Howard Hughes Quotes

Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.

I'm not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Goddamit, I'm a billionaire.

Musk comes off much more like Thomas Edison than Howard Hughes. He’s an inventor, celebrity businessman, and industrialist able to take big ideas and turn them into big products.

Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, The Titanic: how the might are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in AMerica is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. Is is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

The Howard Hughes thing hadn’t actually sounded like such a bad deal until about...oh, eight thirty-five this morning. Something about having his ex carry him to the bathroom and help him wash his balls just took all the fun out of becoming an eccentric recluse.

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Howard Hughes, like so many wealthy people, died in an asylum of his own making.

Jeanette once told me that video games and mainstream entertainment were like marketing tools for the confused and disconnected youth of America. She believed society and its moral center, its sense of propriety and right and wrong, black and white, had become so corrupted on a basic level that one day all decent people would become overwhelmed and disconnect from society in Howard Hughes fashion. You had to worry when someone as smart and inherently decent as Jeanette Miller began talking like that.

The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down.

It was speculated that a car manufacturing company like Ford, or a space or aircraft project like NASA’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory Project, or millionaires like the Rockefellers or Howard Hughes were secretly purchasing the land. One account even suggested the Mafia was buying land to launder ill-gotten gains or dump bodies in the swamps. However,

If you take big risks there are big rewards.

The advantage always favors the one who is trying to create fear, over the one who is trying to erase it.”87

I sleep. In this room. In the dark. I have a place I can sleep. I have a chair. That's just beautiful. Oh, yeah. I like the desert. It's hot there in the desert, but it's clean. It's clean.

I have my own religion. My conception of religion is being to the other fellow what you would like for him to be to you and do what you think is necessary to be the type of man that God could appreciate.

Howard got sex-crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab's Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty's yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes's--one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes Enterprises' fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself.

MOTHER GOOSE: Howdy, Chris! Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to have a chat with me! CHRIS COLFER: How did you get inside my house? MG: This is your house? Good lord, I thought we were in Queen Victoria's tearoom Has anyone ever told you that you decorate like an old woman? CC: As a matter of fact, I - Wait! Who are you? MG: Really Chris? Is that how you greet your favorite muse? CC: Oh my God. . . You're Mother Goose! This can't be real@ I must have hit my head or something! MG: As I said to Howard Hughes, no, you're not dreaming, I'm really here.

In the mid-thirties, a young black poet named Langston Hughes wrote a poem, "Let America Be America Again": . . . I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek- And finding only the same old stupid plan. Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. . . . O, let America be America again- The land that never has been yet- And yet must be-the land where every man is free. The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's ME- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again. Sure call me any ugly name you choose- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America! . . .

The hat-check girl wore her hair in a schoolgirl pageboy so you were meant to think of Dorothy Collins – all innocence, wide-eyed and breathless – but this was mock-innocent and she knew her business, a narrow waist and shapely hips, lovely full breasts thrust out and upward inside the black satin bodice probably by one of those wired contraptions Howard Hughes had allegedly invented, the strapless brassiere a marvel of American know-how defying gravity, invented for that busty film actress Jane Russell who was probably one of his mistresses. A thing like that must hurt as much as the high-heeled pointy-toed shoes, Lyle Stevick though, worse than the corsets poor Hannah wore, sighing and lacing herself up as if the flesh was something you had to carry around with you, not exactly you but your burden and responsibility.

Both the date of Lennon’s murder and the careful selection of this particular victim are very important. Six weeks after Lennon’s death, Ronald Reagan would become President. Reagan and his soon-to-be appointed cabinet were prepared to build up the Pentagon war machine and increase the potential for war against the USSR. The first strike would fall on small countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. Lennon, alone, was the only man (even without his fellow Beatles) who had the ability to draw out one million anti-war protestors in any given city within 24 hours if he opposed those war policies. John Lennon was a spiritual force. He was a giant, like Gandhi, a man who wrote about peace and brotherly love. He taught an entire generation to think for themselves and challenge authority. Lennon and the Beatles’ songs shout out the inequalities of American life and the messages of change. Change is a threat to the longtime status quo that Reagan’s team exemplified. On my weekly radio broadcast of December 7, 1980, I stated, “The old assassination teams are coming back into power.” The very people responsible for covering up the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King, for Watergate and Koreagate, and the kidnapping and murder of Howard Hughes, and for hundreds of other deaths, had only six weeks before they would again be removing or silencing those voices of opposition to their policies. Lennon was coming out once more. His album was cut. He was preparing to be part of the world, a world which was a worse place since the time he had withdrawn with his family. It was a sure bet Lennon would react and become a social activist again. That was the threat. Lennon realized that there was danger in coming back into public view. He took that dangerous chance and we all lost!

The late Marlon Brando was once asked if he considered himself the best actor in Hollywood. That was a treacherous question, but Brando answered it in a creative way. He said, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m the best actor. I’m the best-positioned actor. People know me, and they want me around. I make life interesting for the people around me. It’s fun for me and it’s fun for them. I’m not always a nice guy, but I’m never the same guy twice. That’s why studios want to put me in movies, and that’s why the public wants to see me there.” Are you like Brando in this respect? Do you get together with your colleagues even when you don’t have to? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track. If the answer is no, ask yourself, whom would you rather be with? Then think about how you can make a career move in that direction. Do you communicate with your colleagues even when it’s not strictly necessary—by phone, e-mail, or in person? Or are you more comfortable being on your own? There probably has never been a person who was more challenged in this area than Howard Hughes. He was undeniably a technical expert, and he was certainly unforgettable. He could design an airplane, fly it, and also direct a movie about it.

FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.

Now, take a man like Nixon, a man who is going to be President of the United States. He’s known for his poker playing, his straight face. He already has a proclivity for intelligence. He wrote to Hoover, asking to join the FBI. After World War Two, the great poker player of the South Pacific was assigned to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, negotiating settlements of terminated defense contracts, where he helped escalate the importation of 642 Nazi specialists into the U. S. defense and aerospace industry—Project Paperclip. Then he gets a call from Murray Chotiner, who works with Howard Hughes and the Bank of America, inviting him to run for Congress against Jerry Voorhis. What did he have besides a poker face? In 1951 Senator Nixon introduced a bill to bring Nikolai Molaxa into the U. S. Molaxa was a former head of the Iron Guard and was allegedly involved in Nazi atrocities. Nixon set him up in an office of his own.

once you commit, don’t hesitate or skimp. Do it right.

February 7: Harry Brand, Fox publicity chief, issues a studio biography playing up Marilyn’s experience as an orphan, her reliance on Ana Lower, her early “immature” marriage, Howard Hughes’s interest in her, her struggles to be recognized as an actress, and her featured roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve.

Honestly, in the modern social media–driven NBA, you’re lucky if the soft-spoken rookie you drafted doesn’t turn into Howard Hughes with a handle. “They’re all fucking crazy now,” one NBA coach said to me, when lamenting how his profession had changed. “All the superstars are fucking crazy.

Further testimony and legal documents reflected an impressive list of former business partners, including Howard Hughes cohort Robert Maheu and Texas oil magnate Clint Murchison.

Howard Hughes, who’d lent me a pair of his chemists and a lab to assist in my nonmilitary invention ideas, like the bouillon-type cubes that could turn water into a soda pop similar to Coca-Cola.

That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves…tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake…but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.”1 —Joan Didion, “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38

Mid May 2012 Dearest Andy, After all these years, you have not changed. You’ll always be the Valet I’ve grown to love and adore. When I read your email, I can hear the sound of your voice as it was so long ago. Although we are miles apart, I continue to feel you close to my heart. After our separation, I looked for a ‘big brother’ and lover like you and failed miserably, until Walter came into my life. He inquires about you persistently. I think he is hoping for a triplet relationship, similar to the one we shared with Oscar. He thinks highly of you. Walter is very similar to you, in that you both know that you are gods who could do no wrong. In the majority of cases, that is how I remember you. Of course we both have our shortcomings, as humans do. The wonderful times we shared definitely overshadowed the negative moments. I fear that having two alpha males in the same house will be a disaster because you’ll both be competing for power and lording your masculinity over me. That’s scary! LOL! That said, my partner and I discuss you frequently. The difference between you two is that he fully supports the writing of my memoirs while you, my friend, have made it clear that writing about my adolescent life experiences isn’t a good idea. I respect both your differing opinions, but this is something I will have to decide on my own. I sincerely believe that now is the moment to tell my story and I will tell it without hurting or exposing anyone unnecessarily. I’ve changed the names of the schools, the society, and, of course, the people that played an important role in my young life. Do you remember when we were in Las Vegas working on “Sacred Sex In Sacred Places”? The Count told us that Howard Hughes was in town and you dragged me along for an audience with the tycoon? You desperately wanted an apprenticeship in his aerodynamics engineering company. I remember the episode well. That experience is definitely worth documenting in my memoirs. We will have many opportunities to reminisce, but for now I am simply happy that we are communicating regularly. Tell me more about yourself in your next correspondence. I love you and miss you. Wishing you all the best! Young.

Third Week of May 2012 Dearest Young, I remember Las Vegas well. I regret losing my temper and taking it out on you because I didn’t get to meet my aeronautical engineering idol, Howard Hughes. I was extremely frustrated. He was close, yet so far away. Looking back, I now realize that I would never have garnered an audience with the reclusive Mr. Hughes, no matter how hard I might have tried. At the time, I thought I had a chance to obtain an apprenticeship in his company. I wanted to learn from the man who seemed to know it all.

My Valet inquired of the Sands’ receptionist, “Ma’am, I’m delivering a personal message to Mr. Howard Hughes. Can you tell me which room he’s at?” The receptionist replied, “I’m sorry sir, we were given strict instructions not to disturb Mr. Hughes under any circumstances. Would you like us to forward a message to him?” “I need to see him in person. It’s an important document I have to hand to him personally,” Andy quickly answered. “Oh! Can you please wait for a moment while I consult my manager?

Radio transmitters are not infallible, and Soviet submarines were notorious for equipment failure.

The grid of Circuits I and II creates four quadrants. Note that Hostile Strength (the tyrant) is inclined to paranoid withdrawal; he must govern, but he is also afraid. Cf. the careers of Hitler, Stalin, Howard Hughes, etc. and the inaccessible Castle and Court in Kafka’s allegories. Note also that the dependent neurotic is not in retreat at all; he or she advances upon you, demanding fulfillment of emotional “needs” (imprints).

What some may not know is that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t originally arrested for killing the president. He was first arrested for shooting and killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald’s arrest came about on November 22, 1963, when a shoe store manager named John Brewer noticed him loitering suspiciously outside his store. Brewer noted that Oswald fit the description of the suspect in the shooting of Officer Tippit. When Oswald continued up the street and slipped inside the Texas Theater without paying for a ticket, Brewer called a theater worker, who alerted authorities. Fifteen Dallas police officers arrived at the scene. When they turned on the movie house lights, they found Lee Harvey Oswald sitting towards the back of the theater. The movie that had been airing at the time was War is Hell. When Lee Harvey Oswald was questioned by authorities about Tippit’s homicide, Captain J. W. Fritz recognized his name as one of the workers from the book depository who had been reported missing and was already being considered a suspect in JFK’s assassination. The day after he was formally arraigned for murdering Officer Tippit, he was also charged with assassinating John F. Kennedy. Today, the Texas Theater is a historical landmark that is commonly visited by tourists. It still airs movies and hosts special events. There’s also a bar and lounge.    The Texas Theater was the first theater in Texas to have air conditioning. It was briefly owned by famous aviator and film producer, Howard Hughes. Texas’s Capitol

The morning conversations I had with my young son reflect the conversations Black parents have had with their children across generations so as to protect their souls and personalities from being destroyed by a society that does not respect their humanity. It is the conversation that Langston Hughes so intimately captures in the poem “Mother to Son”: “So boy, don’t you turn back. /Don’t you set down on the steps. /’ Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” 2 It is the conversation James Baldwin has when he writes his nephew on his fourteenth birthday: “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.” 3 And it is the conversation that Howard Thurman engages in his book Jesus and the Disinherited.

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works” — Ed Catmull.

Some of Batista’s followers intimidated jailed and even killed political opponents. One of the pro-Batista paramilitary thugs was Rolando Arcadio Masferrer Rojas, who was born in Holguín on July 12, 1918. He had been a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, organized in 1936 by the Communist International during the Spanish Civil War. Returning to Cuba, Masferrer became a staunch supporter of Batista, who at that time had the backing of the Communist Party. Masferrer was by no means the average run of the mill thug and, in addition to being a lawyer, he ran for office and won a seat in the Cuban Senate. He was also a guerrilla leader, political activist, a member of the Cuban Communist Party, a newspaper publisher, and responsible for the founding of “Los Tigres de Masferrer,” a guerrilla organization he organized to support Batista militarily. He also published two newspapers, Tiempo in Havana and Libertad in Santiago de Cuba. Becoming a radical anti-communist, he was ousted from the Cuban Communist Party. Regardless, Masferrer was a dangerous man and people learned to keep their mouths shut and play it low key when he was around. As a pro-Batista political activist, he took credit for supposedly attacking Castro’s rebels in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Actually, in most cases his group of not-so-fierce fighters stayed safely within the city limits of Santiago de Cuba, extorting money from the residents. In 1959, after Castro’s entry into Havana, Masferrer fled to the United States where he befriended American union bosses such as Jimmy Hoffa and got to know Mafia leaders such as Santo Trafficante in Tampa, Florida. Masferrer worked with Richard Bissell of the Central Intelligence Agency, planning another assassination attempt on Castro. He was seen at a ranch owned by multi-millionaire Howard Hughes, where he was training paid assassins, and he even met with President Kennedy in Washington. With money contributed by fellow Cubans living in Florida, he later planned to carry out the assassination of Fidel Castro by attacking him from a distant base in Haiti. It all ended when, on October 31, 1975, Masferrer was killed by a car bomb in Miami. Although his figures may be somewhat exaggerated, Castro claimed that Masferrer was responsible for the death of as many as 2,000 people during the Batista era.

The Dark Cloud Is the communication issue that people seem to have in interviews Is the manner in which media outlets manipulate what is on the news Is the life story of the eccentric and troubled Howard Hughes Is the horrifying way Nazis in WWII treated innocent Jews

In the sixties and early seventies, the Big 8 international accounting firms ruled their employees with strict codes of conduct that were often brutally enforced.

Particularly for staff accountants, life was demanding in the Big 8 accounting firms during this time. The environment resembled a boot camp. In those days, to become a CPA, accountants had to work for two years at a CPA firm, and pass a two-and-a-half-day exam, (passed by less than 40 percent of those taking the exam) to become a CPA. These requirements gave CPA firms the upper hand when dealing with their staff accountants during those first two years.

You don’t learn from successes; you don’t learn from awards; you don’t learn from celebrity; you only learn from wounds and scars and mistakes and failures. And that’s the truth.

Money Horror Show

He was leaving behind a Las Vegas transformed from a crime-based, mob-owned casinos and hotels, to the new large corporate organizations building massive billion-dollar complexes. These complexes included hotels, casinos, five-star restaurants and their celebrity chefs, shops, and vast entertainment venues that showcased the world’s biggest stars.

Empires implode from within due to their own excesses.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” —Muriel Rukeyser

It takes tremendous discipline to control the influence, the power you have over other people’s lives.” —Clint Eastwood

Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.” —Sun Tzu

President Johnson raised our expectations to a peak when he pushed through the Civil Rights Bill that year. Automobile horns were blowing all over Washington that day as liberals, white and black, passed each other on the streets and highways, flashing peace signs as recognition. It wasn’t enough. Super-right-wing groups started dropping from trees and crawling from under rocks. Even Barry Goldwater could not control the extreme far-right. Whenever blacks progressed an inch, right-win extremists reacted as though it were a mile. When Howard Hughes died, a note was found among his memorabilia saying that enough had been done for blacks to last them for a hundred years

President Johnson raised our expectations to a peak when he pushed through the Civil Rights Bill that year. Automobile horns were blowing all over Washington that day as liberals, white and black, passed each other on the streets and highways, flashing peace signs as recognition. It wasn’t enough. Super-right-wing groups started dropping from trees and crawling from under rocks. Even Barry Goldwater could not control the extreme far-right. Whenever blacks progressed an inch, right-win extremists reacted as though it were a mile. When Howard Hughes died, a note was found among his memorabilia saying that enough had been done for blacks to last them for a hundred years.

Howard Hughes was in serious trouble.

Manfred, you’ve got a

delirious, but only in the specifics. What

On August 5, 1963, Albert “Bud” Wheelon, former director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, assumed leadership of the all-new Directorate of Science and Technology, and over the next few years he helped build arguably the most powerful development and engineering establishment in American history, a government-funded Skunk Works for outlandish projects—like figuring out how to retrieve a submarine wrecked seventeen thousand feet below the ocean’s surface.

One early proposal typified the learning curve necessary for a group that had built its reputation on aerospace: What if deep-sea submersibles were used to attach rocket boosters to the wreck? The boosters could launch the sub up through the ocean and to the surface, at which point—well, that’s where that idea fell apart, since no one knew how to catch the rocket-boosted wreck once it hit the surface and before it began to climb into orbit.

Nodules were first identified by John Young Buchanan, the staff chemist on the scientific voyage of the HMS Challenger, a British vessel that sailed the oceans from 1872 to 1876, covering seventy thousand nautical miles in the hopes of opening up the mysteries of what lay under the sea.

For years afterward, engineers traded Savage stories, one favorite being the time a captain, working in the office as a civilian, pulled him aside to point out what he considered a lack of respect. “Perhaps you don’t know this, son, but I’m a naval officer,” the man said, and Savage nodded glumly. “I know that,” he replied. “I noticed the Navy ring when you were picking your nose.

The primary function of the office during the design phase was to monitor each piece of the puzzle—the ship, the barge, the claw, the pipe, the electronics, and the many smaller contributions by contractors scattered around America—and to make sure they all worked and could be assembled together in the end into a working tool—a sub-snatching supership.

Pendleton tried to keep a straight face when he found one such man up on deck, cursing and scratching his scalp like a flea-bitten dog. “Goddamn, this wig is so itchy I wish I could throw it overboard,” the man said. “But the security guys would kill me.

Honeywell, in Seattle, was picked to develop a number of the key system components, including the station keeping and sonar, as well as data-processing systems for Clementine. The idea was to put controls for the ship and the capture vehicle all in the same room, on the same console, and it was all based on the very cutting edge of computing power at that time. Specifically, Honeywell would use six computers, each with thirty-two kilobytes of core memory, and a suite of peripherals, including magnetic tapes, alphanumeric CRT displays, card readers, line printers, and plotters.

Up to this point, specific positions on the ocean were still identified the way they had been for centuries—by using a sextant. The Sea Scope was one of the first vessels ever equipped with satellite navigation, which at that time was the size of a refrigerator and built by Magnavox.

Every man on the Explorer had a job to do, and with so many of the systems still works in progress, and only a very small window for the recovery, the crew had virtually no downtime. But when they could steal even a few hours, life was comfortable. A crew of fifteen cooks worked in the mess hall, keeping it provisioned twenty-four hours a day. At any moment, a crew member could stop into the mess and get a good, hot meal—rib eye steaks, lamb chops, burgers, seafood, as well as an array of salads, desserts, and freshly baked bread and pastries. For men who had only a few minutes, lounges around the ship were stocked with fresh fruit, nuts, candy, coffee, tea, and soft drinks. There was even a soft-serve ice cream machine. Two native New Yorkers had arranged for the cooks to buy and hide a large supply of bagels, lox, and cream cheese that they managed to conceal in the depths of the walk-in freezer—for a few days, until someone found the stash and word got out.

But there was so much paper being generated on a daily basis that the shredders kept jamming, and the security guys realized it was sometimes easier to just rip the paper into tiny pieces by hand and then dispose of it the old-fashioned way—by going to the top deck and making it rain. This process worked well enough, with one exception, when an overtired team working the late shift made the mistake of throwing the paper into the wind instead of with it, resulting in a blizzard of classified confetti that blanketed the deck, and causing the poor security guys to scramble and clear the evidence before Jack Poirier awoke and lost his mind.

The simulator, like all of the major systems, ran on the most sophisticated computers available at that time. For the capture vehicle, that meant two redundant Honeywell 316s, each worth twenty-five thousand dollars and carrying sixteen kilobytes of hardwired memory in four thousand eight-bit boards.

The trash had no intelligence value. But it was useful as a prank. The next day the trash went out with every item, including a few well-thumbed Playboys as a special gift, covered in a thick slime of Aqua Lube, a green grease used for lubricating pipe joints that is designed for use in deep-ocean environments. It is detergent- and solvent-resistant and is famous for its ability to ruin clothes and stay on skin for days, even after vigorous washing. To make sure the Soviets didn’t miss a single bag of slimy mail, the crew began to pump acetylene gas into the bags. This made them extra-buoyant, so much so that they’d skip across the waves when thrown overboard, often causing the SB-10 to change course and chase them.

Colby was a veteran of the OSS’s legendary Jedburghs, a group of spies recruited to parachute behind enemy lines in the early years of World War II and wreak havoc, organizing resistance and blowing up roads and bridges. The Jedburgh motto was “Surprise, kill, and vanish,” and Colby was perfect in the role.

Two years later, an improved Trieste was ready, and on January 23, 1960, Piccard and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh traveled seven miles down toward the deepest known point in the Pacific, into a section of the Mariana Trench known as Challenger Deep. They spent only twenty minutes on the floor, staring agog at all manner of never-before-seen creatures, then began the long ascent back to the surface. The entire trip took nine hours and only one human (the film director James Cameron) has been that deep since.

Kobzar was loved by his crew and respected by his superiors, who noted how he personally helped train watch officers, oversaw survival training, and could capably handle any job on the sub. He had a question he liked to repeat to men under his command: “Who is the most dangerous man on a submarine? The one who doesn’t know what he’s doing!

Bissell arranged for a presidential action to add Groom Lake, as the test area was called, into the AEC territory, so that on maps it would just look like more land partitioned off for nuclear tests. The new CIA base—later nicknamed Area 51—was built for a total of eight hundred thousand dollars. “I’ll bet this is one of the best deals the government will ever get,” Johnson observed.

Titanium worked—while causing all sorts of problems. For instance, it was so strong that all of the Skunk Works’ existing tools and bolts were rendered useless, forcing Johnson to reinvent those, too. What was more, there wasn’t enough titanium available in the United States, so the CIA had to use subcontractors and dummy companies to covertly buy the rare alloy from, of all places, the Soviet Union.

When the supersonic planes returned to base, pilots and mechanics puzzled over the tiny black dots that pitted the windshields. Test samples came back as organic material. The source: insects that had been sucked up into the stratosphere during Russian and Chinese nuclear tests and were just winging around the earth in the jet stream, seventy-five thousand feet up.

A single Blackbird could photograph one hundred thousand square miles per hour, with the ability to zoom in up to twenty times, providing enough resolution from eighty-five thousand feet to look down into the hatches of container ships unloading materiel in Haiphong harbor.

The specifics of spying are secret and closely guarded, but the fact that spying is being done is very much in the open. Everyone does it. And no one talks about it.

Captain Harry Jackson was back home in Groton, Connecticut, having breakfast with his wife, when a news segment came over the radio, explaining what had occurred on Jack Anderson’s radio program. Once the report finished, his wife looked over and locked eyes with her husband. “Did you hear what I just heard?” she asked. “Yep,” he replied. “Were you there?” Jackson sipped from his mug of coffee. “I don’t know,” he said.

Imagine standing atop the Empire State Building with an 8-foot-wide grappling hook on a 1-inch-diameter steel rope. Your task is to lower the hook to the street below, snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the car back to the top of the building. On top of that, the job has to be done without anyone noticing. That, essentially, describes what the CIA did in Project AZORIAN, a highly secret six-year effort to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor during the Cold War.

The first time I met Howard Hughes was on a picture I did retakes for, a Billie Dove picture for Frank Lloyd in the early thirties. That was the first time I ever met this strange individual.

What are you talking about? You don’t meet Howard Hughes. You meet his money.