Thanks for the heads up Alex. Thought it was a pretty even-handed report considering it was from CBS. I read Maheu's book Next To Hughes last winter and indeed, this is how Bob portrays events. Couple of extra details though, carrying all that cash in those circumstances gave Maheu the heebi-jeebies. Not his idea of a good move but when the Great Man speaks... Hughes was taking a hammering on the casino buys but to a greater extent regulatory bodies were hunting for his head on his airline business deals and were a major source of grief for him. His idea by hiring O'brien was a stab at buying the whole Kennedy political machine to find favor in D.C. and seeing what success he could have getting close to a President. Of course his dementia was getting worse and his major thrust when Nixon came along was stopping nucular testing in Nevada. His reasoning on that was never too clear as he was slipping away from the real world about that time. As brillant as H.H. was, Maheu never leads us to believe that geopolitics was anything that occupied Hughes on any level so he missed the point of the testing.

The book has an interesting tale about events concerning Maheu, the CIA and mobsters in a scheme to assasinate Castro. Maheu already had gangland contacts when he and Howard rolled into Las Vegas. Glad to see Mr. Maheu looking as good as he did in the interview!