What 'The Aviator' doesn't say about Owen Brewster

Sunday, February 27, 2005

By PAUL H. MILLS

"The Aviator," the Leonardo DiCaprio box office sensation featuring Alan Alda as Sen. Owen Brewster, has turned the spotlight once again on our former senator from Maine.

Much of the movie features a 1947 senate investigation, spearheaded by Brewster, that probes Howard Hughes for failing to deliver on two Pentagon airplane contracts funded with $40 million in taxpayers' money. Hughes adroitly distracts the public inquiry from shortcomings of his own company and instead puts Brewster on the defensive.

Hughes does this by alleging that Brewster had privately offered to drop the investigation if Hughes would merge TWA with Pan American World Airways, an airline of which Brewster had been a suspiciously enthusiastic advocate.

"The Aviator," which has received 11 nominations for tonight's Academy Awards, devotes its final hour to the Hughes-Brewster confrontation and the fallout that contributed to Brewster's narrow loss to Gov. Frederick G. Payne when Brewster came up for renomination in 1952.

But there is much more to it than the movie shows.

At the outset of his public career some 20 years before the Hughes hearings, Brewster was a governor known for putting the people's interests ahead of those of major corporations. Though ridiculed for not denouncing the initial support he received from the then-powerful Ku Klux Klan, Brewster refused once elected to pursue the Klan-backed agenda of cutting off public funds to the state's parochial schools.

Instead, Brewster stood up to the state's major industrial interests, vetoing a bill that would have allowed Central Maine Power Co. to sell its power to out-of-state companies and opposing other efforts that would have expanded the influence of big business.

Although "The Aviator" portrays Brewster as a favoritism-oriented Republican, it was Brewster who named staunch Democrat and esteemed lawyer William R. Pattangall to the state Supreme Judicial Court.

Liberal Portland Evening News editor Ernest Gruening, who after leaving Maine would go on to become one of Congress's most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War as a 1960s Democratic senator from Alaska, gives Brewster high marks in his 1973 memoirs, which cover a part of Brewster's governorship.

Seen in this light, Brewster's investigation of Hughes, the billionaire who commanded one of the largest personal fortunes in the world, was but a further expression of Brewster's populist orientation.

Nevertheless, "The Aviator's" suggestion that Brewster called upon improper methods is in keeping with the image promoted by popular historians. It is also one that Brewster sought to dispel in his efforts to flee political purgatory. Like many former senators, Brewster occasionally put in time as a congressional lobbyist. He also courted the Eisenhower administration for a high-level position.

When his efforts to win a presidential appointment fell short, Brewster, a graduate of Bowdoin College and Harvard Law School, turned in 1954 to his erstwhile colleagues on the Senate Government Operations Committee for the chief counsel's position. This was a post that flamboyant Wunderkind Roy Cohn had parlayed into one of the most visible though controversial positions in America, and Brewster was nominated to take Cohn's place by Committee Chairman Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Opposition from Democrats on the committee, however, forced a withdrawal of the nomination, one that was also dogged by reminders of Brewster's perceived tactics in the 1947 Hughes investigation.

Among the allegations that stung Brewster was a claim that he had hired a Washington police lieutenant to tap Hughes' phones at the time of the Hughes hearings. After the demise of Brewster's nomination to the Cohn position, Brewster fought back with a familiar weapon in his arsenal. He sued.

Brewster's use of libel actions had won him respect and deference in Maine's Guy Gannett newspapers earlier in his career. The settlement of a libel claim against the Portland-based chain resulted in more sympathetic news media. After the libel claim, publisher Guy Gannett assigned two reporters to the Brewster event, and the newspapers also endorsed Brewster.

Brewster's next target was The Boston Herald. Brewster had taken umbrage with its editorial that had urged senators to reject McCarthy's nomination of Brewster to the Roy Cohn position. In a $400,000 lawsuit filed against the Herald, Brewster alleged that the editorial resulted in his losing the appointment and other opportunities because it asserted falsely that he had arranged for wiretapping of Hughes' phones at the time of his famous confrontation with Hughes.

When the case went to trial in 1960, a federal court jury agreed that the editorial had libeled Brewster. Spurred in part by deposition testimony from Sen. John F. Kennedy that the editorial had no effect on the senate committee's refusal to confirm Brewster's appointment, however, the jury refused to award damages.

The same year, 1960, Brewster became a lead player in private efforts by Vice President Richard Nixon, a Brewster ally, to orchestrate the downfall of Cuba's Communist leader Fidel Castro. Overthrowing Castro was a behind-the-scenes goal for Nixon, who believed in the summer of 1960 that his own White House bid that year would be boosted if the outgoing GOP administration could uproot the cigar-chomping Cuban dictator.

In his book "The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon" (Penguin, 2001), author Anthony Summers shows Brewster to have been Nixon's liaison with a number of key figures whose objectives included targeting Castro.

Among those brought on board by Brewster for Nixon's mission to eliminate Castro was a Washington liaison for mafia leaders Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante. The Nixon-Brewster operation was not implemented in time for the November election, which Nixon lost by a razor-edged margin to Kennedy.

Had Nixon won, it is intriguing to consider what place might have been reserved for Brewster in the White House back room. It might have been one that provided fertile matter for yet another movie featuring our former Maine governor and senator, whose death in late 1961 also deprived us of a key to understanding his dramatic life.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington lawyer who writes about Maine's political scene. He can be reached at pmills@midmaine.com.