Duel under the Klieg Lights

More than 1,200 sweating spectators had squeezed into the humid, marble-walled caucus room of the Senate Office Building. Before them klieg lights glared; six movie cameras were trained on one vacant chair. Michigan's Senator Homer Ferguson, a man with a reputation as a prosecutor, stood behind a little forest of microphones and an underbrush of wires, and kept his eyes trained on the main door.

Howard Hughes, the Hollywood playboy and planemaker, about whom the public had heard very much but actually knew very little, was late for his date with the Senate War Investigating subcommittee. Sensing the crowd's restiveness, Homer Ferguson announced reassuringly: "Mr. Hughes will be here." The hubbub quieted.

Fifteen minutes later Howard Hughes eased himself through a packed aisle. There was scattered applause and, like a seasoned jnovie star, he turned to nod to the spectators. They saw a lank, dark-mustached man in a rumpled, ill-fitting grey suit, his scrawny neck sticking out of a too-large collar. He did not look like a formidable adversary for Maine's portly, assured Owen Brewster. It was because of Senator Brewster, the chairman of the committee, that Howard Hughes was there. For two weeks they had shot at each other in the newspapers. Now their duel was to be resumed under oath.

"I Charge Specifically." The technical purpose of the inquiry was to find out, if possible, why the Government had not yet--two years after the war--got any return whatever on the $18 million it invested in Howard Hughes's mammoth wooden flying boat; and why it had received only one unusable aircraft for the $22 million it sank in Hughes's XF-11 photo-reconnaissance plane. But there was another more pressing point, and Senator Brewster went rapidly to it.

He hoped that "no undue delicacy will delay our taking up ... things of a more personal character." With no delicacy whatever, Hughes launched into his accusation. "I charge specifically that during a luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel [in Washington] in the week beginning Feb. 10, 1947, in the suite of Senator Brewster, that the Senator told me in so many words that if I would agree to merge Trans World Airline [which Hughes controls by owning 46% of its stock] with Pan American and would go along with his community airline bill, there would be no further hearings in this matter."

Hughes went on to tell of "certain events" which followed a breakdown of discussions for a merger of his T.W.A. with Juan Trippe's Pan American. He said that the Senate subcommittee's assistant counsel, Francis Flanagan, bobbed up at Hughes's office and "started getting very tough about this investigation. ... It was quite apparent to me that this was the application of the screws on me. . . ."

Then, said Hughes, he telephoned Juan Trippe and the Pan Am chief had flown to California. "I asked him what he would do about Senator Brewster. He said he would ask him to hold up the investigation and also try to delay hearings on the community air bill with the hope that we might get together on both matters."

"So Bald a Proposition." That was the sum of Hughes's charges --for the time being. It was Owen Brewster's turn. He plunged right in: "It is inconceivable to me that anyone could seriously contemplate that anyone who has been in public life as long as I have--in the State Legislature, as Governor, in the House and Senate--could, on such short acquaintance and in one short meeting, make so bald a proposition as he describes. It sounds a little more like Hollywood than Washington. I can assure you that I never did."

Bald Owen Brewster had his own series of events to relate and he spent more than an hour detailing them as Hughes hitched at his garterless socks, drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, cupped a hand to his deaf ear, and scowled at committee documents which the Senator offered as evidence.

Brewster reminded his listeners that the committee first got interested in inquiring into Hughes's big flying boat back in 1942, when Harry Truman headed the committee. He recited Army and War Production Board objections to it. As for pressures to drop the inquiry, it was Hughes himself who had come to him soon after he (Brewster) had been made the committee's chairman when the Republicans reorganized Congress last January. "He [Hughes] said he wanted a hearing right now." It was Hughes who had brought up "the matter of a possible merger involving Pan American--I hadn't heard of it before. Of what happened between Mr. Hughes and Mr. Trippe, I have no knowledge."

"A Trap for Me." The Senator got in strong, specific denials. "Not a word" had been said at the Mayflower luncheon about calling off the investigation. Then Brewster sprang his own sensation: the strong implication that Hughes had tried to scare him off the investigation. Brewster said that Hugh Fulton, onetime chief counsel of the committee (under Harry Truman) and later one of Hughes's lawyers, came to him "as a friend of Howard Hughes and a friend of mine." Hugh Fulton, said Brewster, suggested that the investigation might turn out to be a hot potato for the Senator. That, said Brewster, incensed him so much that he called in his stenographer and had her take down his scorching retort in Fulton's presence.

The Senator's voice broke and he seemed close to tears as he said: "They were seeking to lay a trap for me." Brewster recovered his control and closed on a stentorian note: "Let the chips fall where they may. I cannot and will not yield to a campaign of this character."

Quite a Few. According to the rules laid down by the committee, neither of the duelists was to have the chance to cross-examine the other. But when Brewster was finished and Senator Ferguson asked Hughes if he had any questions, the flyer snapped: "Yes--200 to 500 of them." If the committee had not sensed it before, here was conclusive evidence that unexpectedly pugnacious Howard Hughes believed firmly in the maxim that the best defense is a good offense. Senator Ferguson told him to put his questions in writing.

Next day, after a night of consultation with his lawyer and Manhattan Pressagent Carl Byoir, Hughes turned up at the hearing room with a fat bundle of notes in his pocket. He began reading: "Senator Brewster's story is a pack of lies and I can tear it to pieces if I am allowed to cross-examine." Senator Ferguson, his patience wearing thin, turned to the press table and said, sotto voce: "He's a hard man to be nice to."

But Howard Hughes roared on, demanding "equal rights," and got a big hand from the audience. With that, red-faced Homer Ferguson ordered the room cleared of all but reporters and cameramen.

Senate guards moved forward uncertainly, and one asked the Senator who was to be removed. "Whoever demonstrated," roared the Senator. Said the cop: "Well, sir, I guess that's everybody." Ferguson rescinded his edict.

Hughes took the offensive again. He charged that the investigation's motive was to smear Elliott Roosevelt. He put white-haired Noah Dietrich, vice president of the Hughes Tool Co., in the witness chair. Witness Dietrich gave his version of a conversation with Committee Investigator Flanagan in California last March. He said he told Flanagan:

"I think you are shooting at Elliott Roosevelt with a shotgun and Mr. Hughes might get hurt in the process. He [Flanagan] told me: 'We are shooting at him with a cannon.' He may have said a rifle or some other one-bullet weapon. What he was trying to convey was that it wasn't a scattergun they were using."

Investigator Flanagan, sitting nearby, reddened and asked for the chair. He said he had said no such things; any talk about Elliott or the Roosevelt family had been wholly Mr. Dietrich's.

"Very Modest." After more wrangling, Senator Brewster agreed to answer the 40-odd written questions which Hughes had brought along. Certainly, he knew Juan Trippe ("a very able man") and Pan Am's Vice President Sam Pryor ("a very close and gratifying friendship"). Yes, he had accepted a couple of Pan Am airplane rides--once when he was traveling on Senate business about the airline bill, once when he went down to Sam Pryor's "very modest bungalow-type house" at Florida's Kobe Sound, "in Senator Pepper's area." (Snorted Democrat Pepper, a committee member, "The kind of people who live [there] don't usually vote for me.")

Brewster went on chattily: "In Novemher, twice in the last two years, Mrs. Brewster and I have occupied for one week at Thanksgiving time this small place of five rooms. The Pryors were not there. I paid the cook $5 a day . . . bought groceries and the turkey. I left the place pretty well stocked up with canned goods." Yes, the Senator had accepted other Pan Am hospitality. He had had three breakfasts at the house on Washington's F Street which Pan Am maintains as its executives' headquarters. That house, said the Senator, is also "very modest," in contrast to T.W.A.'s "palace" in Arlington, Va. (a 20-room affair with eight bars, he said). He did not like to be critical of Pan Am, but he wished the committee would go and look at Pan Am's F Street place--"It has a toilet on the first floor that is always out of order . . . more than any other I know."

"Trick-Shot Artist." Back in the witness chair, Airman Hughes took off again. In scrawling longhand he had written a statement and he read it challengingly: "The public has witnessed two men getting up under oath and saying things which contradict each other. ... It stands to reason one of us is telling something which is not the truth. I have been reprimanded for using the word liar, so I shall try to avoid using the word.

"Nobody kicks around in this country without acquiring a reputation, good or bad. ... I may be a little unkind in what I have to say. . . . Brewster has been described to me as clever, resourceful, a terrific public speaker . . . one of the greatest trick-shot artists in Washington."

Then Texas-born Hughes went on to describe himself: "I'm supposed to be capricious, a playboy, eccentric, but I don't believe I have the reputation of a liar. For 23 years nobody has questioned my word. I think my reputation in that respect meets what most Texans consider important."

"Side Issues." Abruptly, Accuser Hughes attacked Senator Brewster because of a story which the Senator had given to the press--that a T.W.A. hostess had refused to travel alone in a plane with Hughes. The aviator produced an affidavit from Hostess Harriet Applewick. She called the Senator's remarks "ridiculous."

By now the hearing was getting considerably out of hand, and Ferguson was looking hard for some way to get it back on the track. At one point, exasperated by Hughes's free-swinging charges, he lectured the witness: "If you believe that because of your great wealth and access to certain channels of publicity you can take control over the committee, you are mistaken. ... It is apparent that you are trying to discredit one member . . . but your prime motive is to discredit the entire committee." Angrily, Ferguson added that there would be no more "side issues." By the end of that day, Hughes and Senator Brewster, facing each other across the table, decided to call quits to their feud.

"Army Hatred." The next day, Senator Brewster told newsmen that he regretted having brought up the story about the airline hostess. Then he quit the capital and flew off (in an American Airlines plane) to a vacation in Maine. But Howard Hughes was not through. He turned his guns on the Army. He and Noah Dietrich contended that it was "personal dislike" of Hughes by Major General Oliver Echols (wartime chief of Air Forces procurement) which blocked Hughes's efforts to speed building of the 200-ton "Hercules" and the XF-11 camera plane. And it was "Army hatred" of him, for his failures to kowtow to Army brass at Wright Field, said Hughes, that made him start spending for entertainment, as other airplane makers did.

Hearing the word "entertainment," Senator Ferguson grabbed at it with relief, looked around the packed room and shouted, "Where's Johnny Meyer?" Hughes said he didn't know, and laughed right in the Senator's face. Ferguson said grimly, "It isn't funny." He asked Hughes: "Will you bring Mr. Meyer in?" After a long pause Hughes replied coldly: "No, I don't think I will." The two men glared hard at each other, then Ferguson signed a subpoena for Expense Account Johnny.

From there until the weekend, Inquisitor Ferguson struggled with his bullheaded, shrewd, obstreperous witness. On his part, Planemaker Hughes put on a fancy performance in self-advancement, the sum of which was that, in effect, he had thought up many of the good planes the U.S. used in World War II--and the Japs had copied one for their Zero. Everybody welcomed the arrival of Saturday night. Some other Republican Congressmen still in Washington were beginning to get restive over the rowdy proceedings. Michigan's Senior Senator Arthur Vandenberg dropped in among the spectators on Saturday and did not appear to be entranced.

This week, with the hearing room once more jammed, with Hughes again primed for the witness chair, Senator Ferguson abruptly announced that the hearings had been postponed until November.

As the janitors moved in to sweep up, 41-year-old Howard Robard Hughes fired a parting blast: "When Senator Brewster saw he was fighting a losing battle against public opinion, he folded up and took a run-out powder . . . headed for the backwoods of Maine. There was no reason for the other Senators ... to continue his losing battle ... if he was too cowardly to stay here and face the music."

But Senators Ferguson and Brewster both said the hearings would be resumed. Then Senator Ferguson went off to Bethesda hospital, for treatment of a bad case of poison ivy.

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