The latest Leonard DiCaprio box office sensation, “The Aviator,” featuring Alan Alda as our own Owen Brewster has turned the spotlight once again on a senator from Maine.

Much of the movie features a 1947 Senate investigation spearheaded by Brewster that probes Hughes for failing to deliver on two Pentagon airplane contracts funded with $40 million in taxpayers’ money. Hughes adroitly distracts the public inquiry from the 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 Am, an airline for whom Brewster had been a suspiciously enthusiastic advocate.

Though “The Aviator” devotes its final hour to the Hughes-Brewster confrontation, and the fallout from it contributed to Brewster’s narrow loss to Gov. Payne when Brewster came up for renomination in 1952, there’s more to Brewster than what the movie tells us.

At the outset of his public career some 20 years before the Hughes hearings, for example, Brewster himself was an aerodynamic-appearing governor known for putting the people’s interests ahead of those of major corporations. Though ridiculed for not denouncing initial support he received from the then-powerful Ku Klux Klan, once in office he refused 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 CMP to sell its power to out of state companies and opposing other efforts that would have expanded the influence of big business.

Though the new movie depicts Brewster as a favoritism-oriented Republican, it was Brewster who named staunch Democrat and esteemed attorney William R. Pattangall to the state’s Supreme Court.

Liberal Portland Evening News editor Ernest Gruening, who himself would become one of Congress’s most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War as a 1960s Democratic senator from Alaska, for example, gives Brewster high marks in his 1973 memoirs.

Seen in this light, Brewster’s investigation of Hughes, the multi-millionaire 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’s 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 and he also courted the Eisenhower administration for a high level position.

When his efforts to win a presidential appointment fell short, Brewster, a Harvard educated attorney, 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 Chair Joseph McCarthy. 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 the most was that he had hired a Washington police lieutenant to tap Hughes’ phones at the time of the 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 Gannett newspapers earlier in his career. The settlement of a libel claim against the Portland Press Herald-based chain resulted in a politically valuable response: The papers bent over backwards for him. After the libel claim, Guy Gannett assigned two reporters for every Brewster event covered by the papers, which also editorially endorsed Brewster.

Brewster’s newest 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. The $400,000 suit Brewster filed against the Herald alleged that the editorial resulted in Brewster losing the appointment and other opportunities because it falsely asserted he had arranged for wiretapping of Hughes’s phones.

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 any damages.

That same year Brewster became a lead player in private efforts by Vice President 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 in the summer of 1960, who believed his own White House bid that year would be boosted if the outgoing GOP administration could uproot the cigar-chomping Cuban dictator.

As recently revealed in a book about Nixon, Anthony Summers’ “The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon,” Brewster was Nixon’s liaison with a number of key figures whose objectives included personally targeting Castro himself. 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 speculate what place would have been reserved at the White House backroom table for Brewster. It is perhaps one that might have furnished fertile matter for yet another movie featuring our former Maine governor and senator, whose death at the end of 1961 also deprived us of a key to understanding his dramatic existence.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@midmaine.com

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