aircraft for the
Pentagon - a photo-reconnaissance spy plane called the F-II, and a
giant plywood cargo seaplane nicknamed the "Spruce Goose."
They were two wartime contracts that cost the taxpayers $40 million.
Now it was 1947, the war was well over, and Hughes had not yet finished
either plane.
Normally this would have
been grist for Drew's mill - a defense contractor cheating the taxpayers,
hints of political string pulling, two projects running way over budget.
But Drew had satisfied himself that Hughes and his designers had done
their level best to develop the two planes that were almost ready
to fly. A passionate aviator and inventor, Hughes had an irrepressible
emotional investment in both projects that went beyond the contracts.
He was personally absorbing the cost overruns.
The real story in Drew's
judgment was Brewster's motive. His political guns were aimed at the
F-II and the Spruce Goose. But his target was Trans World Airlines,
and his objective was to defame its majority stockholder, Howard Hughes.
Brewster was the chief water carrier in the Senate for the rival Pan
American Airlines. The two giants of the air were duking it out for
the exclusive right to fly international routes from the United States.
Under a regulatory scheme called the "chosen instrument,"
one airline would be selected to fly the international routes and
would be subsidized by the taxpayers. Brewster was pushing through
a law to give Pan Am that worldwide monopoly, and Hughes stood in
his way.
(4)
Jack
Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker
(1979)
During these days I tried
to probe Brewster's strengths and weaknesses
with something of the objectivity of a pug studying the ring habits
of his next opponent. I looked first for those personal weaknesses
that Drew had taught
me to cherish in an adversary: overweaning vanity,
bumbling pomposity, addiction to creature comforts, a tendency to
alcoholic indiscretion, the heedless pursuit of venery.
I found nothing. Brewster
was unpretentious of manner and disciplined in utterance. He did not
drink at all, or even smoke, and in his relations with the habitually
exploited Capitol Hill secretary, I found no departure from the most
punctilious code of chivalry. His daily routine was a rigorous model
of hard work; his life at home was frugal. Even his two culpable indulgences
had a saving grace about them: the corporate plane rides were no doubt
prized for the working time they saved him, and when he occupied Sam
Pryor's Hobe Sound lodge for Thanksgiving vacations, he brought his
own turkey and cleaned the place up afterward. As far as our spies
could ascertain, his nightly revels at his Mayflower Hotel apartment
were confined to doing his laundry; nylon wash-and-wear shirts had
recently been introduced and Brewster had purchased one; each night
he washed out his white shirt, hung it up to dry and the next morning
put it on again, ready to face, impeccably, the Washington power structure.
Such men do not make easy opponents.
It was Brewster who showed
me the advantages of being born ugly. Ugly he was - billiard-bald
on top, cheerless-eyed, meaty-lipped, an appearance dark and gloomy.
For him, the ballot box would have seemed the least likely springboard
to success. Yet he had carried his unfair burden up through the Maine
legislature to become governor of his state, and then congressman,
senator, chairman and a power in national Republican councils. This
had to bespeak the inner superiority that unkind fate can nurture
- the compensating enlargement of brains, tenacity, guile, fortitude.
On the hard testing ground of numberless speaking halls, committee
chambers and smoke-filled rooms, he had somehow managed to warm the
chill his visage cast, to triumph over his physiognomy through the
qualities he brought to the lectern and the conference table.
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