Our Howard Hughes Moment

Be eccentric but for America with world peace always in mind

I recently made a bit of a pilgrimage to a cemetery in Houston, Texas.

Texas, too, is a nation within our nation and I spent many happy years there after my divorce and during the pandemic before being called to Washington D.C. I will never be a Texan anymore than I could be a Hawaiian and I would gently correct my friends outside the Lone Star state who didn’t know that you have to earn being called a “Texan” and that I preferred being called a “Texas resident” or even a “refugee.”

My heuristic is simple enough. If an American state has had an embassy in another country it’s a nation within our nation and so it is with Texas, having had embassies in Britain and France.

I remain eternally grateful to the people of Texas. It’s not really my thing but I was treated with the hospitality with which it’s well known. I feel about it a bit like Edward Bloom did upon visiting the town of Spectre, Alabama in the movie Big Fish. Texas is a little too perfect for me.

At the Hughes family plot

Back to the Glenwood Cemetery, I was there to visit someone long past —Howard Robard Hughes Jr., dead on April 5, 1976, buried alongside his parents Allene Stone Gano and Howard Robard Hughes Sr.

We’re awash in fail sons but Howard Hughes was anything but. He took his father’s oil monopoly and parlayed it into other areas of American ambition — film, casinos, real estate, and of course aviation. His most interesting innovation, though, may well have been serving as a CIA asset—something that few people really seem to understand or appreciate notwithstanding its obviousness upon retrospect.

My favorite book about Howard Hughes was written by Michael Drosnin — a strange character in his own right, especially with his ties to the Israeli and Jewish world — and titled, Citizen Hughes: In his Own Words, How Howard Hughes Tried to Buy America (1985).

His death was front-page news around the world, but he attracted none of the standard public eulogies routinely accorded the famous, the wealthy, and the powerful. Not even his ex-wife, Jean Peters, said much. Just “I’m saddened,” that was all, and there were no other loved ones to mourn him.

[Howard Hughes] was an American folk hero, a man who had lived first the dream the the nightmare — in that sense, perhaps the single most representative American of the twentieth century. But upon his death he had become so loathsome and scandalous a figure that no national leader noted his passing. None of the politicians he had funded said a word. Not Richard Nixon, not Hubert Humphrey, not Larry O’Brien, not even Paul Laxalt.

Only one powerful man stepped forward to praise him, a man who almost never spoke publicly, a man himself so secretive that his name had never appeared in print until just a year earlier, when he was ousted amid scandal from the lofty position he had held for three decades — chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. James Jesus Angleton.

It was entirely fitting that Angleton, the CIA’s purest product, the spook’s spook, should alone deliver his epitaph:

“How Hughes! Where his country’s interests were concerned, no man knew his target better. We were fortunate to have him.

“He was a great patriot.”

In the end the people who matter know, don’t they? They always do.

But all greatness comes with it a price — loneliness and being misunderstood. The Arab poet Khalil Gibran knew it best:

That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,

And to be understood is to be leveled down,

And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness

And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed.

Making people think you’re crazy isn’t so crazy.

Of course then there are people using the “fact” of you being crazy to try to steal from you. Ah yes, we’re supposed to believe that Hughes was mad as a hatter — as if that isn’t a time honored tradition of appearing crazier than you are to protect the people you love, to protect yourself. Yes, Hughes eschewed public attention but then so did the CIA’s other man in Las Vegas — Kirk Kerkorian — as memorably profiled in The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History.

That Citizen Hughes ending seems very similar to the ending of The Dark Knight trilogy and given Christopher Nolan’s fondness for the enigmatic billionaire — he once flirted with doing his own Hughes bio pic starring Jim Carrey — I do wonder if perhaps the Dark Knight trilogy is, in fact, Nolan’s Hughes movie. Discuss that amongst yourselves.

There are more ornate gravesites at Glenwood Cemetery but I found few as moving as the Hughes family plot. I couldn’t quite tell if the flowers were Texas bluebonnets but they ought to have been, right?

I’ll return to Howard Hughes in a moment but it’s important to give us a sense of place first and foremost. It’s also important for people to know that the Aviator is a terrible film.

So, yes, we need that Christopher Nolan Howard Hughes movie. But then again watching the Dark Knight trilogy I realize that maybe we already have it.

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I’ve written before about the Chinese advisor Wang Huning — a sort of evil Tocqueville who traveled within America and studied our weaknesses. In Wang’s telling Americans remain terribly anxious about not having a leading edge in technology because they fear being dominated.

I suspect that this fear undergirds a lot of the UFOlogy we’ve been talking about as of late. Having been the ships on the horizon descending on the New World we fear that it might well happen to us and that we might even deserve it. There’s a long and proud history of Mormon aviators and obsession with UFOs. Some have even argued that the tenants of the Mormon faith are consistent with UFOs.

An equally disturbing thought is the possibility that among us there might occasion a kind of seditionist element, lurking, that could harness superior technology to bring down our whole system and to paralyze it with chaos and confusion. One man’s anarchy is another’s fresh start, after all.

If the state holds a monopoly on the use of violence might other state’s challenge that monopoly by empowering our own domestic seditionists? Haven’t we done precisely that when we harmed the Muhajideen in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles? Hence the Russian involvement in Texit or the Likud tie ins to the fentanyl trade?

There’s long been the question as to what extent these seditionists elements themselves are penetrated by the Feds. Reading Hugh Nibley you sometimes wonder if he really represents America’s interests in Deseret or a synthesis of the two into a kind of shared Mormon-American experience. Was Nibley Our Man in Deseret? Very possible if this podcast is right. It’s hard to imagine the very same man who did his utmost to bust a Nazi cell at Scripps College turning traitor with his co-religionists in Salt Lake City.

There’s always been a fear around the Mormons having superior technology. Maybe the Mormon breeding programs were themselves a superior technology. You’re not supposed to think that. It smacks of eugenics and as you know, that’s a naughty word especially when it is effectively practiced.

We talked about this matter in the context of Novell and the Mormons. I’ve written about it before on this Substack.

To supervise our young genius — don’t you dare say otherwise! — you might even consider putting a small, insular, smart, mostly trustworthy minority in charge, albeit behind the scenes. Such a community would need to self-police and, if its deep state technology, be able to pass a security clearance. So no drugs, please!

You might, in other words, go with the Church of Latter-day Saints. And that’s precisely what was done when the powers that be created Novell, the second largest provider of software for personal computers after Microsoft. It may also be what’s going on with other more modern tech billionaires but we aren’t allowed to talk about that just yet. No, we cannot talk about how Mormons are often assigned to keep an eye on our would-be wayward tech entrepreneurs and how this is for their own good.

How Microsoft defeated Novell with the help of foreign intelligence and organized crime is a subject we shall explore in future posts. But don’t feel too bad for Novell. It, too, was backed by criminal cash. Indeed Mormon and Las Vegas cash is to Novell what Chinese, German and Russian-Jewish cash is to Microsoft. It is the fuel thrown into the furnace to keep the lights on.

You might wonder if a similar thing is happening with the space industry where there’s been billions spent on helping Mr. Musk get the rockets up. As I told SpaceX board member it’s not a good business model. I suspect a lot of foreign governments have figured this out and Musk may be running out of good will now that Uncle Sam is de facto nationalizing SpaceX. Viewed this way, Musk isn’t the richest man in the world but a sort of handmaiden between governments.

Nowadays American dominance of the infinite of space is well secured — what’s a Space Force for if not that? — but its the infinitesimal and genealogical which eludes capture. Once again the Mormons look to be ahead of the American deep state with their Ancestry.com genealogical work. Just how much of 23 & Me is tied into the Mormon control of Ancestry I can’t say but I suspect quite a lot. I’m having some friends tuck into the 23 & Me financials. It’s strange to put it mildly.

You’re not supposed to wonder as I do if, perhaps, the Mormons are keeping the best technology and insights for themselves. Might other countries understand the superiority of the Mormons as an ally? In other words, might Deseret get superior technology from other countries and husband it for themselves or deploy for their own designs?

The Russians are sequencing the dead to pinpoint the living. The way it works is that they sequence their ancient burial sites and then hack the genomics databases in the West. They match. Then they recruit.

There’s this question of proxies. Can foreign states help or hinder technological development? Isn’t that what the petrodollar is for? All those oil dollars need to come back into technology, technology which can, in fact, make the world better.

The CIA was persuaded that the Mormons had better technology so they cut a deal. Are they cutting deal now?

I suspect that they are and that the U.S. Deep State is well aware of the speed with which Desertification is happening in the Mountain West and how it’ll impact the Deseret Mormon communities.

One already gets the sense that the Mormons themselves are aware and doing all they can to secure drone technology. They’re planning a remigration along the routes that they traversed long ago.

Might we be encouraging that remigration so that they can get right with all those they wronged on their migration west to Utah?

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Howard Hughes was of French Canadian heritage. So, too, was his right hand man, Robert Maheu. Maheu was the CIA connection for Hughes. Both were clearly Our Man in Vegas.

Was Hughes a Mormon? His father lived in Keokuk where a number of Mormon dissidents lived, including my own family.

I think he was keeping an eye on the Mormons as they were on him. He was a hostage and a prisoner at the Desert Inn but, I think, to some extent he was freest when he was writing his memos.

Maybe Hughes wanted his papers to be stolen from his offices and ultimately turned over for public consumption. Maybe Hughes knew that the price of his greatness and eccentricity was his own estrangement. He lost his wife and lived his life more or less alone.

Maybe Hughes’s obsession with staying out of the limelight wasn’t because he was crazy but because he was conscious of the considerable dangers he faced going out in public.

We need more homegrown Howard Hugheses who are less interested in overthrowing the government and more interested in working alongside it, who more interested in doing the work than in running, say, the Department of Government Efficiency.

For now and from what I understand Speaker Mike Johnson has tamed Musk’s excesses. Our institutions still work. Our individuals need to do their part too.