| did not see the ad, but destiny acted as though | had answered it, when | was contacted by Murray Chotiner for Herman Perry, vice president of the Bank of America. Perry later became vice president of the Western Tube Corporation, a CIA front located in the Whittier Bank of America building. But now he wanted to know only if | was a Republican and if | was available.
My responses were both affirmative.
It was Perry who brought me out for an extremely brief meeting with Howard Hughes. Hughes was handsome, dynamic, self-assured. Somehow he had seen the FBI dossier on me, which had apparently been compiled when | applied for a position with the Bureau after graduating law school. Oddly enough, | had never heard back from the FBI directly.
“Nixon,” he addressed me, “you have a magnificent political future ahead. You will be able to steer your ship independently. But always keep it in a tiny compartment of your mind that you do not own the ocean. | do.”
| never saw Howard Hughes face to face again.
kok # The seeds of my distrust of the Justice Department were sown in
1948 during the Alger Hiss case. Those people just sat on each other’ s
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