Lawrence (Larry) O'Brien
was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 7th July, 1917. As a young
man O'Brien met John
F. Kennedy and
helped him in his various political campaigns. This included managing
his successful campaigns for the Senate in 1952 and 1958. O'Brien
also played a significant role in Kennedy being elected president
in 1960.
Kennedy appointed O'Brien
as its special assistant in 1961. O'Brien was in the Presidential
Motorcade in Dealey
Plaza when Kennedy
was assassinated. President Lyndon
B. Johnson appointed
O'Brien as Postmaster General in 1965 and he held the post of three
years.
O'Brien remained active
in the Democratic Party and was chairman
of the Democratic National Committee (1968–69 and 1970–73).
He was also employed by Howard Hughes
to protect his interests in Washington.
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. The plan was to wiretap
O'Brien's conversations.
Frank
Sturgis,
Virgilio
Gonzalez,
Eugenio Martinez, Bernard
L. Barker and
E.Howard
Hunt were
later arrested and imprisoned for this crime.
O'Brien was also commissioner
of the National Basketball Association (1975–84). His achievements
included the merger of the ABA with the NBA, negotiating and signing
a lucrative television contract with CBS, arranging a historic collective
bargaining agreement with the NBA Players Association and introducing
an innovative anti-drug program in 1983. In 1984, the NBA Championship
Trophy was renamed the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy.
Lawrence O'Brien died in
New York on 28th September, 1990.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
H.
R. Haldeman, The
Ends of Power (1978)
For years
Nixon had been trying to track down proof that Larry O'Brien was on
Howard Hughes's payroll as a lobbyist at the same time that he was
Chairman, of the Democratic National Committee. This could be hot
ammunition to discredit O'Brien, Nixon believed. What had O'Brien
done in exchange for Hughes's money (reportedly, a huge $180,000-a-year
retainer)? A wiretap on O'Brien's telephone and a bug in his office
could obtain the proof Nixon wanted.
To take such
a risk as that burglary to gain that information was absurd, I thought.
But on matters pertaining to Hughes, Nixon sometimes seemed to lose
touch with reality. His indirect association with this mystery man
may have caused him, in his view, to lose two elections.
His brother
Don had been granted a $205,000 loan from Hughes in the 1950s when
Nixon was Vice-President. Jack Anderson had broken that story shortly
before the 1960 election, and Nixon felt his razor-thin defeat by
John Kennedy was partially due to that story.
Then; in the
1962 California gubernatorial rare the loan had surfaced again, this
time in a Reporter magazine article by James Phelan - and Governor
Pat Brown could have credited his surprise victory over Nixon to the
repercussions of that story.
And yet, even
with this background,, at that very moment, unknown to me at the time,
$100,000 of Hughes's cash was resting in a safe deposit box in Florida
leased by Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo, Nixon's closest personal friend.
Years later,
in 1976, I asked Nixon about that $100,000, which by then had been
the subject of vigorous investigation for years. The investigation
had finally petered out with no results. Rebozo explained that the
$100,000 was a campaign contribution, and the reason it never reached
the Campaign Committee was that an internecine war had broken out
in the Hughes empire; Rebozo said he was afraid the President would
be embarrassed by one side or another in the Hughes war if the campaign
contribution was revealed.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
