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Watergate

Howard Hughes link to Watergate stacks of newspaper article
Images sourced from jfk.hood.edu

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested and charged with attempted burglary and intercepting telephone communications — planting wiretaps. It happened at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. The building was called the Watergate. Thus did a major scandal begin, culminating in Richard Nixon resigning as president. Now, Nixon had a Nevada connection: his wife, Pat, had been born in Ely. But was Watergate connected to Las Vegas? The best guess is, yes.

To understand why requires something like a flow chart. We’ll try to provide it. Let’s start with Howard Hughes. A lot of you know the story about him moving to Las Vegas in 1966. A decade before, he lent money to Nixon’s brother Donald, and it didn’t make the Nixon family look good. After Hughes moved into the Desert Inn’s penthouse, he got involved in politics here. He also gave money directly to Donald Nixon’s brother Richard, including when he ran for president in 1968. Apparently, Hughes also made a similar donation to his opponent, Hubert Humphrey. Among other things, Hughes hoped they would stop atomic testing, which he disliked. That didn’t happen.

Understandably, since he had a lot of business interests, Hughes employed lawyers and lobbyists. One of them was Larry O’Brien.

He had worked in the White House for John Kennedy, and he was later the NBA commissioner. In between, he also was chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which was housed in the Watergate building. The theories about why the break-in happened include trying to find out what O’Brien might know about the Hughes-Nixon connection.

But there’s more to Nevada’s role, and it’s tied to Hughes. When he moved here, one of the figures involved was Hank Greenspun, who owned the Las Vegas Sun. He encouraged Hughes’s arrival and actions as good for business. But Hughes eventually fell out with his number two guy, Bob Maheu. Maheu ended up suing Hughes, as did Greenspun. Along the way, in 1970, Maheu gave Greenspun copies of memos that Hughes had given him. Hughes and Maheu never met. Hughes communicated with him on the phone or in memos written on legal pads. Greenspun put the memos in his office safe.

If you read the Sun section inside the Review-Journal, you may know that Brian Greenspun continues a tradition his father started … of turning over their “Where I Stand” column each August to a variety of community members while the usual author is on vacation. In August 1972, that’s what Hank Greenspun did. One day that month, Greenspun’s longtime assistant, Ruthe Deskin, went into his office. She found the window jimmied open and the front of the safe partly off.

This happened about two months after the Watergate break-in … and a year after Greenspun had asked a White House press official about money that Hughes had given to Nixon. That information wasn’t in the memos, but somebody appears to have wanted to find out for sure. According to Hank Greenspun, Sam Dash, the chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, told him those memos were what led to Watergate.

Nevada being tied to the scandal that all others are compared to? Who would have thought it!