Howard Hughes
We just saw The Aviator, a movie portraying the life of Howard Hughes. The movie was very long, but, I thought, very well done. I hope there is a show about the real Howard Hughes because I’d like to see what liberties the producers of the movie took and what was actually based upon reality. I’ll have to wait until the A&E Biography for the interactive version, but for now I’ve found a couple of good websites. The first link, from wikipedia.org, presents a comprehensive overview of his extraordinary life. The second link, that of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has been said to be Hughes’ only act of philanthropy (Hughes later donated the rights to his airline company to the HHMI, thereby granting his billion dollar business a tax-free status). The most interesting link, http://www.famoustexans.com/howardhughes.htm, provides a brief but exciting overview of the career of Howard Hughes and his links to clandestine CIA operations and, ultimately, to Nixon and the Watergate scandal. Did you know that the long-time Kennedy advisor Larry O’Brien (and head of the DNC), the man that Nixon had burglars try to wiretap, was an employee of Hughes at that time? Or that CIA operations against Castro were carried out from land that was leased by Hughes?
Making this all more interesting was the fact that Hughes suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder.