Howard Hughes, the son
of Howard Robard Hughes, was born in Houston on 24th December, 1905.
Howard's father was the founder of founder of the Hughes Tool Company.
His brother, Rupert Hughes, worked as a writer for Samuel Goldwyn's
movie studios
Hughes attended private
school in Boston before moving to the
Thatcher School in California. A poor student, he never graduated
from high school. However, his father arranged for him to attend the
Rice Institute by donating money to the institution.
Howard Robard Hughes Sr.
died when his son was 18. Howard inherited a controlling share in
the Hughes Tool Company but his uncle, Rupert Hughes, supervised his
business interests until he reached the age of 21. In 1924 Hughes
bought out his relatives and became the sole owner of the Hughes Tool
Company.
On 1st June, 1925, Hughes
married Houston socialite Ella Rice. The couple moved to Hollywood
and in 1928 Hughes produced the academy award winning film, Two
Arabian Nights. In 1930 Hughes wrote and directed Hell's
Angels, a movie about pilots in the First
World War. In order to make the movie Hughes obtained 87 aircraft
used in the war and hired the world's best pilots. The movie cost
$3.8 million and although a box-office success, it lost over $1.5m.
Hell's
Angels was followed by other films such as The
Age for Love (1931), The Front
Page (1931), Cock of the Air (1932),
Scarface (1932) and Sky
Devils (1932).
While making Hell's
Angels, Hughes developed a strong interest in aviation.
In 1932, Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company. In 1934 Hughes
built and personally test-piloted the world's most advanced plane,
the H-1. On September 13, 1935, he set a new speed record, taking
the plane to 352 mph. Three years later Hughes piloted a Lockheed
14 with a crew of four on a flight around the world. During the flight
he broke the New York to Paris record that had previously been held
by Charles Lindbergh.
During the Second
World War Hughes became interested in building military aircraft.
He was awarded two contracts, of $18m and $22m each, to create and
build two revolutionary aircraft - a giant plywood cargo seaplane
that could carry thirty-five tons of men and weapons (HK-1), and a
very fast photo-reconnaissance aircraft (F-11).
Hughes also returned to
film making and in 1943 produced and directed The
Outlaw. The film starred Jane Russell and because of her
conspicuous cleavage was initially banned. The following year Hughes
formed a production company with Preston Sturges. Later he obtained
a controlling interest in RKO.
Jane Russell in The Outlaw
(1943)
In 1946 Owen
Brewster, chairman of the Senate War Investigating Committee,
announced that he was very concerned that the government had given
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".
Hughes, accused of corruption,
leaked information to journalists, Drew
Pearson and Jack Anderson, that
Owen 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 Owen
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 the late 1950s Hughes
began employing Robert
Maheu, a former FBI agent and veteran
of CIA counter-espionage activities,
on a freelance basis. This included intimidating would be blackmailers
and obtaining information on business rivals.
Hughes became involved
in politics and was a secret supporter of Richard
Nixon. In 1956 the Hughes Tool Company provided a $205,000 loan
to Nixon Incorporated, a company run by Richard's brother, F. Donald
Nixon. The money was never paid back. Soon after the money was paid
the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reversed a previous decision to
grant tax-exempt status to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
This information was revealed
by during the Drew Pearson and Jack
Anderson during the 1960 presidential campaign. Nixon initially
denied the loan but later was forced to admit that this money had
been given to his brother. It was claimed that this story helped John
F. Kennedy defeat
Nixon in the election.
In
1960 Richard
Bissell and
Allen W. Dulles decided to work with
the Mafia in a plot to assassinate Fidel
Castro. Maheu was employed by the CIA
to organize the conspiracy. The advantage of employing the Mafia for
this work is that it provided CIA with a credible cover story. The
Mafia were known to be angry with Castro for closing down their profitable
brothels and casinos in Cuba. If the assassins were killed or captured
the media would accept that the Mafia were working on their own.
On
25th September, Robert Maheu arranged for
two CIA agents to meet Johnny
Roselli and
Sam
Giancana,
at the Fountainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach. Maheu told Roselli and
Giancana that the CIA was willing to pay $150,000 to have Castro killed.
Hughes
sold his TWA stock in 1966 for $546m. He now moved to Las Vegas where
he used his money to buy up four hotels and six casinos. He employed
Robert Maheu to oversee this business.
Maheu explained later what his role was in the operation: "When
he came here, he wanted to tie up all the property on the Strip to
develop it properly. He didn't want it to be honky-tonk or like Coney
Island. Hughes was a catalyst in the city cleaning up its act."
Hughes also employed Larry
O'Brien to protect his interests in Washington. O'Brien was also
chairman of the Democratic National Committee. On
20th March, 1972 Frederick LaRue and John
Mitchell of the Nixon's re-election committee decided to plant
electronic devices in O'Brien's Democratic campaign offices in an
apartment block called
Watergate.
Frank
Sturgis,
Virgilio
Gonzalez,
Eugenio Martinez, Bernard
L. Barker and
E.Howard
Hunt were
later arrested and imprisoned for this crime.
Hughes became a recluse
but continued to run his business interests from sealed-off hotel
suites. His health deteriorated and he died April 5, 1976, en route
by private jet to a hospital in Houston. He left an estate estimated
at $2 billion.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Mark Fisher, Howard
Hughes (April, 2003)
As
fantastically wealthy manipulators go, Howard R. Hughes was king.
The billionaire's Midas touch had less to do with his fabled technical
and financial genius than with endless secret deals and covert political
bribes. "I can but any man in the world," Hughes liked to
boast. Indeed, Hughes's conspiratorial authority stemmed from his
ability - and eager inclination purchase loyalty from anyone, including
the president of the United States, in a position to advance his,
well, idiosyncratic designs.
Everything
about Hughes was larger than life, including his paradoxical legend.
Heir to a Houston fortune based on a drill bit patent that revolutionized
oil mining, the dashing young Hughes captured the American imagination
during the Great Depression years. Cowboy aviator, Hollywood playboy,
patriotic military contractor, maverick financier, Hughes was a comic
book hero whose can-do exploits knew no limits. Later in life, as
his eccentricities metastasized into madness, the darker portrait
emerged: the stringy-haired old man, a real lunatic with a mortal
fear of germs holed up in a penthouse hermitage.
Throughout
his life, Hughes's obsession with control expressed itself in a mania
for espionage and spookery, especially as it applied to nurturing
his substantial neuroses. However, despite his seeming omnipresence
in the eye of many a stormy conspiracy, Hughes was just as manipulated
by others. Known to spooks as the "Stockholder," Hughes
fronted for CIA covert operations, sometimes unknowingly; Hughes,
the demented shut-in, saw his empire manipulated by remote control.
We
join the Hughes saga during the late 1950s, with the arrival of the
shadowy and some sleazy Robert Maheu, fountainhead of many real and
imagined Hughes conspiracies. In the fifties, Hughes hired Maheu to
intimidate would-be blackmailers and spy on dozens of Hollywood starlets
toward whom Hughes felt possessive. Maheu was a former FBI man whose
private security firm fronted for the CIA on ultra-sensitive (read:
illegal) missions. By the time he became Hughes's private spook, Maheu
already had impressive credentials supervising contract kidnappings
for the CIA and acting as the Agency's literal pimp, hiring prostitutes
to service foreign dignitaries and their peculiar sexual appetites.
Maheu's most notorious CIA job was a go-between in a failed 1960 plot
to assassinate Fidel Castro, which recruited the Mafia to do the "hit."
Friendly with the darndest folks, Maheu enlisted the aid of Vegas
mobster John Roselli ("Uncle Johnny" to Maheu's children),
Chicago godfather Sam "Momo"
Giancana, and powerful Florida mob boss Santos Trafficante. Apparently,
Hughes had no involvement in Maheu's freelance CIA work but delighted
in the spook's exploits and connections, which only enhanced the billionaire's
reputation and influence. (According to journalist Jim Hougan, Maheu
informed Hughes of his efforts on behalf of the CIA to kill Castro.)
By some accounts, however, the Stockholder was the Agency's largest
contractor. In dedicating his resources to the CIA, though, Hughes
wasn't guided entirely by selfless motives. During the late sixties,
he asked Maheu to offer his empire to Agency as a CIA front. At the
time the Hughes fortune was threatened by major legal trouble the
beleaguered billionaire hoped to deflect the nettlesome litigation
with a "national security shield".
(2)
Spruce
Goose, Flight-Line Online ( 2004)
When
America entered the second world war our geographic isolation from
the areas of conflict gave us a distinct advantage over our enemies.
The technology of the time simply made it too difficult for those
fighting against us to mount serious action against our homeland.
In the end, this advantage left us the time and manufacturing power
to smother our foes with an unending supply of the materials necessary
to wage war. But we also had to overcome the vast distances, we had
to find ways to safely deliver these materials, and men to use them,
to the areas of conflict around the world. At the time, ships were
the only way to get the job done and the men doing it were finding
that it was very dangerous work! Shipyards across America were at
full production but enemy submarines were sinking the critical vessels
nearly as fast as they could be built. Something had to be done.
The idea for the HK-1 flying
boat came from Henry Kaiser... Head of one of the largest shipbuilding
firms of the time, Kaiser thought a ship that could fly over the danger
might be the answer. Howard Hughes was known as an innovator in aircraft
construction and design. These two men, both legends in their own
time, would launch the venture to build the huge craft (originally
three were to be built). The new plane's official name bore the initials
of the principals in the project HK-1....But to most of us it's always
just been "Spruce Goose".
The huge plane would be
made primarily of wood, saving materials critical to the war effort.
The difficulties creating such a large airframe made of wood were
unknown at the beginning of construction and would prove to be many.
The final product is a tribute to the efforts of the team in overcoming
the problems they faced. A structure made of lumber was created that,
even on close inspection, bears little resemblance to any form of
wood! Hughes would prove to be a demanding taskmaster during the period
of development and construction. His attention to detail and insistence
everything on the new plane be nearly perfect, was largely responsible
for both the beauty of the finished product and it's not being ready
to fly until after the war had ended.
The timing of completion
and final cost brought Hughes and the project under the critical eye
of the post-war congress, one Senator grudgingly referring to the
plane as "The flying lumberyard". Howard Hughes was called
to Washington D.C. to defend both the project and himself. During
a break in the hearings, he flew back to California to conduct a test
on the "Goose", it was during this test the accidental flight
took place. This event, whether intended or not, put a halt to critics
of the project and served as the finale for this gigantic aircraft
...... the project was dead. Though his feathers had been ruffled
by the intense questioning he had endured, the flight had vindicated
Hughes and the project. The HK-1, which by now would be known forever
as the "Spruce Goose", was put into storage . It remained
hidden from public view, carefully preserved, until after Howard Robard
Hughes death in April of 1976.
(3)
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.
(4)
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.
(5)
Hank
Greenspun, Las
Vegas Sun (18th
December, 1977)
There
was no way to tell, from one day to another, while Mr. H. R. Hughes
was resident among us earthlies, what would come from the mind and
pen of the world's most famous recluse.
As in a memo
introduced in the Mormon Will trial from a collection of original
writing owned by this columnist, one day he would recommend you for
a Nobel Peace Prize and the next day he would be plotting a means
for your total destruction.
It would take
a gyrating mind like his to keep up with the course he had laid out
and which was subject to change at a moment's notice through will
and caprice.
In the memo
placed in evidence, and reproduced on the front page of Friday's SUN,
he referred to the fact that "Hank has allied himself with us."
For the record,
this editor had not allied himself with anyone but his own beliefs.
Hughes was
discussing an editorial I had written suggesting we should proceed
cautiously on nuclear testing until we learned what caused the sudden
deaths before any more tests were made.
The mere suggestion
that a slowdown is indicated caused Mr. Hughes immediately to assume
that I now was in his corner insisting that the Test Site be shut
down.
What I was
indicating was most sensible and legitimate because a few days later,
when news had come out that the sheep had died of a nerve gas being
tested in Utah, I immediately wrote that the underground program in
Nevada must proceed as long as Russia was continuing with nuclear
exploration.
I did believe
that we must not rush pell mell into radiation destruction until we
learned what happened to the sheep. Humans should not be subjected
to a similar fate.
There will
be other memos produced in court before the trial is concluded which
will show the almost irrational behavior of the man who caused more
battles in the courts of the nation than any single individual or
even corporate establishment.
Most of the
legal involvements were instigated by his past General Counsel Chester
Davis and also a few Las Vegas law firms, holdovers from the Davis-Bill
Gay combine who are still sucking at Summa's financial resources for
all they can get, but many were still caused by Hughes' own brilliance
at one moment and his downright Machiavellian behavior the next without
changing pens or paper.
One memo will
show from his own writings how he tried to stop Kirk Kerkorian from
building the International, now the Hilton, and other hotels from
being built unless he had total control over the gaming industry.
For too many
years since his departure, I have permitted myself to be pictured
as the villain in the relationship waiting for some opportunity to
prove by a jury of my community peers where the fault lay.
On national
TV, whenever I was questioned as to the effect Hughes had on the Nevada
scene, I would respond that it was positive in many areas but detrimental
in others. By his own writings, the people of Las Vegas and the entire
state will now be able to judge for themselves which man had the community
interest at heart.
I was his
strongest advocate in the good he wrought, but also his severest critic
in his monopolistic endeavors and his attempt to corrupt every public
official at every level in local, state and national government.
(6)
Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy
War (1976)
Howard Hughes's name
surfaced in the story of Watergate on May 20, 1973, when James McCord
told the Ervin committee and its media audience of an abandoned 1972
White House plot to steal certain documents from the safe of editor
Hank Greenspun's Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun was an ally of Robert
Maheu, the top Hughes aide who connected the CIA and the Mafia in
1960, who came to prominence in the Hughes empire during the Las Vegas
period, and who then lost out in the Las Vegas power struggle that
violently reconfigured the Hughes empire late in 1970. McCord testified
that his fellow Plumbers, Hunt and Liddy, were to have carried out
the break-in and theft of the papers and that Hughes interests were
to have supplied them with a getaway plane and a safe hideout in an
unnamed Central American country.
What could
the Greenspun documents have been? Why should both Hughes and Nixon
have been interested enough in them to attempt a robbery?
Liddy
said (testified McCord) that Attorney General John Mitchell had told
him that Greenspun had in his possession blackmail type information
involving a Democratic candidate for President, that Mitchell wanted
that material, and Liddy said that this information was in some way
racketeer-related, indicating that if this candidate became President,
the racketeers or national crime syndicate could have a control or
influence over him as President. My inclination at this point in time,
speaking as of today, is to disbelieve the allegation against the
Democratic candidate referred to above and to believe that there was
in reality some other motive for wanting to get into Greenspun's safe.
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