Word: drosnin
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This is the gulf of credibility that Michael Drosnin faced when he began work on Citizen Hughes, part biography and part expose, based on thousands of pages of memorandums in Hughes' handwriting. There were added problems: the documents were stolen property, and Drosnin had a source to protect--the burglar who broke into Hughes' Los Angeles office building and took the papers in 1974. Drosnin, a former reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, insists that he never paid a penny for the notes, which were later validated by the two handwriting experts used by the Hughes...
According to Drosnin, it was the facts about $100,000 of Hughes money in Bebe Rebozo's safe-deposit box that set off the Watergate break-in. "I want to hire Bob Kennedy's entire organization," wrote Hughes to Maheu shortly after hearing that the Senator was dead. Maheu managed to get the lobbying services < of Lawrence O'Brien, Kennedy's campaign manager and later Democratic Party chairman. Because of O'Brien's connection with Hughes, Drosnin argues, Nixon feared disclosure of the cash in his friend's bank and ordered the plumbers into O'Brien's Watergate office...
...Hughes cash was all the White House worried about, or that the gift was the only potential scandal the opposition party was sitting on. A paranoid with bottomless pockets may have indirectly caused Nixon's final political crisis, but he was probably not the main reason. In addition, Drosnin's case is not helped by pop-novel techniques that cheapen his journalistic efforts: "But now aboard Air Force One, the President was gripped by a darker thought. The terrible fear that O'Brien knew --that he had somehow learned from his hidden masters all about the secret Hughes cash...