As fantastically wealthy manipulators go, Howard R. Hughes was king. The billionaire's Midas touch had less to do with his fabled technical and financial genius than with endless secret deals and covert political bribes. "I can but any man in the world," Hughes liked to boast. Indeed, Hughes's conspiratorial authority stemmed from his ability - and eager inclination purchase loyalty from anyone, including the president of the United States, in a position to advance his, well, idiosyncratic designs.

Everything about Hughes was larger than life, including his paradoxical legend. Heir to a Houston fortune based on a drill bit patent that revolutionized oil mining, the dashing young Hughes captured the American imagination during the Great Depression years. Cowboy aviator, Hollywood playboy, patriotic military contractor, maverick financier, Hughes was a comic book hero whose can-do exploits knew no limits. Later in life, as his eccentricities metastasized into madness, the darker portrait emerged: the stringy-haired old man, a real lunatic with a mortal fear of germs holed up in a penthouse hermitage.

Throughout his life, Hughes's obsession with control expressed itself in a mania for espionage and spookery, especially as it applied to nurturing his substantial neuroses. However, despite his seeming omnipresence in the eye of many a stormy conspiracy, Hughes was just as manipulated by others. Known to spooks as the "Stockholder," Hughes fronted for CIA covert operations, sometimes unknowingly; Hughes, the demented shut-in, saw his empire manipulated by remote control.

We join the Hughes saga during the late 1950s, with the arrival of the shadowy and some sleazy Robert Maheu, fountainhead of many real and imagined Hughes conspiracies. In the fifties, Hughes hired Maheu to intimidate would-be blackmailers and spy on dozens of Hollywood starlets toward whom Hughes felt possessive. Maheu was a former FBI man whose private security firm fronted for the CIA on ultra-sensitive (read: illegal) missions. By the time he became Hughes's private spook, Maheu already had impressive credentials supervising contract kidnappings for the CIA and acting as the Agency's literal pimp, hiring prostitutes to service foreign dignitaries and their peculiar sexual appetites. Maheu's most notorious CIA job was a go-between in a failed 1960 plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, which recruited the Mafia to do the "hit." Friendly with the darndest folks, Maheu enlisted the aid of Vegas mobster John Roselli ("Uncle Johnny" to Maheu's children), Chicago godfather Sam "Momo" Giancana, and powerful Florida mob boss Santos Trafficante. Apparently, Hughes had no involvement in Maheu's freelance CIA work but delighted in the spook's exploits and connections, which only enhanced the billionaire's reputation and influence. (According to journalist Jim Hougan, Maheu informed Hughes of his efforts on behalf of the CIA to kill Castro.) By some accounts, however, the Stockholder was the Agency's largest contractor. In dedicating his resources to the CIA, though, Hughes wasn't guided entirely by selfless motives. During the late sixties, he asked Maheu to offer his empire to Agency as a CIA front. At the time the Hughes fortune was threatened by major legal trouble the beleaguered billionaire hoped to deflect the nettlesome litigation with a "national security shield".

When America entered the second world war our geographic isolation from the areas of conflict gave us a distinct advantage over our enemies. The technology of the time simply made it too difficult for those fighting against us to mount serious action against our homeland. In the end, this advantage left us the time and manufacturing power to smother our foes with an unending supply of the materials necessary to wage war. But we also had to overcome the vast distances, we had to find ways to safely deliver these materials, and men to use them, to the areas of conflict around the world. At the time, ships were the only way to get the job done and the men doing it were finding that it was very dangerous work! Shipyards across America were at full production but enemy submarines were sinking the critical vessels nearly as fast as they could be built. Something had to be done.

The idea for the HK-1 flying boat came from Henry Kaiser... Head of one of the largest shipbuilding firms of the time, Kaiser thought a ship that could fly over the danger might be the answer. Howard Hughes was known as an innovator in aircraft construction and design. These two men, both legends in their own time, would launch the venture to build the huge craft (originally three were to be built). The new plane's official name bore the initials of the principals in the project HK-1....But to most of us it's always just been "Spruce Goose".

The huge plane would be made primarily of wood, saving materials critical to the war effort. The difficulties creating such a large airframe made of wood were unknown at the beginning of construction and would prove to be many. The final product is a tribute to the efforts of the team in overcoming the problems they faced. A structure made of lumber was created that, even on close inspection, bears little resemblance to any form of wood! Hughes would prove to be a demanding taskmaster during the period of development and construction. His attention to detail and insistence everything on the new plane be nearly perfect, was largely responsible for both the beauty of the finished product and it's not being ready to fly until after the war had ended.

The timing of completion and final cost brought Hughes and the project under the critical eye of the post-war congress, one Senator grudgingly referring to the plane as "The flying lumberyard". Howard Hughes was called to Washington D.C. to defend both the project and himself. During a break in the hearings, he flew back to California to conduct a test on the "Goose", it was during this test the accidental flight took place. This event, whether intended or not, put a halt to critics of the project and served as the finale for this gigantic aircraft ...... the project was dead. Though his feathers had been ruffled by the intense questioning he had endured, the flight had vindicated Hughes and the project. The HK-1, which by now would be known forever as the "Spruce Goose", was put into storage . It remained hidden from public view, carefully preserved, until after Howard Robard Hughes death in April of 1976.

My mentor's sympathies, then, lay with (Howard) Hughes, but Drew (Pearson) felt stranded in an unsatisfying posture. It was his nature to want to play an important part in the great political brawls of the time, to put his mark on them, to help shape their outcome toward the benefit of his causes or the distress of his foes. Yet he would not take Brewster's side and could not take Hughes's. For though Hughes was probably the victim of an unsavory gang-up, his own conduct in the matter was too shabby to defend and he was not even making a fight of it himself. Grumbling at each day's leaks, Drew held back, watching the thing spin, looking for a handle to pick it up by.

At this point in his disintegrating fortunes, Howard Hughes phoned Drew from one of his West Coast redoubts. He had long considered Pearson to be journalism's leading molder of public opinion and the man most knowledgeable about the Byzantine twists of conspiratorial Washington. And since Drew's animus against Hughes's tormentors was clear, there was a mutuality of interest present that encouraged him to seek Drew's help and advice.

In the manner of cornered men whose expense accounts have already been made public, Hughes admitted to misdemeanors but pled innocent to felonies. He had indeed wined and wenched government officials and military brass, sometimes to excess. It was necessary, he said; his competitors did it, and as a relative newcomer trying to buck long-entrenched interests and liaisons, he had to play the game in order to get a hearing on his proposals. He had never looked on aviation as a moneymaker, he insisted; he was in it because he had a passion for it. He yielded to no man in his mastery of the dark arts of making money, as the astronomical profits of his other businesses showed, but in aviation, he had lost $14 million in thirteen years.

Then he got to the nub: three months before, Brewster had attempted to lobby him in behalf of Pan Am, he said, and having failed, they were both out to destroy him. Pan Am had put great pressure on him to merge Trans World with Pan Am and co-sponsor the chosen-instrument plan. Brewster himself had told him at the Mayflower Hotel that the probe would be dropped if he joined forces with Pan Am.

Senator Brewster in 1947 was chairman of the powerful Senate War Investigating Committee. He was also the bosom friend of Pan American Airways. Brewster and Pan American wanted Howard Hughes's TWA to consolidate its overseas lines with Pan Am. This Hughes refused to do. Whereupon Brewster investigated Hughes, and, during the period when he was before Brewster's Senate committee, Hughes's telephone wire and that of his attorneys were tapped, apparently under the off-stage direction of Henry Grunewald, who admits that at various times he checked telephone wires for Pan American Airways.

Grunewald and others deny this. Nevertheless this is the conclusion which Senators are forced to arrive at. No wonder businessmen who come to Washington are worried about talking over telephones. They never know when some competitor, perhaps with the cooperation of a Senate committee, is listening in. Yet this is supposed to be the capital of the USA not Moscow.

There was no way to tell, from one day to another, while Mr. H. R. Hughes was resident among us earthlies, what would come from the mind and pen of the world's most famous recluse.

As in a memo introduced in the Mormon Will trial from a collection of original writing owned by this columnist, one day he would recommend you for a Nobel Peace Prize and the next day he would be plotting a means for your total destruction.

It would take a gyrating mind like his to keep up with the course he had laid out and which was subject to change at a moment's notice through will and caprice.

In the memo placed in evidence, and reproduced on the front page of Friday's SUN, he referred to the fact that "Hank has allied himself with us."

For the record, this editor had not allied himself with anyone but his own beliefs.

Hughes was discussing an editorial I had written suggesting we should proceed cautiously on nuclear testing until we learned what caused the sudden deaths before any more tests were made.

The mere suggestion that a slowdown is indicated caused Mr. Hughes immediately to assume that I now was in his corner insisting that the Test Site be shut down.

What I was indicating was most sensible and legitimate because a few days later, when news had come out that the sheep had died of a nerve gas being tested in Utah, I immediately wrote that the underground program in Nevada must proceed as long as Russia was continuing with nuclear exploration.

I did believe that we must not rush pell mell into radiation destruction until we learned what happened to the sheep. Humans should not be subjected to a similar fate.

There will be other memos produced in court before the trial is concluded which will show the almost irrational behavior of the man who caused more battles in the courts of the nation than any single individual or even corporate establishment.

Most of the legal involvements were instigated by his past General Counsel Chester Davis and also a few Las Vegas law firms, holdovers from the Davis-Bill Gay combine who are still sucking at Summa's financial resources for all they can get, but many were still caused by Hughes' own brilliance at one moment and his downright Machiavellian behavior the next without changing pens or paper.

One memo will show from his own writings how he tried to stop Kirk Kerkorian from building the International, now the Hilton, and other hotels from being built unless he had total control over the gaming industry.

For too many years since his departure, I have permitted myself to be pictured as the villain in the relationship waiting for some opportunity to prove by a jury of my community peers where the fault lay.

On national TV, whenever I was questioned as to the effect Hughes had on the Nevada scene, I would respond that it was positive in many areas but detrimental in others. By his own writings, the people of Las Vegas and the entire state will now be able to judge for themselves which man had the community interest at heart.

I was his strongest advocate in the good he wrought, but also his severest critic in his monopolistic endeavors and his attempt to corrupt every public official at every level in local, state and national government.

Howard Hughes's name surfaced in the story of Watergate on May 20, 1973, when James McCord told the Ervin committee and its media audience of an abandoned 1972 White House plot to steal certain documents from the safe of editor Hank Greenspun's Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun was an ally of Robert Maheu, the top Hughes aide who connected the CIA and the Mafia in 1960, who came to prominence in the Hughes empire during the Las Vegas period, and who then lost out in the Las Vegas power struggle that violently reconfigured the Hughes empire late in 1970. McCord testified that his fellow Plumbers, Hunt and Liddy, were to have carried out the break-in and theft of the papers and that Hughes interests were to have supplied them with a getaway plane and a safe hideout in an unnamed Central American country.

What could the Greenspun documents have been? Why should both Hughes and Nixon have been interested enough in them to attempt a robbery?

Liddy said (testified McCord) that Attorney General John Mitchell had told him that Greenspun had in his possession blackmail type information involving a Democratic candidate for President, that Mitchell wanted that material, and Liddy said that this information was in some way racketeer-related, indicating that if this candidate became President, the racketeers or national crime syndicate could have a control or influence over him as President. My inclination at this point in time, speaking as of today, is to disbelieve the allegation against the Democratic candidate referred to above and to believe that there was in reality some other motive for wanting to get into Greenspun's safe.