Bryan Burrough

by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

  The NFL owners gathered at Miami’s Kenilworth Hotel for the vote in January 1960. At a gathering the night before, Marshall sent a wandering accordion player to George Halas’s table to serenade him with “Hail to the Redskins,” a pointed reminder of his intentions. Halas promptly sent the musician to Marshall’s table, where he played “The Eyes of Texas.” The next morning Clint Jr. went to Marshall’s room, introduced himself, and phoned Tom Webb. The two then performed an elaborate charade for Marshall’s benefit, Murchison begging and wheedling the silent Webb to turn over the song. Murchison hung up. Marshall implored him to try harder. Murchison called a second time, again begging Webb to hand over the song, until finally Murchison put down the phone and told Marshall the rights were his. Marshall promptly pledged to back the birth of the new Dallas team.aa

  Back in Dallas, Clint Jr. and Tex Schramm hired their coach, a stern New York Giants assistant named Tom Landry, then set about selecting the team’s name. Murchison insisted on the Dallas Rangers. Schramm resisted, pointing out Dallas already had a minor-league baseball team called the Rangers. Murchison prevailed. A press release went out, announcing the name. Schramm, however, wouldn’t give up, and finally persuaded Murchison to rename the team the Dallas Cowboys. It took years for Clint Jr. to warm to the name. Five years later he issued a press release announcing the team might change its name back to the Dallas Rangers. The reaction was immediate. Murchison counted 1,148 phone calls to the Cowboys office. As he wrote in a note to a Dallas sportswriter, the tally came in at “Keep the name Cowboys, 1,138. Change the name to Rangers, 2. Murchison is stupid, 8.”

  In an effort to compete with Lamar Hunt’s Texans, the NFL announced the new Cowboys would begin play a season earlier than planned, in the fall of 1960. Lamar and the other AFL owners promptly slapped the league with a ten-million-dollar antitrust suit, calling the move “sabotage.” In fact, despite Lamar’s barbed quotes in the press, he and Clint Jr. remained friendly rivals. At a luncheon just before Christmas 1960, Clint Jr. surprised Lamar by wearing a bright red Dallas Texans blazer. A week later Clint was hosting a gathering at his home when two friends dragged in a massive six-foot-high gift-wrapped box. Clint stepped over, unwrapped the bow—and was startled when who should emerge but a smiling Lamar. The two men bore a passing resemblance, and more than once Clint Jr. found himself being introduced to people as Lamar. At one point, when a tall bespectacled man appeared at Cowboys offices asking for Tex Schramm, a new receptionist asked, “Are you Mr. Murchison?” The man smiled and said, “Lamar Hunt.” Afterward Clint Jr. presented the woman with pictures of both of them captioned, “This is Lamar” and “This is Clint.”9

  During that first season in 1960, both the Texans and the Cowboys played at the seventy-five-thousand-seat Cotton Bowl. Neither drew the crowds Lamar and Clint Jr. needed. The Cowboys mailed two hundred thousand letters to prospective season ticket holders; 2,165 signed up. Barely twenty thousand people appeared for their first game, and attendance plummeted after that, falling as low as two thousand one Sunday. It didn’t help that, forced to field a team of NFL castoffs—one a rodeo cowboy, another an art teacher—Tom Landry’s Cowboys failed to win a single game, finishing with eleven losses and a tie. The tie, in a December game against the Giants in New York, got Clint Jr. so excited he scurried around the El Morocco night club trying in vain to find a Texan to tell. He arrived back in Dallas to find a Love Field welcoming throng of exactly two fans.

  At one Cowboy home game barely eight thousand people appeared, and when it began to rain, all sought shelter beneath the press box. From his perch inside, it appeared to Clint Jr. that the entire stadium was empty. It stung, though Clint kept his spirits up. When the New York restauranteur Toots Shor wrote seeking box seats for a Giants game in Dallas, Clint sent him the tickets along with a note. “In case you want to bring any of your friends with you,” it read, “I am also sending you Sections 1, 2, 3 and 4.” Shor opened an accompanying box to find every ticket in those sections, ten thousand in all.10

  Clint Jr. lost seven hundred thousand dollars that first year, but Lamar had it worse. Though his Texans won eight games and lost six against the other new AFL teams, Texan crowds were even smaller than the Cowboys’ and their tickets cost less. At year-end, a Dallas sportswriter guessed Lamar had lost about one million dollars. “At that rate,” he concluded, “he can only afford to lose for the next one hundred years.”ab Clint Jr. once said the only game he truly enjoyed in those early years was between the teams from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh: “It was the only game I’d seen since joining the NFL that hadn’t cost me $50,000.”

  The Cowboys and Texans fought for the hearts of Dallas football fans for three long years, but nothing they did, not even the AFL Championship Lamar’s Texans won in 1962, could fill the Cotton Bowl. Finally, in 1963, Lamar ran up the white flag. He wanted to relocate the Texans to a city within easy commuting distance, and was poised to move them to New Orleans when, at the eleventh hour, its mayor refused to let the team play at Tulane Stadium, fearing the loss of Tulane fans. Instead, Lamar negotiated a one-dollar-a-year stadium lease (for two years) with the mayor of Kansas City and in May 1963 announced that the Texans were moving to Missouri to become the Kansas City Chiefs.

  The AFL, plagued with dwindling crowds, remained shaky until later that year, when Lamar ensured the league’s survival by negotiating a thirty-five-million-dollar television package with NBC. Three years later, in June 1966, he would spearhead the AFL’s merger with the NFL and the creation of a title game between the two league champions. The NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, wanted to call the game “the Big One.” But it was Lamar, after seeing his children bouncing a Super Ball, who came up with the name that stuck: the Super Bowl. His Chiefs would lose Super Bowl I to the Green Bay Packers in January 1967, but Lamar’s place in American sports history was secure. He was thirty-five.

  IV.

  With the notable exception of Bunker Hunt, the second generation of the Big Rich paid scant attention to politics, though the day was fast approaching when they all would grapple with what their fathers had wrought. Gauging what if any political legacy the original Big Four oilmen left their children is a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Was it their efforts—Facts Forum and LIFE LINE, Murchison’s anti-Adlai newspapers, Cullen’s fiery telegrams—that explained why so many Texans became ultraconservative? Or were oilmen just a product of the state’s innate attitudes? The reality is probably a bit of both.

  Whatever the case, there is no denying that by the early 1960s, while Texas ultraconservatives no longer held any major state office, their numbers were growing. Far below the media’s radar, Houston had emerged as a stronghold of the paranoid Birchers, while Dallas bristled with racists and right-wing demagogues, many of them avid LIFE LINE listeners. (George Rockwell of the American Nazi Party once said Dallas had “the most patriotic, pro-American people of any city in the country.”) As the nation, and the state’s own politics, moved away from their hard-core values, Texas ultraconservatives grew restive. When George Bush ran for a Houston congressional seat as a moderate Republican, he found angry Birchers shouting him down at public meetings. When Lyndon Johnson accepted John F. Kennedy’s invitation to run as vice president in 1960, Texas ultraconservatives denounced him as a traitor. During the campaign that November, Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, came to Dallas for a speech, only to be met by an unruly crowd outside the Adolphus. After Johnson had words with a demonstrator, he waded into the crowd and was spat upon. Afterward Johnson called it “a mob scene that looked like some other country. It was hard to believe that this was happening in Dallas, and in Texas.”

  Not all Texas conservatives were right-wing nuts, of course; as George Bush’s ascendancy attested, the state’s population of mainstream conservatives was growing as well. By 1961, thanks in no small part to the organization-building Roy Cullen had initiated with Jack Porter in the 1940s, many Texas conservatives had defected to the Republican Party. That year, in fact
, the state elected its first Republican senator, the conservative John Tower. The growth of the Texas GOP paralleled the emergence of a national conservative movement whose arrival, driven by the writings of William F. Buckley and his peers, had been but a twinkling in the eyes of Texas oilmen a decade before. At least initially, many liberals couldn’t tell the difference between the Buckleys and the Birchers, both of whom vaulted into public view to fill the vacuum left by Dwight Eisenhower’s retirement and the defeat of Richard Nixon in 1960. The status quo’s reaction was swift.

  On November 18, 1961, during a fund-raising speech at the Hollywood Paladium, President Kennedy lashed out at what he termed “the discordant voices of extremism” emanating from the Far Right. The media, dominated by liberal-leaning journalists, smelled something new; the ensuing weeks brought a torrent of exposés into the new “Radical Right”—in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times Magazine—that drew little distinction between moderate conservatives and the wild-eyed Birchers. None of this had any obvious connection to the “new” Texas—until December 4, when Newsweek adorned its cover with a retired major general named Edwin Walker, who had resigned from the army after being accused of teaching troops John Birch dogma.

  Walker had settled in Dallas, where in speeches around the city he had drawn a small but vocal following. The Newsweek cover—“Thunder on the Right: The Conservatives, the Radicals, the Fanatical Fringe”—portrayed him as a would-be Mussolini preaching to throngs of ultraconservative Texans. In the blink of an eye, as only the American media’s herd mentality can make it appear, the country, and especially Texas, seemed awash in right-wing nut jobs. With the news that H. L. Hunt had been among Walker’s backers—Hunt, in fact, felt Walker should run for president in 1964—many in the press, recalling the McCarthy-era backlash against the Big Four eight years earlier, blamed the Radical Right’s “emergence” squarely on Texas Oil money.

  In a special edition devoted to the “rise of the radical right,” The Nation came right out and said so: “Virtually every Radical Right movement of the postwar era,” it argued, “has been propped up by Texas oil millionaires.” In The Nation’s hands, all the old skeletons came tumbling out of the closet: John Henry Kirby, Vance Muse, Martin Dies, Roy Cullen, Facts Forum, Murchison, and Sid Richardson hobnobbing with Joe McCarthy around the Del Charro pool. According to the article:

  Favored by exemptions granted no other segment of American society [The Nation wrote] Texas oilmen have amassed incredible millions—in some cases, actual billions—and have become an arrogant economic oligarchy immune to the ordinary influences, superior to the ordinary needs and desires of America. The influence of Texas oil today is all-pervasive. Its millions, piled up thanks to the bounteous depletion allowance, spread through every section of American industry; one can hardly turn around in the publishing field in New York, without bumping into a Texas oil millionaire who bought himself a share—often a controlling share of an established periodical or book-publishing firm. The influence of overpowering wealth is a supremely potent force indeed, and this influence today is working its benefices on behalf of the Radical Right.

  The Nation overstated its case against Texas Oil, and especially against Hunt, to whom it assigned much of the blame for the growth of the Radical Right. But this and similar reviews insinuated themselves into mainstream press coverage, and by 1963, almost a decade after the anti-McCarthy backlash, the entire state of Texas had been tarred with an image of right-wing extremism once reserved exclusively for the Big Four. Texans have a strange tendency to embrace their myths, even the dark ones, and so it was with the “new” ultraconservatism. That ultraconservatives remained a quarrelsome minority in the state didn’t matter. They were loud, and they wanted to be noticed, as Adlai Stevenson discovered when he visited Dallas in October 1963.

  Stevenson was to speak on “United Nations Day,” in favor of an institution ultraconservatives loved to hate. General Walker mounted a counter-demonstration dubbed “United States Day,” and to the dismay of many, the state’s new governor, Texas Oil’s old friend John Connally, issued a proclamation saying so, too. Walker’s supporters infiltrated the Memorial Theater audience for Stevenson’s speech and attempted to hoot him down, while others picketed outside and waved American flags. When Stevenson tried to placate some of the demonstrators afterward, a woman struck him. A young man spit on him. As he wiped the spittle from his cheek, Stevenson muttered, “Are these human beings or are they animals?”

  The incident was splashed across front pages around the country. The subtext was clear: Forget the astronauts. Forget those freshly scrubbed Murchison boys on the cover of Time. This was the new Texas, same as the old Texas. For the moment, no one gave much thought to the fact that it was exactly one month until President Kennedy was scheduled to tour the streets of downtown Dallas in an open limousine.

  V.

  One month earlier, on the night of September 12, 1963, Clint Murchison Jr. finally opened his new home for guests. The party, almost ten years in the making, marked his fortieth birthday. Hundreds turned out to marvel at the great stone mansion, the largest in Dallas, probably the greatest in the state. The big-screen television, the robot bartender, the miles of walnut paneling that hid every electronic gadget out of sight—it was all worth it to Clint. Their elementary-school-aged children were now teenagers, but for one night at least, the long delay didn’t matter to his wife, Jane. The guests oohed at the swimming pool and its underwater viewing chamber, aahed at the intricate moldings and gorgeous live oaks, and tried not to dwell on the fact that Clint’s Cowboys were still mired in last place. It was a wondrous evening, the kind people would be talking about for years, and it was the last party anyone in Dallas would enjoy for a long time.

  VI.

  On the morning of November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy woke in a suite at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, where Sid Richardson had lazed away many hours talking with his bookies. Some of the president’s advisers had warned him about coming to Texas, but the crowds in San Antonio and Houston the last two days had been welcoming. Kennedy and Governor Connally were set to drive through the streets of downtown Dallas. They would pass near Clint Murchison’s headquarters at 1201 Main, then slide directly beneath H. L. Hunt’s office window, before rounding the Texas School Book Depository, recently purchased by D. H. Byrd.

  As he left for the brief flight to Dallas’s Love Field, where demonstrators were waiting with signs that read YANKEE GO HOME and YOU’RE A TRAITOR—an aide handed Kennedy a copy of the Dallas Morning News and pointed to a full-page advertisement draped in a funereal black border. “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” it read. The text was an anti-Communist screed that broadly painted the president as a Communist dupe. “WHY” it asked, “has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party praised almost every one of your policies and announced the party will endorse and support your reelection in 1964?” One of the men who paid for the ad, it turned out, was Bunker Hunt.

  The president read the ad, then turned to his wife, Jackie, grinned, and said, “Oh, we’re heading into nut country today.”

  FOURTEEN

  Sun, Sex, Spaghetti—and Murder

  I.

  A few minutes past noon, H. L. Hunt stood in his office window watching the presidential motorcade pass beneath him on Main Street. He lost sight of it as the cars rounded the Texas School Book Depository Building. As they eased down into Dealey Plaza, shots rang out. By nightfall John F. Kennedy was dead, a native Texan, Lyndon Johnson, had been sworn in as president, and Texas Oil had changed forever.

  Hunt was the first oilman to be swept up in the ensuing pandemonium, but by no means the last. Within minutes his son Herbert and his security chief, Paul Rothermel, hustled into his office. As they did, the phone rang. It was an FBI agent advising Hunt that, as a vocal critic of Kennedy’s, his life might be in danger. He advised Hunt to leave Dallas. Hunt objected. Herbert and Rothermel urged him to go. Hunt relented, saying he planned to travel east. �
�I believe I can do better going to Washington to help Lyndon,” he said, as if Johnson would have anything to do with him. “He’s gonna need some help.”

  Two days later a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at the Dallas County Jail, and it was the Hunts who needed help. Ruby had been outraged by the tone of LIFE LINE’s attacks on Kennedy, and police found two LIFE LINE scripts in his coat pocket when he was arrested, along with Lamar Hunt’s telephone number. Across the country, editorial writers, though careful not to criticize Hunt by name, lambasted LIFE LINE for fostering the “climate of hate” in Texas that many Americans came to believe had at least contributed to the president’s death. Hunt began receiving death threats. His phones rang in the middle of the night. At one point, someone even fired shots at Mount Vernon.

  By Christmas the Hunts became targets of the federal investigation that would be subsumed by the Warren Commission. An FBI man interviewed Lamar, who denied knowing Jack Ruby; apparently Ruby had intended to call him but never had. Agents questioned Bunker about the “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” ad the following spring. Several people, including a convicted con man, came forward to say they had seen Ruby and H. L. Hunt together on more than one occasion, but Hunt himself was apparently never interrogated. Hunt, however, remained nervous about the Warren Commission probe, and directed Paul Rothermel to canvas his FBI and CIA contacts in an effort to monitor its work. In the ensuing months Rothermel’s memos were so thorough that, in many cases, Hunt was briefed on the commission’s findings before Earl Warren himself.

  When issued in September 1964 the commission’s report mentioned H.L., Bunker, and Lamar by name, but effectively cleared them of wrongdoing or any substantive ties to either Oswald or Ruby. During the investigation Hunt ignored all threats to his security, keeping his home number listed in the telephone book and appearing on downtown streets without a bodyguard. But in both his public and private statements he underwent a complete reversal on Kennedy, lavishing praise on the dead president and excoriating his killer. “Thinking people,” he wrote in one internal memo, “know patriots had nothing to gain by this vile deed.” In a newspaper column he titled “The Assassination Must Not Be Forgotten,” Hunt wrote: “The assassination of President Kennedy was the greatest blow ever suffered by the cause of freedom… . This is part of the legacy left Americans by his Marxist assassin, and being a Marxist he would have wanted it that way.”1