Noah Dietrich
[1] Although these dates have been recorded as the official period of employment, Noah Dietrich continued to oversee and make executive decisions for the Hughes industries as late as 1970.According to his own memoirs, he left the Hughes operation over a dispute involving putting more of his income on a capital gains basis.[2] He graduated from Janesville High School in 1906, married in 1910, and became a bank cashier in Maxwell, New Mexico, for the next six months.Then Dietrich, along with his family now consisting of his wife and two daughters, decided to move back to Los Angeles, where he worked for the CPA firm of Haskins and Sells, which later merged into what is now Deloitte.[3]: 190–191 Dietrich also discussed in considerable detail the real impetus behind the government's investigation of Hughes Aircraft following World War II.Ostensibly, the probe involved Hughes' failure to deliver the infamous flying boat, the Hercules, a military transport aircraft, to the government on time.Dietrich wrote, however, that the real purpose of the probe may have been neutralizing Hughes, owner of TWA, while rival Pan Am – whose president, Juan Trippe, had implored Maine Senator Owen Brewster to carry it – pushed for a federal law establishing only one official American carrier of international air traffic, and Pan Am becoming that carrier.Dietrich wrote that he surrendered his interest just to be rid of Hughes, a move he later regretted, since the leases turned big profits eventually.Only when he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis (the same illness that killed shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis), did Dietrich finally retire in full."[3]: 11 Time[4] revealed in 1972 that a copy of an early draft of the manuscript for Dietrich's memoir, ghost-written by journalist James Phelan, may have fallen into Clifford Irving's hands, and identified the draft as a key element in Irving's being able to convince publishers and others that his hoax Hughes autobiography was genuine.When he later wrote his own memoir, The Hoax, Irving corroborated the hypothesis posited by the Time article, writing that he indeed obtained and a made a copy of a draft of Dietrich's manuscript, which he then used as source material for his fabricated Hughes autobiography.He then turned the project over to another journalist, Bob Thomas, who finished the Dietrich memoir within six weeks.On February 15, 1982, Dietrich died of heart failure in a hospital in Palm Springs, California.