Howard Hughes
The Innovator
Who was Howard Hughes? There are many answers. But through all his shifting activities he remained a riverboat gambler with a bottomless pot of money and a habit of doing as he liked. We remember him as a Hollywood playboy whose exploits made the papers almost daily—and as a recluse who hid from his closest associates. During a decades-long involvement with aviation he built a record-breaking racing plane that the Army Air Corps declined to purchase and an enormous flying boat that flew only once. Yet his life also held many solid achievements. While his final years as a deranged hermit have come to dominate the public’s memory, in his prime Howard Hughes was a genuine innovator during several successive eras of aviation and filmmaking.
He sponsored the Lockheed Constellation, an outstanding airliner that set the pace in commercial aviation until the coming of jetliners. At the firm he founded, Hughes Aircraft Company, the scientists Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge led the U.S. Air Force into the era of electronics. Another of that company’s managers, Harold Rosen, introduced the communications satellite in the form we use to this day. For all his achievements, Hughes does not fit the mold of a tinkerer-turned-tycoon who builds a corner store into a global corporation or of the inspirational leader who assembles and drives a brilliant staff through sheer force of personality. Still, in his unconventional way, he deserves the title of technological pioneer.
His father, Howard, Sr., was a technologist in his own right who made a fortune in oil—but as a manufacturer, not as a wildcatter. During the great Texas oil rush early in this century, drillers were often stymied because standard drills, shaped like a fishtail, wore out quickly when grinding through hard rock. Howard, Sr., invented a rotary drill bit with 166 cutting edges. It quickly became an industry standard. He did not sell these bits but leased them at $30,000 per well. Protected by patents, they formed the basis for his enormously successful Hughes Tool Company. When he died, in 1924, his orphaned only child was left in charge of the firm at the age of 18.
Young Howard had an uncle, the novelist Rupert Hughes, who was prospering as a screenwriter and director in Hollywood. Howard promptly set out for that city and drew on his family fortune to make movies as an independent producer. The first, Swell Hogan , was so bad that he decided not to release it. The second, Everybody’s Acting , succeeded at the box office and covered his expenses. The third was Two Arabian Knights , starring William Byrd (who later became Hopalong Cassidy of B-movie fame) and Mary Astor. It won an Academy Award for 1927-28 (best comedy director, Lewis Milestone—who decades later would direct Ocean’s Eleven , the first Rat Pack movie). The success left Hughes in a mood for bolder forays.
He had already discovered flying. Now he decided to direct and produce Hell’s Angels , an epic about World War I air combat. He sank more than two million dollars into the effort, including assembling a private air force of 45 planes and airships. Then came Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer , and talkies were suddenly the rage. Hell’s Angels was ready for release, but it was a silent film, and Hughes would have to reshoot much of it.
He needed a new leading lady; Greta Nissen, his original star, had a strong Norwegian accent and wouldn’t do. He found what he wanted in the teenaged Jean Harlow, the first of movieland’s platinum blondes and certainly one of Hughes’s greatest inventions. Hell’s Angels launched her career as a star.
Off-screen, however, Hughes’s troubles were multiplying. His first wife, Ella Rice (a member of the Houston family that had endowed Rice University), divorced him in 1929 after four and a half years of marriage, taking a settlement that would cost $1.25 million. Then the stock market crashed. Hughes calmly went on shooting, even adding a few rudimentary color sequences.
Finally, in 1930, with nearly four million dollars spent—making Hell’s Angels the most expensive film up to that time—the movie reached the theaters. It did well but took years to cover Hughes’s expenses. Neither this nor the divorce settlement nor the Depression bothered Hughes much, for the Hughes Tool Company, which he owned outright, was still gushing money. His next success, Scarface (1932), starred Paul Muni in the role of a thinly disguised Al Capone. When a New York State censorship board refused its approval, Hughes shocked the film industry by suing the board. He eventually forced it to back down. By then Hughes had produced about a dozen movies, including the original (1931) film version of The Front Page .
Then, with Hollywood at his feet, he shifted careers and took a major plunge into aviation. He started in 1932 by working as a co-pilot for American Airways, a job that included such tasks as handling passengers’ baggage. He used an assumed name, and people sometimes remarked on how much he looked like Howard Hughes. Then, dropping his secret identity, he obtained an Air Corps fighter plane and won an air race with it in Miami early in 1934. This success fired his ambitions anew. He had made the world’s best aviation film; now he would build the world’s best airplane.
He held no engineering degree, and he lacked experience at the drawing board or on the shop floor. But he could hire people who had this background, and he knew enough to respond intelligently to the best technical suggestions. While the Depression had put many good plane builders on short rations, Hughes had money to burn. He pulled together a picked group of designers, engineers, and mechanics that he called the Hughes Aircraft Company. His plane, which became known as the H-1, skillfully synthesized such existing ideas, introducing fully retractable landing gear and rivets set flush with the fuselage to reduce drag. Hughes flew the H-1 to a world speed record of 352 miles per hour in September 1935.
He then rebuilt it to carry enough gasoline for a cross-country flight. In January 1937 he flew from Los Angeles to Newark in seven and a half hours, setting a record that would hold up for seven years until Hughes himself broke it. This feat won him the Harmon Trophy, awarded to the world’s best aviator. He also met with President Roosevelt at the White House. But when he tried to pitch his designs to the Army Air Corps, he found no interest. The plane was speedy enough but lacked features that would have made it suitable for combat.
By now even the United States was too small to contain Hughes’s vaulting ambitions. He bought a two-engine plane from Lockheed and flew it around the world in less than four days. This accomplishment, in mid-1938, won him a congressional medal, the Collier Trophy for progress in aviation, and a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City.
Hughes had reached pinnacles of success in two vastly different enterprises. Daring and bold as he was, though, he was also painfully shy. Collier ’s magazine described him as “self-conscious with strangers and reticent with intimates.” He felt out of place at parties: “When standing he inclines his head out and down and looks at the ground. Seated, he clasps his hands between his wide-spread knees and stares at his knuckles.”
He also had a strong phobia about germs, which had drawn encouragement from his mother’s robust emphasis on cleanliness. When he learned in the mid-1950s that he had caught syphilis, Hughes stuffed the whole of his wardrobe and bed linens into padlocked canvas bags and ordered them burned. He then scrubbed his home from top to bottom with strong lye soap.
In time his shyness would ripen into reclusiveness, and his obsession with germs would broaden into utterly debilitating mental illness. But that all lay in the future. In the late 1930s, and for many years thereafter, what counted was his keen mind. Robert Rummel, who became his senior technical manager, recalls Hughes’s “consummate, unquenchable interest in airplane design. His questions concerning broad design concepts as well as details were crisp, comprehensive, and usually exasperatingly detailed. He wanted to know everything.”
Hughes made another bold move in 1939 when he purchased control of a major airline, TWA ( Transcontinental and Western Air, later changed to Trans World Airways). Its president, Jack Frye, was in deep trouble over plans for a new aircraft, the Boeing Stratoliner. Frye wanted to place an order for these planes, but the nation’s economy was in a slump, and TWA had been losing money. Its chairman, John Hertz of Lehman Brothers, had refused to release the funds for this purchase.
To raise cash, Frye offered to sell some of TWA’s air routes to Hughes to be leased back to TWA. Characteristically, Hughes upped the ante, saying, “Why don’t we buy TWA?” He purchased 12 percent of the airline’s stock, giving him an interest as large as that of Hertz and Lehman. Now, with Hughes’s support, Frye took charge and challenged Hertz to a proxy fight—a shareholder’s election to decide if Hertz should remain chairman. Hertz, having no wish to pursue the matter, caved in. Hughes then bought more stock and told Frye to go ahead with the Stratoliner.
The Stratoliner was an early effort in the new field of four-engine airliners. Douglas Aircraft, the nation’s leading builder of commercial airplanes, was preparing its own entry, the DC-4, and was winning interest from United and American Airlines. Yet it offered a very unspectacular design. Its cruising speed, 200 mph, would merely match that of the Stratoliner. Its cabin would be unpressurized, limiting it to low and stormy altitudes that made passengers airsick.
Hughes expected to go much further. In 1939 he and Frye developed a concept for a fourengine airliner that would be advanced indeed. Hughes would gladly have used his own plane builders, but now that he controlled TWA, federal law prohibited him from building equipment for his own airline. He had purchased his world-circling plane from Lockheed, and now Frye approached that firm. The airplane that emerged was the Lockheed Constellation.
The key to its success lay in pressurizing the fuselage—sealing it so it could hold a comfortable internal pressure. The plane could then cruise at 20,000 feet, far above the turbulent weather. The rarefied air at that altitude would also substantially reduce drag. Yet the engines would still put out full power, for they would mount superchargers—compressors to provide them with all the air they needed. The plane could cruise at an impressive 275 mph, while its top speed of 340 mph would exceed that of contemporary fighter aircraft.
Two years after the Constellation’s design was decided, America went to war. The Army drafted the Constellation and the DC-4 into wartime service and quickly expressed a strong preference for the DC-4, which was farther along in development. It entered military use as the C-54 transport plane. The Constellation also enlisted for the duration, as the C-69. In April 1944 Lockheed arranged for a test flight, ostensibly to deliver its prototype to the Army. But Hughes, a consummate showman, stage-managed the event to suit his purposes. Having painted the plane in the vivid red of TWA, he and Frye flew it from Los Angeles to Washington in less than seven hours.
For Donald Douglas, builder of the DC-4, this flight presented a twofold challenge. It showed that the commercial Constellation could fly nonstop from coast to coast, something no other airliner could do. And the flight time stood a half-hour under that of Hughes’s 1937 transcontinental speed record. Douglas responded by reinventing the DC-4. New and more powerful engines would boost its cruising speed above 300 mph, topping the Constellation. These engines would also stretch the range. A pressurized cabin now was a necessity, and the cabin would also grow in length to accommodate more seats. The new plane was the DC-6.
The stage was set for one of the great rivalries in aeronautics. Douglas and Lockheed both had superb designs that could take advantage of continuing increases in the power of engines. During the subsequent decade each firm repeatedly introduced new and more capable models. Their competition defined the progress of airliners until the advent of jetliners.
Meanwhile, Hughes returned to Hollywood. He had made no movies since 1932, but in February 1943 he outraged the censors anew with The Outlaw , a tale of Billy the Kid. He introduced the buxom Jane Russell as Doc Holliday’s girlfriend Rio. The film had been shot in 1940 and 1941 and featured what an obituary of Hughes called “greater exposure of Miss Russell than was customary.” As he had done with Scarface , Hughes milked the ensuing censorship controversy for the maximum possible publicity. A toned-down version was released in 1946.
He also sought greater prominence for Hughes Aircraft, working during the war to build new facilities and shoulder part of the national effort. At the outset he decided that the aircraft of the future would be built of plywood, not aluminum. As problems cropped up with aluminum construction, Hughes and others looked back to the proven technology of the 1920s. He pinned his hope on a newly patented process that bonded thin sheets of plywood to a wooden frame. He used this process as the basis for the design of a fast twin-engine bomber, the D-2, which he pitched to the War Department. Its officials showed no interest, for they strongly preferred aluminum. Indeed, they dismissed Hughes Aircraft out of hand.
An internal War Department memo, written in early 1943, concluded “that the plane is a hobby of the management and that the present project now being engineered is a waste of time.” Though harsh, this assessment was close to the mark. Howard Hughes wanted to build new aircraft and contribute to the war effort, but he wanted to do it his own way. While Hughes Aircraft was more than a hobby, it was definitely an extension of its founder’s ego. (Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft did make important contributions by building components of planes.)
Hughes found a new opportunity in a partnership with the shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser. Kaiser had introduced assembly-line methods to achieve amazingly rapid production of the Liberty ship, a standard cargo freighter. Nevertheless, German submarines took a heavy toll on Allied shipping during 1942. Kaiser, as ebullient as Hughes, responded by proposing to build a vast fleet of flying boats, enormous aircraft that would cruise high above the danger.
The view was far less sanguine in Washington, where federal officials were ready to ignore their plans outright. Political considerations intervened, for Kaiser had a solid record of success in shipbuilding, while Hughes carried the glamour and hope of aviation. Supporters claimed that their plan could win the war. Buoyed by popular enthusiasm, which drew again on Hughes’s skill at public relations, the partners won an $18 million contract to build three flying freighters.
The design called for an airplane with a wingspan of 320 feet, a record that stands to this day. Its weight of 200 tons made it nearly three times as heavy as any other aircraft in existence. Hughes Aircraft had no background with flying boats of any size, but Howard Hughes nevertheless proposed not just to build this behemoth but to draw on his experience with the D-2 by Grafting it of wood. As a result, it became known as the Spruce Goose , even though most of the wood in it was plastic-impregnated birch.
Time passed and the Goose refused to hatch. Hughes spent much of the allotted funds with little to show for it, and the government responded by moving to cancel his contract. In February 1944 Hughes hurried to Washington, lobbied furiously, and won the right to build a single prototype. At war’s end it was still far from finished, but in November 1947 the leviathan was finally ready for testing. With Hughes at the controls and plenty of newsmen in attendance, it skimmed across Long Beach Harbor. Hughes lifted it into the air, reached an altitude of 70 feet, and flew for less than a mile before setting it back down. The Goose never flew again, but for the rest of his life Hughes kept it in a hangar, where he cherished it as the largest of his many trophies.
The D-2 went through a similar cycle of hype followed by disappointment. Hughes modified its design, changed its construction from wood to aluminum, and won a contract to build a hundred copies in a photoreconnaissance version, the XF-H. Again the war ended before production could begin; again the War Department canceled his contract and left him with no more than a handful of prototypes. Then in July 1946, when Hughes once more indulged the urge to be his own test pilot, his XF-11 crashed and nearly killed him.
He had now built four airplanes—the H-1, D-2, XF-11, and Spruce Goose —with none of them reaching production, even during the wartime aviation boom. His Constellation was on its way to a brilliant success, but he had left that in the hands of the experienced professionals at Lockheed. If Hughes Aircraft was ever to amount to anything in its own right, he would have to build it up on merit in the face of a severe contraction in the aviation market.
Despite his eccentric ways, Hughes had an inner solidity, an ability to attract good people and to pursue good ideas. After the war he drew on this native talent to steer Hughes Aircraft into another new area, military electronics. This decision reflected his keen eye for promising directions in technology. Air Force Gen. Elwood Quesada, who later headed the Federal Aviation Administration, said that Hughes was the first corporate head to realize that military aircraft would need lots more than the pilot. During the war a number of scientists and engineers had worked on radar, fire control (the aiming and firing of a plane’s weapons by electronic means), and automated systems for the military. They now faced a postwar world where they might have to work in the civilian market, building television and hi-fi equipment. In the postwar aviation slump, as in the Depression, Hughes found talented people easy to hire. He was famous, rich, and smart, and he was giving them a chance to continue pursuing their wartime interests. With Pentagon support dropping rapidly, few firms cared to compete with him.
The first thing he needed was a chief scientist. In April 1946 he hired Simon Ramo, who had built a strong reputation at General Electric. Ramo brought in Dean Wooldridge, who had been one of the top people at Bell Labs. Hughes also assembled a stellar team of senior managers: Gen. Ira Eaker, the Air Force’s deputy commander; Gen. Harold L. George, head of the wartime Air Transport Command; and Charles (“Tex”) Thornton, who would go on to build Litton Industries as a leading conglomerate.
They started with a small Air Force grant to study fire control. This quickly blossomed into an eight-million-dollar contract to build fire-control systems for a new interceptor, the Lockheed F-94. Hughes’s scientists took another study contract, dealing with guidance systems for an air-to-air weapon, and parlayed it into the highly successful Falcon missile. Fitted with onboard radar, it successfully homed in on target airplanes even in its earliest tests.
Then, in 1950, in a major coup, Hughes Aircraft defeated General Electric, Westinghouse, and a number of leading airframe manufacturers in a competition for fire and navigational control in the F-102 fighter. By then the nation was again at war, in Korea, and the Air Force needed all the advanced electronics it could get. With its early head start, Hughes Aircraft walked away with a virtual monopoly.
The rapidly growing company needed Hughes’s close attention. This requirement clashed strongly with his personal style. He enjoyed the glamorous parts of his ventures—flying fast planes and directing films. But when it came to finance and administration, he was anything but a hands-on corporate leader, preferring to go off for long periods and leave his associates dangling. He had been doing this for years. When he told Jack Frye that he would buy control of TWA, he went away on his yacht and couldn’t be reached for advice on how much to pay for the stock. In later years, when Frye tried to reach him by phone, he would go for weeks without returning a call, even when the matter in question involved millions of dollars.
His other quirks were flourishing. He was often rumpled and disheveled, postponing haircuts for as long as possible in a decidedly crew-cut era. He slept little, and when he made phone calls, it was often at two or three in the morning. He made business appointments in out-of-the-way places, at night, and if he showed up at all, he would be as much as two hours late. Irrelevant details obsessed him. In designing a passenger plane, for example, he became so absorbed with the galley that all work on the engines was held up for months. The crash of his XF-11 had left him in considerable pain, and his doctor responded with increasingly large doses of morphine, later switching him to codeine. It was the beginning of a serious drug addiction. Advanced syphilis also caused his mental state to deteriorate.
The first major quarrel with his managers took place when Hughes Aircraft won the F-102 contract. A large expansion of staff and facilities would be required, and Howard Hughes insisted that it take place in Las Vegas. He owned land there and hoped to dodge California state taxes, but Ramo and Wooldridge knew that they could not attract good specialists to work in what was then a city of honky-tonks. They protested vigorously and eventually persuaded Hughes to enlarge the existing plant in Culver City, near Los Angeles. He then vanished. Soon after, when Harold George was waiting impatiently for an important decision, Hughes responded by demanding a detailed accounting of sales of candy bars in the company’s vending machines. On another occasion George received a directive concerning seat covers for company-owned cars. At the same time, since Hughes refused to be fingerprinted, he never received the security clearance he needed to learn about Ramo’s top-secret work.
A buyout could have refreshed the firm with committed leadership, and Hughes received an attractive offer from Lockheed, but he rejected it, vowing he would never sell. In August 1953 Ramo and Wooldridge decided they’d had enough and handed in their resignations. This sparked an exodus of talent that included George, Thornton, the directors of production and of research and development, the sales manager, and 16 senior staffers who had made up an advisory council.
Hoping to save the situation, Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott flew out in September and bluntly told Hughes to shape up. Chastened, Hughes put the company in the hands of an executive board with authority to make major decisions entirely on its own. This gave new life to the firm. Freed from Hughes’s peculiarities, it would now come into its own as a major defense contractor.
The peculiarities ranged beyond Hughes Aircraft. They also affected his ill-starred ownership of a movie studio. Between 1933 and the end of World War II, Hughes had made only one film, The Outlaw . Between late 1945 and early 1948 he collaborated with the famed director Preston Sturges on two unsuccessful films: The Sin of Harold Diddlebeck (later retitled Mad Wednesday ) and Vendetta . Then in May 1948 he purchased control of RKO Pictures for $8.83 million. Within months his high-handed decisions had brought the resignation of RKO’s president and its studio chief, the highly regarded Dore Schary. Production plummeted. RKO had released 28 movies the year before Hughes bought it but made only 11 in 1952. The staff fell from 2,000 in 1948 to around 500 four years later, while losses approached $20 million over the same period. RKO still held valuable rights to old movies that could be shown on television, and Hughes finally sold the film division of the company for $25 million in 1955.
Through all these corporate dramas, Hughes Tool Company continued to spout cash, and he retained control of his crown jewel, TWA. The jet age was at hand, and during 1956 he placed orders totaling some $400 million for jet airliners and engines. This was the largest purchase in the history of commercial aviation, and Hughes expected to pay for it by relying on his personal assets. But all profits from Hughes Aircraft were earmarked for a medical foundation Hughes had established in 1955, and Noah Dietrich—his chief financial officer and the most knowledgeable of his lieutenants—insisted that the cash flow of Hughes Tool would not be enough. Howard Hughes would have to arrange outside financing. He refused to do this, fearing loss of his absolute control, and as their disagreements grew in intensity, Dietrich resigned. He had worked for Hughes since 1925, but now he too had had enough.
Then Hughes Tool went into a slump as an oil glut brought a falloff in drilling. In June 1959, unable to pay for some of the Boeing 707s he had ordered, Hughes sold six of them to his principal rival, Pan American World Airways. In October, facing imminent bills for the delivery of Convair 880 airliners, he sent armed guards into the plant to prevent workers from completing their assembly. Since he was one of Convair’s biggest customers, the company made no attempt to oppose him.
These measures addressed the immediate problems, but in 1960 he finally had to seek $165 million in financing. Negotiations were in a delicate stage in July, when Hughes provoked a disagreement with the president of TWA, Charles Thomas, who promptly resigned. Thomas, a former Secretary of the Navy, had held the confidence of Wall Street, and when he left, financiers stiffened the terms they would offer to Hughes. Now, to receive his loan, he would have to sur- render control of TWA to a voting trust controlled by his lenders, much as he had given up control of Hughes Aircraft in 1953. Hughes delayed accepting this as long as possible, but he knew the alternative was bankruptcy for TWA. On the last day of 1960, the airline’s operations passed out of his hands. Nothing could have been more galling to him.
By then Hughes was entering the full throes of his madness. Facing business pressures during the late 1950s, he lived for a time in a room used for showing movies. He talked lucidly and at length on the telephone with bankers and lawyers, but he also spent hours rearranging Kleenex boxes in various patterns. Prolonged use of codeine had brought on severe constipation, and he sometimes sat on the toilet continuously for as long as 26 hours.
His fear of germs was ever-present. To avoid them, he wrote out memoranda several pages long that set forth protocols for such matters as opening a can of fruit or taking an item from a cabinet. He spent hours cleaning his telephone. For a time he consumed only milk, Hershey bars, pecans, and bottled water, which an aide delivered each day in a brown paper bag and presented in a formal ritual.
He wore the same white shirt and brown slacks for weeks until one day he set them aside and went about naked. In 1958 he suffered an outright breakdown, throwing tantrums and babbling incoherently. He had married the actress Jean Peters, a long-time friend, in 1957. She stayed with Hughes through all his troubles until 1966, when she refused to move to Las Vegas with him. They were divorced in 1971.
Yet amid his obsessions and his drugs, he retained a keen mind that continued to deal coherently with the business matters that concerned him. He also had no shortage of flunkies to cater to his whims. These were generally former truck drivers and construction workers, blue-collar types who knew very well that by ministering to Hughes, they could assure themselves of lavish salaries and expense allowances. In this fashion, and with plenty of support from lawyers and accountants, Hughes made his way through the 1960s.
During that decade his mind, his health, and his appearance continued to deteriorate. He ate little; though more than six feet tall, he weighed less than 100 pounds. His hair rolled down his back, his beard trailed onto his chest, and his toenails were so long that they curled up. On many days the most he could do was travel between his bed and the bathroom. He seldom washed, and his surroundings grew exceedingly foul.
He nevertheless remained a man to reckon with. He bought a controlling interest in Northeast Airlines in 1962 and held it until 1964. He also fought doggedly in the courts to retake control of TWA. This effort failed, but the airline prospered under its new management, which caused its stock to rise sharply. Hughes owned 78 percent of the outstanding shares, and when he sold them in 1966, following the failure of his attempts to retake control, he walked away with a check for $546,549,771. In 1969 he bought Air West after a lawsuit forced the approval of a reluctant board of directors. It was no more than a regional carrier, but it brought many gamblers to Las Vegas, where his interests had burgeoned. Renamed Hughes AirWest, the airline remained part of his empire until his death.
Yet the biggest success came from a part of his empire that he no longer controlled. At Hughes Aircraft, Harold Rosen had introduced the communications satellite in the form we use to this day. Bell Labs had laid the groundwork by building Telstar , the first such spacecraft, and launching it during 1962. But Telstar flew in low orbit, which was easy to reach. Rosen wanted to use geosynchronous orbit, at an altitude of 22,300 miles. This would allow a satellite to turn with the globe every 24 hours, thereby staying above the same spot on earth. Rosen’s first spacecraft, the experimental Syncom , reached this high orbit in February 1963. The first true commercial satellite, Early Bird , went up two years later. Just as Hughes Aircraft had grabbed an early lead in military electronics after the war, so this venture opened vast opportunities as the world looked toward the routine use of commercial communications satellites. The firm went on to establish itself during the 1970s as the world’s leading builder of such spacecraft.
Though Howard Hughes had deteriorated alarmingly by then, only a few of his closest aides knew the full details, and they weren’t talking. To the nation at large, and to most people within his corporations, he remained a mystery man, a recluse who was rich beyond belief, pulling strings behind the scenes and ready, perhaps, to astound the world at any moment by drawing a billion-dollar rabbit from his hat. His secretiveness, his wealth, and his mystique all suited the CIA, which had secrets of its own.
The floor of the Pacific Ocean is carpeted with nodules, football-sized and smaller, that are rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt, and copper. These metals appeared ripe for the taking, and Hughes Tool contracted with the Los Angeles firm of Global Marine, Inc., to build a large deep-ocean drilling ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer , with the announced intent of launching seabed mining as a major new industry.
Experts questioned whether such mining was economically feasible, but Hughes Tool’s involvement stilled the doubts. In fact the company was acting as a front for the CIA, which was aware of Hughes’s faltering condition but continued to draw on his remaining sparks of lucidity. A Soviet submarine had sunk 750 miles northeast of Hawaii in 1968, and intelligence agents hoped to raise it, thereby recovering its nuclear warheads, code books, and weapons manuals. The Glomar Explorer was useless for economical ocean mining, but after its completion in 1972, it indeed found the sunken sub and tried to raise it with a grapnel. When the sub broke in two, the ship salvaged what it could.
Hughes could still be rational at times; as late as 1972 he held a press conference, talking with reporters by telephone for two and a half hours while disparaging a faked autobiography of him that was about to be published. But his health, appearance, and demeanor grew ever more desperate until death finally claimed him in April 1976.
How, then, can we sum up Howard Hughes, this rare mix of money, talent, and psychosis? At his best, before 1950, he was far more than a venture capitalist putting up funds to support other people’s work. He had ideas in his own right, good ones, and he won the involvement of highly capable people. In this fashion he gave a valuable push to commercial aviation, led the Air Force into a new era of electronics, and built Hughes Aircraft as a major firm.
But his people did well only when he left them alone. When he became personally involved in running his companies, his quirks and obsessions came to the forefront, and they cost him control of Hughes Aircraft, RKO, and TWA.
Hughes worked in an era of large opportunities, when aviation and electronics were expanding into new realms. It was a time when corporations could still belong to their owners, not to stockholders with cautious boards of directors, and when a man like Hughes could still be a generalist. Building on his father’s company, he expanded by turns into movies, aviation, and electronics, and in each of these areas he did memorable and even pathbreaking work. Though Howard Hughes long ago became pegged in the popular mind as an eccentric recluse, there remains a grandeur about him.
