Citizen Kane : Shot by Shot

[Jeff Bernstein]

Confronting the audience's gaze

Emphasizing the lens.

Vertigo, 1:38:23

Persona, 5:30

Carnal Knowledge (1971), 1:36:41

And the Ship Sails On (1983), 14:18

Whatever Works (2009), 28:11

[Jeff Bernstein]

Exacting detail

Paperwork : note the names of the architects at bottom. Not an essential detail, but it adds verisimilitude. Also elegance.

 

[Jeff Bernstein]

Perry Ferguson, Art Director of CK

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

99

How cute : Following the sequence of Kane's two failed marriages, now this allusion to his failure at the polls.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Some political films before Kane

Lawyer Man (1932), 45:21

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), 41:15

The Great McGinty (1940), wr./dir. Preston Sturges. Here, Dan McGinty becomes governor of his state. BONUS : Who destroyed and ended Sturges' career? Howard Hughes.

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

WATERGATE

 

We do not know if the people who make our history are more intelligent than we think, or whether stupidity rules the process of thought at its highest level. Is America governed by accident more than we are ready to suppose, or by design? And if by design, is the design sinister? Are the actors playing roles more intricate than we expect?

NORMAN MAILER[2]

 

Regarding Mr. Nixon, I have tried not to bother him since he has been in office, and I have made no effort to contact him.

HOWARD HUGHES, January 7, 1972.[3]

 

In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, five men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices on the sixth floor of the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C. What followed was twenty-six months of snowballing events in which member after member of the President’s White House staff were convicted of offences growing out of the break-in until nine in all were brought down. The public investigation of the Watergate break-in led to the uncovering of a whole world of corruption at the heart of the Nixon Administration. Finally, on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States. It would be the first and as yet only time a President would suffer such ignominy and disgrace.

 

President Nixon’s spectacular downfall resulted from his role in a cover-up of what at first was reported as a petty burglary. “Tricky Dick” would be caught out in a lie—the President said publicly in the days following that he had known nothing of the events of June 17.[4]

 

What were the five men doing there at the Watergate?[5] Why did the President feel that he was implicated in the ostensibly petty crime to the extent that he would sweat blood in an attempt to brush it under the rug?[6] It all has to do with the shadowy presence of Howard Hughes in Washington, D.C.

 

Nixon had many pathologies and one of them was his morbid fear of Howard Hughes the Tycoon. In order to explain why the President of the United States would quiver with terror whenever the name Howard Hughes was spoken, we have to look back to the campaign for the American Presidency between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon lost in what had been the closest presidential race in history up to that time, a matter of one hundred thousand votes. What had balanced the scales out of Nixon’s favor? A furore over secret ‘loans’ to the tune of $205,000—some of those ‘undeclared campaign contributions’ which we hear about in the media from time to time—that the Nixon family had received back in 1956 from Howard Hughes.[7] Richard Nixon, who had been vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the time of the loans, apparently did not learn from his mistakes, because Nixon willingly received undeclared donations of cash from Howard Hughes between the years 1968 to 1970—more of those questionable transactions which Nixon sought to keep secret at all costs, perhaps even consciously erasing eighteen-and-a-half minutes of one of his White House Tapes in a desperate measure to hide his connection to Hughes. If the latest Hughes ‘loan’ hit the headlines, not only might it spell disaster for Nixon’s bid for re-election in 1972, but Congress would have the ammunition to initiate impeachment proceedings against him.

 

What specific Hughes loan was Nixon terrified of, the knowledge of which led Nixon to suggest—however indirectly—the operations that eventuated in the Watergate hanky panky? In July 1970, Richard Danner, one of Howard Hughes’ representatives to the Nixon Administration, handed $50,000 in bundles of $100s in a manila envelope to Charles C. (“Bebe”) Rebozo,[8] confidant to President Nixon.[9] The transaction took place at the President’s estate in San Clemente, California.[10] Later in the year, at Rebozo’s home in Key Biscayne, Florida, Danner handed Rebozo another package of a further $50,000.[11] Rebozo put the $100,000 campaign contribution for President Nixon’s re-election campaign in a safe-deposit box (No. 224) at the Key Biscayne Bank and Trust Company in Miami.[12]

 

In 1968, Hughes had already openly donated $50,000—with the amount distributed among ten checks to circumvent contribution limitation regulations—to the Nixon campaign organization. [13] Late in 1972, Hughes donates another $150,000 to the Nixon campaign.[14]

 

On the surface, Hughes enjoyed sterling relations with the Nixon administration. For example: Back in April 1969, the Nixon administration approved Hughes’ request for the acquisition of Air West airlines. In both January 1969 and March 1970, the Nixon administration chose not to block Hughes’ applications to purchase further casinos in Las Vegas and went so far as to lean on the Department of Justice to back off on antitrust proceedings.[15] In 1971 the Nixon Administration allowed Hughes to successfully dodge the Internal Revenue Service with respect to the IRS’s inspection of “charities” such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Though the HHMI violated new regulations of the IRS—by spending less than 6% of its assets a year on medical research—the IRS did nothing and would do nothing to inconvenience Hughes.[16] Terry Lenzner, a high-level investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee, later commented, “The senior people in the Nixon administration treated Mr. Hughes as if the law did not apply to him.”[17] Richard Nixon did not want Howard Hughes bothered because Howard Hughes knew far too much.[18]

 

Various Washington insiders were on Hughes’ payrolls in one capacity or another during the time of Nixon’s presidency. One was Lawrence O’Brien, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and no friend of Nixon’s. O’Brien had acted as a representative for Hughes on a variety of occasions in Washington, D.C. since July 1968 and was paid handsomely for the service. It had been Hughes’ old chief representative—and now adversary—Robert Maheu who had hired Lawrence O’Brien for Hughes in the first place. O’Brien’s office was at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Building.

 

MORE ON LAWRENCE O’BRIEN. Lawrence O’Brien, once a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet, was Robert Kennedy’s campaign manager until that presidential hopeful was assassinated in June 1968. O’Brien then switched to Hubert Humphrey’s campaign. Norman Mailer noted, “Nobody had more contacts in Washington than Larry O’Brien.”[19]

 

According to a White House memorandum written by John Dean, Counsel to the President, on January 26, 1973, Maheu and O’Brien were old friends from the Boston area who had maintained significant contact during the Kennedy Admistration.[20] But Maheu in his memoir wrote that he didn’t meet O’Brien until July 4, 1968.[21] At any rate, O’Brien agreed to begin working for the Hughes Organization in early July 1968. He established Lawrence F. O’Brien and Associates, Inc., a public relations firm, and took on Hughes as one of the clients. O’Brien would be paid $15,000 a month on a two-year contract.[22]

 

“There was, of course, the delicate matter that Hughes wanted to hire me but didn’t want to meet me face to face,” O’Brien recalled in his memoir. “Maheu raised the issue—he said that was simply Hughes’ style of operation, that he, Maheu, had worked for the man for years, and was his chief executive officer, but had never met him.”[23]

 

O’Brien would be the man to set up the meeting between Robert Maheu and President Johnson (regarding nuclear testing) in August 1968. Other jobs included an unsuccessful attempt to get the TWA v. Hughes suit settled out-of-court.[24]

 

In March 1970, O’Brien became Chairman of the National Democratic Committee, yet remained on the Hughes payroll. In his memoir Maheu describes O’Brien in innocent terms: “Larry was working for Howard Hughes as a political consultant specializing in tax legislation.”[25]

 

Leonard Garment, a special consultant to President Nixon, recalled in his own memoir President Nixon’s antipathy to O’Brien:

 

It was not simply that Nixon lost the presidency in 1960, though that was bad enough; it was the way he lost. Nixon was beaten by a smarter, shrewder, and—hardest of all to take—tougher bunch of politicians, led by the Kennedy family itself, fed by the Kennedy fortune, and implemented by all the iron-headed Kennedy political professionals epitomized by Larry O’Brien.[26]

 

President Nixon discovered the Hughes-O’Brien link after Nixon had the IRS carry out a tax audit on O’Brien soon after moving into the Oval Office.[27]

 

*

 

A second government insider was Robert Foster Bennett, director of a public relations agency that served as a front for the CIA. Bennett seemed to be a friend of Nixon’s presidency and was intimately allied with the Nixon White House; in 1970 he was engineering campaign contribution funds intrigues for the benefit of the President’s re-election campaign. Following Maheu’s ouster from the Hughes Organization in December 1970, Robert Foster Bennett became Howard Hughes’ main man in Washington, D.C. beginning in January 1971. During Nixon’s reign in the White House, it was Bennett’s public-relations firm, Robert R. Mullen and Company, which acted as a conduit between the Hughes Organization and the CIA. Bennett was a perfect man for this job as go-between. Not only was Bennett a Mormon from Utah, but he was a CIA associate himself with his own case officer at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. One of the masterminds of the 1972 Watergate burglary was ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt[28]—originally hired by Mullen & Co. on May 1, 1970, and who in 1971 went to work for Bennett as an agent for Hughes in a large-scale and completely secret CIA operation known as Project Jennifer.[29]

 

MORE ON ROBERT FOSTER BENNETT. In the wake of Watergate, investigative journalist J. Anthony Lukas was one of the few newsmen to focus intently on Bennett and his role in Washington. In the New York Times on January 29, 1976, he described Bennett as “the mystery man of Watergate, a shadowy figure rarely mentioned in most accounts, but whose trail can be followed through the duskiest corners of the scandal.”[30]

 

Robert Bennett, born September 18, 1933, in Salt Lake City, was the youngest son of Wallace F. Bennett, the Republican Senator from Utah. In 1968 Bennett managed his father’s re-election campaign. In 1969 he was appointed Director of Congressional Relations at the Department of Transportation. In 1970 he went to work for President Nixon’s political machine. According to Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, “Robert Bennett had been the organizer of about 100 dummy campaign committees used to funnel millions of dollars in secret contributions to the President’s re-election campaign.”[31]

 

In the summer of 1970, Howard Hughes was watching the television news in his sealed penthouse atop the Desert Inn when he was struck numb with horror at one of the stories. He heard of America’s plan to dump 66 tons of lethal nerve gas, sealed in concrete containers, off the coast of the Bahamas. For months Hughes had been entertaining a move to the Bahamas, just as he had back in the autumn of 1966. The prospect of moving to a toxic waste dump understandably appalled him. He drafted a memo to his top-level operatives. “I want you to hire one of those Washington or N.Y. public relations firms that specializes in single difficult emergency political problems such as this,” a highly alarmed Hughes wrote. “I beg you to move like lightning on this.”[32]

 

Robert Maheu contacted Richard Danner, who passed on the Hughes news to Bebe Rebozo. Chester Davis organized a legal action to halt the dumping on behalf of an activist organization called the Environment Defense Fund. Bill Gay contacted Robert Bennett, asking if Bennett could help on the nerve gas issue.[33] Bennett had a good friend in the White House with inside connections: Charles Colson, Special Counsel to President Nixon. None of Hughes’ pressure tactics worked in this instance. The dumping took place as scheduled on August 18, 1970.

 

In December 1970, the time that Maheu and O’Brien were removed from the Hughes payroll, Gay invited Bennett to become Howard Hughes’ new representative in Washington, D.C. Bennett accepted the job. “Get a base,” Gay told him.[34] One month later Bennett retired from the Department of Transportation and joined Robert R. Mullen & Company. Bennett became company president in February, then owner of the company in September. Mullen & Co. was located in a building at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, just a stone’s throw from the White House and across the street from the Executive Office Building, an administration wing of the White House. Also across the street was the building housing the headquarters of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

 

Bennett later testified that he didn’t find out about the Mullen-CIA link until after he joined the company, and that he first became associated with the CIA when he was introduced to Mullen & Co.’s case officer at Agency headquarters, Martin J. Lukasky. Bennett would have found out that Mullen & Co. had served as a front for the CIA in various countries of the world, such as Switzerland, Mexico, Holland, and Singapore, since at least 1962.[35] Bennett’s explanation, notes Norman Mailer, “asks us to tolerate the idea that a useful CIA front was sold to a non-CIA man who was then kindly informed of the CIA’s relation to the company he bought; in return for such courtesy, he proceeded without ado to labor for the agency.” Mailer was skeptical. “Since Bennett will labor long hours, it is comfortable to suspect he has been with the CIA before we have met him.”[36]

 

Meanwhile, since the 1950s the CIA had been awarding the Hughes Tool Company annual contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the development of a variety of secret equipment. By 1965, the CIA had become Hughes Aircraft’s prime contractor. A Hughes-Mullen link was comfortable for both parties.

 

With Bennett at the helm, it would be business as usual at Mullen & Co., which became a prime stop on the intelligence community’s Old Boy network. Bennett gathered together a workforce of putatively “retired” CIA officers.[37] James Phelan described Bennett in less cloak and dagger terms as the “Washington representative to dispense political funds for the Hughes corporation.”[38]

 

Charles Colson prepared an internal White House memo dated January 15, 1971:

 

Bob Bennett. . . . has just [taken] over the Mullen public-relations firm here in Washington. Bob is a trusted loyalist and good friend. We intend to use him on a variety of outside projects. One of Bob’s new clients in Howard Hughes. I’m sure I need not explain the political implications of having Hughes’ affairs handled here in Washington by a close friend. As you know, Larry O’Brien has been the principal Hughes man in Washington. This move could signal quite a shift in terms of the politics and money that Hughes represents.[39]

 

“By mid-1971,” J. Anthony Lukas wrote, “Bennett was the fulcrum where three powerful forces met: the White House, the CIA, and Howard Hughes. With that kind of power rattling around, important things were bound to happen at Mullen & Company.”[40]

 

*

 

Lawrence O’Brien and Robert Foster Bennett—one Democrat and one Republican, both men on Howard Hughes’ payroll who just happen to be at the heart of the Watergate fiasco.

 

President Nixon came to worry over what Lawrence O’Brien knew about his, Nixon’s, relationship to ‘Hughes money’. It was assumed that whatever Robert Maheu knew about Howard Hughes’ dealings in Washington with both Democrats and Republicans, Lawrence O’Brien probably knew, and such insider knowledge might be used against Nixon in the upcoming presidential election of 1972. Nixon might fall to grief once more because of undeclared campaign contributions from the Billionaire Hughes.[41] The President sought to attack O’Brien first on O’Brien’s Hughes link, so as to preempt any attempt by O’Brien to discredit Nixon by invoking Nixon’s Hughes link.[42] If Nixon could get hard proof of O’Brien’s connection to Hughes, O’Brien would probably keep his own mouth closed for the purposes of self-preservation.[43] This idea of Nixon’s was the catalyst for the ensuing Watergate scandal. According to John Dean, “the chain of events that destroyed the Nixon Presidency” came with these words from Richard Nixon to White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman while flying on Air Force One on January 14, 1971:

 

It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes. Bebe has some information on this, although it is, of course, not solid. But there is no question that one of Hughes’ people did have O’Brien on a very heavy retainer for ‘services rendered’ in the past. Perhaps Colson should check on this.[44]

 

Colson is Charles W. (“Chuck”) Colson, special counsel to the President, a man whom H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff, described as “the President’s personal hit man; his impresario of ‘hard ball’ politics.”[45] As it happened, Colson indeed set in motion an attempt to ‘check on that’—the result being the scandal of WATERGATE.[46] There were many on Nixon’s team who had been involved in dirty tricks campaigns against the opposition over the years, and Colson was one of those men. Nixon, a profoundly uptight man, was haunted by a paranoia of enemies real and imagined and had organized a covert operations squad known as the ‘Special Investigations Unit’ located in the basement of the White House to plug the leaks on sensitive material that was streaming from the government to the press, as well as starting a wide-ranging wire-tapping program of Americans known to be or suspected of being anti-Nixon.[47] Colson would look for a man to help plug the leaks.

 

On July 6, 1971, Colson hired E. Howard Hunt as a ‘consultant’ to the White House at $100 a day. We’ll remember that Hunt is already connected to Hughes through Bennett.[48] Hunt maintained an office in the basement of the Executive Office Building across the street from the White House. His job was to undertake subterfuges to embarrass the Democrats, and in the months following, Hunt performed a series of cloak-and-dagger jobs with both Bennett and Colson steering him in particular directions.[49] Hunt had a partner-in-crime in G. Gordon Liddy, an ex-FBI man, a flamboyant character at the Special Investigations Unit—otherwise known as ‘The Plumbers’.[50] Donald Segretti, an Army Captain and lawyer, joined the espionage team in September, 1971, yet another man in this affair with a suggestive link to the Howard Hughes Organization.[51] The Hunt-Liddy-Segretti team—now working under the aegis of The Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP)—proceeded to engineer a series of silly capers to discredit Nixon’s ‘enemies’.[52] By May, 1972, Hunt had assembled a cadre of shady characters to plague the Democrats with all manner of hanky panky for the purposes of getting Nixon re-elected.

 

On the evening of Saturday, May 27, Hunt’s team broke into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate. Wiretaps were planted on the phones of both Lawrence O’Brien, National Chairman of the Democratic party, and R. Spencer Oliver, executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen. Oliver’s phone conversations will be diligently monitored and logged. But the bug on O’Brien’s phone won’t work properly. Hunt’s team will have to sneak back in to fix the problem. The date of their second break-in? June 17, 1972.

 

“Let me give you another brain squeezer,” [said Charles Colson]. “Do you have any idea why it was Spencer Oliver’s phone in the DNC that wound up getting bugged?”

“No, I don’t know,” [replied John Dean.] “I assumed it was comic error.”

“Maybe so. But did you know that Spencer Oliver was once planning to go into business with Bennett at the Mullen Company? Or that his father worked for Bennett at the Mullen Company on the Howard Hughes account?”

                        “No, I didn’t. But what does it add up to?”

                        “You tell me.”[53]

 

Four days after the break-in and arrest of Hunt’s five-man team, Nixon is speaking about it to H. R. Haldeman, his White House Chief of Staff, in the oval office. This is a bit of Haldeman’s recollection of the conversation from June 20, 1972:

 

NIXON: On that DNC break-in, have you heard that anyone in the White House is involved?

HALDEMAN: No one. Magruder says Liddy at CRP did it on his own. And Hunt’s been gone from here for months.

NIXON: Well, I’m worried about Colson.

HALDEMAN: Why?

NIXON: The FBI’s starting their investigation, and I know one thing. I can’t stand an FBI interrogation of Colson.

HALDEMAN: Chuck tells me he’s clean. Hunt hasn’t been on his payroll for months. Colson hasn’t even seen him.

NIXON: Colson can talk about the President, if he cracks. You know I was on Colson’s tail for months to nail Larry O’Brien on the Hughes deal. Colson told me he was going to get the information I wanted one way or the other. And that was O’Brien’s office they were bugging, wasn’t it? And who’s behind it? Colson’s boy, Hunt. Christ.[54]

 

President Nixon had made it a policy to tape-record his every conversation in the Oval Office for the purposes of the Historical Record. The tapes subsequently proved to be a great embarrassment to him.[55] While the Watergate scandal was whirling out of his control, the United States Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, otherwise known as the Senate Watergate Committee, subpoenaed a series of the White House tapes as evidence. The June 20, 1972 tape was one of the tapes required for submission. This particular tape featured a particular anomaly, an eighteen-and-a-half minute gap of silence which became an infamous tidbit of the Watergate scandal. Haldeman alleges that the conversation cited above—a conversation about the Howard Hughes’ loan to Lawrence O’Brien—was the matter that was erased. The conversation was erased because it directly implicated Nixon in the Watergate break-in that Nixon had professed no knowledge of prior to the fact.

 

So we have heard from John Dean and H. R. Haldeman, two members of Nixon’s inner circle, that the President prompted Chuck Colson to dig up some dirt on Lawrence O’Brien. We have learned that Colson subsequently hired Howard Hunt to engineer dirty tricks for the benefit of Nixon’s re-election campaign. Hunt and crew embarked on a campaign of hijinks which resulted in the Watergate break-in. Chuck Colson denies knowing anything about the specific scheme to bug the Democratic National Committee offices. If, for the sake of argument, Colson is telling the truth, then—we ask one more time—who might be behind Hunt’s endeavor to bug O’Brien’s phone?

 

“I had a few meetings with Bennett when the President wanted to find out about O’Brien’s retainer from the Hughes people,” [said John Dean.] “Bennett expressed no love for O’Brien. He said O’Brien probably knew everything about Hughes that Maheu did.” Chuck [Colson’s] eyebrows went up at the news. I went on. “You think Bennett might have suggested to Hunt that they bug O’Brien?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck sighed. “I’m supposed to be the White House expert on Hunt and Bennett, and I don’t know. You can twist your head into a pretzel with this stuff. But I think Bennett sure would have reason to go after O’Brien—for the Hughes people, to curry favor with us, or even for the CIA. Who knows? But I’m sure he had a lot of influence over Hunt, even though they didn’t seem to like each other particularly.”

                        “Incredible. What a mess!” I laughed.[56]

 

Robert Foster Bennett was a maestro of human moves. He pricked up his ears when E. Howard Hunt, an employee of Bennett’s, was hired as a special consultant to the White House through Charles Colson’s office. Bennett knew that with Hunt in place Bennett and the CIA were now tethered directly to the White House. Bennett endeavored to get Hunt into the White House’s good graces by suggesting to him schemes favorable to Nixon’s interests. Hunt and Liddy were for the most part flamboyant and effective in their subterfuges, up until the Watergate imbroglio. In the wake of June 17, 1972, Robert Foster Bennett played every side of the fence like a virtuoso.[57] He was a CIA contact, yet he fed stories to the media.[58] Nixon himself said, “Bob Bennett is Deep Throat.”[59]

 

“The Watergate caper remained a mystery for months after the break-in,” noted Jack Anderson in his influential Washington Post column. “Yet on July 10, 1972, less than a month afterward, Bennett reported “detailed knowledge of the Watergate incident” to his CIA case officer.”[60]

 

The televised Senate Watergate Hearings, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., began on May 17, 1973 and lasted until August 7.[61] A parade of witnesses were caught on the television cameras of all three major national networks during the entire 319 hours of the public hearings. Robert Bennett, however, was interviewed off-the-record in closed sessions.[62] In fact, dozens of persons associated with the Hughes organization, including Robert Maheu, Bill Gay, Nadine Henley, and John Meier, were interviewed behind closed doors and off-the-record.[63] Whatever was said has never been released into the public domain. Just as the CIA’s involvement in the Watergate scandal was completely ignored by the press at the time, so too did the Hughes organization remain wholly behind-the-scenes and safe from unfavorable government and media scrutiny.[64]

 

“The late billionaire was the only major Watergate figure who eluded the special prosecutors to the end,” Jack Anderson recalled. “Yet some Watergate investigators believe he was the cause of the Watergate break-in.”[65]

 

Fred D. Thompson, co-chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 and 1974, wrote a memoir of his experience investigating the Watergate scandal, At That Point In Time. In Chapter VII, “The CIA Connection”, Thompson recounted the CIA’s successful efforts to shut down any investigation into the Agency’s role—and by extension, Hughes’—in Watergate. The CIA had friends in the highest places, namely the chairmen and other key members of the House Armed Services Subcommittee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, the two Congressional oversight committees which monitored the CIA. What was uncovered during Thompson’s and his associates’ investigation into the CIA-Hughes relationship to Watergate didn’t even make it into the main text of the Senate Watergate Committee’s final report (issued June 27, 1974), but was buried as an addendum under the heading of Separate Views of Senator Howard Baker, the Vice-Chairman of the Committee. Ray Price, one of President Nixon’s speechwriters, later wrote his own memoir, With Nixon. There, Price, like Thompson, marvelled at the CIA’s powers of evasion. “The Hughes-CIA-Mullen & Co. links to Watergate have been probed extensively,” wrote Price, “but never completely or conclusively.”[66]

 

*

 

Here is chief of staff Haldeman’s wrap-up of the Watergate scandal:

 

1.    The Watergate break-in itself came about as a result of President Nixon telling Charles Colson to get some information regarding Larry O’Brien; of Colson assigning the job to Howard Hunt; of Hunt using Gordon Liddy and the CRP capability and resources to repeat the pattern of their earlier Ellsberg break in.

 

2.    The break-in effort collapsed because the Democratic party was ready for it. They knew it was going to happen, and let it. And the CIA monitored the burglars throughout. Finally, the break-in was probably deliberately sabotaged.

 

3.    The subsequent cover-up came about as a result of a variety of motives and concerns in the minds of a number of people.[67]

 

“Why would the CIA sabotage the Watergate operation?” Haldeman wonders.[68] He muses on a few related considerations. One is this:

 

Larry O’Brien was of particular interest to CIA. . . . He had worked for Hughes, who was CIA’s secret partner in the Glomar Challenger and many other projects. (Hughes corporation’s earnings from CIA were in the tens of millions.) CIA certainly wouldn’t have liked a private White House team finding out everything that O’Brien knew about a Hughes-CIA connection.

 

Haldeman goes on to say, “In a twist of fate, this O’Brien-Hughes connection interested Nixon, too.”[69]

 

WATERGATE IN A NUTSHELL: President Nixon, pondering the spectre of ‘Hughes money’ commenced the chain of events that led to the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate. Then, in an almost ‘by the way’, Robert Foster Bennett, Howard Hughes’ representative in Washington, D.C., his ear properly to the wind, was the Svengali of the scandal that brought down the presidency.[70]

 

And what of Howard Hughes himself? What were his concerns regarding this unprecedented crisis of the federal government in which his name was all too prominent? Hughes had none. He lay entranced by a steady diet of drugs and movies, out of the country, out of his mind, unaware of the American political catastrophe happening outside of his blacked-out curtains.

 

*

 

POSTSCRIPT TO WATERGATE. On March 3, 1974, Chester Davis, Hughes’ chief counsel and third in the Summa Corporation hierarchy, spelled out Hughes’ relationship with Watergate in a memorandum sent to the inner circle of Mormons maintaining Hughes’ narcotics malaise.

 

We are involved in the Watergate affair to this extent:

 

1.      E. Howard Hunt, convicted for the Watergate break-in, was employed by Bob Bennett (our current Washington representative). In addition, Bennett was maintaining liaison with the White House through Chuck Colson, who was deeply involved in the Watergate cover-up.

 

2.      Bennett, Ralph Winte (employed by us re: security matters) and Hunt are involved in plans to burglerize [sic] Greenspun’s safe, and even though those plans were rejected and never carried out, investigators see political motivation related to Watergate.

 

3.      The political contribution by Danner to Rebozo and visits by Danner to Mitchell, are claimed to be an effort for influencing Governmental decisions, including an alleged change in rulings of the Department of Justice.

 

4.      Payments made to Larry O’Brien and his employment has [sic] been claimed to have been part of the possible motivation for the Watergate break-in because of White House interest in that arrangement as a possible means of embarrassing O’Brien and the Democrats.

 

5.      The massive political contributions supposedly made by Maheu, particularly those made in cash . . . is part of the over-all Watergate investigation dealing with the need for reform.[71]

 

*

 

As a result of his stringent reculsiveness, Howard Hughes himself wouldn’t even hear about the scandal of Watergate until June 1973, when he happened to notice a story in the London Express about the drama unfolding in Washington D.C. “What’s Watergate?” Hughes asked.[72]

 

 

 

---

[1] For the quickest, most general introduction to this American scandal—which puts Ronald Reagan’s laryngitis during the Iran-Contra Hearings and the Monica Lewinsky hoopla in the shade—see Oliver Stone’s Nixon, read Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. As a start. 

 

[2] Mailer, Norman, “A Harlot High and Low”, p. 159-60.

 

[3] Quoted in “Excerpts from Transcript of Newsmen’s Conversation with Howard R. Hughes”, p. 22.

 

[4] At a press conference on June 22, President Nixon said, “The White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident.” Quoted in Bernstein, Carl and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974), p. 29; also Kutler, Wars of Watergate, p. 191. ¶ At a press conference on August 29, President Nixon said, “I can say categorically that . . . no one on the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident. What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur, because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What really hurts in if you try to cover it up.” Quoted in Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 57. ¶ At a press conference on April 30, 1973, President Nixon said, “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” Quoted in Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 311. ¶ At a press conference at Disneyworld in Florida on November 21, 1973, President Nixon said, “I am not a crook.” Quoted in Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 334.

 

[5] Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post reported: “Those arrested at the break-in were James W. McCord, Jr., security coordinator for the President’s re-election committee, a former FBI agent and CIA employee; Bernard L. Barker, a Miami realtor and former CIA employee who was involved in the 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; Frank A. Sturgis, also of Miami, a soldier of fortune with CIA connections; Eugenio R. Martinez, another anti-Castro Cuban and part-time informant for the CIA; and Virgilio R. Gonzalez, also Cuban-born, a locksmith.” The Final Days (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 24. ¶ “All but one of the Cuban-Americans involved had CIA backgrounds. . . . One of them, Eugenio Martinez, was still on a CIA retainer [at $100 a month] when the break-in occurred.” Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 146; 153. ¶ “The five intruders were caught red-handed in possession of a bag of burglary tools, a walkie-talkie, forty rolls of unexposed film, two 35-millimeter cameras, pen-sized tear gas guns, bugging devices, a wig, $5,300 in new $100 bills, documents linking them to CRP, and address books containing the name and telephone number of Howard Hunt with the note “W. House.” Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, p. 385. ¶ “One of the men had $814, one $800, one $215, one $234, one $230. . . . Most of it was in $100 bills, in sequence.” Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 16. ¶ By the way, “Woodstein” describes the Watergate as an “office-apartment-hotel complex”. See Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 14. It is also referred to as the “Watergate office complex”. Kutler, Wars of Watergate, p. 4.

 

[6] On June 23, six days following the break-in, Nixon attemped to persuade the FBI and the CIA to assist in a White House cover-up.—Obstruction of justice: an impeachable offence. ¶ Then, between July 6, 1972, and March 23, 1973, President Nixon diverted close to $430,000 from various funds to pay for the burglars’ legal fees and, it was thought, their silence. See Garment, Deep Throat, p. 87.

 

[7] “And Hughes was feared in the Nixon White House,” writes John Dean in his memoir of his role in Watergate, “where some believed that the “Hughes loan” scandal had cost Richard Nixon the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy.” Blind Ambition: the White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976),  p. 67. ¶ Dean was Counsel to the President at the time of the scandal and suffered its effects.

 

[8] “According to Danner’s executive-session Watergate testimony, $50,000 in $100 bills was removed from the safe at the Frontier. He gave the money to Rebozo to pass along to Nixon.” DuBois, “Puppet and the Puppetmaster”, p. 112. ¶ At this time Rebozo, President of the Key Biscayne Bank and Trust Company in Miami, had been close friends with Nixon for twenty years and was considered by the President as “the fifth member of the Nixon family.” For Nixon-Rebozo relationship, see Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 100-5. ¶ “Rebozo . . . was suspected of having used the bank he owned in Florida as a conduit for cash smuggled in from a Bahamian casino.” Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. xiii. ¶ By the way, it was Richard Danner who had introduced [then-congressman of CA] Nixon to Rebozo in the first place—in Miami in 1950, when Danner had been the campaign manager of George Smathers, elected senator of Florida in that year. See Brodie, Nixon, p. 340; Ambrose, Nixon, p. 301; Crewdson, “Report Questions Rebozo’s Account of Hughes Funds”, p. 14. ¶ “Shortly after he became president [in 1968], Nixon invited both Rebozo and Danner to a stag dinner for Prince Phillip.” Brodie, Nixon, p. 342. ¶ “When an unrelated IRS investigation led to the discovery of a hundred-thousand-dollar cache, held in hundred-dollar bills in a safe-deposit box at Rebozo’s bank, the carefully cultivated image of the innocuous, apolitical friend was shattered.” Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 109. ¶ “Both Rebozo and Nixon were friends of James Crosby, chairman of the board of Resorts International, a company that has been repeatedly linked to top Mob figures. Rebozo’s Key Biscayne Bank, which did a good deal of business with Resorts, was a suspected conduit for Mob dollars skimmed from the firm’s Paradise Island Casino in the Bahamas.” Scheim, Mafia Killed President Kennedy, p. 298.

 

[9] Nixon’s first term of office ran from 1968-72. ¶ Murray Chotiner, special counsel to the President during Nixon’s first term: “He was involved in . . . representing Nixon in contacts with an operative for billionaire Howard Hughes, whose secret gifts of cash may be the key to Watergate.” Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 53. ¶ Herbert W. Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, testified before the Senate Watergate Committee that on April 30, 1973, Rebozo told him that he had disbursed part of the Hughes money to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary; Nixon’s two brothers; and to “unnamed others”. Rebozo subsequently changed his story, and told Kalmbach on January 8, 1974, that “I [had] not in fact disbursed any of the Hughes cash to the several people I named.” Rose Mary Woods and Nixon’s two brothers subsequently denied under oath having received Hughes funds. See Crewdson, “Report Questions Rebozo’s Account of Hughes Funds”, p. 14; “The $100,000 Misunderstanding”, Time, May 6, 1974; Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 190-1; Turner, “Maheu Jury Weighs New Data on Complex Hughes Business Deals”, p. 11.

 

[10] “There were no formalities. Danner did not ask for a receipt. This was a private matter . . . ”[HH:HLM], p. 452. ¶ The Ervin Committee, investigating the scandal of Watergate, will “document a series of checks from “Howard R. Hughes” (per his money-handler Lee Murrin) to Robert A. Maheu, for possible payment to Nixon, beginning July 30, 1968.” Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, p. 64. ¶ “One envelopeful came from Hughes’ Silver Slipper slush fund, and the other from his personal bank account.” Phelan, “Hughes: Beyond the Law”, p. 58. ¶ “ . . . drawn from Hughes’ account at the Texas National Bank of Commerce . . .” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 244. ¶ Rebozo will testify that he removed the wrappers around the blocks of Hughes cash because the name Las Vegas was printed on the wrappers. See Anderson, “Scenario of Hughes-Nixon Link”, p. B15. ¶ Maheu talked at length about the Danner-Rebozo transaction in a deposition given in his July 4, 1973 deposition in his libel suit against Hughes. See Turner, “Testimony Indicates Hughes Sought Political Influence”, p. 28. ¶ In a television interview given on December 19, 1973, Rebozo said he took the $100,000 from the Hughes representatives as a favor to President Nixon. Regarding the undeclared campaign contribution, Rebozo said he “didn’t want it to get mixed up or lost”. See “Rebozo Explains Reason For Taking Hughes Fund”, New York Times, December 20, 1973, p. 12. ¶ Rebozo later said he held the money because “I didn’t want to risk even the remotest embarrassment of Hughes’ connection with Nixon.” Quoted in Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 26. See also Thompson, At This Point In Time, p. 184-5. ¶ “Rebozo wanted to make sure that I was not embarrassed again by any connection with Howard Hughes, so he decided not to mention the money to me and simply to hold on to it until after the election, when he thought it could either be used to help pay any deficit the campaign had incurred or for the 1974 congressional election.” Nixon, Memoirs, p. 965.

 

[11] Robert Maheu wrote that he was present at the second meeting. He recalled: “Danner had picked up the money earlier in the day from the cage in the Silver Slipper Hotel.” Maheu, Next to Hughes, p. 274; see also Turner, “Testimony Indicates Hughes Sought Political Influence”, p. 28. ¶ The precise date of the first and second meetings are in question. J. Anthony Lukas say Danner delivered the first $50,000 to Rebozo on September 11, 1969; then the other $50,000 “sometime in 1970”. See Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 25; see also Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 489-91. The second meeting could have taken place in October 1970, according to Davenport, Hughes Papers, p. 157-8. In communication with IRS agents in 1972 and 1973, Richard Danner changed his story regarding the dates of the two transactions three times. He settled on July 3, 1970, and August 1970. Testifiying before the Senate Watergate Committee in 1974, Rebozo agreed with Danner’s recollection of the dates. See [HH:HLM], p. 452; Crewdson, “Rebozo Disputed On A Hughes Deal”, p. 17.

 

[12] See Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 26; [HH:HLM], p. 453. ¶ According to Anthony Summers, $100,000 is equivalent to almost $500,000 in year 2000 values. See Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 280. ¶ “Howard Hughes . . . whose own $100,000 donation would later result in two volumes of Senate testimony in the Watergate affair.” Hougan, Spooks, p. 180. ¶ We can hear President Nixon admitting that the Hughes campaign contribution took place on the White House tape dated June 7, 1973, 12:33-1:26 pm. See Kutler, Stanley I. (ed.), Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 592. ¶ In the White House Tapes Nixon will sometimes refer to the “Hughes outfit” and the “Hughes people”. Kutler, Wars of Watergate, p. 119; 592. ¶ News of the Hughes $100,000 donation came to light in Jack Anderson’s syndicated column on August 6, 1971, then again on January 24, 1972. See Crewdson, “Report Links Watergate to Hughes-Rebozo Funds”, p. 34; Kohn, “Strange Bedfellows”, p. 84-5. Kohn points out that Anderson printed his first column after the IRS began a Nixon-initiated audit on Robert Maheu. ¶ In 1971, “Maheu and Meier both talked with columnist Jack Anderson.” DuBois, “Puppet and the Puppetmaster”, p. 188. ¶ The August 6, 1971 Anderson column led the White House’s “Plumbers” unit to organize a plot to assassinate Anderson. The first idea was “aspirin roulette”—planting a poison tablet in Anderson’s aspirin jar; then came the idea of staging an automobile accident; and the bizarre idea of coating Anderson’s steering wheel with poison. G. Gordon Liddy, one of the plumbers, admitted to the plot in a depostion in 1984. See Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 204-5; also Kohn, “Strange Bedfellows”, p. 84-5; Anderson, “The ‘Why’ of Watergate Explored”, p. B15. ¶ Anderson recalled in 1976: “That column [August 6, 1971], and every other I wrote about Nixon and Hughes, provoked a reaction so much stronger than on any other subject over there whenever I linked them to Howard Hughes. . . . They were mistaken, but they were convinced at the time that I was getting my stuff on Hughes and Nixon from Larry O’Brien.” Quoted in DuBois, “Puppet and the Puppetmaster”, p. 188; see also Maheu, Next to Hughes, p. 300-1. ¶ At one point Nixon thought about using the Hughes contribution to help pay for the legal expenses of his two key aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman,  after they both became embroiled in the Watergate investigation. See “Nixon Admits Plan To Use Hughes Cash”, Washington Post, May 25, 1977, p. 2. ¶ Rebozo returned the money to Chester Davis on behalf of the Hughes organization in June 1973. It was not the original $100,000, but another packet of bills. See Meyer, “The Hughes Report”, p. 11; [HH:HLM], p. 515; Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 26; Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 443-4; Nixon, Memoirs, p. 965. ¶ “Last October [1973], the President declared in a news conference that Mr. Rebozo, whom he has known since 1950, had “turned back” the Hughes money “in exactly the form it was received,” and did “not touch it.” See Crewdson, “Report Questions Rebozo’s Account of Hughes Funds”, p. 14. ¶ “Rebozo’s Key Biscayne Bank, which did a good deal of business with Resorts International, was a suspected conduit for Mob dollars skimmed from the firm’s Paradise Island Casino in the Bahamas.” Scheim, Mafia Killed President Kennedy, p. 298.

 

[13] See Turner, “Testimony Indicates Hughes Sought Political Influence”, p. 28; also Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 514. ¶ “Payment of over $5,000 to a presidential candidate . . .  was then illegal and punishable by a fine of $5,000, or ten years in prison, or both.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 242.

 

[14] See Anderson, “Hughes Watergate Role Hinted”, p. B11; [HH:HLM], p. 454; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 246. ¶ “$50,000 to [Nixon’s secretary] Rose Mary Woods, and $100,000 to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, when the law regarding contributions changed in 1972. Fifty thousand of the CRP fund went to an individual named Gordon Liddy.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 246. ¶ “In the days before 7 April [1972], I arranged the setting up of enough committees to spread out $50,000 from Howard Hughes and collected the checks in the offices of Hunt’s employers, the Mullen Company.” Liddy, Will, p. 215. ¶ Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 26, and Hinckle, Deadly Secrets, p.  359, say Hughes donated another $100,000 for the 1972 election. ¶ In a November 1972 memo to Hughes, aide Howard Eckersley wrote, “We gave as much as we could safely.” Quoted in Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 292. ¶ See also Buckley, “Greenspun Says Hughes File Was Sought”, p. 30.

 

[15] The Landmark Hotel and Casino in 1969 and the Dunes Hotel and Casino in 1970. See Kohn, “Strange Bedfellows”, p. 82; [HH:HLM], p. 449-50; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 245-6; Turner, “Testimony Indicates Hughes Sought Political Influence”, p. 28; Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 25; and Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 357-9; 474. ¶ Nixon would have a long history of influencing and attempting to influence various government agencies such as the IRS, the CIA and the Department of Justice. See, for example, Block, Masters of Paradise, p. 217-8. ¶ When Nixon became president he set the IRS on Lawrence O’Brien, Harold Stassen, and Roberrt Maheu among others.

 

[16] By 1970, “Hughes now allowed a mere 0.2 percent of the vast assets earned from Hughes Aircraft on secret government projects to be spent on medical research. . . . In effect, Hughes had stockpiled a fortune that was tax-exempt and gathering interest in banks. Some $25.6 million of the money had gone into Hughes Tool—allegedly for interest on loans and payments on property leases.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 255; also Appendix C and D in [HH:HLM], p. 636-7. ¶ In 1971, “Robert Foster Bennett . . . used as an argument to the White House’s legal adviser, John Dean, that Hughes Aircraft, as a supplier of strategic materials, including surveillance devices against Russia and Cuba, would be in trouble if it had to drain off cash to pay taxes on the Medical Institute. . . . Hughes was let off the hook. . . . Throughout the years until Hughes’ death, the Medical Institute still paid no taxes . . . [though] less than 0.4 percent a year now flowed into the Institute operations.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 263.

 

[17] See “Watergate: ‘Aviator’ Connection?”, 60 Minutes.

 

[18] President Richard Nixon will be favorable to Howard Hughes’ satellite-making interests as well. In 1970, President Nixon, in a memorandum to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, favored an “open skies” policy for America’s communications satellite industry. The “open skies” policy allowed commerical industry to compete in the marketplace of electrospace; that is to say, COMSAT would not be able to exist as sole provider of satellite services to the United States. This policy was favorable to Hughes because there would be more companies entering into the telecommunications industry and hence more potential customers for his Hughes Space and Communications. For a brief account of “open skies”, see Snow, Marcellus S., “Competition by Private Carriers in International Commercial Satellite Traffic”, in Demac, Tracing New Orbits, p. 37.

 

[19] Mailer, “A Harlot High and Low”, p. 171.

 

[20] See Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 27; Mailer, “A Harlot High and Low”, p. 171; another part of the memo is in [HH:HLM], p. 461.

 

[21] See Maheu, Next to Hughes, p. 253. Hinckle, Deadly Secrets, p. 358 says, “Maheu and O’Brien were old friends.”

 

[22] See Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 275; Maheu, Next to Hughes, p. 256; 267-8; “Hughes Hired O’Brien”, p. 1; Anderson, “Howard Hughes—Hidden Kingmaker”, p. B11.

 

[23] O’Brien, Lawrence F., No Final Victories (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1974), p. 256.

 

[24] See Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 25.

 

[25] Maheu, Next to Hughes, p. 1. ¶ Investigating what O’Brien did for Hughes, the Senate Watergate Committee came up with nothing of note. One committee member remarked, “For the kind of money he got, he did relatively little.” However, the committee did not publish its documents on the Hughes-O’Brien investigation in its final report. See “Hughes Hired O’Brien”, p. 13.

 

[26] Garment, Leonard, In Search of Deep Throat (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 60. See also Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 291.

 

[27] See Anderson, “The ‘Why’ of Watergate Explored”, p. B15.

 

[28] E. Howard Hunt is one of the most colorful and unsecret CIA officer of them all. He played an intrinsic role in the ill-fated CIA-organized invasion of Cuba (Bay of Pigs) in 1961. He just happened to be at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. On that fateful day Hunt, dressed like a tramp and looking suspicious, was picked up by police officers at Dealey Plaza. He was released later in the day without being booked. Hunt-as-Hobo is not mentioned in the Warren Report. (For Hunt’s connection to the Kennedy assassination, see Mark Lane, Rush to Judgement.) Hunt figures as a sizable character in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. ¶ “Though a career CIA operative, Hunt also pursued a parallel career as a novelist, turning out a rapid-fire succession of spy stories under a series of pseudonyms. In one of these, the protagonist was a “master spy” who served several clients at once, without letting any of them know that he was also serving the others.” Price, With Nixon, p. 366. ¶ Hunt was known in Washington, D.C. as one of the CIA’s “deep cover operatives”. See Kutler, Abuse of Power, p. 85. ¶ One of Hunt’s aliases at the CIA was “Mr. Edward”. See Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 158.

 

[29] Involving the building of a contraption known as the Hughes Glomar Explorer to raise a sunken Russian sub from the bottom of the Pacific. The cover story for the huge ocean-going vessel, constructed at a shipyard near Philadelphia on the Delaware River, was that it was to be a deep-sea mining ship. The Glomar Explorer was a $350 million contract for the Hughes Tool Company. This highly classified business arrangement between Hughes and the CIA would hit the headlines in the summer of 1975 following a break-in at the 7000 Romaine Street. The American public at the time never heard about the outcome of Project Jennifer. But by 1976 the CIA considered the mission a success.

 

[30] See Lukas, J. Anthony, “The Bennett Mystery”, New York Times, January 29, 1976, p. 32. See also Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 28; Lukas, J. Anthony, Nightmare: the Underside of the Nixon Years (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999), p. 39-40; Haldeman, Ends of Power, p. 117; [HH:HLM], p. 500; 509.

 

[31] Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 30.

 

[32] See Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 379-89; also Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 249-50.

 

[33] Lukas, “The Bennett Mystery”, p. 32, says July; Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 386, suggests August.

 

[34] See Lukas, “The Bennett Mystery”, p. 32.

 

[35] See Davenport, Hughes Papers, p. 244; Lukas, “The Bennett Mystery”, p. 32.

 

[36] Mailer, “A Harlot High and Low”, p. 174.

 

[37] See Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 28; Hinckle, Deadly Secrets, p. 352.

 

[38] See “Penthouse Interview: James Phelan”, p. 130.

 

[39] Quoted in DuBois, “Puppet and the Puppetmaster”, p. 187.

 

[40] Lukas, Nightmare, p. 40. In his notes on sources to Nightmare, Lukas pointed out that “a severe paucity of information on . . . the role of Robert Bennett and Mullen & Company”, and that his information on Bennett comes from unnamed sources and unpublished documents.

 

[41] Indeed. A world of pain opened up for Nixon on May 14, 1972, when “the Santa Ana Register reported that Senate investigators had found evidence indicating that funds left over from the 1968 Nixon campaign had been used to purchase [Nixon’s] San Clemente property. It was a curious story. But it was by no means pure fantasy. The rumor was in the air. Hank Greenspun [of the Las Vegas Sun and old Hughes ally via Robert Maheu] had heard almost the same thing—that campaign contributions in 1969 and 1970 had gone to furnish San Clemente, although he specified that the money had come from Howard Hughes.” Lukas, Nightmare, p. 344-5. ¶ This story would blow up in Nixon’s face, and in December 1973 he announced—in a desperate attempt at damage limitation—that he would donate his San Clemente estate to the American people after he and his wife died. See Nightmare, p. 463. ¶ See also Crewdson, “Report Links Watergate to Hughes-Rebozo Funds”, p. 34; Anderson, “The ‘Why’ of Watergate Explored”, p. B15; Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 26; 28; Nixon, Memoirs, p. 953-6. ¶ The Senate Watergate Committee concluded that $46,000 of the Hughes money was spent on a putting green, pool table, and other amenities for Nixon’s house at Key Biscayne. See “Watergate: ‘Aviator’ Connection?”, 60 Minutes.

 

[42] “Apparently on its own initiative, IRS began looking into O’Brien’s tax status when it learned from its investigation of Billionaire Howard Hughes’ income taxes in late 1971 or early 1972 that O’Brien had received “fairly substantial amounts of money” from Hughes. O’Brien concedes that he was paid roughly $180,000 for public relations work he did for Hughes.” “More Evidence: Huge Case for Judgment”, Time, July 29, 1974. ¶ As part of his campaign of dirty tricks, President Nixon set in motion an IRS audit of Lawrence O’Brien early in 1972. He admits as much on the White House tape dated August 1, 1972, 11:03-11:58 am. The audit allowed Haldeman to report to Nixon how much money O’Brien had received from Hughes, as revealed by the White House tape dated September 8, 1972, 12:22-1:05 pm. See Kutler, Abuse of Power, p. 109-110; 135-6. See also Nixon, Memoirs, p. 677. ¶ The stupidity of the IRS audit on O’Brien was not lost on Nixon, as revealed by this comment from August 7, 1972, 11:24 am-1:18 pm: “NIXON: The problem we have with the Hughes thing is twofold. One, it allows them to re-open the Don [Nixon] thing [1956 loan].” Kutler, Abuse of Power, p. 124. See also August 3, 1972, 5:00-5:30 pm (p. 118).

 

[43] In the summer of 1969, John D. Ehrlichman, Counsel to the President, requested of the FBI to search its central files for any “pertinent derogatory information” on “Mr. and Mrs. Hughes”. In response, the FBI merely rehashed its old information regarding the 1947 Senate Hearings and other minor points. (If the released FBI file on Hughes is an accurate representation of the facts, then the FBI never had anything on Hughes.) See J. Edgar Hoover’s letter to Ehrlichman, dated August 13, 1969, included in FBI Howard Hughes File #66-99801.

 

[44] Blind Ambition, p. 66; also quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 460. See also “Much Ado About Haldeman”, Time, February 27, 1978. ¶ On January 18, 1971, Haldeman sent a memo to Dean requesting any or all information on O’Brien’s relationship with Maheu and Hughes. Dean talked with Colson, who turned to his friend Bob Bennett.” Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 27; see also [HH:HLM], p. 461. ¶ “Dean turned the matter over to John Caufield, Ehrilchman’s in-house private detective. Caufield found little on O’Brien, but he kept running into more details of the Hughes-Nixon connection and warned Dean that it might be dangerous. Nevertheless, the IRS began a tax audit of Robert Maheu, Hughes’ ousted chief aide. Maheu retaliated with a leak to columnist Jack Anderson about a reported $100,000 Hughes payment to Nixon through Bebe Rebozo. Las Vegas journalist Hank Greenspun told Herb Klein [White House Communications Director] that he had information the money had been used to furnish the President’s San Clemente estate.” Kutler, Wars of Watergate, p. 204. ¶ “What had O’Brien done in exchange for Hughes’ money (reportedly, a huge $180,000-a-year retainer)?. . . .  To take such a risk as that burglary [Watergate] 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. . . .  And yet, even with this background, at that very moment, unknown to me at the time, $100,000 of Hughes cash was resting in a safe deposit box in Florida leased by Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, Nixon’s closest personal friend.” Haldeman, Ends of Power, p. 19-20. ¶ However, according to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Domestic Adviser, “Nixon didn’t need someone to bug O’Brien to establish a Hughes connection; Nixon knew positively that O’Brien was on Hughes’ payroll. He knew it well before the Watergate burglary; so did the IRS, the Secretary of the Treasury (George Schultz), Colson and I. An IRS audit of Hughes’ tax returns had disclosed the Hughes-to-O’Brien payments. A routine IRS Sensitive Case Report informed the President of O’Brien’s appearance in the Hughes investigation (along with the President’s brother Don and other celebrities). All that is a matter of public record. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue described his report to the President in public testimony some three years ago.” See “Ehrlichman Reviews Haldeman”, Time, March 6, 1978.

 

[45] Ends of Power, p. 5. ¶ “Charles W. Colson began his White House career in 1969 at the age of 37. He reported to Haldeman and the President as the administration’s liaison to outside political and special-interest groups—and as the resident White House practitioner of underhanded political crafts.” Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 171. ¶ “Colson . . . a “knee to the groin man”, who described himself as “a flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic.” Brodie, Nixon, p. 476. ¶ “In the Nixon White House, the President’s “dark side” came to be personified, by many of us, by Charles W. Colson.” Price, With Nixon, p. 30. ¶ Colson was known to have said, “I would drive over my own grandmother for the president.” Quoted in Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 120. ¶ “As 1971 edged into the election year of 1972, Colson was more and more at Nixon’s side, talking with him, feeding the fires of resentment against the “enemies”, against those within the administration who were “disloyal”, . . . feeding the desire to get even. . .” Price, With Nixon, p. 30. ¶ In 1974, Charles Colson told the Senate Watergate Committee that he considered Robert Bennett “a good friend”. See Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 155. ¶ Colson will also tell the Senate Watergate Committee that Howard Hughes maintained “close organizational ties with the CIA.” Quoted in Hinckle, Deadly Secrets, p. 331.

 

[46] Not everyone was so enthusiastic about this strategy of nailing O’Brien. Jack Caulfield, Nixon’s White House liaison with the Secret Service, was against any such hanky-panky. In a memorandum to John Dean dated February 1, 1971, Caufield wrote, “The revelation than an O’Brien-Maheu relationship exists poses significant hazards in any attempt to make O’Brien accountable to the Hughes retainer. . . .  Mayhew’s [sic] controversial activities in both Democratic and Republican circles suggest the possibility that forced embarrassment of O’Brien in this matter might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.” Quoted in Dean, Blind Ambition, p. 69-70; also in Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, p. 26; and in Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 27. See also Kutler, Wars of Watergate, p. 204.

 

[47] “Neither Court nor Congress limited the President’s constitutional power “to protect national security information against foreign intelligence activities.” In June 1969, Attorney General John Mitchell proclaimed an audacious doctrine. He claimed that these Presidential powers permitted wiretapping of any domestic group “which seeks to attack and subvert the government by unlawful means.” In June 1972 the Supreme Court rejected this doctrine, holding that no such domestic group or individual could be tapped without a warrant.” Lukas, Nightmare, p. 62. ¶ President Nixon got into a towering rage when Daniel Ellsberg, an economist working for the RAND Corporation, a Washington, D.C. think tank, passed sensitive government documents (“The Pentagon Papers”) to the New York Times, which began printing them June 13, 1971. The Ellsberg leak led Nixon to establish the Special Investigations Unit, later known as the Plumbers. In September 1971 the Plumbers broke into the officer of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiastrist, in an unsuccessful attempt to gain embarrassing material on Ellsberg. According to author J. Anthony Lukas, the Plumbers were looking for material on “sexual experimentation, drug use and psychological disorder”. See Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 9.

 

[48] “Hunt had excellent connections with Hughes Tool and the Summa Corporation through his employer, Robert Bennett, whose Mullen Company represented Hughes and who was embroiled in the campaign to prove the purported authorized biography of Hughes by Clifford Irving to be a fraud [in 1972].” Liddy, Will, p. 205; see also Hunt, Undercover, p. 180. ¶ Hunt recalls his hiring by Mullen & Company and his hiring by Colson in Hunt, Undercover, p. 141-3; 148.

 

[49] Hunt had a penchant for assuming disguises—including a red wig, a speech-altering device, a bogus  Driver’s Licence and Social Security card—to carry off some of his clandestine operations. In the summer of 1971, Hunt—on leads supplied by Bennett—investigated the private life of Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. In September—working for Colson—he produced fake cables, one allegedly from the American embassy in Saigon, another allegedly from the State Department, in an attempt to implicate (the deceased) John Kennedy in Vietnam messes. In February 1972, in an instance working in both Bennett’s and Coulson’s interests, Hunt and Liddy carried out a successful campaign to defuse accusations from Jack Anderson, a Washington journalist, that the Nixon campaign had accepted a bribe by the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation to settle its antitrust lawsuit on favorable terms. Everything hinged on a secret memorandum that had been leaked from ITT headquarters. Hunt and Liddy, acting on information supplied by Frank William Gay of all people (and transmitted via Robert Foster Bennett), persuaded the world-at-large that the memorandum was a forgery and the Anderson controversy soon died away. In fact, Hunt’s operation was so much smoke in the public’s eyes, but it greatly pleased the White House and the Howard Hughes Organization. ¶ “International Telephone and Telegraph, a CIA-Hughes connected instrument busy backing anti-Communist activities in Chile and other South American countries.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 281. ¶ A significant event in light of the Watergate break-in was the Las Vegas Sun caper that Bennett suggested to Hunt in February 1972. Bennett provided information that the safe in the publisher Hank Greenspun’s office contained damaging information on Senator Ed Muskie, a Democrat running for the Presidential nomination. More importantly to Bennett, the safe was supposed to contain a great deal of documents regarding the Greenspun-Maheu relationship, as well as the Hughes-Maheu relationship, which Bennett wanted to get his hands on in order to pass it to the Hughes Organization for brownie points. Hunt and Liddy examined a floor plan of the Las Vegas Sun offices and Liddy went so far as to fly to Vegas to ‘case the joint’, but nothing came of the plan, which faltered after Romaine Street refused to supply a getaway plane. ¶ According to the Senate Watergate Committee: “In October 1971, Herb Kalmbach (the President’s personal attorney) visited Greenspun in Las Vegas and discussed both the $100,000 contribution and any information Greenspun may have had on Donald Nixon’s relationships to Johnny Meier.” See Anderson, “The ‘Why’ of Watergate Explored”, p. B15. ¶ A second significant event occurred early in 1972. Acting on a request from the Hughes organization, Bennett asked Hunt to organize an operation to plant electronic surveillance devices inside the home of Clifford Irving, the man behind the Hughes autobiography hoax. Hunt and James McCord submitted a price for the job, but, according to Hunt, the Hughes organization found the cost unacceptable and cancelled the operation. See Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 149-50. ¶ “This seems an unlikely reason for them to have turned it down, but the Hughes-to-Bennett-to-Hunt-to-McCord sequence is, in the wake of Watergate, interesting, to say the least.” Price, With Nixon, p. 364.

 

[50] Liddy joined the Special Investigations Unit in July 1971, and in December 1971 he became Finance Counsel and head of campaign intelligence for The Committee to Re-elect the President. ¶ “In the days before 7 April [1972], I arranged the setting up of enough committees to spread out $50,000 from Howard Hughes and collected the checks in the offices of Hunt’s employer, the Mullen Company.” Liddy, Will, p. 215. ¶ “The Plumbers . . . investigated “leaks” to the news media. . . . Their office was in the Executive Office Building basement, across from the White House.” Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 215. ¶ “The West Wing is the bridge of the ship, but the Old Executive Office Building is its working boiling room.” Garment, Deep Throat, p. 164.

 

[51] “In October, 1971, Segretti settled down in an adults-only apartment colony in Marina Del Rey, a shiny new community built around a boat basin in Venice, near Los Angeles, which the Los Angeles Times had called “a highly desirable residential-social-recreational area for the affluent single set.” Lukas, Nightmare, p. 154. ¶ This was the Marina City Club, which just happened to be entirely owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. ¶ “The Marina City Club project was in fact conceived as an investment device and tax shelter for key people at the Hughes Aircraft company.” [HH:HLM], p. 456. ¶ “Marina del Rey, where Segretti lived, was on the water and, if you believed the ads, represented the ultimate in swinging-singles living. Lots of sailing, saunas, mixed-doubles tennis, pools, parties, candlelight, long-stemmed glasses, Caesar salads, tanned bodies, mixed double-triple-multiple kinkiness in scented sandalwood splendor.” Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 122.

 

[52] Segretti’s own flavor of dirty tricks were branded “sophomoric” by Hunt. They included systematic campaigns against Senator Edmund Muskie, a 1972 Democratic presidential contender. One of Segretti’s gang “walked into a Muskie press conference in a long overcoat and dropped two white mice with blue ribbons on their tails reading “Muskie is a rat fink,” and a small finch which darted around the conference room causing great commotion. [Another of the gang] gave a girl $20 to run naked outside Muskie’s hotel room shouting “I love Ed Muskie.” Lukas, Nightmare, p. 157. ¶ Segretti’s gang attacked the Muskie campaign headquarters with stink bombs. They distributed a phony letter on Citizens for Muskie stationary which embarrassed the candidate with its outrageous contents (the infamous “Canuck Letter”). The dirty tricks went on and on and the momentum built toward the hijinks at the Watergate. ¶ Political prankster Segretti referred to his shenanigans as “ratf—king”: “It meant double-cross, and, as used by the Nixon forces, it referred to infiltration of the Democrats.” Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 132. ¶ Other Segretti/CRP “intelligence work” included: “Following members of Democratic candidates’ families; assembling dossiers of their personal lives; forging letters and distributing them under the candidates’ letterheads; leaking false and manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray; seizing confidential campaign files and investigating the lives of dozens of Democratic campaign workers.” Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 143.

 

[53] Dean, Blind Ambition, p. 391. ¶ “In one of those curious coincidences, both Oliver and O’Brien had Hughes connections. Oliver’s father, Robert Oliver, had been the Mullen Company’s “Washington Lobbyist for the Hughes Tool Company.” O’Brien, of course, had been on the Hughes payroll until shortly after the firing of Maheu, collecting about $300,000 for his work on various Washington projects for the Hughes empire.” [HH:HLM], p. 508. ¶ “Oliver’s father, R. Spencer Oliver, Sr., was a close friend of the Mullen firm’s founder, Robert Mullen, and was used by the Mullen company as Washington lobbyist for the Hughes organization.” Price, With Nixon, p. 364. ¶ To underline this point: It is extremely interesting that there is a specific Bennett connection here because it flows toward the suspicion that Robert Foster Bennett was implicated in the origins of the Watergate break-in. ¶ “The 200 calls intercepted on [Oliver’s] telephone produced nothing of real value to the White House.” Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 9.

 

[54] Haldeman, The Ends of Power, p.18 ¶ “Trim, crew-cut and powerful, Haldeman, at the age of 46, had gone from managing the Los Angeles offices of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency to managing the business of the President of the United States.” Bernstein, President’s Men, p. 170. ¶ Jeb Stuart Magruder was the Deputy Campaign Director for the Committee to Re-elect the President. 

 

[55] Nixon had a foul mouth and all too often his concerns were venal, petty, spiteful, vengeful—anything but honorable. Transcripts of his Oval Office conversations reveal this unhappy character trait all too well.  ¶ “The taping system was installed in the Oval Office in February 1971, and then in other parts of the White House, and the telephone system in April. . . . The last taped conversations apparently occurred on Thursday, July 12, 1973.” Kutler, Abuse of Power, p. 1; 637. ¶ See also Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 347. ¶ Richard “Expletive Deleted” Nixon generated around 4,000 hours of tape recordings. 

 

[56] Dean, Blind Ambition, p. 391. From a conversation the week of December 17-23, 1974, after Nixon had resigned. ¶ Charles Higham is of the opinion that Hughes was directly and intimately behind the Watergate break-in., and that the break-in on the Democratic National Headquarters involved retrieving a series of Hughes-Maheu memos in Lawrence O’Brien’s possession.—“Liddy said a Hughes aircraft would take the burglars by prior arrangement to Nicaragua after the burglary was over; Jack Real says it was one of the fleet of TriStars and others confirm this remarkable fact.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 284. ¶ Following this logic: After Maheu’s exit, O’Brien was no longer working for Hughes, and the Hughes organization would have wanted to keep tabs on O’Brien to monitor any sensitive disclosures he might impart to others.

 

[57] An internal CIA memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence dated July 10, 1972, conveyed that Bennett had reported on the Watergate break-in to his CIA case officer, Martin Lukasky, shortly after June 17. Bennett said he was carrying out efforts to conceal the CIA’s involvement with both Watergate and Mullen & Co. (Bennett’s information was not subsequently passed on to the FBI, which was investigating the Watergate case.) Bennett also said he was feeding stories to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. See Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 148; 150; see also Price, With Nixon, p. 356. ¶ “He also talked with reporters from the Washington Star, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek, among others. He spoke with Assistant United States Attorney Earl J. Silbert, who was directing the Watergate grand-jury investigation, and with Hobart Taylor, Jr. . . . the Washington lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee in a million-dollar civil lawsuit filed against Nixon’s reelection committee a few days after the break-in. With some, Bennett spoke more candidly that with others.” [HH:HLM], p. 512-3.

 

[58] “The mysterious Bob Bennett immediately assumed a central role in the cover-up, acting as a go-between for Liddy and Hunt, all the while doing his best to expose it, reporting not to Hughes or even to his fellow Mormons, but to the CIA and the Washington Post.” Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 433. ¶ “Memorandum of March 1, 1973, to CIA Deputy Director for Plans from CIA Chief/Central Cover Staff: “Mr. Bennett said also that he has been feeding stories to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post with the understanding that there be no attribution to Bennett. Woodward is suitably grateful for the fine stories and by-lines which he gets and protects Bennett (and the Mullen Company).” Quoted in Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, p. 62; see also Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 178.

 

[59] The government source leaking sensitive material to Bob Woodward, Washington Post reporter. ¶ Bennett testified to the House of Representatives’ Special Subcommittee on Intelligence in 1974: “Bob Woodward of the Washington Post interviewed me at great length on . . . numerous occasions. I have told Woodward everything I know about the Watergate case, except the Mullen company’s tie to the CIA.” Quoted in Garment, Deep Throat, p. 185. ¶ Though Leonard Garment in In Search of Deep Throat decided (admittedly via circumstantial evidence) that John Sears, Deputy Counsel to President Nixon, was the White House whistleblower called Deep Throat, Garment will say that, other than Sears, “Bennett . . . was the closest that any candidate would ever come.” (p. 189).

 

[60] See Anderson, “Hughes Watergate Role Hinted”, p. B11.

 

[61] Congress remained on the attack until Nixon had no move left but resignation or impeachment and a criminal trial. In July 1974, the Congressional Committee’s conclusion was this: “Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposes of these agencies. . . . In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.” Quoted in Lukas, Nightmare, p. 538. ¶ In mid-1973, the Senate’s Watergate Investigating Committee appointed Professor Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School as its Special Prosecutor. Cox’s Prosecution Force was given the power to bring people to trial. At the time, Cox’s brother Maximilian was a law partner of Chester Davis, Hughes’ chief counsel. Nixon became increasingly frustrated at Cox’s efforts to investigate the $100,000 Hughes loan. In the infamous Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973, President Nixon ordered the firing of Special Prosecutor Cox, which led to the resignations of his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General. See Buckley, “Greenspun Says Hughes File Was Sought”, p. 30;

[62] Behind closed doors, Bennett admitted to members of the Senate Watergate Committee that he had delivered messages between Hunt and Liddy in the days following the break-in. See Thompson, At That Point In Time, p. 149. See also [HH:HLM], p. 514.

 

[63] As of the first week of December 1973, “The Hughes organization has refused to honor several committee subpoenas. Five prospective witnesses connected with the Hughes organization have filed suit in federal court to prevent the committee from forcing them to testify in preliminary sessions prior to any public appearances. The committee is scheduled to hold a closed meeting this week to consider whether it should begin contempt proceedings against five Hughes men.” “Lost Momentum and Broken Unity”, Time, December 10, 1973.

 

[64] See [HH:HLM], p. 515; Maheu, Next to Hughes, p. 304; Horrock, “Maheu Says He Recruited Man For C.I.A. in Castro Poison Plot”, p. 1.

 

[65] Anderson, “Hughes Watergate Role Hinted”, p. B11. See also Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 449.

 

[66] Price, With Nixon, p. 361.

 

[67] Ends of Power, p. 317.

 

[68] In an interview with Michael Drosnin, Charles Colson suggested that both Bennett and the CIA instigated the Watergate break-in: “I think Bob Bennett had a tremendous motive—he had more interest in what O’Brien was doing and saying than we did—and I’ve always felt that the CIA had some motive because of their interlocking ties with both Bennett and Hughes.” Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 499. ¶ “Now that few people seemed to care about the question of who had ordered the break-in, there was new information that the Democrats themselves had prior knowledge and that the Hughes Organization might be involved. And there were stories of strange alliances.” Nixon, Memoirs, p. 1001; also quoted in Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 502.

 

[69] Ends of Power, p. 146-47.

 

[70] To be certain, no one on the outside is able to confirm if it was Bennett who initiated the bugging operation; or Colson; or John Mitchell (Nixon’s Attorney General); or if Hunt and Liddy dreamt up the scheme themselves. No one can confirm that the CIA designed the caper to fail in order to bring disrepute upon the President in a settling-of-an-old-score-sort-of-thing. And then maybe the burglars were in the DNC not first and foremost to set wiretaps but for another reason altogether?  ¶ Norman Mailer suggests an idea in Harlot’s Ghost: “Take a look at who else was in the Watergate Office Building back there in June 1972. The Federal Reserve kept an office on the seventh floor just above the Democratic National Committee layout. What makes you think McCord was bugging the Democrats? He could have been using the ceiling of the sixth floor to put a spike-mike into the floor of the seventh.” (p. 29-30). ¶ I have yet to arrive at a single thought as to why the Hughes Organization might want to play a part in the downfall of Richard Nixon; in fact, that suggestion is highly questionable. Easier it is to believe that Bennett picked up a pay check from Hughes and represented Hughes’ interests but received orders first and foremost from the CIA. Regardless of this ambiguity, what is constant in all this is Bennett’s shadowy presence at the heart of the scandal, and, at the beginning of it all, Nixon’s obsession with ‘Hughes money’. ¶ “Because Robert Bennett’s CIA ties were exposed by the Watergate scandal, he has closed down the Mullen Agency. He now works for the Hughes organization as a vice president and CIA liaison.” Howard Kohn, “Strange Bedfellows”, quoted in Mailer, “A Harlot High and Low”, p. 186. ¶ “When the Watergate story broke, Bennett either sold or dissolved the Mullen Company, and he is now [1977] director of public relations for Summa.” “Penthouse Interview: James Phelan”, p. 130. See also “The Hughes Legacy: Scramble For The Billions”, Time, April 19, 1976. ¶ “Since Watergate, Bennett has gone to work full-time for Hughes in Encino, Calif.” Lukas, “The Bennett Mystery”, p. 32. ¶ In 1977, Bennett was described in the New York Times as “Summa’s vice president of public relations”. See Turner, “2 Suits by Nevada Publisher Show Tangle of Hughes Deals”, p. 14 ¶ “After Watergate Bennett left Washington and made his fortune. In due course, he re-entered politics—this time electoral politics in his home state of Utah. Bennett, once an obscure public relations entrepreneur, succeeded his father as senator from Utah. The younger Senator Bennett is now a figure of considerable stature within the Senate.” Garment, Deep Throat, p. 187. ¶ As of 2004, Senator Bob Bennett (R, Utah) is Chief Deputy Majority Whip and a member of the Senate Republican leadership team. He is also  Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee and a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee. He has a seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and chairs the Subcommittee on Agriculture. He also serves on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Senate Small Business Committee. He is also a member of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force.

 

[71] Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 497. For references to other Davis-Hughes memos on Watergate, see Anderson, “Hughes Watergate Role Hinted”, p. B11.

 

[72] See Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 439; Real, Asylum, p. 137-8; Gonzales, “Secret Files”, p. 197.

Edited February 27, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

THE TWA TERMINAL. Between 1956 and 1962 the new TWA Terminal at Idlewild Airport in New York City took shape. This particular passenger terminal would be TWA’s most significant, as New York served as the airline’s main international gateway. Amid all of the problems with the airline’s top management that plagued the years 1956 to 1960, the Terminal project had soldiered on. The TWA building, Terminal 5, a curvaceous, poetic, sculptural vision, was designed by the celebrated architect EERO SAARINEN. In 1956, Saarinen, a passionate, cerebral man, was a rising star in the rarefied world of architecture. One of his earlier achievements had been the design of the St. Louis Arch (a magnificent structure not built however until 1959-1964). In 1958 Saarinen began what might be his most monumental work, the Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia. That TWA had chosen Saarinen for the job at Idlewild demonstrated TWA’s dynamic style and forward vision. No other airport terminal would look even remotely like it anywhere in the world. Saarinen was the perfect choice to exemplify the age of the jet. Since Howard Hughes owned 78 percent of the company in this period, Hughes must have given the final go-ahead for the initiation of the multimillion dollar project.[1] Saarinen’s TWA Terminal is one of the most spectacular buildings in America.

---

[1] “It was Hughes’ idea to have the TWA flight center at Kennedy International Airport designed by the late Eero Saarinen.”  Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 237.

[Jeff Bernstein]

92–98 : Last Words

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “Sixteen years after his first marriage, two weeks after his first divorce, Kane married Susan Alexander, singer, at the Town Hall in Trenton, New Jersey. For wife two, one-time opera-singing Susan Alexander, Kane built Chicago’s Municipal Opera House. Cost: $3 million. Conceived for Susan Alexander Kane, half-finished before she divorced him, the still unfinished Xanadu. Cost: No man can say.”

 

Note the spree of numerical references : Sixteen, first, two, first, two, one, 3, (and possibly add “half” to this list).

 

The spree of numerical references is amusing, because an audience might find it hard-going to follow the bombardment of numbers on the fly. But Welles and Friends—co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz—engineer a wry storytelling pay-off. After the spree of numbers, we reach the subject of Xanadu and hear the word “Cost”, and are prepared for yet another number—but no number comes. All those numbers have set up a surprise ending of the cannot-be-calculated. The audience, prepared as it were for an answer, is left hanging in a mystery. “After all those numbers,” one might say, “there is no number!”

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

99–110

 

 Politics

NEWSREEL NARRATOR (9:44–10:28) : “Kane, molder of mass opinion though he was, in all his life was never granted elective office by the voters of his country. But Kane papers were once strong indeed, and once the prize seemed almost his. In 1916, as independent candidate for governor, the best elements of the state behind him, the White House seemingly the next easy step in a lightning political career, then suddenly, less than one week before election, defeat. Shameful, ignominious. Defeat that set back for 20 years the cause of reform in the U.S. forever canceled political chances for Charles Foster Kane.”

 

The Newsreel presents its best English in the first two lines, (obviously?) because of the significance of the story point in CK. Theory 1: Also, the story is so disastrous (gleefully so, to the Newsmen) that telling it straight is hurtful enough. Theory 2: Possibly the Newsmen's joy over Kane’s defeat brought out the best of their creativity. That said, the Newsreel’s English here is far from perfect. The third sentence is a run-on : the elements are connected imperfectly : an “F” from the High School English teacher.

 

“Defeat that set back for 20 years the cause of reform in the U.S. forever canceled political chances for Charles Foster Kane.”

 

This last sentence is dense : What is the most important point here? The “cause of reform”? Or “canceled political chances”? 

 

The intonations of the Narrator become all the more portentous as he speaks these portentous, torpid words, which adds amusement to the Newsreel—which is contrast : the ineptitude of the Newsreel compromises its serious subject matter.

 

100

A campaign speech, but not the speech featured at 1:00:57–1:03:13.

 

101

Another colossal building : continuing the cinematic symbolism of the colossal structure of Kane’s life, and his colossal presence in American life.

 

If not for symbolism's sake, what is the purpose of this shot? Theory 1 : The storytellers of CK wish to break up two interiors with an insert of an exterior. Theory 2 : The makers of the Newsreel are shoehorning in material on autopilot. Theory 3 : The decorations communicate “election”—possibly. Since the decorations communicate nothing specific, the audience has no idea if this is footage of, say, a political election, an Independence Day celebration, a prize-fight, or whatever. This may be another instance of the Newsreel editors cutting in whatever material to hand.

 

102

Here, and in 103, the Newsreel editors are—hard to believe—subtle : Through parallel editing, they communicate the idea that the “Independent” candidate Kane used his newspapers (both his fame and the power of his persuasive coverage) as a vital weapon in his campaign.

 

103

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “and once the prize seemed almost his.” The newspapers are travelling upward on the production line. Already more than a few times we have seen in CK a thematic conjunction between character aspiration and visual upward movement. Also, in our post-Lynch age, we note the visual cue of “the motor of the Art-Engine is humming”.

 

104

NARRATOR: “In 1916, as independent candidate for governor, the best elements of the state behind him . . .” The transition from newspapers to fire in 104–105 is an inversion of the transition of 83–84. A thematic link? Some media concepts catch fire and set off conflagrations in the people. Note the different audio-visual presentation from 81–83. Those shots are of crowds demonstrating negatively to Kane while the Narrator remarks : “Spoke for millions of Americans. . . .” Here, the audio-visual dichotomy is absent, and the meaning of this style choice is clear : the unanimity of the Newsreel style conveys that Kane was heading to a win.

 

105

NARRATOR : “the White House seemingly the next easy step . . .“ Surprisingly, this reflection by the Newsreel is not hype. Later, Bernstein remarks about Kane's first wife : “President’s niece? Before he’s through, she'll be a president’s wife.“ (47:46)

 

This campaign speech is (apparently) featured at 1:00:57–1:03:13. The Insiders are inviting Kane Inside. Kane is enjoying the “love”–forgetting for a moment how disposable we are : soon he is reminded of that fact. 

 

106

More fire. The elemental as visual symbol of the pulse of the people in time. NARRATOR : “[the White House seemingly] the next easy step . . . “ Here in 106 we see people stepping around. Wry Robert Wise. In fact, these people are policemen (note the badges and ceremonial plumed helmets) : more symbolism of power. Kane “had it all.“

 

107

The climactic height of the Newsreel : literally.

 

108

The boyish smile of the abandoned boy receiving love. 

 

109

Complex disaster to come. Charles Foster Kane had Ultimate Power in his grasp. But the closer you get to the headland, the more treacherous the waters.

 

110

Kane finds true love? (We'll get to it.) At any rate, here he is mocked for it. He is mocked for achieving the greatest blessing allowed to the living.

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

111–115   Depression

 

Five desolated shots. NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “Then, in the first year of the Great Depression, a Kane paper closes. For Kane, in four short years, collapse. Eleven Kane papers merged, more sold, scrapped.”

 

The word "merged" is ambiguous in its usage there. Is "merged" used as verb, or adjective?

 

111

FADE IN TO GLOOM. The rising smoke stacks and arrow-tipped gate sustain the upward motif, yet here the motif is vitiated of its heroic aspect. The upward reach here and in 112 (the water tower) exists akin to the skeleton of a once-vital organism. In 111, a sense of loss is associated with air pollution—comically, the loss here is founded in “FACTORY CLOSED”. The gate recalls CK's first shot with its unfriendy sign of NO TRESPASSING. This desolate shot shows us an inert, misbegotten effort of the past.

 

112

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “Then . . . ”

 

Another sign—CLOSED—fronting a desolation. Other than a water tower (here a symbol of spent potential?), the buildings are obscure. Perhaps the suggestion is : lost in overgrown nature. The branches recall Xanadu on its mountaintop in 98, so are here used as a symbol of encroaching isolation?

 

113

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “In the first year of the Great Depression, a Kane paper closes.”

SHOT MOVES FROM ESTABLISHING TO CU.

 

The left-to-right movement—the predominant, high-energy movement during the Newsreel's opening Xanadu sequence—serves a gloomy function here.

The stream of newspapers has reduced to a single sheet of paperwork.

 

114         

For the fourth time in four shots, the word “CLOSED”. The theme here has the relentlessness of depression.

 

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “For Kane, in four short years,”

 

The stream of newspapers has reduced to scraps pushed in the breeze, reduced to garbage equivalent to the abandoned bric-a-brac on the street.

 

CLOSED : In this time Kane himself closes : he withdraws from public and social life. The Newsreel subsequently describes him as "aloof, seldom visited, never photographed" (12:00).

 

115

The heroic animation from earlier (49) is now used to convey the somber. How quickly fortunes change.

 

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “collapse. Eleven Kane papers merged, more sold, scrapped.”

 

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Two shots that move from Establishing to CU

Notorious (1946), 1:02:28–1:03:02

 

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

emphasizing the lens

Metropolis (1927), 2:00:11

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Sunrise (1927), dr. F. W. Murnau

(2:37)

Contrast : (1:33:26)

Illusion of distance (13:00)

Watching Dream-Movie of Their Hopes (14:53)

Anonymity of the uncanny urban (36:45)

Remembering the old technology (54:58)

Surreal (59:43)

Inhuman environment (1:00:05)

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Nosferatu (1922), dr. F. W. Murnau

Darkness (1:29:41)

Interior Distance (34:47)

 

[Jeff Bernstein]

Finances of the Grand Duke (1924), dr. F. W. Murnau

The Grandiose (8:48 / 13:51)

[Jeff Bernstein]

Nosferatu’s hands?

[Jeff Bernstein]

M (1931), dr. Fritz Lang

 Hyper-realistic paperwork (46:56–47:27 / 47:35–48:01)

 

The hand that browses through recalls

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

116

This compound sentence is not composed of related ideas. Theory : The repetition of the word “News” tricks some in the audience into thinking otherwise? What solace is it to anyone alive or dead that “Kane Himself Was Always News?” The phrase is an empty one. But notice the tense—“was”. In fact, he will be. Charles Foster Kane will be news—for the next two hours, at least; the Spectator has barely begun to absorb CK. The film stays with a person for life, so the “Was” is bittersweet; those for whom CK remains a monument will soon pass away from this Earth.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Death Notice

 

This commentary has moved into the realm of the deadly serious. We the Spectators are about to watch a man’s final days, and then the appearance of his death notice to the public. Going away, in some contexts, might suggest “abandonment”. Might we say the dead abandon the living when they die? At Kane’s death it might have crossed his mind, at the last, before his beatitudinous renewal of youth, that his death would be one final vengeful stepping away from people. He would get his revenge on life by leaving it! And in the moment of deciding to step away from one world, he stepped into another : the world of the snowglobe. At death, Kane felt youthful for the first time since youth. Kane’s death brought him his sweetest moment in his adult life.

 

A man is about to be sacrificed so we may live. How we understand the rest of Citizen Kane will determine the degree of utility of that sacrifice.

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

1970s : THE DRONE OF HUGHES’ WAKING HOURS

 

The Billionaire led anything but a ‘highflying’ life. Hughes would awake, at whatever time in the day, and immediately have his narcotics administered to him by his Inner Circle. The enfeebled Hughes would then start watching movies. His ‘day’ would consist of watching movie after movie. He’d watch certain selections over and over, like Summertime, starring Katharine Hepburn, or Shanghai Express, starring Marlene Dietrich, sometimes more than a half-dozen times. According to the operations logs, at one point Hughes watched the Agatha Christie mystery Ten Little Indians forty times within one month.[1] Ice Station Zebra, a Cold War espionage thriller starring Rock Hudson, was one of Hughes’ favorites, and was watched an astounding 150 times.[2] He would eat one simple meal a day, then return to his movies. The sound had to be cranked to its highest levels for Hughes to hear, the movie-music reverberating off the hotel walls, irritating his aides. Hughes justified his interminable movie watching, once telling George Francom, “You think I’m just wasting my time, but I’m learning a lot about making movies.”[3] (If Hughes noticed one of his old flames on screen, he sometimes turned wistful and with atypical humor comment to one of his aides, “Remember her?”[4]) At the end of his waking hours Hughes would have more pills or a syringe administered to him and then maybe the Mormons would request his signature or even just verbal approval for a million-dollar transaction of some kind. Then Hughes would drift off into heavy narcosis. He would not see daylight for months.

 

For example, to take an ordinary day from months upon months of such days—In Vancouver, on the night of June 16, 1972, round about the time the five Watergate burglars were caught in the act of their misdeed, Howard Hughes watched The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (for the seventh time), blissed out from a mega-dose of Blue Bombers.[5] (Hughes’ usual dose of Valium at this time was an incredible 700 milligrams within an eight-hour period.[6]) Comfortable in his chair, he went on to watch a minor film festival of mostly minor films—Billy the Kid Outlawed, The Mad Room, The Silencers, Captain Newman, M.D., The World of Suzie Wong—before finally falling asleep at 10:30 a.m. on the Sunday morning.[7] The Watergate brouhaha passed him by like a spider on the wall. He didn’t even hear about the break-in or the word ‘Watergate’ until more than a year after the fact.[8] It was the Hughes money and the Hughes reputation which moved across the wide earth influencing the tides of fortunes. Hughes money was an entity unto itself, replicating and distributing itself quite apart from Hughes-the-man’s mental or physical participation in it all. As for the man himself, hidden away in his penthouse suite? For most of the time he was hypnotized by his fixes, not much more than a remnant of a man. The Mormons had severed their Boss almost completely from the activity of the outside world.

 

Hughes, via Nadine Henley his personal assistant at Romaine Street, had started hiring Mormons in the late 1940s to help run his affairs, after Hughes found out that Mormons didn’t drink or smoke, two things in which Hughes himself had never had any interest. Moreover, Mormons were serious-minded and weren’t known to ‘party’, even on New Year’s Eve. By the 1970s the Mormons of his inner circle were stringing him along with the promise of, the administering of, or the withholding of, pharmaceutical drugs, and all the clichés about long finger- and toe-nails and Jesus-hair and emaciated wizened appearance are true, as we have come to hear by eyewitnesses such as the Cygnus’ captain (Feb. 72) and the London physicians (Sept. 73). The Mormon Minions maintained Hughes in his disability.

 

Hughes might prepare messages to this, that, or the other person, reaching out for contact, but more often than not the messages slipped between the cracks and never got delivered. Virtually no one on the outside had a clue what was going on inside the inner circle. Certainly whatever was going on was very weird, because why, for example, did Hughes sell Hughes Tool when he didn’t have to? With a mentally-inhibited Hughes at their mercy, the Mormon Minions were enjoying the fruits of their association with the billionaire.

 

*

 

Howard Hughes was subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee in 1974 to appear before the Committee and answer questions regarding his role in the Watergate affair. Not surprisingly, it was ignored.

 

Yet Hughes himself expressed an interest in speaking to investigators of the Watergate Committee. Chester Davis, however, cut him short, as evidenced by a memo from Davis to Hughes, which refers to Hughes’ dependence on narcotics (“the tablets I know you obtain”) and the price Hughes paid for it:

 

I have taken note of your comments but do not fully understand what it is you expect of me. When I told you that we have so far resisted the efforts of the IRS, SEC and the Senate Watergate Committee from seeing you, it was for your own good.

These people would love the opportunity to get to grips with you personally and they would not be easy to shake. They are all after publicity for themselves and giving you a bad time is one way to get it. We must know exactly what it is they want and then we will know how to deal with the matter.

Also, you are aware that I do not want to let you meet with these people because you are in no fit state to stand up to them, either mentally or physically. But it is very hard to get you to understand this. You are your own biggest danger at the moment. Suppose you had the tablets that I know you obtain, and started muttering about some of the political deals we, or rather, you have had. This could be trouble and I want no part of this. Neither do you, so leave it all to Bill Gay and myself in the future.[9]

 

I do not want to let you!—Davis sounded somewhat like a father chastising a child. At any other time in Hughes’ life, such a comment would have enraged him. Throughout his life Hughes never fancied being told what to do. Consider his coming of age at eighteen when he stood up against his paternal relatives who had dared presume to dictate his behavior. Hughes had then turned his back on them and disinherited them entirely. Consider Hughes’ confrontation with Noah Dietrich in 1957, when Dietrich refused to go Hughes’ way in negotiations over remuneration. Hughes simply fired the man who had steered his empire capably for thirty-two years. When a lawyer once told him, “Mr. Hughes, you have to do this,” Hughes replied, “Don’t ever say that to me.”[10] Time and time again—his family’s criticism of his film pursuits, the censorship battles over Scarface and The Outlaw, the TWA debacle—Hughes, indomitable individualist, went his own way amid a cataclysm of criticism and all else be damned.

 

Now the outspoken, formidible Chester Davis dared to stand up against his employer. His memo must have cut Hughes to the quick. No addict likes to be reminded of their addiction. It irritates.

 

Yet Davis emerged unscathed, because Hughes had changed. Hughes was trapped in a world in which the power that he held was only an illusion. Those on the outside now controlled his empire. The employees outranked the Boss. Hughes, who would never be overruled, was overruled.

 

DRONE

 

One of Hughes’ memos to his aides, from July 1975, included this bid for fair play and common decency from his employees:

 

If you knew how much it disturbs me, and how unhappy it makes me when you are completely cold and unfriendly as you were tonight, I really don’t think you would turn on the punishment outlet quite all the way. So, all I ask is that the next time you get ready to give me a really harsh expression of your views, you merely take into account the fact that my life is not quite the total ‘bed of roses’ that I sometimes get the impression you think it is. In fact, if we were to swap places in life, I would be willing to bet you would be asking me to permit you to re-swap back to the present position before the passage of the first week.[11]

 

This is a communication from a man who is no longer in control of his destiny. This is a man weakened by years of sickness, whose spirit has capitulated to those in his employ who were there, ostensibly, to tend to his health and welfare. The Boss of an Empire—grovelling to minor employees? The aged Hughes was a slight man easily pushed around, manipulated, mocked. His aides were confederate in maintaining the direction of his sickness. His private physicians kept him in narcotics while ignoring the myriad physical disorders disfiguring their one patient’s body. The tail was wagging the dog. Hughes had no real fight in him. This meek memo was the brunt of his sway.

 

On the outside, businessmen, government figures, even the President of the United States feared the power of Howard Hughes the Tycoon. On the inside, in the eyes of his aides, the man himself was a pathetic, ornery baby. They humored the Old Man. Maintaining their Boss’ wretched condition was favorable for their pocketbooks and security of employment.

 

From the Operations Logs:

 

 

            Thursday

10 August 1972

                        1:30 AM B/R

                        3:45 ″   Chair

                                    Inst:

                                    He doesn’t want to be permitted

                                    to sleep in the bathroom anymore.[12]

 

When from time to time Hughes submerged from his drugged-out condition to achieve a moment of clarity he was horrified at the claustrophobia of his predicament. How crushing on Hughes’ spirit his loneliness must have been! Once he had craved fame, and won the love of millions; once he had known the pleasures of many hundreds of willing women; and now he was off on his own in obscure cubicles. His years of seclusion had taken their toll mentally on the man, as well as physically; his spirit had been broken some time earlier. Hughes the man had lost all stature in the world. Perhaps the claustrophobia he experienced felt akin to the trauma of a drowning swimmer’s final realization.

 

He might have lamented the fact that he had lost precious years of his life in watching a frightening amount of forgettable movies in nondescript hotel rooms.[13] Instead of living his life out in the world where hearts and minds connect, he had given himself up to isolation in hotel rooms. Movie by movie, he had buried himself that much further underneath it all. He had sacrificed himself—but to what? Watching one movie, or perhaps two, can enliven a person’s day now and then; but watching movie after movie, hour after hour, day after day, sometimes three or four movies a day, a routine that stretches for weeks and weeks—the spectacle of movie after movie will become wearisome on the eye, ear and mind; the routine will become a grind. A perceptual torpor will set in, and the cinematic images will flicker blankly before the eyes of the laggard onlooker. For far too long a time Howard Hughes was reduced to the state of an unthinking animal. Movie after movie flickered before his drowsy eyes as before a benumbed lab rat.

 

In the process Hughes achieved escape from the terrors and responsibilities of being Howard Hughes the man.

 

Achieving a moment of clarity, Hughes, pondering what had become of himself, might have recognized that he had lost himself. But this anxious self-knowledge Hughes heeded in fleeting moments was always overawed by subsequent retreat into the narcosis of the status quo. His physical body and psychic rhythms demanded their daily fix of codeine; his drugs were his escape from his terrible realizations. And the vicious circle continued. He allowed the dread realization of the ruin of his life to evaporate in the narcotic effects of his pharmaceutical intake. The next movie would be threaded through the projector.

 

*

 

Year in year out, Hughes had stood by his decision to remain under his own self-arrest. One reason why was that he feared incarceration in the booby hatch. Inside Hughes all the time was the real, rational fear that his mind was going, regardless of whatever mental strength he might put up in defense. He knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with the inner works. Perhaps today Hughes would have been administered Lithium, or whichever anti-depressant. But in Hughes’ day medical science had yet to introduce and perfect the pills. He lived in the time when the madman was demonized, and mental hospitals were harrowing dungeons with hideous shock treatment and chains on the bed. Back then, if Hughes was cracking up he knew he had to hide his condition from the world. If he sought help, he might be forcibly institutionalized into one of those nightmare places.

 

Yet we must resist thinking of Hughes’ years of seculsion as an entirely sane decision, even if rational justification—at least in his own mind—for his seclusion existed. An unhealthy mind might very well sustain isolated pockets of rational thinking.

 

A sane man would not willingly and so completely cut his own legs out from under himself. His powers of judgment were blurred, his thought processes hampered first and foremost by phobias and compulsions. Over time his beclouded consciousness had weakened what was strongest in him, his self-confidence, his self-possession, his will to dream and act with verve. Hughes became stuck in a diabolical psychological hole, a private Hell of his own making. He capitulated to it in an act of psychic suicide.

 

Yet all the time the fiction had to remain that he, Howard Hughes the Tycoon, was always in control. Even from the center of his incapacitation he ordered his aides to do his bidding. But Hughes the man laying down the law in memoranda was his make believe that he was still in control. He was following through with the fiction of being sane while maintaining a clearly outrageous situation. His money was the power that kept his network of aides mobilized to maintain his lunatic self-creation. The aides went along with their Madman Boss who pretended that he was sane, even if he knew that he was lost.

 

---

[1] See Phelan, Money, p. 128.

[2] See Phelan, Hidden Years, p. 4; “The Secret Life of Howard Hughes”, Time, December 13, 1976. ¶ MGM’s Ice Station Zebra (1968), also starring Ernest Borgnine and directed by John Sturges, is set on a nuclear submarine named the U.S.S. Tigerfish. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. There are no women among the thirty-eight credited cast members. According to I.M.D.B., W.R. Burnett—who co-wrote the script for Hughes’ Scarface—did uncredited work on the screenplay for Ice Station Zebra.

[3] See “Howard Hughes: The Real Aviator”, DVD documentary.

[4] See Matheson, Weird Ways, p. 143.

[5] Here’s an conjunction: On the very day of the Watergate burglary, some of Nixon’s top men, including John Mitchell, the U.S. Attorney General, and Jeb Magruder, Deputy Campaign Director for the Committee to Re-elect the President, were in Los Angeles and staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel—Hughes’ old haunt—when they received news of the break-in. See Lukas, “The Hughes Connection”, p. 8; Stuart, The Pink Palace, p. 105-7.

[6] See [HH:HLM], p. 487; 509.

[7] Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 431.

[8] See Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 439; Real, Asylum, p. 137-8; Gonzales, “Secret Files”, p. 197.

[9] Quoted in Gonzales, “Secret Files”, p. 197; also in “Memo Suggests Hughes Sought Watergate Role”, New York Times, November 21, 1976, p. 33.

[10] Hughes added, “I’ve never done anything because I thought I had to do it.” Quoted in “Penthouse Interview: James Phelan”, p. 127.

[11] Quoted in Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 455. ¶ “The Mormons were firmly in control. Sullen and resentful after fifteen years of servitude, forced to perform absurd and odious tasks, they pressed their dependent boss for ever greater salaries, and while each was paid more than $100,000 a year, they still often treated him with contempt.” Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, p. 455.

[12] Quoted in Gonzales, “Secret Files”, p. 154. ¶ Continuous use of codeine causes constipation and hemorrhoids. Hughes would be caught on the can for hours at a stretch, impacted in his routine, his addiction, his fears, his penthouse fortress. With his long hair and beard he looked like a transient, a hobo, but he never wandered anywhere. A series of locked doors divided him away from freedom. Stuck in the bathroom, wan and spindly, could he bear to look at himself in the mirror? To feel the shock of sudden awareness of the degredation of submission to the downward spiral? Or was he so far gone that he didn’t see anything untoward about his condition? The long nails, the sores on his body, his rotten teeth—perhaps they did not give him pause. We will never know the true condition of his madness. What really went on in those hotel rooms is a secret that Hughes took to his grave.

[13] Perhaps at times he even mourned Jean Peters. That darling woman had married a man whose eccentricities had kept them apart. That darling woman’s thirteen-year marriage-only-in-name had failed miserably.

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

OUTER LIMITS

 

We are fast approaching the end of our story, the last days of the strange decline of the inimitable Howard Hughes. Originally handsome, clever, courageous and charming, and always wealthy beyond compare, he died weak and deformed in body, with the mind of an idiot, incomprehensible in speech and poor in spirit. For all of the paranoia of his younger years regarding the relatively young ages of his mother and father at their deaths in Houston, Hughes the exiled son would live into his seventieth year.—If one can call the last twenty years of his life ‘living’. For a man so in love with velocity, with the thrill of the take-off and landing, it was tragic that he was stalled for decades in darkened bedrooms. For a man so irresistible to the ladies that he literally had hundreds of beauties to choose from, it was tragic that he remained for so long alienated and isolated, far from any woman’s care. For a man so in love with the grand gesture, how tragic it was that his life had been reduced to a grim circumscribed existence.

 

For a man who had always demanded total control, how tragic it was that he had fallen completely under the power of those who had maintained his drug dependency. Locked away in his hotel room Hughes never wore clothes and his capacity for logic had dwindled; the bedroom became an infant’s crib and the movies he watched did his dreaming for him. His mind was failing, his body was withering, but the Summa Corporation considered it all business as usual. During the last year of Hughes’ life memoranda from his Mormon executives came thick and fast, though Bill Gay knew that Hughes was entirely ‘out-of-it’ due to codeine and valium. Bill Gay, the number-one man in the Summa Corporation, knew this because one of Hughes’ personal physicians, the one who procured the enormous amount of pharmaceutical drugs, just happened to be Bill Gay’s brother-in-law. Howard Hughes, in fact, had four personal physicians, yet still his body degenerated for years, suffering from myriad medical disorders (tumor on his scalp; rotting teeth; deteriorating bones; peptic ulcer; semi-blocked urinary tract; swelled prostate gland; failing kidneys; dehydration and malnutrition). Howard Hughes’ story—the story of ‘Howard Hughes the Billionaire Tycoon’—had gotten away from him long before he arrived at the end. For years Howard Hughes the man had ceased to be a part of his own Empire. He had become the forgotten man behind the recognizable name.

 

And yet once Howard Hughes the man had held such magic and fascination. He assumes control of a multi-million-dollar company at age nineteen. He lives it up in Hollywood with Cary Grant his bosom buddy, making flamboyant movies while romancing such stars as Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn. He becomes an international aviation superhero, a ‘household name’, a true-blue American hero for American sons to model themselves on. He buys TWA, introduces a new dazzling passenger aircraft and builds the airline into an international carrier. He actually gets along with, of all people, J. Edgar Hoover, who hands over a thick file on Hughes compiled by FBI spies, out of a sense of honor or something. He builds the largest airplane ever built and flies himself into the newsreels once more. All the while Hughes Tool Company is steadily making more money a year than a sextuple-roll-over lottery winner. He becomes one of America’s largest defense contractors.([1]) His company Hughes Aircraft builds missiles and satellites and the first spacecraft to achieve a controlled soft landing on the surface of the moon. He becomes a billionaire, the richest man in America. He buys up over twenty percent of Vegas and in one fell swoop becomes the largest property owner in Nevada, but no-one ever sees him. Government officials began to doubt that Hughes is even alive, let alone in the state. He vanishes from the United States, then reappears as a ghost haunting the Watergate scandal. . . . One cannot aggrandize any aspect of the story of Howard Hughes. Facts are far more powerful than fancy. . . . Howard Hughes was one of the Americans of the twentieth century. In his day and beyond, Americans were awed at the magical name of Howard Hughes.

 

*

 

Hughes had been spirited away out of England on December 20, 1973. After twenty-six months installed at the Xanadu Princess Hotel in the Bahamas, the debilitated Hughes was carried onto a stretcher and flown to the top floor of the Acapulco Princess Hotel in Acapulco on February 10, 1976.([2])The windows of his bedroom were sealed shut from the outside world by plywood and black curtains.([3]) On Monday, April 5, Howard Hughes was dead.

 

In the last months of his life Hughes’ “inner aides” were Levar Myler, Howard Eckersley, John Holmes, Levar Myler, and Clarence A. Waldron. His “outer aides” were Eric E. Bundy, Roy Crawford, Clyde B. Crow, and Gordon Margulis.([4]) One of Hughes’ private doctors, Dr. Chaffin, later told the New York Times that in this period “he could get permission to examine Mr. Hughes by going through an aide.”([5]) Dr. Chaffin said he was present for Hughes in Acapulco from December 23, 1975 to April 5, 1976, and yet though he might be allowed inside to gaze upon a sleeping Hughes almost every day, in this period Dr. Chaffin was only able to get three “official visits” with Hughes, only three times in almost fourteen weeks in which Dr. Chaffin spoke with and treated his patient.

 

At dawn on that final morning a local doctor named Victor Manuel Montemayor was summoned to Hughes’ penthouse suite to find Howard Hughes unconscious and in the twitching throes of a seizure.([6]) Dr. Montemayor was taken aback by the man’s physical degeneration. Think of it!—A billionaire succumbing to dehydration and malnutrition while staying in the most expensive room in the most expensive hotel in town!

 

Hughes was “half-naked with only bedsheets covering his body,” the doctor recalled. His patient was emaciated and covered in bedsores. There was a ferocious open sore on the left side of his head. Needle marks ran up and down his arms and around his groin. His gray hair was long and stringy, as was his “chestnut-colored” beard. He was “very pale,” the doctor said, “breathing in pants, slowly.”([7]) Dr. Montemayor shone a light into Hughes eyes and got little response. “It meant that his brain was off,” he later explained.([8])

 

Dr. Montemayor strongly recommended that Hughes be transferred at once to the local hospital where he would be given more intensive care, more oxygen and intravenous fluids to fortify his wasting constitution.([9]) But nothing could be done until Bill Gay in Southern California gave his final say. After all, it was Gay, not Hughes, whom Summa employees knew as the “maximum leader” or “prime minister” of the Summa empire.([10]) The two other doctors in the room—one of whom was a Hughes “official” private doctor—spoke on the phone with the Summa Corporation’s headquarters in Encino for instruction.([11])Word came back to fly Hughes to Houston, Texas. (A suite was reserved for him at the Houston Methodist Hospital in the name of “J.T. Conover.”([12]) They weren’t to go immediately, however; they were to wait for Dr. Thain who was due to arrive in from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on a Lear 24B jet at any time.([13]) Dr. Montemayor could only throw his hands up in despair.

 

“I had a sense that the doctors weren’t really in command of the situation,” Dr. Montemayor later told a reporter for the Washington Post. “I had the sense that I was not just dealing with individuals, but with a whole corporation.”([14]) However, even the resources of a great corporation were evidently insufficient to care for Hughes properly. “It was obvious he wasn’t getting the best possible treatment in the hotel,” Dr. Montemayor remarked, an understatement. “In my opinion, he died of a disease called neglect.”([15])

 

Over the telephone, Kay Glenn, Bill Gay’s right-hand-man at Romaine Street, instructed aides Chuck Waldron and Gordon Margulis to “make the Old Man look presentable.”([16]) Hughes’ hair, beard, and nails were trimmed.([17]) According to Richard Hack, “Margulis . . . plac[ed] the nail ends with the shorn hair in a plastic bag for shipment back to Hughes’ offices in California.”([18])

 

Dr. Thain’s plane arrived in Acapulco and he arrived at the hotel at about 7:00 a.m. with a suitcase ladened with medicine for Hughes.([19]) Jack Real recalled:

 

At 7:30, I stopped by Howard’s suite on my way to the airport to find an airplane to take Howard to Houston. Dr. Larry Chaffin was in Howard’s bedroom with his patient, and Dr. Thain was in the outer office, where he seemed to be feeding documents through the paper shredder. . . . ([20])

 

Real chartered the Lear Jet that Dr. Thain had flown in on, then returned to the hotel at 9:00 a.m.

 

Dr. Larry Chaffin was still in with Howard, but Dr. Thain—along with Chuck Waldron and Eric Bundy—appeared to be working at the paper shredder. I saw piles of paper everywhere, both typed documents and handwritten memos on paper from yellow legal pads.([21])

 

Gordon Margulis recalled, “Everyone was swarming around like a bunch of blue-assed flies, shredding papers and documents.”([22]) The Hughes operatives would leave behind them three plastic trash bags jammed to overflowing with shredded documents.([23])

 

An incredulous Jack Real asked Dr. Thain,

 

“How come you’re not attending your patient?”

“Well,” Dr. Thain told me, “He’s going to die sometime today, so why should I worry about him?”([24])

 

Confirming Real’s account, Chuck Waldron will eventually tell the Mexican police that no one prior to departure from the hotel “checked to see if the patient had died or was still in a deep coma” after it was decided to move Hughes.([25])

 

At about 11:00 a.m., the body of Howard Hughes was laid out on a stretcher, covered in a white sheet, and loaded into a yellow and white ambulance that had been hired from a funeral parlor.([26]) The ambulance driver, C. Jaime Quevedo, later signed a statement which stated that he and a second ambulance attendant had waited outside the Acapulco Princess for two hours prior to the journey. Quevedo said that he had been unable “to say whether the person they were transferring was alive or dead.”([27]) The Aeropuerto de Internacional de Acapulco was located 16 miles outside of the city.([28]) Hughes was driven to the airport at a rapid clip.

 

At the airport, Aide Gordon Margulis carried Hughes, a wretched, spindly creature, onto the waiting plane.([29]) Boarding with Hughes were Dr. Thain, Dr. Chaffin, and John Holmes.([30]) Roger Sutton, the pilot, thought Hughes looked “very wasted” and “very, very pale.” Jeff Abrams, the co-pilot, described Hughes as looking like “a tired, worn-out old person.”([31]) They described him as emaciated, wan, with long gray hair and beard, an aged wreck in bed clothes.

 

Hughes was wearing an oxygen mask. “During loading,” George Francom recalled, “the water in the oxygen tank spilled up into his mouth chamber, and I didn’t know if it would choke him or what. I was concerned about that, but there was nothing I could do about it. I think he was conscious but it’s hard to tell really.”([32])

 

At 11:45 a.m., after waiting on the tarmac for five hours, Hughes’ blue-and-white Lear Jet took off heading northeasterly.([33]) Left behind on the ground, Jack Real watched it go. He had done, he thought, his best.

 

The Lear Jet landed at Houston Intercontinental Airport at 1:50 p.m.([34]) By 3:00 p.m. Hughes was laid out in the morgue of the Methodist Hospital.([35])([36]) Hughes’ heart had stopped.

 

The chief pathologist determined that Howard Hughes had died in the air.

 

 

 

---

[1] During his lifetime the workforce of Hughes Aircraft would grow from eighteen employees to over fifty thousand thousand employees.

 

[2] As usual the top floor was sealed off and guards were posted at significant points. ¶ “The bill at the Acapulco Princess for his party’s seven-week stay totalled $82,659, just for food and lodgings. When the salaries of his doctors and attendants—from $20,000 to $110,000 a year—and the additional expenses entailed by Hughes’ bizarre life style were added on, the cost of his brief stay in Mexico exceeded $250,000, an average of $5,000 a day.” Phelan, Hidden Years, p. 25.

 

[3] See Horrock, “Howard Hughes at the End”, p. 16.

 

[4] Margulis said his salary was approximately $20,000 a year. ¶ “Such senior aides as Levar Mylar and John Holmes got up to $110,000, plus $10,000 in Christmas bonuses, a new car every two years and expense accounts exceeding $50,000.” Kihiss, Peter, “Hughes Attendants Say the Billionaire Was Used by Aides”, New York Times, January 11, 1977, p. 20.

 

[5] Horrock, “Howard Hughes at the End”, p. 16.

 

[6] In the early hours of April 5 Dr. Chaffin voiced the fact that neither Dr. Clark, nor Dr. Crane, nor Dr. Thain, nor Dr. Chaffin were licensed to practice medicine in Mexico. A local doctor would have to be brought in if Hughes had to be immediately hospitalized. Dr. Chaffin phoned Dr. Victor Manuel Montemayor, whose name, Dr. Chaffin recalled, had come to him from a patient. See Horrock, “Howard Hughes at the End”, p. 16. ¶ Dr. Montemayor, an army lieutenant colonel, arrived at about 5 a.m.

 

[7] See “Doctor Recounts Hughes’s Last Day”, p. 17; “Howard Hughes’ Last Hours”, p. 16.

 

[8] See Hack, Hughes, p. 8.

 

[9] Though Dr. Chaffin told the New York Times that the results of the blood and urine test on April 4 confirmed that Hughes was suffering from a kidney ailment, Dr. Montemayor told the same newspaper that he read the same results and thought them “good” and that Hughes must have been immediately suffering from some other ailment. See Horrock, “Howard Hughes at the End”, p. 16.

 

[10] See Gonzales, “Secret Files”, p. 106.

 

[11] Dr. Crane was the Romaine Street-sponsored physician. Dr. Lawrence Chaffin was the other.

 

[12] See Phelan, Hidden Years, p. 21; Horrock, “Howard Hughes at the End”, p. 16; Stern, “Melodramatic End”, p. 6; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 25.

 

[13] [HH:HLM], p. 21 and 23, suggests Dr. Thain flew in from the Bahamas; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 322, Hack, Hughes, p. 6, and Real, Asylum, p. 237, say Miami. But the pilot told the New York Times that he had taken the physician from Fort Lauderdale. See “Hughes Seen By Two Pilots As Worn Out”, p. 70.

 

[14] See Simons, “Mexicans Raise Questions on Hughes’ Death”, p. 1; also Hougan, Spooks, p. 416.

 

[15] See Phelan, Hidden Years, p. 21; Hack, Hughes, p. 16.

 

[16] See Hack, Hughes, p. 7.

 

[17] Hughes’ thin gray hair was left shoulder-length. See “The Hughes Legacy: Scramble For The Billions”, Time, April 19, 1976.

 

[18] See Hack, Hughes, p. 7.

 

[19] See Simons, “Mexicans Raise Questions on Hughes’ Death”, p. 14; “Hughes Seen By Two Pilots As Worn Out”, Real, Asylum, p. 239. ¶ “When Thain arrived . . . Thain ordered two intravenous shots of Solu-Cortel, to prevent Hughes from dying of a cerebral edema.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 322. ¶ Higham says Thain arrived on April 4, while [HH:HLM], p. 23, Hack, Hughes, p. 8, and Real, Asylum, p. 239, say April 5.

 

[20] Real, Asylum, p. 239.

 

[21] Real, Asylum, p. 239.

 

[22] Quoted in Phelan, Hidden Years, p. 21.

 

[23] See Simons, “Mexicans Raise Questions on Hughes’ Death”, p. 14. ¶ According to Frehner, Waldron admits to the shredding. Just after Hughes flew out of the country, Waldron “slipped into the now-empty penthouse and proceeded with the clean-up operation that he knew had to be accomplished. He gathered up and secured papers and files that no longer had purpose. Also, he identified those that he knew Hughes, or the members of his staff, would not want to fall into someone else’s hands. Included in this collection were such things as Hughes’ handwritten memos and other personal communications. Chuck methodically identified, separated, and destroyed a number of these items by feeding them through a paper shredder.” Frehner, Hughes and Me, p. 318.

 

[24] Real, Asylum, p. 241.

 

[25] See “Doctor Recounts Hughes’s Last Day”, p. 17.

 

[26] See Davenport, Hughes Papers, p. 240. ¶ “yellow sheet” and “Gates Learjet ambulance plane”, says “The Hughes Legacy: Scramble For The Billions”, Time, April 19, 1976. Also: “A tube dangling from one of his arms connected him, presumably, to a dialysis machine.” ¶ “yellow sheet” and “wearing an oxygen mask” with an “intravenous needle stuck into his arm”, says “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 25.

 

[27] See “Doctor Recounts Hughes’s Last Day”, p. 17.

 

[28] Most sources only say “airport”, probably because the airport goes by a few different names: Acapulco Airport; Aeropuerto de Internacional. de Acapulco; Juan Alvarez International Airport; and Plan De Los Amates Airport. See Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 322; Real Asylum, p. 221; 239; 241; Hack, Hughes, p. 8-9; [HH:HLM], p. 24; 579; [HH:US], p. 373; and Frehner, Hughes and Me, p. 305. ¶ Strange that there is no mention of the name of the airport in “Hughes Seen By Two Pilots As Worn Out”, p. 70.

 

[29] See “Penthouse Interview: James Phelan”, p. 114.

 

[30] See Sterba, James P., “Cause of Hughes’s Death Is Given as Kidney Failure”, New York Times, April 7, 1976, p. 18; “Doctor Recounts Hughes’s Last Day”, p. 17; Stern, “Melodramatic End”, p. 6; “Billionaire Howard Hughes Dies at 70”, p. 8.

 

[31] For both quotes, see “Hughes Seen By Two Pilots As Worn Out”, p. 70. See also “The Hughes Legacy: Scramble For The Billions”, Time, April 19, 1976; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 25; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 18.

 

[32] See George Francom interview in “Howard Hughes: The Real Aviator”, DVD documentary.

 

[33] “license # N855W.” Frehner, Hughes and Me, p. 316. ¶ The Hughes entourage ignored the Mexican law which required that a special medical certificate was needed for a seriously ill person to depart the country. See Simons, “Mexicans Raise Questions on Hughes’ Death”, p. 14.

 

[34] “Dr. Thain, still wearing the embroidered leisure shirt he had been wearing in Florida, disembarked . . .” Phelan, Money, p. 8. ¶ “After the plane touched down at Houston Intercontinental Airport, Thain told the pilot, “There is no hurry. He’s gone.” “The Hughes Legacy: Scramble For The Billions”, Time, April 19, 1976. ¶ “What struck ambulance driver Jay Dixon as strange was the mood of those now standing around as the body of the late billionaire was covered and loaded for transport to the hospital. “There was some laughter at one point. It seemed out of place,” he said. The customs official agreed, adding that no one, including Hughes’ doctors or his aide, seemed unduly upset or distraught.” Hack, Hughes, p. 13. 

 

[35] “One of a select circle of institutions to receive research grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.” [HH:HLM], p. 580. ¶ “Methodist Hospital is the teaching arm for the Baylor University College of Medicine, which for years had received research grants from Hughes’ Medical Institute.” Phelan, Money, p. 7.

 

[36] [Hughes had died] At 27,000 feet. See Gonzales, “Secret Files”, p. 198. ¶ “According to Dr. Thain, he died at 1:27 p.m., a half-hour out of Houston Airport.” Phelan, Hidden Years, p. 22. See also Horrock, “Howard Hughes at the End”, p. 16; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 322; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 25. ¶ “over south Texas,” says “Doctor Recounts Hughes’s Last Day”, p. 17. ¶ “fifteen minutes out of Houston.” “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 24. ¶ In the air, Dr. Thain had “dripped dextrose into the dehydrated old man through a catheter” and “monitored Hughes’ heartbeat every fifteen minutes—then every two.” When Hughes expired, he was covered in a burnt-orange blanket. At the airport, Customs  Officer Marie Denton was shown a photocopied birth certificate which listed Hughes’ local address as the “Exxon Building”. A green and white ambulance brought the corpse to the hospital. See “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 25-6.

 

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

123  Slow and Steady

So these are the final days of Charles Foster Kane, one of America’s wealthiest men. He inhabits his castle all by his lonesome, except for his servants, who have a "neither here nor there” attitude toward their boss. (Example : Kane’s butler at 1:52:00.) As the Narrator says : in his last period, Kane was “aloof, seldom visited, never photographed” (12:00). Did Kane realize that all the money in the world doesn’t keep a lonely man warm at night? Did he notice that the largest, most opulent castle in the world seems all the larger, and all the less opulent, emptied of anyone of interest? Once Xanadu was filled with dozens and dozens of Susan’s friends (i.e., 1:39:37); now no friends occupy Xanadu. Charles Foster Kane lives alone. His mother abandoned him into a world that abandoned him.

 

What may have crossed his mind late in life? Power means nothing, since Death eradicates it effortlessly. And no amount of money can buy one’s way out of Death. No amount of money can buy Love, either. If Money has no power against Love or Death, why does Tyranny force us all into the trouble of chasing after money for our one precious lifetime? No, Power and Money mean nothing very much to the mature person looking back at the labyrinth of life. Kindness and Love are more valuable, because they bring peace. But Kane spent his entire adult life fighting. Where did all the fighting lead him? To a lonely place. A life with no one to share it with is bleak. A life whom no one understands is also bleak. Did anyone understand Kane in his lifetime? Does anyone understand anyone? All one can do is be kind to the next person. Doing this, each raises the other’s game.

 

But that is not the teaching that Tyranny forces on us. But the world at this time is not even worth ignoring. Hollywood, for example, may extol the value of Love over money, but you have to pay Hollywood to hear this lesson.

 

121

Kane, alone and isolated, forgotten and unloved that he is, is still committing his thoughts to paper (perhaps for his newspapers), still trying to get the words right, still formulating ideas and plans, as if he refuses to face the truth : and perhaps he never did. Is it plausible that Kane never “saw the light” of his unpleasant behavior through the years? Is it plausible that he blamed everyone else for his isolation? Isn’t that what people do in our world? Blame everyone else for their problems? Perhaps Kane was no different than the next person. Up to the end he may have felt indomitable confidence in his own forward course, though he had long before steered it into a bleak place.

 

This last view of Kane writing recalls his first :

(37:37) The youthful Idealist full of good intentions.

 

Perhaps, at the end, during his last, long illness (i.e., 46), he had a fleeting notion of the pointless of money? All the riches in the world aren’t enough to persuade Death to pass one by. Indeed, near the end of his life he admits that money steered him wrong, and without it he “might have been a really great man” (29:25), which suggests it wasn’t money in the first place that initially motivated his rise, but the power of his own intellect. Theory : Kane had a magnificent brain early destroyed by what the world calls “success”. Los Angeles is full of such examples.

 

What matters in life is peace at the center. The fresh air of the freedom of the peace at the center is priceless. Tyranny doesn’t instruct us in how to get there. One of the Ten Commandents, by the way, is not “Thou Shalt Get Educated”.

 

What happens when one follows one’s own confidence, which is founded on air? One usually ends up breathing the bleak air of failure. Yield your life unwittingly to Tyranny at youth, and regret your blindness forever after. One secret of life is that the second half of a person’s life is more valuable than the first half, though society puts its priority on youth. Hence, youth must educate itself to the maximum, to prepare rigorously and properly for the future, or they’re in for a shock of long duration. By this point, the only exit Charles Foster Kane had available to him to escape his life mistakes was Death.

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Faust (1926), dr. F. W. Murnau

 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Rembrandt, Old Man in an Interior with Winding Staircase (1632)