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."