Citizen Hughes by Michael Drosnin

Author:Michael Drosnin [Drosnin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-48299-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

At first the cheers drowned out the gunshots.

Bobby Kennedy had just won the big one. California. It looked like he might actually go all the way. In twelve incredible weeks he had helped force Lyndon Johnson to abdicate, he had beaten Hubert Humphrey in his home state, South Dakota, and now he had defeated his antiwar rival Eugene McCarthy in California. At midnight on Tuesday, June 4, 1968, he entered the packed ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to claim his victory.

Smiling and exuberant, Kennedy joked with his cheering supporters, flashed a V-sign and declared, “Now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!” Then he left the podium, looking like the next president of the United States.

Minutes later he lay dying, shot through the head.

Howard Hughes watched it all. He saw it happen live and in color, and he stayed up through the night to watch the replays—the victory speech, the sound of gunfire, Bobby lying in a pool of blood—over and over again. He listened to the hospital bulletins, watched the random and collective scenes of shock and horror—people running, crying, screaming, kneeling silently to pray—he saw the Kennedy family gather for another grim death watch, and he kept his own TV vigil.

News reports and solemn commentary blared in his bedroom all night: “There was only one assailant … this was not a conspiracy … a sense of guilt for all Americans … it was clearly the act of one man … the crisis of violence in this country … just weeks after the King assassination … brother of the martyred president … there is no doubt, this was not a conspiracy.…”

While TV commentators once more rushed to reassure a shocked nation, Hughes began to conspire. He reached for his bedside legal pad and, while Kennedy’s life still hung in the balance, wrote:

“It seems to me that this particular moment in the historical passage of time may be the very most ideal to launch our anti-anti-trust campaign.

“In other words, I cannot imagine another time, if we waited a year, when public sentiment will ever again be so violently and passionately focused on the need for measures to control crime.

“Surely this is the truely perfect background to support our appeal to the criminal division of Justice, pointing to what we have already done in clearing the atmosphere here, and the extreme disadvantage of permitting the Anti-Trust Division to jeopardize this unique opportunity, which in all likelyhood, will never again be available—that is to say, the opportunity, with the public aroused as it presently is, of eliminating completely force and violence as significant factors bearing on the way of life in this community.

“Bob, I urge you contact Justice at once. I just dont want you to miss the opportunity of mobilizing this intense feeling.”

A golden opportunity to get on with his Monopoly game in Las Vegas. That was all the assassination meant to him. At first. But Hughes maintained his TV vigil for almost twenty-six hours while Kennedy clung to life, and by the time Bobby died he had come to see the deeper meaning of the tragedy.

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