^*Hughes would not have gone to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to seek treatment, because to the extent it functioned at all as anything but a tax dodge, it was merely a research facility. Around this time, Hughes employed former Kennedy family fixer Larry O’Brien to successfully wrangle a loophole in the Tax Reform Act of 1969 to ensure that the Medical Institute would remain protected from new tax regulations that would force other major corporate-sponsored charities to ante up.