Word: drosnin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...various times, Hughes owned, a Las Vegas television station, several casinos, Hughes Aircraft, Aircraft, Hughes Tool, TWA, and--according to Michael Drosnin, author of Citizen Hughes--Paul Laxalt, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon...
...Drosnin explains it. Hughes first hired Democratic Party official Larry O'Brien to be one of his Washington operatives. Later Hughes made a secret $100,000 donation to Nixon through his confidante. Bebe Rebozo Put simply, he paranoid Nixon--afraid that O'Brien would reveal the Nixon-Hughes connection - arranged for burglars to read the Democratic Party's Watergate headquarters and find dirt on O'Brien which could be used to keep him silent...
...Drosnin's prime sources are some 10,000 secret documents which were stolen from Hughes' Los Angeles headquarters on June 5, 1974, including about 3000 of the hand-written memos through which Hughes conducted all of his business. After the L.A. Police Department, the FBI and the CIA gave up their investigation of the crime, Drosnin, by winning the friendship of the burglar who led the heist, finally got his hands on the billionaire's dirty laundry. And for seven years, Drosnin lived underground as "Michael Howard," poring over the revealing documents, interviewing dozens of sources, and assembling the chronicle...
Above all else, Citizen Hughes is first-class investigative reporting. It is studded with names, dates, facts and intrigue. Not really a biography--Drosnin's treatment of Hughes's life before the 1960s is definitely too skimpy--Citizen Hughes explores how power in America can be bought, sold and abused. Again and again, Drosnin quotes liberally from the memos, the only surviving glimpses into the thought and feeling of the mad billionaire behind this operation...
Along the way. Drosnin presents countless other vignettes of Hughes gone amok: his Ted-Turner style July 1968 attempt to take over ABC which he ultimately gave up because it would have required him to leave his penthouse and make a personal appearance before the Federal Communications Commission; his frantic efforts under both Lyndon Johnson and Nixon to stop nuclear testing in Nevada and his offers of multimillion-dollar bribes to both if they would: the transfusions of pure Mormon blood he regularly purchased from Salt Lake City because they made him feel so good; his Thanksgiving 1970 top-secret...