The sound of shattering glass silenced the room, except for the obnoxious holiday music playing on the stereo at the 1977 University of Utah “Daily Chronicle” Christmas party. I had hurled the champagne flute with great gusto towards the bricks above the fireplace where it smashed, sending glass shards down onto the assembled guests below. It was the fourth such glass I had rapidly disposed of in quick succession, each time accompanied by a loud, expletive-filled toast to one of my colleagues at the student newspaper, many of whom were conservative, button-downed Mormon teetotalers. I had been drinking heavily for hours. The attendees were not amused. Horrified is more like it. Several seemed to be picking glass fragments off of their dinner plates.
I was promptly escorted from the room. That was okay by me because the party was a little too bourgeois for my tastes. Catered by the top French restaurant in Salt Lake City, Le Parisien, it was a tad too Gucci. My memory of events becomes sketchy after that. I somehow made it to the backyard where I apparently mistook a large, vertical rectangular window as the door to get back into the party. I bloodied my knuckles on the bricks surrounding it while trying to navigate my re-entry to the soiree. I was later found passed out in the snow. Oh well, never a dull moment. It was my way of letting off steam. I had been under a lot of pressure at work.
I was the number two guy at the “Chronicle” that year, the Associate Editor. A few days before the Christmas party, a diminutive, intense man with piercing eyes and a prominent nose had walked into my office in the Olpin Student Union Building on the University campus. His name was Preston Truman, but he liked to be called Jay. I had spoken with him on the phone many times but this was the only time I would ever meet with him in person. He unceremoniously plopped a large cardboard box overflowing with pieces of paper on my desktop in front of me.
“Here are the papers that Howard’s guys smuggled out of Mexico with him on the day that he died. They’re all yours. You’re supposed to be a pretty good writer. Let’s see what you can do.”
The “Howard” that Truman was referring to was, of course, none other than the legendary Howard Hughes. The cardboard box that he had placed on my desk was the box that changed my life. But to fully understand this momentous office meeting, we must commence with the beginning of the story.
It all started the day it all ended, April 5, 1976. Howard Hughes, one of the world’s richest and most famous men who had become a notoriously eccentric recluse, was dying in his penthouse at the Acapulco Princess Hotel. It was panic time. His aides knew they had to get him out of the country and back to the U.S. before he gave up the ghost. It was imperative that Hughes’ post-death probate proceedings take place in America, not in Mexico where the government would want a huge chunk of the billionaire’s money in taxes. They had to move quickly before the Mexican authorities found out Hughes was dead and moved in to seize everything in the hotel suite. As they prepared to transport Hughes’ lifeless body out the door for a mad dash to the airport, someone moved quickly around several rooms of Hughes’ headquarters in the hotel, gathering up loose documents from desks, countertops, tables and filing cabinets and stuffing them into a box for transport back to the U.S. so the Mexicans wouldn’t find them and use them as evidence in legal wranglings. That was the box that changed my life. That box was on board the Lear Jet zooming towards Methodist Hospital in Houston when Hughes died in the skies at 1:27 p.m. All the doctors could do by the time the plane touched down was perform a post-mortem. And what a shocking one it was.
The emaciated, grotesque body that the aides unloaded onto the tarmac was a pathetically sad caricature of what the great man had once been. According to Wikipedia:
“His reclusiveness and possibly his drug use made him practically unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails and toenails were long. His tall six-foot four-inch frame now weighed barely ninety pounds. The F.B.I. had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body…He suffered from malnutrition and was covered in bedsores…X-rays revealed five broken-off hypodermic needles in the flesh of his arms. To inject codeine into his muscles, Hughes had used glass syringes with metal needles that easily became detached.”
By the end of his life Hughes had become a bedridden, full-on junkie. Chronic back pain had caused him to become addicted to painkillers. When he wasn’t lying in bed wasted he was sitting on the toilet trying to have a bowel movement. Opiods freeze up one’s G.I. tract, resulting in perpetual constipation. He stored his urine in bottles. He cut his hair, beard and nails maybe once a year. Pretty glamorous stuff. Lifestyles of the rich and famous, eh?
During his best years Hughes was nothing like the terribly repulsive character he had morphed into at the end of his life. As a young man, Hughes was a far cry from the sorry state he wound up in when he died at age seventy. In the beginning, Howard Hughes was a stud. Back in those days he had it all. Fame, power, money, women. Tall, dark and handsome with leading-man good looks, the world was at his beck and call. (Incidentally, Hughes in his prime is pictured in the Dr. Bob “Common Man” video.) He was a charmer, a sophisticate, a ladies’ man. A strapping frame nearly six and a half feet tall anchored a trim build. He was suave and debonair, engaging in conversation, witty and curious. And, above all, he was filthy rich. His accomplishments were the stuff of legend and spanned many fields. As Wikipedia notes:
“Howard Hughes was an American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist and pilot. He was best known during his lifetime as one of the most influential and richest people in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer and then as an important figure in the aviation industry…
“As a film tycoon, Hughes gained fame in Hollywood beginning in the late 1920s when he produced big-budget and often controversial films. He later owned RKO Pictures film studio.”
When he was in the film industry Hughes dated many movie starlets. As for the movies he made? Well, he tried hard but none of it was high art and he enjoyed only moderate commercial success. Bottom line, nearly all of Hughes films were entirely forgettable trash. Hughes largely cranked out what we today would call B-Movies.
Hughes then moved on to the aviation industry with much better results. He was recently ranked as number twenty-five on the all-time “Heroes of Aviation” list and for good reason. He was an accomplished pilot and aircraft designer during aviation’s formative years. Hughes was a happy, productive man in those days. In 1937 he set the transcontinental airspeed record, flying from Los Angeles to Newark, NJ. The following year he set the record for flying around the world the fastest. He won many aviation awards. He designed and built the Hughes HR-1 Racer and the super huge H-4 Hercules. The Hercules, known informally as the “Spruce Goose,” was built in 1947 and, according to Wikipedia, was “the largest flying boat in history with the longest wingspan of any aircraft from the time it was built until 2019.”
His last big successes in life came in Sin City, as Wikipedia tells it:
“During his final years, Hughes extended his financial empire to include several major businesses in Las Vegas, such as real estate, hotels, casinos and media outlets. Known at the time as one of the most powerful men in the state of Nevada, he is largely credited with transforming Vegas into a more refined, cosmopolitan city.”
But the end was near and it would not be pretty. There would be no fairytale ending for Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. His American Dream ultimately devolved into a horrendous nightmare. Wikipedia sums up the final act thusly:
“Once one of the most visible men in America, Hughes ultimately vanished from public view, although tabloids continued to follow rumors of his behavior and whereabouts.”
While Hughes seemed to be one of the world’s biggest success stories, all was not well within the empire. Wikipedia puts it this way:
“Later in life he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle, oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash and increasing deafness.”
By middle-age as Wikipedia recounts, Hughes’ many neuroses were getting worse. He “always ate the same thing for dinner; a New York strip steak cooked medium rare, dinner salad and peas, but only the smaller ones, pushing the larger ones aside…Hughes had a phobia about germs…Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects to insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains or other imperfections on people’s clothes and demand they take care of them…and his passion for secrecy became a mania.”
Hughes mental deterioration was gradual and incremental but others were starting to notice that he was pretty nutty by middle age. A Wikipedia anecdote from his years as a movie mogul is telling:
“While directing ‘The Outlaw,’ Hughes became fixated on a small flaw in one of Jane Russell’s blouses, claiming that the fabric bunched up along a seam and gave the appearance of two nipples on each breast. He wrote a detailed memorandum to the crew on how to fix the problem…Hughes was fixated on trivial details and was alternately indecisive and obstinate…(with) unpredictable mood swings.”
Hughes gradually went from being extremely eccentric in the 1940s to full-tilt crazy by the end of the next decade. Consider this startling Wikipedia story:
“In 1958, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio’s darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk and was surrounded by dozens of boxes of Kleenex that he continuously stacked and rearranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides giving them explicit instructions neither to look at him nor speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continously watching movies. When he finally emerged in the summer of 1958, his hygiene was terrible. He had neither bathed nor cut his hair and nails for weeks…After the screening room incident, Hughes moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where…he would sit naked in his room with a pink hotel napkin placed over his genitals, watching movies…In one year, he spent an estimated $11 million at the hotel.”
You get the idea. Hughes was bonkers but nobody wanted to bring it up because his checks were still good. The emperor literally had no clothes but who wanted to tell him?
Only in America do we create this peculiar type of monster. Obsessed with celebrity, fame and material wealth, our society elevates the mega-rich onto pedestals from which they inevitably topple in the most disturbing of manners. Surrounded by sycophants who never tell them no, our heroes are doomed to fail in proportions befitting Greek tragedy. Inevitably paranoid and isolated, their whole universe is occupied by yes men whose sole purpose in life is to remain on the payroll. Whatever it takes. Just keep the boss happy, keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes to yourself and don’t ask any questions. It’s an unavoidable recipe for disaster. The larger they are, the harder they fall. Hughes’ sad tale is only one of many. In more modern times the soap operas and drama surrounding the final years of Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley, while not as severe as Hughes’ downfall, are comparable.
But none of that mattered on the fateful day in the fall of 1977 when Jay Truman did his document dump in my office. Almost miraculously, I had been given exclusive access to over two thousand pages of the personal papers of one of the most famous men in the world. Wow. What a strange twist of fate. Sometimes life can be truly weird. The opportunity of a lifetime had been dropped into my lap. Now it was up to me to decide what to do with it. Even though I suspected I was in a little over my head, I remained calm. Take a deep breath. We got this. I decided just to stay focused, remain in the moment and methodically take the project one step at a time. It was time to be a stand-up guy and rise to the occasion.
The first matter at hand was to determine what exactly was in the box. I suspected it was a treasure trove but the wheat had to be separated from the chaff and I had to learn the new language of the larger-than-life world I was about to enter.
The box was a cluster. Lots of folded-up, crumpled-up pages; some ripped and torn, others crammed into file folders. It looked as if someone had gone around a room strewn with documents and papers and hurriedly tossed them into a box. Which is apparently exactly what had happened. There were lots of Xerox copies and lots of original documents, too, many with Hughes’ distinctive yet legible signature. Lots of initialing.
The whole mess might as well have been a bunch of hieroglyphics as far as I was concerned. Names, places, dates, legal terms, all of which were Greek to me. A massive, twisted mumbo-jumbo of confusion and disarray. This was going to take a little work.
There were private correspondences with friends and allies, newspaper clippings, tax statements, legal documents and interchanges with his legal team, billing statements and invoices, contracts, project proposals and updates, minutes and agendas from board meetings, and memos.
Lots and lots of memos.
Memorandums were the way the Hughes empire communicated. Because of his germ phobia, the boss detested face-to-face meetings. If you wanted to communicate with the old man, you either wrote it down or typed it out. The Hughes team burned through reams and reams of typing paper.
The hundreds of memos in the box dealt with everything from mega-deals to the mundane. From international power-brokering to whatever trivialities the boss was complaining about that day; the whims of the ever more mercurial Hughes. There was a lot of chatter about the nuts-and-bolts, day-to-day operations of Hughes far-flung empire at companies like the Summa Corporation, Howard Hughes Corporation, Hughes Aircraft Company, Hughes Airwest Airlines, and his biggest charity, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The memos discussed personnel matters, acquisitions and sales of properties, office gossip and on and on. It was all a little overwhelming, to say the least. The next issue to be resolved was whether or not the papers were real.
Were they authentic? As far as I could tell, yes. A couple of days after Truman gave me the box, a local lawyer who specialized in all things Hughes got wind of it and asked to come by and take a look. Upon inspection he said the papers sure appeared to be the real deal to him. Common sense also made me feel that the papers were bona-fide. If it was a hoax it was an extremely elaborate one. Why would anyone go to all that work to do it? What did they possibly stand to gain? Incidentally, the F.B.I. certainly seemed to think that the papers were real when they called me in on the carpet a few months later to grill me on where-the-hell did I get the stuff. But let’s hold off on that story for a minute.
All things considered, I felt confident that the papers were real so I decided to proceed with caution. But what to do next?
I took it as a challenge. I was fired up. For three weeks over Christmas break I ensconced myself amid the stacks at the University’s Marriott Library in the middle of the sprawling campus. There I devoured about fifteen biographies and books about Hughes. I took extensive notes and made detailed outlines. Names, places, dates, events, etc. Then it was time to go back to the box and take a second look. I had my Rosetta Stone.
Armed with my several notebooks, I started analyzing, deciphering and decoding the documents. Trying to make sense of it all, I slowly was able to paint a picture of the inner workings of the Hughes dynasty. It all clicked; it all eventually fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Bingo. I had hit paydirt. The information the memos revealed convinced me I had several worthy national news stories waiting to be broken. It was time to go talk to my boss.
The guy I worked for at the “Chronicle” that year was Editor-in-chief Rick Hall. Rick was a Mormon and he was a good guy. Bright and personable, Rick was the kind of dude you enjoyed seeing every day at the office. Always friendly, helpful and encouraging. Rick possessed many qualities we all would do well to emulate. Even-tempered, he was not judgmental. He was humble, he didn’t put on airs. A straight shooter, gracious and civil. Rick Hall was a leader.
Although we were friends and had a good personal and professional relationship, Rick and I lived in different worlds. I was part of the liberal, partying subculture at the University comprised of artists, hippies, Dead Heads and East Coast ski bum transplants. Rick had been born and raised in the white-bread Salt Lake City suburbs. He was a returned missionary and a bishop in the Mormon Church. Rick sported an all-American clean-cut look. He wore dress shirts and slacks. His manner and vibe reminded me of a somewhat urbanized John-Boy Walton. Rick had excelled at baseball in his youth. I’m sure he must have played church league basketball, that activity is huge among Mormons. If he didn’t eventually become a Boy Scout troop leader, he should have. He had a great wife and over the years had a bunch of kids and grandkids. He went on to a lengthy, distinguished career at the “Deseret News,” the longest running daily west of the Mississippi, where he eventually became Managing Editor. A true Mormon success story. The American Dream in the land of Zion.
Rick and I had formed a good management team at the “Chronicle” that year. We came from different backgrounds but we genuinely liked each other and respected each other’s work. We shared a bond of mutual respect. Since his religion forbade him from working on Sundays, I accommodated the situation by covering for him and basically overseeing every Monday edition.
I was an important member of his team. A big part of my job as Associate Editor was to crank out lengthy feature articles. Because he knew I was reliably capable of producing top-notch journalistic content, Rick tolerated the quirks of my personality and my occasional eccentric behavior. Let’s put it this way, he had witnessed my Christmas party champagne toasts.
I trusted Rick totally and had confidence in his judgment. He was a cautious, conservative, old school journalist. He played by the rules and had an innate sense of fairness. When I walked into his office, dropped the
box onto his desk and announced what was in it, his jaw dropped. At first he was skeptical, of course. Where did I get this stuff? I told him the story as I knew it to that point. He examined each piece of paper, which I had organized into file folders and labeled by topic. He looked me in the eye and told me he needed a couple of days to think about it.
Forty-eight hours later, after consulting with faculty advisors Roy Gibson and Don Woodward, he gave me the green light. It was a go. I will forever be grateful to Rick for the confidence he showed in me and to the “Daily Utah Chronicle” and the University of Utah for opportunities provided. Lucky? Yes. But as the old canard goes, luck is a matter of hard work and preparation. I had done both. In January 1978 it was time to start writing.
Had I bitten off more than I could chew? Oddly, despite the fact that I was just twenty-three and still wet behind the ears, I somehow felt prepared for the moment.
I was a good writer. As an English major I had honed my compositional, analytic and grammar skills. The department’s professors, particularly a witty, free-thinking leprechaun named Phil Sullivan, were excellent. I had also taken several journalism courses which had proven helpful.
At the “Chronicle” I had already written hundreds of articles. News, entertainment, sports, columns, features, you name it. I had served for a year as the entertainment section editor. I had worked on the copy desk and as night editor. I had mastered layout, graphics and headline writing. I had authored many editorials. I had written a humorous and controversial column under the nom-de-plume Jackson Jones. (By the way, a Dr. Bob song of the same name which explores my collegiate alter ego can be accessed at the website by clicking on the “Men R Pigz” album.) The previous year I had won first place in the entertainment features division at the Rocky Mountain College Press Association awards ceremony in Las Vegas. My winning story was an interview I did with the Osmonds who at the time were experimenting with a hard rock sound similar to Led Zeppelin’s. I had asked them if they felt any conflict or sense of hypocrisy about their new venture into the hedonistic realms of rock considering the admonitions of their church leaders which forbade such excursions. Needless to say, the Osmonds were not pleased with that line of questioning. I had interviewed many other celebrities for the “Chrony,” including columnist Jack Anderson, gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, baseball announcer Harry Caray, United Concerts CEO Jim McNeil and musicians Hoyt Axton, Tom Scholz of Boston, Steve Marriott of Humble Pie, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter of Steely Dan, Keith Knudsen of the Doobie Brothers and Kevin Cronin and Gary Richrath of REO Speedwagon. I had done tons of reviews of every stripe. Concerts, theater, albums, books, movies, restaurants, dinner theater. I sat elbow to elbow onstage at a “Meet the Media” event with newly-elected arch-conservative Sen. Orrin Hatch, arguing with him over whether marijuana should be legalized and the Electoral College discarded. (He said no to both, I said yes.)
I had paid my dues. For my age, I was a fairly seasoned reporter. I felt prepared. I felt like I sort of knew what I was doing.
Plus, I had one more ace up my sleeve. The dude who had my job, Associate Editor, the year before me had set quite an example. I had learned a lot from him. He had inadvertently introduced me to the concept of journalism as show biz. A showman and a natural self-promoter, he had shown me that the “Chronicle” could be a stepping stone to much bigger things. The sky’s the limit. Think big. He was way too self-centered to ever be called a mentor but he was a huge inspiration despite himself, a valuable role model. I was fortunate to have been able to observe his style and tactics the previous academic year. He was a journalist’s journalist and he was a piece of work. His name was Andrew Welch.
With boyish good looks, he had a big, toothy grin, wore wire-rimmed glasses and made lots of eye contact. He had bangs and his dishwater blond hair hung down to his shirt collar. He looked like a cross between John Denver and tennis great Jimmy Connors. He was the first openly gay person I had ever known. He was athletic, good at tennis and golf. He was the strong-armed quarterback the night the “Chronicle” intramural flag football team pulled off a stunning upset victory over a bunch of frat house tough guys underneath the lights on the Astroturf at Rice-Eccles Stadium in front of 25,000 empty seats. Andy was one of the gang.
He had a fun side. He loved disco music. One of his favorite things to do was to take long drives careening through the hairpin turns of Emigration Canyon in the Wasatch Mountain foothills east of Salt Lake City. Vain and egotistical, he would occasionally take his eyes off the road to straighten his hair and check his look in the rear view mirror. With the rag-top down and the tires of his Fiat Spyder squealing above the din, Andy would take deep tokes of high-grade sensimilla rolled in Bob Marley-size doobies as the Bee Gees blared on the eight-track. (Speaking of Marley, the Dr. Bob tribute song, “Rastaman,” is available for streaming on our website.) My girlfriend and I were among the groups of straight couples he would chaperone on late night, walk-on-the-wild-side tours of the gay bars on Salt Lake City’s notorious west side where we would sample the cutting-edge edge sounds being cranked out by the deejays. Andy could be a riot.
But he also had a serious side.
Andrew Welch was a man of his times. It was the golden age of investigative journalism. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the “Washington Post” had just played a crucial role in toppling President Richard Nixon for his part in the Watergate scandal corruption. They, among others, revealed the whole sordid affair to the nation via their exposes. They were idolized. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portrayed them in the hit movie, “All the President’s Men.” Smart kids wanted to grow up and be investigative journalists just like jocks wanted to be pro athletes. Investigative journalists were heroes. Andy wanted to be both.
While he was Associate Editor, I witnessed Andy do several impressive investigative stories. He was one of the most hard-working, relentless reporters I have ever seen in my life. Absolutely tenacious. A dynamic go-getter, when Andy smelled blood in the water and you were his target, forget about it, it was all over, you were a goner. He had swagger in abundance and big cahones. Humility was not among his personality traits. But if you can walk the walk, then you can talk the talk. Andy rubbed lots of people wrong but he didn’t care. Nothing stood in the way of his pursuit of a good story, he was like a bloodhound on the trail when tracking down a lead. Brash and unafraid to speak truth to power, his secret weapons were his perseverance and killer instincts. Although he generally was spot-on in his judgments, he definitely weaponized journalism.
He was a good writer but not a great one. His talents and his looks were better suited for television than print. While working at the “Chronicle” he was soon discovered by local ABC affiliate KTVX-4 who hired him as one of their reporters. In that capacity he singlehandedly ran a corrupt County Attorney named Ted Cannon out of office.
I was blown away. Within months of that stunning accomplishment he was whisked away to the big-time when he was hired by the San Francisco PBS affiliate where he went on to a noteworthy career making award-winning documentaries. Wow. It all happened at breath-taking speed. Mind blowing.
Inspired by my predecessor’s accomplishments, in the winter and spring of 1978 I wrote several lengthy news feature articles based on the documents Truman had given me. It turned into a seven-part investigative series we called “The Hughes Papers.” We broke several stories nationally. All went out on the A.P. and U.P.I. newswires with the “Chronicle” as well as me personally being credited. Several prominent national newspapers published the accounts.
The biggest story we broke concerned kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. She was the granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, an old buddy of Hughes’. In February 1974 at the tender age of nineteen she had been kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California by a small urban guerrilla left-wing group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Over a year later she was still with the S.L.A. when Hughes decided to get involved and step in to help out the Hearst family by paying a multi-million dollar ransom. Just as he was on the verge of coughing up the dough and pulling the trigger, the F.B.I. suddenly and unexpectedly caught up with the S.L.A. on September 18, 1975 and took Hearst into custody, thereby ending the ordeal and making Hughes’ ransom contribution unnecessary. His involvement was big news throughout the world.
In short, “The Hughes Papers” made quite a splash both locally and nationally. The series was a big hit, garnering me substantial praise, kudos and attention. But the story didn’t end there. Among the many interested parties following the action at the “Chronicle” were the top cops in town.
A few days after we published the final installment of “The Hughes Papers,” I received a call from from the F.B.I.’s Salt Lake City office requesting that I come by for a little chat. Since the papers were technically stolen property, I figured it was best to cooperate with the feds.
The F.B.I. was interested in how the papers had gotten to me. The Bureau, of course, had been keeping a close eye on the Hughes dynasty for decades. Over the years through his extensive work in the field of aviation, Hughes had entered into many government and Defense Department contracts with his several business entities, most notably Hughes Aircraft Corporation. In his private life, Hughes had interacted with countless politicians and national and international bigwigs. He was more powerful than many countries and kings and queens. Anything that went on in Hughes’ world attracted F.B.I. attention. My splashy “Hughes Papers” series had not gone unnoticed.
When I met with the agent in charge, he had good news and he had bad news. The good news was that ninety-nine percent of the documents Truman had given me were real. Entirely legitimate. The bad news was that four individual pages out of the more than two thousand in my possession were phony. Four one-page memos were fake. They had been fabricated and salted into the box along with the authentic documents.
I had been duped. Slightly.
Which begs the question, who exactly was the man who brought the papers to me? Who was Preston “Jay” Truman?
Jay Truman was a man on a mission, a man with a righteous cause. He spent his entire life tilting at windmills in his quixotic quest for truth, justice and the American way. He was idealistic and high-minded. Such types are fixated on their goals – Jay kept his eyes on the prize – and almost impossible to stop. Although he eventually enjoyed the sweet taste of victory, he faced the eternal quandary of do the ends justify the means? I’ll let you be the judge.
To understand Jay Truman one must understand his cause. Jay was a huge part of on ongoing Utah protest movement known as the downwinders.
The downwinders had evolved as a tragic unforeseen consequence of the vast amount of misguided nuclear weapons testing conducted during the 1950s by the U.S. government in the desert wastelands of Nevada. It was the height of the Cold War. Americans were expected to make sacrifices to help with national security. No group of people sacrificed more than the downwinders of Utah.
The tragic situation was addressed in a documentary called “Downwinders and the Radioactive West,” released by the Utah PBS affiliate. Promotional materials for that show, produced by John Howe, describe it as being “about the fallout of nuclear testing that resulted in a decades-long debate over cancer rates, the steep cost of patriotism and the responsibility of a nation to protect its citizens (from the) environmental contamination due to nuclear testing in Nevada.”
The film explains that “testing took place 144 miles west of St. George, Utah – the Nevada Test Site…Residents were warned in advance of nearby tests; school children would be led outside to watch for the familiar mushroom-shaped cloud to appear on the horizon.
“In subsequent years, communities in southern Utah began to notice a troubling phenomenon…Cancer clusters were emerging in different communities, with relatively rare cancers such as thyroid cancer and leukemia showing up even among children…
“Utahns were documenting increased rates of cancer in their families and communities but the federal government had not taken responsibility.”
The documentary quotes former Utah congressman Jim Matheson unequivocally stating, “There’s no question the government lied to everyone in Southern Utah about the potential risk of nuclear weapons testing from the exposure to fallout. No question at all.”
All in all, there were a total of nine hundred and twenty-eight nuclear blasts conducted by the U.S. government during that era that spread fallout across the region. Soon, residents of Southern Utah began seeing those inexplicable cancer clusters. Deaths
skyrocketed. The government stonewalled.
Jay Truman was born in Enterprise, a small town outside of St. George, in 1951. He grew up in the midst of the whole mess, witnessing the horror of watching friends and loved ones suffer and die. It made him an angry man. Rightly so. Not surprisingly, he eventually died of cancer himself. Throughout his life he was fond of saying, “A is for atom. B is for bomb. C is for cancer. D is for death.”
Jay’s decades-long battle to get the government to admit mistakes and provide compensation for the victims became his cause celebre.His lifelong obsession with obtaining justice for the downwinders was described in his 2021 “Salt Lake Tribune” obituary thusly:
“A brilliant man with a photographic memory, he was the go-to source for many people on downwinder issues, a walking repository of information. He is the subject of Tim Skousen’s film, “Did the Government Kill John Wayne?”
Thankfully, in the years before he died Jay got to see his lifelong crusade pay off somewhat. He received substantial vindication when, in 1979, a federal court ruling in a trial featuring legendary environmental lawyer Stewart Udall, found in favor of the downwinders contention that they had been wronged and harmed by the feds. That eventually led in 1990 to Congress passing the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act which, according to PBS, “provided compensation to downwinders…and also acknowledged that Congress ‘apologizes on behalf of the nation’ to individuals who were ‘involuntarily subjected to increased risk of injury and disease to serve the national security interests of the United States.'”
Make no mistake, I will forever be grateful to Jay. He gave me the box that changed my life. What more could one man ask of another? But he also burned me slightly
and betrayed my trust. Let me explain.
Jay’s relentless pursuit of justice for the downwinders ultimately paid off. His obsession with vindication and validation for the victims was rewarded. But it was an obsession. And obsessive behavior can sometimes cause us to lose our judgment. Do the ends justify the means when one has a noble cause? That is a question each of us have to answer for ourselves. Undeniably, Jay would do just about anything to help the downwinders.
Including putting four phony memos into the box that changed my life. Alas, everyone has an agenda and Jay had his. He cared passionately about his cause. Maybe a little too passionately. Maybe it warped his judgment. In some ways, Preston “Jay” Truman was among the most remarkable and admirable
men I ever met. But he wasn’t perfect. None of us are. Even the best among us have flaws. Jay had a grudge. He was out to settle a score.
The four memos that the F.B.I. said were phony all threw shade on a federal judge named Aldon J. Anderson. The documents made it appear that the judge might be taking bribes from Hughes. Judge Anderson, unbeknownst to me at the time, had previously made a ruling against the downwinders. Jay apparently wanted to make him look bad. One plus one equals two. Go figure.
“The Hughes Papers” series in the “Chronicle” had included a story based on the Anderson memos which implied that the judge might be on the take. We immediately published a retraction and an apology. It was not my proudest moment as a journalist.
Jay wanted the Anderson memos out in the public arena. I was his chosen conduit. So be it. He probably rationalized his actions by the fact that he had given me two thousand pages of the real deal which would drastically alter the direction of my life for the better. Which it did. Jay changed the trajectory of my existence. I’m not here to judge.
The F.B.I. wanted to know how Jay had received the box of documents in the first place. My response was to simply point out the window of the Bureau’s fourth story office towards the Mormon Church office building towering over the Temple and dominating the downtown Salt Lake City skyline a few blocks away. What I meant was that the answer to that question resided somewhere within the vast, mysterious Mormon Church domain. I didn’t know the exact details of how Jay had gotten his hands on the box that changed my life. But I did know that whatever circuitous route it had taken somehow involved Mormons.
Howard Hughes liked Mormons. He thought they were hard-working, loyal, trustworthy and sober, qualities he highly valued in employees. When he became a Vegas tycoon, Hughes hired as many Mormons as possible to work in his casinos and hotels. Then he gradually started hiring them to work as his personal aides. Eventually he was completely surrounded by, and to a great extent controlled by, an all-Mormon staff in his dark, reclusive world. By the end, his inner circle was all Mormons. Wikipedia describes it this way:
“A small panel, unofficially dubbed the “Mormon Mafia” for the many Latter-day Saints on the committee…originally served as Hughes’ ‘secret police’…eventually the group oversaw and controlled considerable business holdings…and everyday operations of Hughes’ empire.”
In the final terrible years of Hughes’ life, the Mormon Mafia were totally in charge. They controlled all access to him. They completely ran his life. They basically had power of attorney. They were in charge of the nut house which had become Hughes’ self-inflicted prison. The Mormon Mafia were the caretakers of Howard Hughes’ insulated, isolated Kafkaesque existence.
It was someone in the Mormon Mafia who gathered up the papers at the Acapulco Princess April 5, 1976. It was they who put them in the box that changed my life and then loaded that box onto the Lear Jet bound for Houston. Eventually that box made it to Jay Truman in Salt Lake.
I don’t know why they did it. I don’t know how they did it. I’m just beyond glad that the Mormon Mafia did deliver that box to Jay. That box was my ticket out of town. A short while after I met with the F.B.I. I was named the winner of the Investigative Reporting division of the “Rolling Stone” College Journalism contest. I was given a monetary award and a position on the magazine’s editorial staff in New York City.
Woo-hoo! Time to get out of Dodge.
Next stop, the Big Apple!
