Bryan Burrough
Page 30
It was headlined “Troglodyte, Genus Texana”:
There is a dangerous ailment in Texas which has been named Cullen’s Syndrome, after the subject of this book. Its concurrent symptoms are these:
The patient is almost always an oil man, not a cotton man or a banker or a cowman or a merchant.
He believes his riches were in no way the result of luck but of his own foresight, courage, and initiative—all made possible by the American Way of Life.
He thinks one way of showing his appreciation for America is to chip in with like-minded patriots and buy Joe McCarthy an automobile.
Although he may never have got as far as high school, he is an authority on textbooks, the tariff and winning football formations, the Constitution, geophysics, currency inflation, and how to get rid of warts.
He is fond of writing letters to office-holders and potential office-holders advising and/or threatening them about the course they should follow. Given half a chance, he will, out of his accumulated wisdom, drop homilies, maxims, aphorisms, texts, proverbs, and parables for the benefit of his fellowman, whom he professes to love dearly.
Thanks to articles like that, by mid-1954 the new stereotype of the ignorant, ultraconservative Texas oilman had taken firm hold in the American imagination. It was Clint Murchison, the oilman most attuned to public opinion, who tried to turn the tide. On July 12 Murchison announced that he and Richardson were buying their beloved Del Mar racetrack and transforming it into a nonprofit foundation, Boys Inc., that would channel 90 percent of its profits to Boys Clubs in California and elsewhere; it was a measure of the Big Four’s notoriety that the New York Times carried the story on page 1. The purchase of five more tracks around the country was under way, and Murchison hoped to lure J. Edgar Hoover to head the foundation if and when he retired.
The Texans’ philanthropy, however, was met by a gale of protest, most of it from a group of fundamentalist Christians in California, who told reporters that the nation’s youth shouldn’t be sullied with gambling profits. The real problem, though, was the IRS, which launched a multiyear investigation into whether profits earmarked for Boys Clubs should in fact be taxed. The IRS review killed Murchison’s plans to buy additional tracks in Michigan and Illinois, but the Del Mar foundation eventually channeled more than one million dollars to Boys Clubs—that is, after the four years it took to repay Murchison and Richardson for purchasing the track. The relationship lasted until 1968.
Murchison’s bid for media approbation, however, did little to halt the flow of vitriol aimed at Texas Oil. And if the Big Four could brush it off, a number of Texas politicians worried what it meant for the state’s future. “National politics is where the Texas reputation has suffered most severely,” a former aide to Lyndon Johnson wrote in the Houston Post in 1955. “Some Washington advisors regard it as ‘unsafe’ for political figures to let it be known that they number Texans among their friends… . It may be unpleasant to face, but a long list of positions of importance in national affairs could be drawn which, under prevailing conditions, no Texan is likely to fill simply because he is a Texan.” Congressman Brady Gentry told the East Texas Chamber of Commerce the backlash was hamstringing all efforts to help the state. “One of the contributing causes to the deplorable state in which we find ourselves,” Gentry said, “is caused by the tremendous publicity that has been given the Big Rich of Texas… . If it still continues, I feel certain that the time will come when the tax depletion will be greatly lessened, if not entirely eliminated.”
One of the few journalists to analyze the anti-Texas backlash was George Fuermann of the Houston Post. In his third book in six years on the “new” Texas, 1957’s Reluctant Empire, Fuermann defended most oilmen, blaming the rise of anti-Texanism squarely on the political activities of Cullen, Murchison, and Hunt. “The increasing suspicion of Texas oil has made it seem to others that oilmen are dishonest and crafty, yet the customs and [honesty] of independent oilmen are among their chief merits,” Fuermann wrote. Of Cullen, Murchison, and Hunt, he noted, “[these] three men, with little help from others, have made Texas oil, and thus Texas, a national antipathy.”13
IV.
The year that followed 1954’s surge of anti-Texan sentiment was not an election year, so the Big Four’s withdrawal from public view in 1955 could be viewed as either a return to normalcy or a respite to lick their wounds. Their retreat from the headlines, however, didn’t mean they had scaled back their political ambitions. It was in 1955, in fact, that Sid Richardson—a man who just twenty years earlier could not afford to buy groceries—conceived of a coup that would represent the apex of the Big Four’s influence in Washington: the replacement of Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon.
Carping about Texas oil power meant little to Richardson. Unlike Hunt and Cullen, he was on the inside-inside the Oval Office, inside the inner circle, inside Eisenhower’s head. No one could touch him there. In the autumn of 1955, Richardson fell in with a group of Eisenhower friends, including George Allen, who felt that Nixon would hamper chances for the president’s reelection in 1956. Dark and dour, Nixon had long been unpopular with many of Eisenhower’s advisers, and Eisenhower himself had real doubts whether he was presidential material. “The fact is,” Eisenhower told his speechwriter Emmet Hughes, “I’ve watched Dick a long time, and he just hasn’t grown. So I just haven’t been able to believe that he is presidential timber.” Among Eisenhower loyalists, both inside and outside the White House, there was already mumbling about replacing Nixon on the Republican ticket when, in September 1955, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Overnight the notion of a Nixon presidency became much more concrete, a possibility any number of Eisenhower’s friends wanted to squash.
Among them was Richardson, who had a man he thought perfectly suited to replace Nixon: his old friend, the Texas Oil attorney Robert B. Anderson. After serving as secretary of the navy for two years, Anderson had retired as assistant secretary of defense just months before, complaining that it was difficult to live on a government salary. In a conversation in late 1955, Richardson mentioned to Eisenhower the possibility of Anderson replacing Nixon on the 1956 ticket. Eisenhower agreed Anderson would make a fine vice president. There was just one problem: Anderson wasn’t willing to return to Washington, even as vice president, if it meant a government salary.
At that point, Richardson put in motion a complex scheme whose sole purpose was to make Bob Anderson a very rich man. A group of four oil companies, including one owned by Clint Murchison, was drilling wells on land owned by Richardson in Texas and Louisiana. Richardson asked each of these companies to assign royalty interests to one of his oldest friends, the onetime Gulf Oil executive Jay Adams, now an independent oilman based in Fort Worth. Acting purely as a go-between, Adams then assigned his interests to Anderson. Anderson then sold them to a company owned by Murchison’s friend Wofford Cain, who later returned them to Richardson’s hands by selling them to his nephew Perry Bass. Though little more than an exercise in paper shuffling, Richardson’s scheme made Anderson $970,000.
A few days before Christmas 1955, Richardson flew to Washington in one of his DC-3s laden with steaks, quail, and ducks for Eisenhower. During the visit he made clear that Anderson was now willing to accept a spot on the ticket; Eisenhower agreed to consider it. In a face-to-face meeting that spring, in fact, Eisenhower suggested to Nixon that he step down and become a cabinet member, the better, he argued, to run for president in 1960. According to both men’s biographers Nixon declined, and Eisenhower didn’t have the heart to push him out. In the end, in June 1956, Eisenhower named Anderson secretary of the Treasury, a position where he remained a great friend to the men of Texas Oil.14
V.
All through the 1950s the fundamentals of Texas Oil continued to deteriorate: rising production costs and competition from lower-priced Middle Eastern oil were slowly strangling the industry. Oil’s decline, however, was more than offset by the astronomic profits oilmen were making
in natural gas. Thanks in large part to a malleable bureaucrat named Mon Wallgren, who had replaced Leland Olds as chairman of the Federal Power Commission, gas prices had risen steadily, from six cents per one thousand cubic feet of gas in 1948 to ten cents in 1955. Texas gas producers, chief among them Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt, saw their profits skyrocket, while the publicly held pipelines, such as the Brown Brothers’ Texas Eastern, watched as their stock prices doubled.
The impetus for the rise in prices was an FPC rule that excluded independents from controls on natural gas, which allowed Hunt, Richardson, and others to request higher prices simply by telling the commission their costs were rising. Their customers, however, were far from happy. By 1954 midwestern states, who were paying 40 percent more for gas than in 1949, could take it no more; Michigan and Wisconsin sued the FPC, demanding protection from further price increases. The matter landed before the Supreme Court, which held for the states, ordering the FPC to regulate the independents. When the FPC dragged its heels, Congress intervened. A bill to nullify the Court’s ruling was introduced in the House in early 1955 and was passed by a small margin that July. A companion bill—which held the future of Texas Oil’s gas bonanza—was introduced in the Senate, where a vote was scheduled for February 1956. Once again it appeared Lyndon Johnson, now Senate Majority Leader, held the fate of Texas Oil in his hands.
The Harris-Fulbright Natural Gas Bill, as it was called, heralded a gathering of Texas Oil power such as Washington had never before seen. The stakes had never been higher: if the bill went through, gas prices were expected to rise between two hundred million and four hundred million dollars a year, an increase that would boost the value of southwestern gas reserves between twelve billion and thirty billion dollars. Lobbyists from every gas producer in Texas and Oklahoma—Humble, Phillips Petroleum, William “Kill ’em” Keck’s Superior Oil, and many more—could be seen prowling the halls of the Capitol in search of arms to twist. Sid Richardson’s man, John Connally, orchestrated the campaign from a war room at the Mayflower Hotel, where he worked with one of Johnson’s oldest pals, the lobbyist Ed Clark. Even the oilmen themselves made appearances. “I saw Hunt here today,” Texans whispered in the Mayflower lobby. “Sid’s here, too. I saw him. And Old Man Keck in his wheelchair.”15
From Connally and Clark on down, everyone in the Texas camp realized this would be a difficult battle to win. The media’s attacks on the Big Four remained fresh, and northern newspapers were up in arms over what they viewed as price gouging by gas producers; the New York Times termed the bill wrong “socially, economically and politically.” Keenly aware of public opinion, Johnson did everything possible to avoid anything remotely controversial that might provoke further headlines, ordering the oilmen to keep out of sight and urging his senatorial supporters to avoid any contentious debate. By the end of January, his strategy appeared to be working. With a vote scheduled for Monday, February 6, Johnson was sure he had enough votes to win.
Then, on Friday, February 3, as Senate debate was winding down for the weekend, one of the bill’s supporters, Francis Case of South Dakota, rose at his desk and made a stunning announcement: a lobbyist for the natural-gas industry, he said, had paid a visit to his office in Sioux Falls and left an envelope containing twenty-five hundred dollars in cash.16 Down at the Mayflower, Ed Clark immediately knew what this meant: At the very least, a Senate investigation. At worst, the bill’s defeat. All that Friday afternoon and into the night he prowled the corridors of the Mayflower, pinholing lobbyists and urging them to leave town—that night—before subpoenas flew. Into the wee hours limousines ferried oilmen to the airport, where private planes waited to fly them back to Texas, Oklahoma, and, in Sid Richardson’s case, Palm Springs.
Somehow, despite the charge of bribery, Lyndon Johnson managed to get the bill passed the next week. But the taint lingered. Editorials across the country condemned oilmen for brazen corruption. Then on February 17, disaster struck: Eisenhower announced that while he favored the bill, he could not abide the “arrogant” behavior exemplified by the Case situation. In a show of courage that cost the Republican Party millions in oil-industry donations, he vetoed the bill. “There is a great stench around the passing of the bill,” he wrote in his diary. This is “the kind of thing that makes American politics a dreary and frustrating experience for anyone who has any regard for moral ethical standards.” In a letter to Sid Richardson, the president wrote, “I could not possibly sign the bill in view of the questionable aura that surrounded its passing, which was, of course, created by an irresponsible and small segment of the industry.”
Pleasant words aside, it was the worst reversal Texas Oil had sustained, and oilmen had no one to blame but themselves. In the wake of Eisenhower’s veto there were calls for an investigation into the role Texas Oil money played throughout the affair. A Senate committee was formed to look into the matter, but Johnson emasculated it, and the committee soon dissolved. Still, lasting damage had been done. The days when Sid Richardson could plot a vice president’s overthrow were over; for the rest of Eisenhower’s term, Richardson’s political involvement remained limited to funding a presidential library. Everywhere, oilmen made themselves scarce. All that remained of their power in Washington was Lyndon Johnson, but after 1956 their roles were to be reversed. It was Johnson, now with his sights on the presidency, who led the oilmen, who were thankful to have any friends in the capital at all.
The collapse of Texas Oil’s power in Washington coincided with the death throes of Cullen’s and Hunt’s political careers. Facts Forum was already flagging in 1955 when Dan Smoot left to head his own small media company. Hunt shuttered what remained in November 1956; outside Dallas, no one seemed to notice. In Houston, Cullen, now seventy-five, was still delivering the occasional fire-breathing speech—in a June 1956 address he called for the impeachment of the entire Supreme Court—but the press, even the Houston newspapers, rarely treated his remarks as news anymore. Cullen’s brand of ultraconservatism did not go away, nor did the political donations of wealthy Texans, but 1956 marked an end to the era in which Lone Star oilmen appeared poised to have a significant impact on the nation’s political direction. Never again would there be a presidential election as in 1952 in which they would be involved at such high levels. For the Big Four, and for their friends around the state, all their money, and all the adoring coverage they had enjoyed during their media honeymoon, had been squandered. It happened in large part because Murchison, Richardson, Hunt, and Cullen were not only politically naive but badly out of step with a postwar America that, like Texas, was fast maturing, where a majority of Americans were beginning to accept civil rights and the federal powers born during the New Deal. As for Hunt and Cullen’s desire to spread ultraconservatism, many of the same qualities that made them successful oilmen—self-reliance and a stubborn streak—hamstrung their political activities. Their need for personal control rendered them unable to build lasting political alliances, or to see the value in investing in any intellectual enterprises but their own. This shortsightedness was vividly illustrated by William F. Buckley’s strenuous efforts to build a partnership with Hunt. In 1954, as Buckley was planning the journal that would become the influential National Review, he appealed to Hunt for backing. Hunt refused, and his son Bunker agreed to invest ten thousand dollars but never paid. It is a measure of Facts Forum’s reach at the time that Buckley offered to excerpt its articles in National Review or vice versa. Already a rising star in the conservative firmament, Buckley even agreed to write for Facts Forum and appear on Dan Smoot’s show if Hunt would help fund National Review. Nothing, however, could pry open the oilman’s bankbook. Buckley, his biographer John B. Judis concluded, “was too Catholic, too eastern and too moderate for most of the Texas Right.”
“I talked to Hunt about National Review and he just wouldn’t do anything,” remembered Karl Hess, one of Buckley’s fund-raisers. “Dan Smoot was Hunt’s ideologue.17 People like Smoot didn’t really want to change
anything. They wanted to lay the curse on the beknighted. Buckley really wanted to change things.” As a result, while Buckley went on to become the champion of modern American conservatism, Cullen and Hunt, as political figures at least, were consigned to the dustbin of history. Had they built bridges rather than guarded them, they and other Texas oilmen might have eventually been embraced as prophets. Instead, historians have correctly dismissed them as fools.
TWELVE
The Golden Years
It’s been a hard day all around. First, my wife’s pet kangaroo has to go and get poisoned, and then somebody stole my midget butler’s stepladder.
—VERBATIM QUOTE OF A TEXAS OILMAN AS HE STEPPED OFF A SANTA FE TRAIN IN HOUSTON, 19571
I.
The wave of publicity that inundated Texas Oil in the early 1950s surged late into the decade, feeding the nation’s appetite for insights into the strange and flamboyant new world of the Texas Big Rich. Much of the curiosity was spurred by depictions such as Edna Ferber’s Giant, offered to the nation a second time as the 1956 movie starring James Dean as Jett Rink. But the exploits of rich Texans encapsulated many of the changes the country was undergoing. There was a sense that America’s population and power were shifting south and west, and Texas oilmen presented a colorful window through which to view these changes. “Texas is such an alluring subject for New York writers,” George Fuermann wrote in the Houston Post in 1956. “First it was cowboys, six-shooters and longhorns. Now it’s millionaires.”