Drosnin, Michael. Citizen Hughes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1985. 532 pages.
On June 5, 1974, Howard Hughes' Hollywood headquarters was burglarized.
Over $60,000 and some souvenirs were missing, but the press didn't mention
that boxes of secret papers were also taken. It looked like an inside job.
A large team of FBI men, CIA agents, and LAPD detectives made no headway in
solving the case, and soon it began to look like they preferred to leave
it unsolved. Two years later Michael Drosnin, a former Washington Post and
Wall Street Journal reporter, found the person who stole the papers and
gained his confidence. Drosnin was given access to 10,000 documents,
including more than 3,000 in Hughes' own handwriting. Then he spent seven
years authenticating these documents and interviewing hundreds of people.
The result is this highly-credible description of the Hughes empire and
its role in American politics. With Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey both
accepting money from Hughes, and DNC chairman Larry O'Brien on the Hughes
payroll at the time of the Watergate break-in, and the CIA using Hughes for
top-secret projects such as the Glomar Explorer, this role was significant.
But if it was decisive, it was probably due to serendipity. Hughes was a
manipulative megalomaniac, and also a drug addict with a phobia of germs and
radiation. It appears, however, that his goals were modest: Howard Hughes
desperately wanted the AEC to stop underground nuclear testing in Nevada.
ISBN 0-03-041846-1
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