One of my favorite blogs is The Daily Mirror, a feature of The Los Angeles Times that merely reprints (that's not the right verb) old pieces from that newspaper. In this posting, they give us much of the story of the infamous loan that Howard Hughes made to Donald Nixon, brother of then-veep Richard M. Nixon. When it was revealed by columnist Drew Pearson, it was a scandal of sorts, though Richard M. and his aides did a pretty good job of spinning the news such that the controversy was not about the impropriety of the loan but about Pearson printing an untrue smear. You'll even see a Times editorial of the day which sides not with its own columnist but with the Nixon spin. History would later show that Pearson's reporting and any suggestions of a bribe were absolutely accurate but at the time, much discredit was heaped effectively upon what the columnist disclosed.
The Hughes loan proved to be a major underlying factor in much of Nixon's future. Some said that even though it was true, he refused to see it as anything but a Liberal/Democratic/Commie last-minute mudball and that it heightened his hatred and paranoia of the press. Some of this can be attributed to a political operative named Dick Tuck, who gained a kind of undeserved fame as a campaign prankster. There are dozens and dozens of tales about him playing tricks on opponents, primarily Nixon. One or two of those tales are actually true…but for a long time, any time anything went wrong on a Nixon campaign trail, it would be blamed on a Dick Tuck prank. And since he would sometimes impishly not deny them, his reputation grew.
One that he actually did engineer came when Nixon was running for governor of California in 1962. The candidate made a stop at a rally in Chinatown and appeared before a large sign with Chinese characters on it. One ally who could read that language whispered to Nixon that the sign asked, "What about the Hughes loan?" and Nixon got furious and was photographed ripping up the sign. The incident revived talk of the loan, which was a salient issue in that campaign as Hughes was then lobbying the state government for all manner of special treatment. Tuck later told the story — I'm not sure if it's true — that in '68, he showed up at a Nixon campaign rally in New York where they were handing out buttons in various languages to woo the multi-ethnic vote. Upon spotting him, Tuck claimed, Nixon aides looked down at the buttons they could not read, recalled the flap with the sign in Chinatown, and made the decision to stop giving out the buttons until they could get translators to verify what they said.
Nixon forever believed that the controversy about the loan was unfair and that it was one of the reasons he lost. Later, one of the prominent theories for the Watergate break-in was that Nixon was worried that other connections he had with Hughes would come to light. The burglary and bugging were, you may recall, at the office of Lawrence O'Brien, then the Chairman of the Democratic party. Before that, O'Brien had been a lobbyist for Hughes and had many connections with the organization…so there was the logical assumption that O'Brien had access to Hughes-related dirt on Nixon. One report says that John Meier, a former Hughes aide who was then working for Hubert Humphrey, had called Donald Nixon and — knowing he'd call his brother with it — fibbed to him that O'Brien had a mountain of such dirt. In any case, the theory goes, the Watergate break-in was to try and find out what O'Brien had and how he intended to use it.
So take a look at the articles and note how effectively the Nixon forces largely knocked down a basically-true news report, at least for a while, as a politically-motivated lie. And if you don't find that interesting, notice the tiny ad for singer Duke Mitchell (co-star of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla) playing at some local night club. History right before your eyes.