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Truman mailed Hughes his medal
A young engineer
Hughes was born wealthy but cared more about engineering than luxury. At 11 he built Houston's first radio transmitter, and the year after that he built the city's first motorcycle. By 30 he had made nine commercially successful movies, back when Hollywood was on the technological frontier.
Records in the air
His other career was aviation. He designed planes, produced them, and piloted them himself, setting world records for top air speed, fastest transcontinental flight, and fastest flight around the world. He liked to remind people that he was a mere mortal and not a Greek god, and his lawyer once argued in federal court that Hughes was a man to whom you cannot apply the same standards as you can to everyone else. Hughes paid the lawyer to say it.
The crash and the withdrawal
In 1946 he suffered his third and worst plane crash. Had he died then, he would have been remembered as one of the most dashing and successful Americans of all time, but he survived, barely.
He became obsessive-compulsive, addicted to painkillers, and withdrew from the public to spend the last 30 years of his life in self-imposed solitary confinement. He had always acted a little crazy on the theory that fewer people would want to bother a crazy person. Once the act turned into a crazy life, he became an object of pity as much as awe.
What went wrong in Hughes's worst crash?
The 1946 crash came on the first test flight of the XF-11, a twin-engine reconnaissance plane Hughes had designed for the Army Air Forces. One set of its counter-rotating propellers reversed pitch in the air, and the plane lost power on one side. Hughes tried to reach a golf course but came down on houses in Beverly Hills. He survived with a crushed chest and third-degree burns. The XF-11 never went into production.
How did Hughes set the around-the-world record?
In July 1938 Hughes flew a Lockheed 14 twin-engine plane around the world with a crew of four in 91 hours and 14 minutes. The route ran from New York to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Fairbanks, and Minneapolis before returning to New York. The previous record, set by Wiley Post in 1933, was more than seven days. New York gave Hughes a ticker-tape parade, and Congress voted him the gold medal the next year.
How is a Congressional Gold Medal awarded?
It takes an act of Congress signed by the president, which makes it one of the highest civilian honors in the country. The first went to George Washington in 1776 after the British evacuated Boston. The United States Mint designs and strikes each medal. Other early recipients include the Wright brothers in 1909 and Charles Lindbergh in 1928.
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