Richard Nixon was a man who saw enemies everywhere—among the elites he despised, the Democrats, the Kennedy family, the media, all the people who’d looked down on him when he was younger. He took office determined to be impervious to them and to get back at them. That was why he hired men like Caulfield and Ulasewicz—to be enforcers against those he thought wanted to do him harm.
Another motivating factor for the president was money. Nixon was intent on accumulating financial and material security so that he would never be poor or beholden to anyone again. This led him to become entangled with one of the most powerful men in the world. That decades-long relationship, I came to learn, was the real secret behind the Watergate scandal. It involved a third attempted break-in that the country knew nothing about.
Donald Nixon pursued success as much as did his slightly older brother, though without similar success. Only one year younger than Richard, and cheerfully ambitious, Donald was always just one venture away from the big score. He was used to being overshadowed by Richard, who at forty-three had achieved fame, power, and national celebrity as vice president of the United States. Donald hoped to reap some of those benefits for himself.
In 1956, Don hatched a new entrepreneurial scheme: a hamburger-joint franchise originating in his native Whittier, California. He had already opened a drive-in, followed by Nixon’s Family Restaurant, whose racy logo featured a man in kilt and tam-o’-shanter riding a bicycle. Don had taken out costly loans by then and needed a wealthy patron. He was surprised and pleased by how quickly he found an investor. And not just any investor, but the wealthiest man in the country.
Howard Hughes proved to be remarkably enthusiastic about the prospects of the Nixon Burger chain, despite the fact that few people in California, or anywhere else for that matter, were clamoring for “the Nixon burger.” Hughes, a self-made billionaire, movie mogul, aviator, and industrialist, offered Richard Nixon’s younger brother a $205,000 loan (the equivalent of $1.6 million today). The loan was not only interest-free, it lacked a payment schedule (indeed, it would never be repaid). In return, all the Nixon family had to offer as collateral was a virtually worthless lot, valued at just $13,000, in their hometown of Whittier.
And so, on December 10, 1956, one month after her elder son, Richard, won reelection as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, Mrs. Hannah Nixon signed over the deed to Lot 10 on Whittier Boulevard. In my career, I have seen many times how seemingly trivial events can have outsized consequences. And American political history is replete with ne’er-do-wells complicating the lives of their president brothers. In many ways, the document Hannah Nixon signed that day—coupled with his brother’s outsized ambition—haunted Richard Nixon for the rest of his life.
Hughes’s connection to the Nixon family surfaced several times in Richard Nixon’s career. In the final days of his 1960 election battle with John F. Kennedy, columnist Drew Pearson reported the existence of a “secret loan” arranged by Howard Hughes to Nixon’s little brother in exchange for political favors. The revelations infuriated Nixon, who blamed them for his narrow loss.
Again, in 1962, when Nixon was leading in his campaign for governor of California, the “Hughes loan” emerged in the newspapers. Nixon lost that race too. In both elections—1960 and 1962—Nixon hurt himself by denying knowledge of the loan and making other statements that were later proved to be untrue.
By 1972, as Nixon sought reelection to the presidency, the office he had finally attained in 1968, Howard Hughes became something of a preoccupation. Nixon had good reason to worry about whether revelations about a secret Hughes loan might resurface. He knew that Donald was not the only member of the Nixon family to have benefited from the Hughes fortune. That was the secret lurking in Hank Greenspun’s safe in Las Vegas—which I believe answers the last lingering question of the Watergate break-in: Why?
• • •
In August of 1973, the televised hearings were in recess, and I had a brief opportunity to catch my breath. Seated in my small office in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building, I reviewed testimony, including John Dean’s.
I was particularly intrigued by Dean’s calm description of Operation Gemstone, a series of schemes to thwart the Democrats that was launched in the office of the attorney general and outlined by G. Gordon Liddy. Some of Liddy’s proposals were ludicrous—such as kidnapping radicals and holding them in Mexico. More feasible ideas included breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building, and also breaking into the safe of a man named Hank Greenspun. James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, had testified that the idea behind the Greenspun break-in related to “blackmail-type information on Democratic candidates.”
Investigators sometimes operate on nothing but a hunch. A few questions stuck in my head: Who was Hank Greenspun? And what did he have that could possibly interest the top officials of the Nixon administration? I didn’t recall any reporter or columnist asking these questions. The press was focused on the cover-up, Nixon’s tapes, and all the other revelations of the hearings reported so widely in the press. But letting news headlines decide the parameters of a case is a common investigative mistake that can prevent you from seeing the larger picture and what’s lurking on the periphery that may be significant.
When you encounter an unknown in an investigation, you run it down. So I assigned a researcher to find out whatever he could on Hank Greenspun. There was no Internet in those days, of course, so our primary resources were old newspaper articles that were accessible in print or on microfiche at the Library of Congress. We learned that Greenspun was the publisher and editor of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper. He had been convicted of violating the Neutrality Act by providing arms to Zionists in Palestine in 1947 and had been pardoned by President Kennedy in 1961. That was enough to give me the sense he was something of a colorful character. I decided to give him a call.
“Mr. Greenspun,” I said, “my name is Terry Lenzner. I am with the Ervin Committee. I’ve been looking at this Gemstone plan, and you’re named in it as a target.”
A forceful voice came through the other end of the line. Herman Greenspun—everyone called him “Hank”—was eager to talk to a Watergate investigator. In fact, he seemed puzzled as to why no one had called him earlier. Greenspun knew all about the plan to break into his safe. The Nixon people, he said, were putting out a “bogus” story that their interest in the safe had to do with “blockbuster” information Greenspun supposedly held related to Senator Edmund Muskie. Greenspun said that explanation was bullshit, or words to that effect. The only thing he knew about Muskie was that he’d paid a fine for a hunting violation. That’s not what the Nixon people were looking for, he said. He indicated there was much more to this story than we knew.
I told him I wanted to fly out to Las Vegas to talk with him. I could not stay long, since I had to return to D.C. to prepare for the dirty tricks hearings.
“Great,” he said. “Come on out.” He gave me the name of a hotel near his office, and I booked a commercial flight from Washington.
The Vegas I arrived in was not remotely like the city it is today. In the mid-1970s, most of the large casino hotels that now line Las Vegas Boulevard had not yet been built. The first, the MGM Grand, was just opening its doors. The offices of the Las Vegas Sun were on Highland Drive, not far from the popular casinos of the day. I entered the building, walked past the newsroom, and met Hank Greenspun in his office.
Hank was seated at his desk in rolled-up white shirtsleeves. He was tall with narrow shoulders and had a large, expressive face. Like his hometown, he was exuberant and lively. Both the city and the man were known for betting big and taking sometimes dangerous risks. At the beginning of our meeting, Greenspun and I engaged in small talk, just as I had been taught to do in Mississippi—talking about the city of Las Vegas, the newspaper, the weather—to get our bearings. It didn’t take long for him to decide that he was comfortable enough with me to open up.
As he regaled me with stories of his colorful life, Hank gave no indication that he was trying to glorify himself. He was open and forthright, and conceded things he’d done wrong. My impression was that Hank was a gutsy guy who knew everyone and everything going on in his city.
He was a Brooklyn-born Jew who served in the army under General George Patton during World War II. After the war, Greenspun settled in Las Vegas, where he worked as a PR flack for the Flamingo Hotel, operated by Bugsy Siegel, a flamboyant member of the Genovese crime family and one of the architects of Las Vegas. When Bugsy was gunned down, Hank was out of a job.
After he bought the Las Vegas Sun, he saw himself as a crusader. He told me he went on trial for “inciting murder or assassination” when, in one of his typically pointed columns, he suggested that Senator Joseph McCarthy kill himself before one of the victims of his anti-Communist “smears” took on that job from him. Clearly not one lacking for a turn of phrase, in another column Greenspun labeled the senator “the queer that made Milwaukee famous.” Senator McCarthy considered a lawsuit but shortly thereafter married his female secretary instead.
Greenspun proudly informed me that he had hired a private investigator to expose corruption in Nevada politics and had led the fight to desegregate the city’s casinos. Black singers like Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole performed in front of packed white audiences in Las Vegas, but after the shows they had to leave by the back door and stay in black-only hotels on the city’s segregated west side.
When our talk turned to Watergate, Hank became even more enthused. He had been watching the hearings and wanted to tell me all about his role in these events, a story he’d been hoping to have a chance to tell. He seemed annoyed that no one had yet sought to interview him about Operation Gemstone. “My name was in the damn plan,” he said. He was eager to have his connection to the Watergate scandal known. If John Dean is an outsized character in the Watergate saga, Hank Greenspun is certainly the most underappreciated. There is scant reference to him in Watergate histories. Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men doesn’t mention him at all.
Hank told me that in the late 1960s, he had become friendly with Howard Hughes, then the wealthiest man in America, who was looking at investments out west. Hank said it was he, in fact, who had invited Hughes to move to Vegas in 1966. By 1973, Howard Hughes was a living legend, frequently mentioned in tabloids and other press. Though I hadn’t followed his story closely, I knew he was a pioneering aviator, owned an airline company (Trans World Airlines), was an early Hollywood film producer, and had romanced a long list of Hollywood stars. The origin of his wealth was his inheritance of his father’s Hughes Tool Company, which held the patent on a drill bit that revolutionized oil exploration. I knew only bare outlines of Hughes’s life, but Greenspun had been privileged to a front-row seat to the Hughes operations for years.
Greenspun made it pretty clear that he thought Howard Hughes was nuts. When Hughes retreated into seclusion, he left the management of his Vegas empire to an ex–FBI and CIA agent and close friend of Greenspun named Robert Maheu. The relationship between Hughes and his top aide was peculiar to say the least. Maheu was Hughes’s closest confidant for nearly a decade, but according to Hank, the two had never met. They apparently communicated through long, mostly handwritten memos in which Hughes issued orders and threats, whined and complained, and charted out his strategic vision to expand his empire. Maheu in return followed Hughes’s instructions and offered solicitous legal and financial counsel. Nevertheless, Hughes fired Maheu in 1970.
Around 1971, Greenspun had what he called “a chance conversation” with Herb Klein, a journalist who had been Nixon’s communications aide in many campaigns. Greenspun believed this conversation led directly to the Watergate scandal.
“I told Klein that the breakup of the Hughes empire in Nevada was going to sink Nixon,” Greenspun said in his firm, deliberate voice. Hank, a Republican, was a Nixon supporter because of what Hank appreciated as Nixon’s fervent support of Israel.
“What do you mean ‘sink Nixon’?” I asked.
He said, “The Hughes-Nixon relationship was going to be exposed.”
“What kind of relationship did Hughes and Nixon have?” I wondered. At that point, I didn’t remember much at all about the Hughes loan to Donald Nixon that had haunted Nixon’s campaigns.
“There was a payoff,” Greenspun said. Hughes, he claimed, had given the president $100,000 in exchange for political favors. The money had gone to Nixon through Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, one of Nixon’s closest friends. Hank told Klein that he knew about that payment and asked what Nixon was going to say about it when it came out.
I wanted to be sure I was hearing all this right. “Holy shit,” I said. “Are you telling me that Howard Hughes gave a bribe to the president of the United States?”
Hank leaned back in the chair behind his desk. “That’s what I’m saying.”
Hank had much more to say. He told me that after his conversation with Klein, Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, came to Las Vegas to ascertain exactly what Greenspun knew about the Hughes-Nixon relationship. “He didn’t learn much from me,” Hank said, “and he left dissatisfied.” This, he asserted, was why the Watergate burglars decided to break into his safe.
He then told me about an article in the New York Times that reported that hundreds of Hughes’s memos and documents, and possibly transcripts of tape-recorded conversations, were “readily available” in Las Vegas. “The biggest collection found is in the possession of Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun,” the Times article noted. The date of this article’s publication—February 3, 1972—was most interesting. It was the day before Liddy, Dean, and Mitchell met in the attorney general’s office to talk about the Gemstone plan and discussed a break-in of Greenspun’s safe.
“They wanted the memos,” Hank said of Nixon’s burglars, otherwise known as the “plumbers.” “The Hughes memos.”
Volumes of Hughes’s handwritten documents were still locked up in Greenspun’s safe, which stood only a few feet away. “Do you want to see them?” he asked.
Hank led me to a huge green safe in the corner of his office. Right above it was an autographed picture of Richard Nixon. Greenspun pointed to scratches on the safe’s faceplate that he said were signs of an aborted break-in that had occurred the previous summer. He had told this story to the New York Times, which published a minor article on Hank’s claim in May 1973.
I could see why Hank’s charges might have been viewed with skepticism by reporters. Some of his suppositions sounded far-fetched. He suggested that Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was part of the Hughes-Nixon conspiracy. He also claimed that Nixon’s plumbers had planned to use a Hughes jet to fly to Central America after they broke into his safe.
Hank retrieved from his safe a stack of papers about a foot high and placed it on a nearby table. There were hundreds of legal-sized pages, most of them covered in a legible, distinctive, looped scrawl. It was unclear how he had obtained the Hughes memoranda. My impression from talking with Hank was that he had convinced Maheu to give him the documents for safekeeping. After Hughes fired him, Maheu was embroiled in litigation with Hughes; Hank had suggested that the memos would be less susceptible to subpoenas and legal scrutiny if they were out of Maheu’s possession. He offered the memos to me like a long-hidden treasure. Clearly, Greenspun felt that he had undeservedly been left out of what was unfolding in Washington and was glad to have someone willing to listen to his story.
I sat down and started to read the documents, with Hank occasionally handing me those he thought I’d find most interesting.
By the time Hank and I met, Hughes had become known as a paranoid recluse obsessively focused on avoiding germs by collecting his urine and watching his fingernails grow. But the memos I read reflected a savvy, impatient, and extremely hands-on business magnate.
Many of the memos shed light on the touchy, and ultimately doomed, relationship between Hughes and Maheu, his trusted deputy. Like an unhappily married couple, they often squabbled through the memos over one thing after another—one’s perceived slight, bruised feelings, or miscommunications.
“Unfortunately no one has an exclusive to having a busy day,” Maheu snapped in one letter—dated Valentine’s Day, no less. “It is now 5:15. I’ve not shaved, showered nor have I had breakfast or lunch and I have given you my undivided attention as I usually do. I cannot help but get the feeling, Howard, that you are making a deep-seated effort to find something about which you want to have a real deep-seated argument.” It ended with this complaint: “Last week you mentioned to me that there are times you get the feeling I think you have been in this world for 12 years instead of 62. I sometimes get the feeling that you think I am still in my Mother’s womb rather than being 50 years of age.”
No corner of his financial empire was too picayune for Hughes’s attention. There was, for example, memo after memo about whether Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer would play in a golf tournament at one of his hotels. “You will remember that when we discussed this before, I said I could persuade these men to come,” Hughes wrote. “That was what I had in mind when I asked you if everything had been arranged to your satisfaction for the golf tournament. You said yes, and you frequently get annoyed with me if I interrogate you in any way that might possibly be considered as an expression of uncertain faith and confidence in your administration . . . I think it would be the very worst public relations for these two men to cancel out right at the very time of our acquisition of Stardust.”
On one of the pages, Hughes had drafted by hand the statement his wife would use in announcing their divorce. The attached press release, dated the next day, showed that she had sent it out in the exact wording.
There was a good deal of discussion of politics and Hughes’s business interests. He obviously savored memos with nuggets of political intelligence. One included speculation about the likely chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1969.
The memos demonstrated Hughes’s annoyance with the federal government’s interference with his enterprises—about nuclear testing in Nevada that he believed would damage Las Vegas tourism, about the FCC objecting to his purchase of a TV station, and about problems acquiring Airwest. During the mid-1960s, according to his memos, Hughes seemed frustrated by his inability to bend President Lyndon Johnson to his will.
As the 1968 presidential election approached, Hughes welcomed the opportunity to influence the next administration. “I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year,” he wrote, “and one who will be deeply indebted and who will recognize his indebtedness.”
The memoranda indicated that Hughes gave $100,000 to both major party candidates in 1968—to the Democratic candidate, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as well as to Nixon—in exchange for policy favors. Ever the shrewd businessman, Hughes was determined to cover his bets. “Why don’t we get word to [Humphrey] on a basis of secrecy that it is really, really reliable that we will give him immediately full unlimited support for his campaign to enter the White House if he will take this one on for us?” This referred to his effort to halt nuclear testing in the Nevada desert.
Then Hughes turned his sights on Richard Nixon. “Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this,” Hughes wrote, “I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life.”
The memos went on and on, covering a wide universe of Hughes operations. I knew I couldn’t read them all in one sitting, even if I’d wanted to. But it was sensational stuff. I persuaded Hank to let me have copies of the documents. We had talked long enough that he seemed to trust me. I stayed overnight in Vegas while Hank had the memos copied.
At this point in my career, I had interviewed hundreds of potential witnesses, and believed I knew how to judge credibility. Hank was flamboyant, leaned to the conspiratorial at times, but was very self-assured. His answers to my questions seemed spontaneous—he didn’t hesitate with his answers or grope for the truth. I had little doubt that what he said was true—or at least, that Hank thought it was true. Hank had no doubt about the documents’ validity. He wanted to help his friend, Bob Maheu, escape more nasty litigation from Hughes. Greenspun also believed that his information could break open the Watergate investigation. With a healthy view of his own contribution to history, Hank Greenspun was certain he was going to be a star witness in the trial of the century.
• • •
When I returned to Washington the next day, I made sure to make multiple copies of the copies. I then debriefed Sam Dash, the senators, and the staff. The information I’d obtained was greeted with enthusiasm tempered by skepticism. Which was about what I was feeling as well. No one, including me, was confident that the Hughes documents were even real. I do recall Senator Baker saying at one point, “If this stuff checks out, it’s a whole new can of worms.”
Hank Greenspun, though likable and earnest, was a convicted felon who, at one time, had worked for a mobster. He also had a reputation for rabble-rousing. I needed far more than his word to charge that the president of the United States had been bribed by Hughes. Sensational as Greenspun’s allegations were, we couldn’t bank on them. We couldn’t rely on snap judgments or preconceived notions. We had to gather and follow the facts. We had to talk to dozens of witnesses—some at the highest levels of the federal government. Each had his own motivations and differing recollections of events.
To begin, I asked researchers to delve through news reports and books to see if public records tracked with the events Hank had described. We soon learned that Howard Hughes had indeed located to Las Vegas in 1966, as Greenspun had said. There were numerous articles about Hughes’s efforts to buy up the city’s hotels and casinos. Even then, Hughes was a mystery. Included in what Greenspun gave me was an article, apparently exchanged between Maheu and Hughes, that claimed that the reclusive billionaire might in fact be dead. Our investigators also compiled a list of relevant Hughes personnel who might be familiar with Hughes’s operations and his financial contributions. At the top of that list, of course, was the other correspondent in the memos: Hughes’s onetime right-hand man, Robert Maheu.
From the summer of 1973 until the following May when our committee finished its work, I met with Bob Maheu many times in conference rooms in a U.S. Senate building. He was a cocky and confident middle-aged man who looked much more benign than he probably was, considering he had worked for both the FBI and CIA.
Maheu told us that Hughes hired him to manage his Nevada operation in 1966, the same year Hughes moved to Vegas, to provide “management services” for Hughes’s hotels, restaurants, casinos, and other holdings. Maheu reported directly to the billionaire, rather than going through executives at Hughes’s primary business entity, Hughes Tool Company. Maheu also acknowledged that Hughes consulted him on what political leaders Hughes should support. He stood by the accuracy of the documents Greenspun had provided, and verified they were genuine correspondence between himself and Hughes.
Because Maheu’s lawsuit against his former boss was ongoing, he was reluctant to put anything on the record that might complicate it. When I tried to lock Maheu down on specific dates or times of meetings and conversations, for example, he said he couldn’t remember. Even when we presented him with easily verifiable information, he claimed memory lapses. But he did provide us with some useful information. He confirmed that he had approached Howard Hughes about making a $100,000 contribution to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign.
According to Maheu, Hughes was amenable to making the donation. He especially liked the idea of channeling the money through Bebe Rebozo because Rebozo presumably would provide ready access to Nixon himself. Maheu also told us, quite bluntly, that Hughes’s contribution was meant to ensure favorable treatment by the Nixon administration for any problems that Hughes’s operations might have with the federal government. He said the initial request for a contribution came from Richard Danner, a former FBI agent who was connected to Nixon.
Dick Danner had been with the bureau for about six years when he resigned to work on a congressional campaign in Florida. When I met with him, after tracking him down in Vegas, Danner looked like he’d stepped right out of J. Edgar Hoover’s office. He was very FBI-ish—a nice-looking, clean-cut man in a starched white shirt, dark suit, and sober tie. Very serious and with an almost paramilitary demeanor, he was cast well for his role in this saga: as a front man for Nixon.
Danner told us he had known Richard Nixon since the 1940s. It was Danner, in fact, who first introduced the future president to Rebozo. During the 1968 campaign, Danner told us that Rebozo instructed him to contact a lawyer named Ed Morgan who was connected to the Hughes organization to ask for a $100,000 contribution to the Nixon campaign.
In February 1969, after Nixon was inaugurated, the Hughes organization offered Danner a job as general manager of the Frontier Hotel and Casino, one of Hughes’s properties in Las Vegas. Danner admitted that he had no prior hotel management experience, and that one of his jobs was to serve as liaison to the Nixon administration. In this capacity, Danner said Rebozo often reminded him that Hughes had not given enough money to the Nixon campaign, and “needled” him about the large contributions Hughes had given to Democratic candidates. He willingly cooperated by answering all my questions in a straightforward manner. This was odd, perhaps, but I attributed this to his experience at the bureau.
Shortly after joining the Hughes organization in 1969, Danner said he met in New York with Rebozo and Ed Morgan to discuss Hughes’s efforts to acquire more hotels in Las Vegas. At a subsequent meeting, they discussed the transfer of the first $50,000 of the $100,000 contribution Rebozo had requested. Danner said the transaction was blown when the hapless Donald Nixon showed up at the meeting, asking that he be the conduit for any contributions to his brother.
In almost all of my preliminary interviews on the Hughes-Rebozo connection, in fact, Don Nixon’s name kept turning up. It seemed that Donald Nixon had learned nothing about the damage his business relationships with the Hughes organization might do to his brother.
Yet knowing how sensitive the Hughes-Nixon relationship had been in the past, the Nixon White House nonetheless went out of its way to assist Mr. Hughes’s financial empire. As we started piecing it together, that assistance raised a number of red flags.
During Nixon’s administration, Hughes received favored treatment from the federal government, winning no-bid billion-dollar contracts and obtaining federal licenses for TV stations with comparative ease. Hank claimed to have seen a memo from Hughes instructing Maheu to offer Nixon $1 million to stop atomic testing in Nevada that was deterring tourism and hurting business at his casinos. That memo was not in the collection Hank turned over to me.
One of the areas we examined closely involved efforts by Hughes to acquire the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas—an effort that brought the Nixon administration into conflict with its own Department of Justice. It also revealed how Hughes dealt with the federal government.
After learning of the Hughes effort to purchase the Dunes, I met with attorneys in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. They told me that Hughes’s efforts to buy up hotels and casinos in Vegas, going back to the late 1960s, had been the subject of considerable scrutiny by antitrust regulators who were concerned that Hughes was trying to build an illegal monopoly in Nevada.
During Lyndon Johnson’s administration, the Justice Department had thwarted Hughes’s efforts to buy the Stardust Resort and Casino. The Justice Department did allow Hughes to buy a second hotel, the Landmark, though that deal was watched carefully and Justice Department employees expressed misgivings. Undoubtedly the government’s actions in both cases frustrated a man liked Hughes, who was accustomed to getting his way. It undoubtedly motivated the sentiments expressed in his memos of getting people in office who would be more malleable to his demands.
By 1969, with a new administration in power and a new attorney general in office—Nixon’s former campaign manager, John Mitchell—Hughes set his sights on another hotel and casino: the Dunes. This time Hughes was determined to get his way. In his interview with us, Dick Danner said he was dispatched by Bob Maheu to meet with Attorney General Mitchell with regard to the purchase. According to Danner’s records, he met with Mitchell three times in early 1970 to discuss the situation. In the first meeting, according to Danner, Mitchell asked for some statistics or data that supported Hughes’s case and that would refute concerns that he was building a Las Vegas monopoly. In the second meeting, which Danner claimed took place on February 26, Danner gave Mitchell a one-page memo. Danner then quoted the attorney general as saying that he would “let the boys look this over and give you an answer later.” On their third visit, on March 19, 1970, the attorney general said the department would approve Hughes’s acquisition of the Dunes. Danner remembered Mitchell as saying, “From our review of these figures, we see no problem.”
Richard McLaren, who served as the assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division during the relevant dates, told a different story. He said that when Mitchell had asked him about Hughes’s Dunes acquisition, he had told the attorney general that the purchase would violate department guidelines. On at least two occasions, McLaren said he urged Mitchell not to approve the deal. All the other staff attorneys who normally would handle the case said they had no recollection of hearing of the case at all.
I then spoke with John Mitchell to hear his recollection of these events. The former attorney general was now living in a hotel suite in New York, registered under a fictitious name. I came to know Mitchell quite well during the Watergate investigation. Nearly sixty years old by the time of the Watergate break-in, he had been a close associate of Richard Nixon for years. Since he had managed the 1968 campaign and was the head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President in 1972, some outside observers viewed Mitchell as a ruthless figure and savvy political genius. What I saw was quite different: a successful bond lawyer from Manhattan who found himself thrust in the middle of almost unimaginable craziness. During Watergate, his whole world imploded. His name was plastered on many damaging memos that John Dean had turned over to the committee. The attorney general was named in Dean’s testimony as having been in all sorts of key meetings, particularly those discussing illegal schemes hatched by Gordon Liddy. Meanwhile, Mitchell lived with his notoriously flamboyant and unstable wife, Martha, who saw conspiracies everywhere and had thrust herself into the national spotlight after the Watergate revelations came to light. (They were to separate very soon afterward.)
The first time he came to Capitol Hill for interviews, Mitchell was pushed and shoved by the gaggle of press and spectators. He looked shocked. He wasn’t scared, but had never been treated like that before. He was totally out of his comfort zone. Seeing him, I was reminded of scenes in movies where generals came up for interrogation before Congress and, to their astonishment, are treated without respect. When Mitchell testified in public hearings, the senators grilled him extensively about the Gemstone and Huston plans, and asked with incredulity why he had never quashed them, nor told the president about them.
Though Mitchell could be peevish and sarcastic when cornered on something before television cameras, in private he was usually cordial and cooperative. We subpoenaed his memos and his diary, which included his daily schedules, and he allowed us to copy and review them. On occasion he even steered us in the right direction. In fact, it was Mitchell who directed us to McLaren in the first place.
Some months earlier, before I met with Mitchell, I had interviewed his secretary to get a sense of him. She liked her boss and told me that he would get all these memos from the White House, glance at them, and then put them in a credenza, never looking at them again. Whenever someone came by for a meeting, Mitchell would ask her to fish the most recent memos out so he could remember what the latest plan was. I could visualize a man like Mitchell sitting in the middle of the discussion of the Gemstone plan, puffing on his pipe and nodding as if agreeing with everything being said. But it was equally likely that he either didn’t understand what was going on or he didn’t care. He never struck me as the ruthless strategist behind the Nixon administration. He was a figurehead.
Unsurprisingly, Mitchell had virtually no memory of Howard Hughes’s attempt to acquire the Dunes Hotel or of his approval of the purchase. At best, he said he could vaguely recall one meeting with Danner on the matter, not three. He didn’t seem sure about that one either.
McLaren, however, had a clear recollection of events, including a memo to Mitchell urging him to oppose the Hughes acquisition. Mitchell gave his approval to Dick Danner anyway. Knowing what I knew of him, this seemed typical of Mitchell. My guess was that he was told by someone higher up—likely Nixon or Haldeman—to approve the Hughes deal, and he did it with hardly a second thought.
What was interesting to those of us investigating the Dunes Hotel deal was not only its impropriety but its timing. The very day after Mitchell gave his approval, Dick Danner flew to Key Biscayne, Florida, Bebe Rebozo’s hometown. Hotel records and Danner’s own diary indicated that he stayed at the Sonesta Beach Resort. In an interview, Danner admitted that he met with Bebe Rebozo during that period but denied that he discussed contributions to the Nixon campaign or the fact that the Justice Department had just approved the Dunes Hotel acquisition. Both assertions seemed difficult to believe.
When I spoke to Hank Greenspun about all of this, he told me a different story. Greenspun said that Danner returned to Vegas with a piece of paper from the Justice Department signifying approval of the Dunes deal. Danner told Greenspun that the approval was conditioned on a contribution to the Nixon campaign, which would come six to twelve months later so as not to appear suspicious. And in fact, a sizable cash contribution did make its way from the Hughes empire to the Nixon campaign coffers a few months later.
We were building a circumstantial case indicating that Howard Hughes and the Nixon administration had, in fact, exchanged money for political favors. As this information began to be compiled, I knew I needed to talk to someone who was close to President Nixon on these matters—the man whose name was tied to the $100,000 contribution. I sought out Charles “Bebe” Rebozo.
Though Rebozo was well known in the newspapers as the president’s closest friend and confidant, Nixon in fact had two best friends. The other friend, the man who spent probably as much time with him as Rebozo, who joined the president on vacations and hung out with Nixon at his homes in Florida and California, was named Robert Abplanalp. Abplanalp was the inventor of the aerosol valve and founder of the Precision Valve Corporation. He owned an island in the Bahamas, among other properties. Unlike Bebe Rebozo, who enjoyed the attention of being the president’s BFF, Abplanalp preferred to travel beneath the radar. He was equally loyal to Nixon but was more discreet and stayed out of trouble. I thought of him as the smart one.
Bebe, by contrast, was a constant presence in Nixon family schemes, especially when they involved money. A sixty-year-old Cuban-American who had known Nixon for decades, Rebozo from the earliest days of the administration was a conduit for financial contributions to the Nixon slush fund. One document we obtained from the White House as a result of a subpoena was a memo from H. R. Haldeman to John Ehrlichman. The memo, marked “confidential” and dated February 17, 1969 (less than a month after the inauguration), stated that Nixon had asked Rebozo to solicit a contribution from billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, then living in London. Naturally, I suspected that Rebozo was also sent to procure funds from Howard Hughes.
Bebe Rebozo was not a cooperative witness. We had trouble subpoenaing him and had to work through his particularly obstructionist lawyer, William Frates. Sam Dash and I received a memo from one of my staff that said “there has been a continuous effort on the part of Mr. Frates to harass and insult [our investigators] and this entire operation appears to be a concocted scheme to obstruct the work of the accountants on this assignment.” Rebozo was slow to release his bank records and the list of documents he produced in response to our subpoenas was never complete. When Rebozo finally did meet with us, he was smooth and arrogant. He acted as if he could get away with anything, that the committee couldn’t touch him.
Rebozo grudgingly acknowledged that he had received two $50,000 cash payments from Hughes, one at Nixon’s California retreat on July 3, 1970, and the second in Key Biscayne that August. But Rebozo insisted that he had not sought the contributions. Rebozo also assured us that he placed the money in a safety deposit box at Key Biscayne Bank and Trust, the bank he owned, and never touched it. We learned more about this from Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach.
Kalmbach was a fascinating witness. I had first questioned him at his Los Angeles law office with Carmine Bellino on April 28, 1973, early in preparation for the Senate hearings. That interview was about Kalmbach’s role in paying Segretti for his “political espionage.” At that time, he said Dean had asked him to raise funds for the Watergate burglars. Kalmbach had been Nixon’s attorney since 1968, and he looked the part. He was groomed impeccably—there was not a hair out of place. He spoke calmly and measured his words. His daily schedule was printed in perfect, precise type on small cards that he carried in his suit pocket.
Kalmbach did not enjoy being the subject of inquiry by a congressional committee. He was used to representing witnesses, not being one, and he was not inclined to let his service to Richard Nixon jeopardize his successful legal career. His cooperation with the committee needed the cover of the appearance that he had no other choice.
Kalmbach tried to avoid answering questions about Bebe Rebozo and the Hughes payment by asserting attorney-client privilege. Chairman Ervin overruled that, concluding that Kalmbach was not serving as Rebozo’s lawyer. In fact, I had asked Rebozo to name his lawyers, and he had not mentioned Kalmbach, although Kalmbach claimed that Rebozo had consulted him. Having demonstrated that he had tried to keep quiet, he then became quite talkative. He told us that sometime during the week of April 23, 1973, Rebozo contacted him and told him that the IRS was inquiring about contributions Rebozo received in 1970. “He said he had personally received $100,000 in campaign contributions from Dick Danner representing Howard Hughes,” Kalmbach told us. “He said that he had disbursed part of the funds to Rose Mary Woods, to Don Nixon, to Ed Nixon [Richard Nixon’s younger brother], and to unnamed others during the intervening years, and that he was now asking my counsel on how to handle the problem.” Kalmbach said he told Rebozo to find the best tax attorney he could and he advised Rebozo to return the money.
After Kalmbach testified on March 21, 1974, Rebozo and his lawyer suddenly asked to meet privately with Senator Ervin. Despite their reservations, I was allowed to attend. We met in a small room in the Capitol as Rebozo’s lawyer walked in with a briefcase. Dramatically, he placed the briefcase on a table and opened it, revealing what he identified as $100,000 in cash. The money was in stacks of $100 bills circled by rubber bands.
I remember Ervin’s astonished expression—his bushy eyebrows fluttered up and down, and he gasped. The cash, Rebozo’s lawyer announced, was the money Rebozo had saved to return to the Hughes organization. It was proof, they maintained, that the money had never been used.
According to testimony provided by Rebozo, Danner, Maheu, Kalmbach, and others, the money that Hughes gave to the Nixon campaign had been procured in 1968. We located two employees of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas who told us that at least $50,000 was taken from the hotel cage, which we believed was the likely source of the Hughes contribution.
Our forensic accountant, Carmine Bellino, worked over several months to piece together what actually happened with money Rebozo received from Howard Hughes. If Rebozo had disbursed part of the money as Kalmbach said, where did the $100,000 he presented to Senator Ervin come from? Rebozo certainly knew that every dollar bill issued by the Federal Reserve has a serial number indicating the date of its release. Our working theory, then, was that Rebozo had spent considerable time collecting $100 bills with serial numbers that were consistent with his prior statements that he had kept the money unused for three years. Unfortunately, Mr. Rebozo, or whoever was helping him, was not very conscientious. We examined every one of those $100 bills and found more than thirty whose serial numbers did not match. Those bills had been issued after the money was said to have been given to Rebozo and thus could not have been part of the cash Rebozo claimed to have left undisturbed. Furthermore, the briefcase of cash presented to us had an extra $100 bill, adding up to $100,100. We prepared another subpoena for him, but Rebozo had left the country.
I flew to California to meet with Donald and Ed Nixon. I knew that we had to tread lightly and not appear to be harassing members of the president’s family. I wasn’t sure what we might learn, but, since Donald Nixon’s name kept popping up throughout our investigation, I felt it was important to talk with him. The senators on the committee agreed, voting to subpoena the brothers to testify privately at a Los Angeles hotel and to provide relevant records.
Don Nixon garnered no more respect from my investigators than he did at the White House. “In the genetic roulette of the Nixon family,” Marc Lackritz once quipped, “Don drew the blanks.” Don was a constant irritant to the White House. It did not take us long to learn that, at one point or another, nearly every senior member of Nixon’s White House staff had been tasked with babysitting Don Nixon—from John Ehrlichman and John Dean to Herb Kalmbach and Jack Caulfield. In fact, one of Caulfield’s first assignments was to monitor Don’s activities. That soon became the purview of the Secret Service, which tapped Don’s telephones at the president’s request. The Secret Service refused to be interviewed on this subject, on the grounds that it related to their protection of the president. My suspicion was that the use of the Secret Service to spy on a presidential sibling was probably illegal but maybe not uncommon.
I spent two days in November 1973 with Don and Ed Nixon at a hotel suite in California. I can’t say I noticed anything resembling familial care or concern between the two. Ed Nixon, who was almost sixteen years younger than Don, worked for a phone company in Seattle. He didn’t have affection for anybody, as far as I could tell. He started telling anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-black jokes as soon as we sat down.
After one conversation with Don, I could see why the president kept a watchful eye on him. Don was more affable than the president, even if a bit clownish. He looked eerily like his famous brother. At one point, I glanced at his silhouette in the window and thought I was looking at the president with his often caricatured nose. Don’s entrepreneurial skills had not improved from the days of the Nixon Burger. He was involved in all sorts of enterprises—for example, looking at financing a porn film with Johnny Meier, who claimed to be Hughes’s business advisor. We learned from the president’s tax lawyer, Arthur Blech, that Don had complained that the Hughes operation hadn’t given him a “finder’s fee” after the federal government approved Hughes’s acquisition of Airwest. If Richard was Michael Corleone, then Don was certainly Fredo.
When we went downstairs to the hotel restaurant for lunch, the married Don nudged me whenever he saw a pretty waitress walk by. At one point he asked me for my autograph. I guess that Don figured this was a historic event, so I obliged him.
Don and Ed both professed to know nothing about the Rebozo money, and claimed they received no payments from Hughes. When I asked Don whether he knew his telephone lines were being tapped by the White House, he said that he did know.
“Why do you think the president wants to bug your phones?” I asked him.
Don shrugged and said only, “He’s my brother.”
As it happened, the president addressed the issue at the same time. He held a press conference that very evening near Disneyland and was asked about newspaper articles, based on leaks from the committee, that he had bugged his brother’s phones. The president said he had ordered the phone taps. He said he did so for security reasons to protect his brother.
Based on their body language and tone, I didn’t think either Don or Ed had any more relationship with the president than they had with each other. If anything, they seemed resentful that their powerful brother hadn’t done more for them. My glimpse into the inner workings of the Nixon family was brief, but it was scary. These totally unimpressive figures shared DNA with the most powerful man in the world.
There was still one other person the committee had to interview, the one person other than Richard Nixon who could tell us everything about the Hughes money. It was time to subpoena Howard Hughes. I drafted a subpoena for the billionaire, asking him to testify and provide documents relating to Bob Maheu and Bebe Rebozo that might fill out the missing details of those relationships. I also asked for information about his license to acquire Airwest, a charitable tax deduction he had received for his medical foundation, and the federal government’s role in his attempt to buy the Dunes. Preparing the subpoena was relatively easy; serving Mr. Hughes with it was another matter. No one was ever sure where he was.
With the help of the Federal Aviation Administration, we obtained the tail number of Hughes’s private plane and tracked its flight path. In early 1974, we learned that the plane was landing at an airstrip in the Bahamas. A United States marshal was sent to the airport to serve a subpoena the moment that Hughes emerged from the plane.
I didn’t expect Hughes to comply with the committee even if served with a subpoena, but we had to make the effort. I was in my office in Washington when the marshal’s office called to tell us Hughes’s plane had touched down on the tarmac. As the plane rolled to a stop, we awaited word. But the doors never opened. The plane sat in place for a moment. Then the engines revved up again and the plane returned to the air. We sent him a letter requesting information, but that was never answered. We also subpoenaed his company’s vice president, his pilot, and a slew of his employees. I don’t think anyone complied.
On June 6, 1974, I drafted a letter for the Ervin Committee to send to the president. It included substantial evidence that Rebozo used cash funds to directly benefit the president and offered to give the president “an opportunity to comment on this material prior to the filing of this report.” The White House never responded to the points raised in the letter. The Senate hearings were over, and the House of Representatives was considering impeachment. It was clear that Nixon, Hughes, and anyone else I had hoped to hear from believed our committee had run out of time, so their strategy was to delay, delay, delay.
Our investigation was hampered throughout. But it did help me understand why the burglars were sent to the Watergate office complex that June night in the first place. And it highlighted a central figure in the Hughes firmament, at least as the Nixon White House saw it. That person was Larry O’Brien.
• • •
One of John Dean’s first disclosures to the committee was the operation code-named Gemstone. This appeared to be the successor to some of the earlier schemes—Operation Sandwedge and the Huston Plan, for example—that never got fully implemented. The meeting over Operation Gemstone, Dean told us, ultimately led to the Watergate break-in to bug the office of Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O’Brien and search his files.
Jack Caulfield gave us a memo he had prepared for Nixon officials in the fall of 1971 that proposed a sweeping operation, code-named Sandwedge, to counter what he believed the Democrats were up to under O’Brien. As I examined White House documents and spoke to witnesses, I learned that O’Brien was a particular and constant target of the Nixon team. “The presence of Lawrence O’Brien as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee unquestionably suggests that the Democratic nominee will have a strong, covert intelligence effort mounted against us in 1972,” Caulfield wrote.
In 1971, memos exchanged between Haldeman, Dean, and Caulfield tried to establish what relationship O’Brien had with the Hughes operation. Some of the memos were labeled HUGHES RETAINER TO LARRY O’BRIEN. Nixon aide Robert Bennett, a future U.S. senator from Utah, reported that O’Brien’s lobbying firm had been retained by Hughes and “the contract still exists.”
The infamous Gemstone meeting in Mitchell’s office on February 4, 1972, concerned two targets—Hank Greenspun and Larry O’Brien. I was confident that there was a relationship between the attempt to open Greenspun’s safe and the Watergate break-in. I assumed the plumbers were looking for the Hughes memos. My theory was that the president and his senior advisors believed O’Brien had evidence that Hughes’s $100,000 contribution was connected to administration favors, and they assumed that O’Brien was just waiting for the right time to put out that information. They feared the secret Howard Hughes loan was going to ruin Nixon politically again, just as it had in 1960 and in 1962.
Watergate conspirator Howard Hunt substantiated this. He testified in late September 1973 that he obtained the plans of Greenspun’s office in early 1972 from a Hughes associate. Just as Greenspun had told me, Hunt testified that he had asked the Hughes people to provide him with a plane to take him and the other burglars to Central America after they had breached Hank’s safe.
Jeb Magruder, then special counsel to the president, testified that Mitchell asked Liddy to survey Greenspun’s offices in Las Vegas to determine if entry was possible. Magruder also said that Chuck Colson told him to get moving on Liddy’s budget requests because information on Larry O’Brien was needed.
We obtained further corroboration from Ralph Winte, the director of Hughes’s security. He told us that he met with Nixon’s aide Robert Bennett in Washington and that Bennett introduced him to Howard Hunt, saying Hunt was with the CIA. In February 1972, Winte and Hunt met at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Hunt proposed to break into Hank Greenspun’s safe to steal the Howard Hughes memos. Winte said that after the theft, Hunt proposed to use a Hughes plane to fly him to Central America.
Tony Ulasewicz told me that Dean and Haldeman had asked him to look into O’Brien’s associations, especially his relationship with Robert Maheu. Tony added a new piece of information: that Nixon campaign officials blamed O’Brien for leaking the information about Hughes’s loan to Donald Nixon that infected Nixon’s 1960 and 1962 campaigns. Speaking of O’Brien, Nixon campaign advisor Murray Chotiner told Ulasewicz, “His turn is coming.”
Tony believed what I did. As he put it later, “The genesis date of the Watergate break-in was not 1972, but 1969.” He said it began with the Nixon group’s decision to target Larry O’Brien to find out what he knew about Howard Hughes.
My view, then and now, was that the break-ins at the Watergate and Greenspun’s office in Las Vegas were parts of the same quest. Nixon wanted to find the Hughes memos and prevent them from destroying him.
• • •
I went to see O’Brien in New York in December 1973. I expected he’d be glad that committee investigators were interested in him and his connection to the Watergate scandal. But that was not his attitude.
From the beginning of our meeting, O’Brien was frosty and defensive. He indulged no small talk to break the ice. He showed no interest in who we were or what we wanted. At one point he questioned why we were interviewing him at all. “I’m the victim here,” he said.
“Do you think that the Watergate break-in and cover-up was related to your work for Howard Hughes?” I asked.
He wasn’t going to discuss that, he said. It was none of my business. It was clear that he thought I was no different from the Republicans who disparaged him.
I had prided myself on not being surprised by what a witness said. But here I was taken aback. O’Brien was a significant figure in Washington then, and I had expected him to appreciate what we were trying to learn from him. We tried to push him on a few specifics, but we got nowhere. It was strange.
I finally realized that O’Brien was afraid that we might be investigating him. He didn’t want his own activities as a lobbyist for Hughes to come under scrutiny. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Hughes treated O’Brien the same way he treated other politicians: using his money to get what he wanted. The biggest irony may have been that Nixon was right to be paranoid about O’Brien.
• • •
There were, as Senator Baker used to say, a lot of animals crashing around in the forest. He believed the CIA was lurking in the shadows of the Watergate break-in. I learned inadvertently that he may have been right. When you pull on a loose thread, sometimes something bigger unravels.
During the Hughes-Rebozo investigation we periodically checked John Mitchell’s diaries from when he was the attorney general. These showed dates and summaries of various meetings. One of my investigators came across a meeting in February of 1971 between Mitchell and Bob Maheu. No subject was indicated, and I wondered about it.
I knew Mitchell couldn’t remember much, so I asked Maheu about it over the phone. There was a pause on the other end.
“I got a subpoena to talk about organized crime in Vegas,” he said. “So I got Mitchell to have me debrief the people who were interested so I could get rid of the subpoena.”
There was something about it that didn’t seem right to me. “What did you talk about?” I asked.
He didn’t remember.
“What was the focus of their questions? What was the name of the primary questioner?”
“I don’t remember any of that stuff,” he said.
Unsatisfied, I called Will Wilson, the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division who was at the meeting with Maheu and Mitchell. I told him Maheu’s story and asked him if it checked out.
No, he replied. It didn’t.
“That meeting was about the wiretap on the McGuire sisters that we came across,” he said.
I was confused. Why was the government interested in the popular singing trio? Wilson told me that the sisters associated with Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, two powerful organized crime bosses. The wiretaps picked up conversations between the Mafia figures about their work with the Kennedy administration to plan the assassination of Fidel Castro. Wilson told me the mobsters were brought into the plot through Bob Maheu. Wilson said the White House had copies of these wiretaps, and he believed that Nixon intended to use this information against Ted Kennedy if Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1972. Mitchell had met with Maheu to get corroboration that the Hughes organization had been involved, which may have been an effort by the Nixon White House to get information on Hughes they could use to control him.
I was stunned. Not only by Wilson’s story, but also by his complete candor. I had no idea that the U.S. government was behind a plot against Castro. I felt I had no choice but to bring this information to Sam Ervin directly and see how he wanted to proceed.
By the spring of 1974, the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee was about to begin its impeachment inquiry of President Nixon—led by the Judiciary Committee’s chair, Representative Peter Rodino, who hired John Doar as chief counsel.
Ervin was intrigued by the information I brought to him. He asked question after question about it. He seemed genuinely interested in the players and the story, and how it might play into our existing investigation. Ultimately, however, time ran out and he decided it was not relevant to Nixon campaign activities in the 1972 election. He felt the country had had enough drama and disruption. We didn’t need to throw another stick of dynamite onto an already burning pile.
I disagreed. I told the chairman that this information could be directly relevant to Watergate if, as I believed, it showed the Nixon team tried to use the plot against Castro to blackmail political opponents. Possibly Nixon wanted to use Hughes’s involvement to get more money from him and keep him in line. There were unanswered questions, and I wanted to keep looking for answers. Reluctantly, Ervin allowed me to keep going.
I subpoenaed Giancana and Roselli. I knew of them from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, since they were members of the Genovese and Bonanno crime families that we targeted. They both agreed to come in and speak with us, accompanied by their attorney, an organized crime lawyer from Chicago. His manner was smooth, and I remember that peaks of a carefully folded, flamboyant handkerchief emerged from his breast pocket.
As they assembled in one of our committee rooms, neither Giancana nor Roselli seemed to take any of this seriously. I figured they had been through so many subpoenas and interviews by law enforcement and spent so much of their lives under surveillance that my questioning was not going to faze them. I was right. When I broached the subject of Hughes or the assassination plot, they declined to answer, their lawyer citing a national security exemption that he claimed prevented them from responding. I was frustrated, but I couldn’t help but laugh. I knew these guys from my work prosecuting organized crime, and now they told me they were involved in national security? It seemed ridiculous.
Ervin declined to overrule their exemption, and as a result, we didn’t go any further. In a sense the chairman was right. Whether or not Hughes and the mob were involved in a plot against Castro had no relevance to whether Richard Nixon had committed any crimes. But it sure as hell was interesting. It would be several more years until the full scope of those activities was exposed in Senator Church’s hearings to investigate the CIA.
• • •
Looking back, it was a miracle that the Watergate Committee succeeded in uncovering as much as it did. The people involved had conflicting (sometimes shifting) loyalties and at times evasive responses filled with hidden meanings and agenda. Herb Kalmbach, for example, once told me that he had agreed to help the Nixon White House cover up its financial activities only if Nixon promised to protect Herb’s family. “My family needed to be safe,” Kalmbach said. His lips quivered, his voice broke, and I saw tears in his eyes. I was moved. But then Kalmbach said the exact same words to others on our committee—quivering his lips, breaking his voice, summoning tears at that precise moment. Then on television, he did the same thing again—the minute he mentioned his family—with almost identical words. I was less moved. Another time, Scott Armstrong and I interviewed a Nixon administration official, Egil “Bud” Krogh, who had headed the White House plumbers group. He recruited Liddy and authorized the break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. When we interviewed Krogh, he was at the Department of Transportation.
Krogh was a serious guy with a reputation for scrupulousness. He struck me as an unusual choice to oversee the plumbers. Armstrong and I met with him and conducted a rather inconsequential interview. At the end of it, I thanked Bud for his time.
Armstrong, realizing how useless the interview had been, made a joke. “Well, we definitely got the big guy today,” Scott said, implying the president.
I knew Armstrong was being sarcastic, but Bud didn’t. The color drained from his face. He looked stricken.
Once we were out of earshot, I chided Armstrong. “Scott, I don’t think you can joke around with these people,” I said. “There is so much nervous tension here. We have to be serious.” In fact, after months of questioning Nixon people about the scandal, we became accustomed to what I called “the look.” It was a sort of contained panic, as if everyone was waiting for one more shoe to drop, for one more person they knew to be carted off to jail.
It turned out Krogh hadn’t told us the truth about what he knew. Late in November 1973, he pleaded guilty for his part in the break-in of Ellsberg’s doctor’s office and agreed to cooperate with the prosecutors. He ended up serving four months in prison. Ehrlichman, in his memoir, said Krogh “materially contributed to the demise of the Nixon administration.”
The major players in the Watergate saga—even the “good guys”—sometimes had an agenda that I didn’t appreciate or understand. For example, in executive session during the Hughes-Rebozo investigation, I questioned General Alexander Haig, who had replaced Haldeman as Nixon’s chief of staff. Senator Weicker swore Haig in and, in fact, was the only senator in attendance.
I asked General Haig a series of questions about what people in the White House actually knew about the Hughes-Rebozo money as well as about the administration’s efforts to prod the IRS to investigate Larry O’Brien. I expected that, as chief of staff, Haig would have a great deal of information about Nixon’s activities. But the interview failed to uncover any new revelations. The general was a reluctant witness and invoked “executive privilege” at least forty times in response to our interrogation.
At the close of the encounter, I followed Senator Weicker and his aide out of the committee room and then went back to my office. Almost immediately the phone rang at my desk. It was a reporter from the New York Times.
“Terry, can you confirm that General Haig took the executive privilege exemption forty times today?” the reporter asked.
I didn’t answer the question. Committee rules said I couldn’t comment, and it went against my nature to disclose that kind of information. I was certain only one other person could possibly have been the source of that information. I rose from my desk in a fury and made my way directly to Senator Weicker’s office.
Weicker was seated behind his desk when I was shown in to his private office. “What can I do for you, Terry?” he asked.
I had long suspected that he and his aide had been leaking to reporters throughout the hearings and I was going to let him have it. I told him about the phone call I’d just received. “Senator,” I said in full umbrage, “we can’t run an investigation with everything being leaked instantly to the press.”
Weicker listened in silence as I went on.
“These leaks are going to give people a reason not to talk to us,” I said, “and they will also allow potential witnesses to know what we are doing and what our next questions might be.”
Finally, Weicker had had enough. The senator was six feet six and standing up behind his desk, he was an impressive, even intimidating, figure. As he looked down at me, a frown lined his face. “Terry, let me ask you something,” he said. “Who elected you to the United States Senate?”
Until that moment, I’d felt totally justified in marching into the office of a United States senator and chewing him out for screwing up my investigation. It never occurred to me the hubris I was exhibiting or, for that matter, that the senator might have had a good reason for his leaks.
Weicker went on to explain to me that he felt it was his duty to inform the public about what we were learning. I knew that his leaks also helped Weicker maintain useful relationships with the press, but I hadn’t yet realized that his purpose was larger than that, and valid. Leaks from the committee helped keep the story going—making it harder for the White House to conceal information or get away with telling only part of the story.
When President Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973—as part of the so-called Saturday Night Massacre when Attorney General Richardson resigned—the administration might have tried to claim the firing was the outcome of a legitimate internal struggle. They might have succeeded in arguing it was not a big deal. But because the public was more aware of the full story—not just from televised hearings but from press reports from many sources, including leaks—the White House’s dissembling had far less credibility.
To me as a former prosecutor, the Watergate investigation was about following leads, assembling facts, and preparing a case in confidence. But it was just as much a battle for public opinion. Senator Weicker got that. I didn’t.
• • •
On June 23, 1975, Richard Nixon appeared before the grand jury to testify on the Watergate scandal that had ushered him from office the summer before. Although President Ford’s pardon of the former president excused Nixon from criminal prosecution, the pardon did require him to cooperate with the special prosecutor.
Reading the transcript of his statements to the grand jury is a fresh reminder of the demons that haunted Richard Nixon—paranoia, suspicion, bitterness. When asked to discuss his efforts to turn the IRS against Larry O’Brien, Nixon characteristically turned the tables.
“So, in other words,” the former president interrupted, “the special prosecutor’s office is only interested in the IRS harassment activities insofar as it deals with Mr. O’Brien? It is not interested in any harassment that the IRS may have done or is doing or has done with regard to, say, me, my friends, or anything like that?”
Nixon’s fixation on O’Brien was apparent. He noted “as public knowledge” that Larry O’Brien and Hubert Humphrey’s son-in-law were both on retainers of “the Hughes organization.” He questioned whether these retainers were “for services rendered” or “for the purpose of being funneled into political campaigns.” He accused the Hughes organization of “payoffs” and claimed O’Brien “had his hand in the till there.” Clearly lost on Nixon was the fact that he was accusing the Democrats of receiving Hughes money when in fact he had been receiving it all along.
Nixon then went into a long, self-pitying discourse. He said, “If you were to look into Larry O’Brien’s activities politically over the years, and into the activities of the Democratic senators and others, including some Republicans who are taking on this sanctimonious attitude about the cleanliness of their campaigns, if you would put them to the same test you have put us, you would find that we come out rather well.”
That was nonsense. Mostly. But penetrating the fog of his typical obfuscation, partial truths, and self-serving accusations was one unnerving thought: Nixon was right. At least, in part. There was a lot of activity with respect to Howard Hughes that few people wanted to untangle. And so we never did.
In December 1973, Sam Dash, responding to leaks about the Hughes-Rebozo investigation, faced reporters. “Both Senator Ervin and I feel the Hughes investigation is as important as anything we’ve produced thus far,” Dash told them. He noted that more than a hundred witnesses had been interviewed in the case, mostly by me. Dash’s support and statements were encouraging. And it seemed that we were really making some headway. By February 1974, I believed we had compiled enough information to justify reopening the Watergate hearings to publicly explore how the federal government had been infiltrated by one of the most powerful industrialists in the world. I also thought there was a chance that television hearings would create public pressure on Mr. Hughes and others in his organization to cooperate with the investigation and maybe appear at the hearings.
On February 15, I drafted a memorandum to Chairman Ervin, formally requesting him to reconvene the hearings. I noted we had assembled evidence of a “clear pattern of involvement by the President with regard to the contribution of $100,000 in cash carried by Richard Danner to the President’s friend Rebozo.” I made the case that these revelations, and others, merited full disclosure to the American people.
After Senator Ervin read my memo, he called me into his office. “Terry, this is good work,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ll hold another hearing.” He said he had thought the matter over carefully. The timing, he indicated, was the problem.
By early 1974, the Watergate scandal had become the center of attention in the House of Representatives, where the Rodino Committee would soon prepare preparing a bill of impeachment against President Nixon. Ervin said he’d turn over the information we compiled to Leon Jaworski, the new special prosecutor who had been appointed to replace Cox. He also said he would allow us to draft a section of the committee’s final report, revealing the evidence about Hughes we had obtained to date.
I respected and admired Senator Ervin, but I was disappointed by his decision. A written report would certainly not have the impact of a televised inquiry. His decision also assumed our investigation was complete. We would not be able to subpoena any more witnesses or garner any new information. I had believed that new hearings would shed light on the central question behind Watergate—why the break-in was ordered, what Nixon had been trying to hide.
Over time, I began to wonder if there might be other reasons that the Hughes-Rebozo hearings were scrubbed. During the investigation of the Hughes network, it quickly became clear that the billionaire’s reach was not limited to Richard Nixon. We had interviewed dozens of witnesses in many major agencies and departments that had dealings with Hughes—from the Department of Justice to the CIA to the IRS to the Atomic Energy Commission to the Federal Reserve.
Mr. Hughes was a bipartisan ATM. Robert Maheu claimed that, before Nixon took office, Hughes had instructed him to take $1 million to the LBJ ranch in Texas—a bribe to get the president to halt nuclear tests in Nevada. Maheu said he did go to the ranch and stayed there for four days. But it was never made clear to me what happened to the $1 million.
There was another allegation that Hughes gave money to Johnson’s vice president, Nixon’s 1968 opponent, Hubert Humphrey. This was early 1974, when Humphrey was considering another run for the presidency. Maheu claimed that, holding a briefcase filled with $50,000, he had entered a car with the vice president and gotten out a block later without the briefcase.
One could assume that Howard Hughes’s money had found its way even to senators on the Ervin Committee. While the committee was quick to denounce the Nixon White House for financial impropriety, it was unlikely the Democratic senators were all that interested in exposing possibly illicit contributions to their own campaigns or those of other Democrats. Senator Talmadge, for one, had financial skeletons literally in his own closet.
While tracking the Nixon campaign’s money trail, we came across the name of a wealthy donor from the South, A. D. Davis, an owner of the Winn-Dixie grocery stores. Davis had given a $50,000 contribution to Bebe Rebozo. I decided to interview Mr. Davis to see what he could tell us about that contribution as well as about Rebozo’s fund-raising.
According to committee rules, whenever investigators interviewed a witness in executive session, at least one senator had to be present to swear in the witness and act as arbiter of the questioning. While preparing for the Davis interview, I was called by Senator Talmadge’s aide, who said that his boss wanted to preside over the session and asked that it be held in Talmadge’s office. Since the witness came from Talmadge’s home state of Georgia, the senator felt a proprietary interest in the matter. Chairman Ervin agreed to the request.
I knew something was amiss when Davis entered Talmadge’s office. One of the first things Davis said was, “Herman, I’ve got my plane here. You want a ride back to Georgia?”
We got little from Davis. Every time I raised a sensitive question about the $50,000 contribution he’d made, his lawyer objected. And Talmadge, as the presiding officer, upheld every objection that was raised. I found that remarkable, and presumed Talmadge had decided to do a favor for a prominent constituent to shield him from embarrassment. But there was more to it than that.
Later, Talmadge’s aide was arrested for taking a bribe from Davis. The bribe apparently was made the day before Davis testified. No evidence linked the senator directly to this. However, when Talmadge and his wife later divorced, she found bundles of cash hidden in her former husband’s shoes while cleaning out one of their closets. On October 11, 1979, Talmadge was denounced by the Senate for “improper financial conduct.” One of the last segregationist Southern Democrats, he was defeated for reelection in 1980 by a Republican. But he never faced criminal charges.
Hank Greenspun, one of the only people willing to finger Hughes, described the billionaire industrialist as “the biggest despoiler of the American political system.” Curiously, Greenspun had also benefited from Hughes, who had given Hank a loan to buy his newspaper. Even the crusading journalist was tainted by money from Howard Hughes.
Hughes got away with it all. He was never questioned about his attempts to influence the American political system through bribery and intimidation. No one ever uncovered how much money he had given to elected officials and candidates of both parties in exchange for political favors. To this day, no one knows exactly how much his influence impacted decisions by the federal government.
Post-Watergate, Congress tried to constrain financial influence on candidates. New campaign finance laws limited individual campaign contributions and provided a formula for public funding of presidential campaigns. Those limits were upended decades later by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. Super PACs now funnel unlimited funds without transparent attribution to benefit political campaigns. In fact, the checks on someone like Howard Hughes are as lax today, if not more so, than they have ever been.
• • •
In retrospect, the Watergate investigation and public hearings served the American people and our democracy extremely well. Elected officials—in both parties—our federal judges, and many members of the media worked to bring many revelations to light. Nixon’s impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors” proved the enduring strength of our Constitution. That America’s elected representatives could peacefully depose the highest elected representative in the land was a remarkable feat, one that spoke to how well and deliberately Congress approached Watergate. Over the decades that followed, I’ve been interviewed by many foreigners seeking to learn from the successful outcome of our Watergate experience. Other countries faced with entrenched corruption, including Afghanistan recently, have hoped to use Watergate as a model for cleansing their political systems without violence.
Watergate’s successes could not have happened, it must be said, had it not been for men like Sam Ervin, Dan Inouye, and other Democrats committed to working in a bipartisan way to uncover the truth. That is also true of Howard Baker, Fred Thompson, and his investigators, most of them Republicans who followed the facts and were willing to implicate a president of their own party, a man they’d voted for and likely admired. The bipartisanship, the comity, on display during those months was an impressive example of America at its best. Unfortunately, Washington wouldn’t always work that way.