The Arrogance of Power (49 page)

The man who promised truth to the nation talked privately as though his stock-in-trade were deception. There was the occasion when, on the way into a meeting with Mormon Church elders, Nixon told John Sears not to believe a word of what he was about to say—it was merely for the Church leaders' consumption. On another occasion, “reasonably well oiled,” he had some advice for Len Garment. “You're never going to make it in politics,” he told the younger man. “You just don't know how to lie.”

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“The money matters,” Nixon announced bluntly at a meeting early in the campaign, and of course it did matter—seriously so. The issue of campaign contributions—what is legal and what is illegal, what is ethically acceptable and what is not—remains a controversial issue, perhaps the most controversial issue, of U.S. elections to this day.

By its own accounting, the Nixon side spent $36.5 million on the 1968 campaign. It was the largest expenditure ever for a presidential contest and gave the Republicans a fundamental advantage. The Humphrey side probably had less than half as much money at its disposal.

Nixon behaved as though it did not matter who donated the money, whether it was given in expectation of future favors, or how it was delivered. He claimed he “refused always” to accept contributions himself. W. W. Keeler, the president of Phillips Petroleum, however, admitted that in 1968 he delivered a package containing fifty thousand dollars “personally to Nixon at his New York City apartment.” This revelation emerged only after the presidency, in the course of a stockholders' suit against Phillips filed on the ground that this donation—and twice that sum in the 1972 election—contravened the law banning corporate contributions.

It was early in the 1968 campaign, when the coffers were empty, that Nixon accepted a hundred thousand dollars from Paradise Island casino owner James Crosby. In spite of the dubious source, finance chairman Maurice Stans recalled, “Nixon was ecstatic” and merely ordered that the money be delivered in thirty-four separate personal checks to thirty-four different campaign committees, to observe the legal requirement that individual donations to local committees be limited to five thousand dollars. At the same time, of course, the ploy camouflaged the real donor's identity.

Arnholt Smith, the San Diego banker, remembered by Pat Nixon as “one of our first supporters,” reportedly personally donated $250,000 in 1968, and the contributions he generated totaled four times that. An associate of his, bookmaker John Alessio, gave $26,000. On election night Smith would be part
of the Nixon inner circle at the Waldorf Towers.
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(Both Smith and Alessio would later go to prison for tax evasion, but only after secret efforts by the Nixon White House to intervene on their behalf.
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)

Bebe Rebozo, not surprisingly, also served as personal fund-raiser, financial cutout, and bagman. It was he who organized the Crosby donation. When the Davis brothers of the Winn-Dixie grocery chain contributed seventy-five thousand dollars, it was to Rebozo's home that the envelope containing the first cash installment was delivered.

Months before the campaign started, Rebozo had accompanied Nixon to England and joined him on a visit to J. Paul Getty's stately home, where they admired the billionaire's collection of Rubenses, Titians, and Renoirs. Rebozo wrote afterward to say how “enthralled” everyone had been, what a wonderful dinner party Getty had given. Later, when Nixon sought a contribution from Getty, and Rebozo was the go-between, Getty duly obliged. Rebozo was also the key intermediary for cash payments that Nixon should by now have known better than to accept, from Howard Hughes.

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“You must remember,” Hughes told his lieutenant Robert Maheu, “that I, Howard Hughes, can buy any man in the world. . . .”

He presented his 1968 agenda in a neatly written memo (see facsimile below): “I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted. . . . Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life.” “If we select Nixon,” Hughes wrote later, “then he, I know for sure, knows the facts of life.”
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Sequestered in a suite atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, the eccentric billionaire was now sixty-two. Long since a recluse, he was seriously disturbed and addicted to prescription drugs, yet remained as manipulative as ever.

Hughes was not particular about where he bestowed his financial largess. He cleared Maheu that year to offer Lyndon Johnson a million dollars (Maheu saw the president but decided not to risk offering the bribe) and to take fifty thousand dollars to Hubert Humphrey (Maheu claimed he made the delivery, though Humphrey denied it). Hughes' favorite, however, was Nixon. “I want you to go see Nixon as my special confidential emissary,” he wrote after Nixon's first primary win. “I feel there is a really valid possibility of a Republican victory this year. . . .”

When he sent Maheu to Johnson, Hughes had instructed him to focus on two primary demands. To recoup the huge losses he had suffered from disastrously budgeted helicopter production, he wanted the Vietnam War to continue. He also sought an end to atomic testing in the Nevada desert, one of his saner obsessions. Hughes's demands varied over time, but his baseline requirement remained unchanged: He wanted whoever became president, as Maheu put it, to be “in his debt.”

How much Hughes paid in cash directly to Nixon, how it was transmitted and by whom and when, are questions so permeated with deceit and confusion as to be beyond discovery.
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One of the few certainties in the matter is that even before Hughes started doling out money, Nixon had approached him for financial support. The man he assigned to make the contact was Richard Danner, the former Miami city manager who years earlier had brought Nixon and Rebozo together. Danner's diary for 1968 indicates constant contact with both men, by telephone and in person. At one early meeting, he later testified, they asked him to approach Hughes.

Hughes laughed out loud when he received the request, then ordered Maheu to arrange a delivery of fifty thousand dollars cash—almost a quarter of a million dollars at today's values. Long delays followed, however, because both Rebozo and Nixon became nervous. Rebozo backed away from one handover fearing that one of the intermediaries, who happened to be a Democrat, might reveal the plan.

Soon after the election Maheu flew by private jet to Palm Springs with the money, hoping that Nevada's Governor Laxalt would be able to arrange for him to see Nixon at a reception. Nixon, however, sent word that he had “no time” for a meeting. Whatever his reason, he would certainly have avoided the encounter had he known that, as Maheu's son remembered it, the Hughes people wanted a signed receipt for the contribution.

Maheu and Danner finally accomplished their mission, sometime into the presidency, by making deliveries directly to Rebozo. Danner described how, after he had been handed ten batches of hundred-dollar bills—fifty thousand dollars—Rebozo “laid the bundles out on the bed and counted them . . . didn't fan them or break down the amounts [but] put them back in the envelope and
put them in his handbag.” Each packet came secured by a Las Vegas bank wrapper, for the source of the cash was a Hughes casino. When the transaction was completed, Rebozo and Danner strolled off for a chat with Nixon.

Maheu also admitted to having given Rebozo a second payment of fifty thousand dollars, which involved an arrival by chauffeured limousine and a wordless exchange of the cash, followed by gin martinis on the rocks and a lavish dinner at a local restaurant. Neither he nor Rebozo, he said, mentioned the reason for the meeting.

If the deliveries were executed with all the finesse of a B movie, the participants' subsequent accounts of them—during the Senate's Watergate probe—played as pure farce. They could not get their stories straight as to when the payments were made, whether they were handed over at San Clemente, at Rebozo's bank, or at his home, or precisely who was present at which delivery.

Investigators noted with interest the timing of the donations. One seemed to dovetail with Hughes' purchase of Air West, a deal that required approval by the Civil Aeronautics Board and—because of the foreign routes involved—by President Nixon himself. Hughes had said he relied on Maheu's “political ability” to get the decisions ratified.

Danner, it emerged, also met three times during the first presidency with John Mitchell, who as attorney general was in a position to grant or withhold clearance for Hughes to acquire yet another Las Vegas hotel. This was an antitrust issue, and Mitchell gave his consent against senior staff advice. It was after one of these meetings that Hughes gave the order to deliver the second fifty thousand dollars to Rebozo—with the explanation that “certain political obligations had to be met.”

What was the money used for? Future probes would uncover an entry in Danner's diary, dated just after the election, reflecting a call from Rebozo about a “house project.” More calls followed, apparently on the same matter, though Danner claimed he could not recall to what the notation “house project” referred. As it happens, however, the calls to Hughes' bagman coincided with early plans for Nixon to buy a house next to Rebozo's at Key Biscayne, the so-called Florida White House.

Extraordinary efforts by Senate investigators to discover the fate of the Hughes money led to suspicion that it had been used to pay for such items as architects' fees, remodeling, a swimming pool, and even—at $213.57—an “Arnold Palmer Putting Green.” The labyrinthine trail petered out when Rebozo refused to produce financial records.

Nixon's attorney Herb Kalmbach recalled Rebozo's having told him that some of the Hughes money had gone to Nixon's brothers, Donald and Edward, and to his secretary Rose Woods. The brothers and Rebozo denied it, and Rose Woods said she had nothing to do with her boss' business affairs. Rebozo claimed he never touched the Hughes money and eventually returned it.
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While investigators had firm evidence of only the two fifty-thousand-dollar Hughes cash payments, some suspected the real total was much higher. In
March 1970, at a meeting in New York, Maheu was asked to call a Hughes aide from a pay phone. Moments later, hunched in a nearby booth, he listened in amazement as the aide read out, or rather whispered, a message from Hughes. “Go to Key Biscayne,” it said, “and offer Nixon through Rebozo one million dollars.” Hughes's hope, Maheu recalled, was that a bribe of that size—the same figure Hughes had had in mind two years earlier for President Johnson—would be persuasive enough to convince Nixon to stop atomic testing in Nevada.

This latest mission was so outrageous, Maheu has said, that he and Danner simply went through the motions. They flew to Florida, stalled for days pretending that Rebozo was unavailable, and waited until Hughes's attention turned to other topics.

Another former Hughes employee, John Meier, claimed recently that a million-dollar delivery to Rebozo did take place, in 1969. Meier said he saw the money, “made up of $100 bills . . . stacked neatly on edge—two rows, five thousand bills in each,” in a colleague's large briefcase. Rebozo made the pickup from a room at Miami's Airport Hotel, then, alarmed that more than one witness was present, abruptly left.

Both Maheu and the man named as the courier have denied this episode took place.
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True, Meier is not a reliable witness. Fired after a compromising business involvement with Nixon's brother Donald, he fled to Canada, a fugitive from an IRS tax fraud charge. Yet the question remains: In this gallery of corrupters and corrupted, men who suffered convenient memory lapses or simply lied, whose account
can
be deemed reliable?

“There is evidence,” the Senate report on these matters would one day say dryly, “suggesting that there may have been more than two deliveries from Danner to Rebozo. The only way much of the conflicting testimony can be reconciled is to conclude there were more than two deliveries of funds.”

To avoid the Senate committee's most awkward questions, Rebozo would eventually flee the country for a while in 1974. “Mr. Rebozo,” said the report, “persisted in his refusal to make records controlled by him or his bank available . . . and placed himself beyond the reach of the committee by traveling to Europe. . . .” By the time he returned, as Rebozo well knew, the committee would have run out of time to issue further subpoenas.