Encounters with Power
A brief, yet definitive close-up view of power. Why it is an absolute necessity in government and business.
HOWARD HUGHES AND OPERATION BOXCAR
In the pre-dawn hours on Thursday, April 25, 1968, Howard Hughes, an exhausted billionaire scribbled a four page letter to then president, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Ten days earlier Hughes had picked up a newspaper and read, and reread the federal government’s announcement of the impending detonation of a hydrogen bomb not 100 miles from his penthouse atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Nevada. Hughes considered this coming event a direct threat to his person after reading: “Persons up to 250 miles from detonation may feel a slight tremor immediately following the explosion, particularly if they are on upper stories of high buildings or other tall structures.”
Hughes began his letter to the President, “It is not my purpose to impede the defense program in any way, and I can positively prove that if my appeal is heeded it will have no deleterious effect,” then moving on to a more direct approach clearly offering something in return, “the nuclear test program will proceed more rapidly than at present.” A powerful man offered another powerful man a bribe to encourage the government to move the test site to another area, far away from Hughes beloved state of Nevada.
Years earlier, Hughes had made sizeable contributions to Johnson’s senatorial campaign. In effect he was calling in a marker. Call this coercive power. When this did not work, Hughes reverted to the tried and true, reward power, and offered a bribe.
We can only imagine how Hughes reacted while laying in his sweat soaked bed awaiting the countdown. At precisely seven o’clock on the morning of April 26, 1968, a 1.2 megaton blast shook the Nevada desert and registered shock waves on seismographs from New York to Alaska. Operation Boxcar went off without a glitch.
It is ironic that Hughes, the most powerful man in America fought toe to toe with the government of the most powerful nation in the world to put a stop to the ultimate in out of control power…atomic fission.
Indeed, there is something magical about power. It can be both good and bad, undeniably it can be both. There are no accurate forms for measuring power. Endless difficulties occur when defining it. Perhaps, Herbert Kaufman got it best over 50 years ago.
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