50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Richard Nixon's Howard Hughes Connection

According to Citizen Hughes by Michael Drosnin, on June 6, 1968--a few days after Robert F. Kennedy was killed--Billionaire Howard Hughes wrote a letter to the former C.I.A. agent who managed Hughes' Las Vegas gambling interests, Robert Maheu, which contained the following passage:

"The Kennedy family and their money and influence have been a thorn that has been relentlessly shoved into my guts since the very beginning of my business activities. So you can see how cruel it was, after my all-out support of Nixon, to have Jack Kennedy achieve that very, very marginal so-called victory over my man.

"So, as I point out, thru this long-standing feeling of jealousy and personal enmity, I have become fairly well-informed about the organization of people that sprung up, first around Jack, and then around Bob."

The Citizen Hughes book characterized former U.S. president Richard Nixon's historical connection to Billionaire Howard Hughes in the following way:

"Hughes had supported Nixon in every bid for office since his first congressional race in 1946 and would continue to back him to the end. In addition to campaign funds, he provided large sums for the personal use of the president and his family. The known bequests--the few made openly and the hidden payoffs later discovered--eventually totalled more than half-a-million dollars.

"More than a financial angel, Hughes was a virtual fairy godfather in Nixon's faltering rise to power. In 1956, when Eisenhower was ready to find a new running mate, Hughes ordered a covert operation to crush the `Dump Nixon' movement, sending Maheu to infiltrate the enemy camp and concoct a spurious pro-Nixon poll...

"The `Hughes Loan Scandal' hit the headlines in the final weeks of the closely contested 1960 election. Maheu took time off from plotting to kill Castro and tried instead to kill the story...

"The `all-out' support Hughes gave Nixon in 1960--a still unknown number of hundred-dollar bills secretly passed through the same bagman who handled the loan transaction--never became public."

Prior to being hired by Howard Hughes in 1955, Robert Maheau "who was alleged to be in charge of the CIA's part of the effort to assassinate Castro, had worked under Guy Bannister in the FBI's Chicago Field Office during World War II," according to Coup d'etat In America: The CIA and The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman.

(Downtown 2/5/92)