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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 Ferguson rescinded his edict.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.")