PRESS: Unfinished Business
Powers, Thomas
UNFINISHED BUSINESS Before getting on with the rest of the American century there are a few pieces of unfinished business to be cleared up. To wit: why did the Watergate burglars want to tap Larry...
...In a lamplit room anything seems possible, perhaps, but in the clear light of morning Mailer's speculations-hedged with qualifications as they are- seem willful and perverse...
...Who killed Maheu's instruments, Sam Giancana and John Roselli...
...The documents can be made to speak in this way, but I can't be brought to believe what they say...
...Hughes's financial interests were large enough to matter to his country as well as to himself, making it easy for the CIA to explain to itself why it was acting on his behalf...
...I can't figure out quite what Kohn is saying...
...After all, when you think of how much Hughes did for the CIA-billions of dollars in contracts, according to DuBois and Gonzales-it is only reasonable to presume the CIA did commensurate things for him...
...It would take a lifetime to absorb and see it whole...
...If our resources and time were infinite, yes, but they are not, and questions of this kind demand huge quantities of both for an uncertain return...
...Was Deep Throat working for the CIA...
...Hunt wanted to be important, Gray wanted to keep his job, Magruder was only doing his, Dean shifted with the prevailing wind, Mitchell had no principled objection to anything Liddy might propose, Rosemary Woods would do anything for Nixon, Nixon could never forgive an enemy or admit a fault or fight fairly when he saw a shot at an opponent's kidney, and so on...
...The explanation these journalists seem to seek is a secret explanation, an exact and particular explanation, of the sort a novelist like Harold Robbins might provide for a politician's career...
...I'd like to know, for example, what happened to democracy in Chile, how much of its destruction was our fault, why our friendship is so often poisoned, and why such questions receive so little attention, and the matter of Nixon-Hughes-CIA and Company so much...
...Is there something, in short, for the conspiracy sleuths to find...
...Their only common conclusion is that there is more here than meets the eye...
...One despairs of finding the answer, but one does not want to give up either...
...But then I thought, Hey wait a minute-"dictating machine...
...Why did the CIA neglect to investigate the presence of certain Cuban agents in the United States at the time of Kennedy's assassination...
...What were the terms of Hughes' arrangement with the Mafia in Las Vegas...
...Is it possible that Watergate, or the Nixon-Hughes-Lansky connection, or the Hughes-CIA axis, or even the Kennedy assassinations, have an explanation of that sort...
...Why did Lyndon Johnson believe that Castro killed John F. Kennedy...
...The literature on these matters is staggering: literally hundreds of books, hundreds of pages of citations in the New York Times Index, tens of thousands of pages of Congressional hearing transcripts, scores of green-and-gray-covered Senate and House committee reports, thou-ands of CIA and FBI documents, thousands of entries in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, thousands of unindexed articles in newspapers and magazines...
...One which might be written down on paper and locked in a safe...
...The fact that Hughes, Nixon, the Mafia, the CIA and all their various partners, allies, friends, agents and heirs want us to sigh and shrug and leave them alone spurs us on...
...It comes down to being a personal matter...
...In the land of Kennedy-Nixon-Hughes-CIA-Cuba-Mafia you can get from anywhere to anywhere...
...This question can hardly be neglected in any country which likes to call itself free, but too many recent Watergate enquiries seem tainted by paranoia...
...Who told Woodward and Bernstein about the pill bottle...
...For a moment this seemed like a confirmation of a similar report in Carl Bernstein's and Bob Woodward's book, The Final Days, in which Nixon is described as having tried to open a new-fangled pill bottle with his teeth...
...I have read Lukas and Mailer and Kohn and DuBois and Gonzales and a good many other conspiracy sleuths as well, just as you probably have during the last couple of years...
...I am of two minds about the attempts of journalists to penetrate the lingering mystery of Watergate, which is not the old (now settled) question of what did Nixon know and when did he know it, but the more fundamental matter of who rules...
...A couple of months ago I had an interview with John Ehrlichman about his recent novel, The Company, and Ehrlichman mentioned in passing that Nixon was so inept with anything mechanical that his secretary had to type out exact instructions and tape them to his "dictating machine" so he could use it...
...Nothing so huge could be so well hidden, I think, and nothing so huge is necessary to explain what we know...
...He simply marches them out in their hundreds, battalion on battalion, until the most skeptical mind must entertain the possibility there really is a connection...
...Their relationship was hardly based on sentiment...
...These authors have all mined the existing literature-Lukas and Kohn have strip-mined it-but they have returned to the surface with a very great many more questions than answers...
...Simple human motives might explain it all, but that does not mean they do...
...Why were Hunt and Liddy planning to crack Hank Greenspun's safe in Las Vegas...
...Their diagrams look like highway maps, in which every throughway and back country dirt track eventually meet...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...In addition, the issues are important...
...But it looms large and imprecise...
...Why did Howard Hughes neglect to leave a will, when he had frequently declared a plan to leave his fortune to the Hughes Medical Institute...
...Is it possible that something at least like that is hidden in the broad Pacific of primary Watergate documents...
...Well, stop and consider what the CIA might be able to do in the Bahamas or Central America or any other place in which Hughes might take an interest, the phones it might tap, the informants it might ask questions, the timely commercial secrets it might reveal, the political opponents it could help to neutralize...
...It would take a team of trained researchers a year just to gather it all...
...It might take forever to understand it...
...Howard Kohn, working with many of the same documents (and creating in the process one of Mailer's documents) does not speculate much about what his facts add up to...
...There are facts in plenty to support any conjecture...
...It is in the nature of the thing that you can never know you know the full truth...
...Why are there so many questions of this sort...
...You know the sort of explanation I mean: the sort that when it is found, is found, and explains all...
...It would take a decade to skim it...
...Kohn's vision is dark, unrelenting and bleak-a world of utter corruption, in which money and power are almost metaphysical principles...
...In the clear light of morning this strikes me as crazy, right up here with the Oswald doubles, a surrender to the charm of melodrama when something simpler will suffice...
...Is Ehrlichman trying to suggest an innocent explanation for the notorious 18-minute gap...
...Purely human motives are sufficient to explain what happened, and the attempt to find a secret pattern is really an attempt to inflate a fundamentally prosaic event with the completeness of theater...
...But what sort of things...
...Did the CIA put a tap on Judith Exner's phone in October, 1960...
...In his long article he suggests, among other things, that the CIA has been secretly investing funds over the years and has a "private" fortune which "could total by now anywhere from $25 billion to $100 billion," that the CIA used Hughes's Las Vegas operations for laundering secret funds, that certain elements in the Hughes empire had replaced Hughes the invalid loon with "HUGHES" a computer "not unrelated to OCTOPUS at Langley," that a 19th-century Mormon secret police called the Danites might have a cell in the CIA, that Hunt was a secret power in the CIA and continued to work for it after his "retirement," that McCord was an FBI plant in the CIA, that the Watergate break-in was an elaborate cover for the real object of the CIA, which was an impending change in the Federal Reserve Board's discount rate to be fed into the Fed's computer in the basement of the Watergate building...
...It is difficult not to believe that everyone connected with Watergate knows more than he has said, or to wonder how things might look if we really knew everything...
...Suspicion, self-interest, vindictiveness and a desire to serve the king are all the motive we need for who did what during Watergate...
...Mailer is especially adept in the hunt for secret explanations...
...Did someone blow up the plane carrying E. Howard Hunt's wife...
...How are we going to answer them...
...They do not pursue a class of men in the spirit of sociology-the cotton interests, say, or the oil lobby-but a particular group of men in a spirit of almost medieval suspicion...
...Why did Howard Hughes give $100,000 to Bebe Reboso for Richard Nixon...
...To wit: why did the Watergate burglars want to tap Larry O'Brien's phone...
...Senator X appears to be a man of the people, see, but in fact a cabal of defense contractors has proof he was a teenage pedophile and is backing his presidential campaign in return for a secret commitment to build a vast new fleet of one-man nuclear submarines...
...For that matter, why did the CIA deal with Hughes, a man whose loyalty it could not check...
...But as I say, I'm of two minds on this matter, and it is morning now...
...It is too much...
...Was Frank Sturgis telling the truth when he told UPI in July that Jack Ruby met Fidel Castro 10 weeks before Dallas...
...For every simple explanation there is a complex one, for every apparent motive the possibility of a hidden one, for every confident answer a skeptical question...
...I know a woman who thinks Watergate was engineered by the CIA to remove Nixon from office because the CIA had discovered Nixon was a cohort if not a literal creature of the Mafia...
...Did the CIA have a case officer monitoring the Plumbers...
...Suspiciousness to this degree is simply stupid, right...
...Why that odd phrase...
...Are Nixon's secret supporters still subtly trying to cover his tracks...
...But on the other hand...
...To get the full conspiratorial basso profundo of this conjecture you've got to read Mailer's article, which does not sound in context as crazy as this list, but which nevertheless has the rich, musty odor of work done solely with documents at midnight...
...What is their hidden meaning...
...Did he mean a dictaphone-or a tape recorder...
...The relation of Hughes to the CIA is a question with an answer, just like the others with which I began, but I am not sure if that is reason enough for pursuing them...
...I have no large explanation of Watergate to offer in place of those which have been offered to me, but the questions I'd really like answered are of a different sort...
...Sometimes the route is broad and well-marked, sometimes circuitous...
...Why did James McCord ask Bernard Fensterwald to represent him during the Watergate hearings, when Fensterwald was well-known as the chairman of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations...
...Our cartographer-authors have done heroic work, mapping the interconnections of power and money in Darkest America, but they are far from agreeing why there are so many unanswered questions and what is their hidden meaning...
...But then evening comes, and someone like Lukas in his calm, meticulous way reminds me of all the unanswered questions, and I begin to wonder just who was Deep Throat anyway, and if it was Bob Bennett what was he telling the CIA, and what was the CIA telling him...
...If there is a hidden meaning in the unanswered questions of Watergate, I suspect it is that we have grown parochial and self-absorbed, and have lost our appetite for the questions which might remind us there is a world beyond ourselves...
...But what...
...Mailer's vision of public life as plot on plot is elegant in its way, but so inventive as to seem almost playful...
...I felt the ground slide beneath my feet as I caught a trace smell of conspiracy...
...The attempt to penetrate certain sorts of mysteries, and especially the sort which can be called conspiratorial, only deepen doubt and uncertainty...
...Not just ancillary detail but something large and fundamental which justifies the expense of the hunt...
...Why did the CIA allow Robert Maheu to tell Hughes that the CIA had asked Maheu to organize a Mafia operation to kill Castro...
...Why did the CIA give Hughes a zillion-dollar contract for the Glomar Explorer...
...But if you haven't got a lifetime to give to this undertaking, you can still get the flavor of its rich complexity by reading one book, J. Anthony Lukas's Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, and three recent articles: Howard Kohn's "Strange Bedfellows: The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection" in Rolling Stone of May 20, Norman Mailer's "A Harlot High and Low: Reconnoitering Through the Secret Government" in New York of August 16, and Larry DuBois's and Laurence Gonzales's "The Puppet and the Puppetmasters" in the September Playboy...
...What is the CIA's relation to the Hughes empire now that Hughes is dead...
...If Howard Hughes gave money to Nixon for favorable federal agency rulings on business matters, and did things for the CIA in order to know things the CIA would intervene on his behalf to conceal, the details matter...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 20
