Next to Hughes: Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes by His Closest Advisor

Robert Maheu – 1992

Like most autobiographies, Robert Maheu’s Next to Hughes has to be taken with a grain of salt and cannot be relied upon as good history, but is primarily of interest for the often unintentional clues it offers about its subject’s true nature.  Those moments are rare in Maheu’s book.  Written “with” the aptly named Richard Hack, the prose is so bland and impersonal that I tend to assume it was really written entirely by Hack based on notes taken during interviews with Maheu.  Maheu’s story is fascinating and that makes it worth reading for its own sake, but there is no analysis, no reflection, no particular insights except for one summing-up paragraph at the end; a kind of “this-is-the-moral-of-the-story” platitude that’s a little too pious to be convincing.  Maheu was either at or near the epicenter of a remarkable amount of major political stories in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  His work as a corporate intelligence consultant – providing, as he put it, a service to the business world similar to what the CIA did for the U.S. government – brought him in contact with the most powerful men in America, both below and above the law; J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and most closely, Howard Hughes.  Maheu was chief-of-operations for the reclusive billionaire for about a decade, never meeting him face-to-face and always communicating via memo and telephone.  While he had a nondescript, business-like demeanor, Maheu was a rather brilliant schemer who bore some influence over two critical scandals of his time; the Bay of Pigs invasion during the Kennedy administration and the Watergate affair, which drove Nixon from office.  Through it all, he also found time to buy up half of Las Vegas on Hughes’ behalf, hold summits with President Johnson to request an end to nuclear weapons testing in Nevada, and conspire with the CIA on (among other things) the assassination of Fidel Castro.  He had friends in every corner and it was generally understood – by Nixon and the CIA – that he was the ideal person to bring together a coalition of U.S. intelligence, business concerns and the criminal underworld to wage the secret war against Castro that lasted from the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency to soon after JFK’s death.  What does Maheu himself have to say about all these things?  Almost nothing, which is why a journalistic biography would be much preferable to this whitewashed, self-serving version of events.  Maheu died in 2008 and to the end he always portrayed himself as a patriotic American businessman who modestly put his skills to use for some powerful men but never understood the depths or origins of his assignments and was certainly never the Machiavellian genius he has been made out to be.  This is simply not credible, of course.  Men like Nixon, Hoover and Hughes do not spend time and money courting a man who is just drifting through history; they wanted him because he had a flair for lateral thinking, for putting the right people together, and – as evidenced by his almost useless autobiography – for secrecy.