Bryan Burrough
Page 43
For all his ranting about the evils of Western oil companies, Gadhafi moved against them in slow motion. Expecting the worst, the oil companies began circling the wagons. In January 1971 Sid Richardson’s old banker, John McCloy, now working for the Rockefellers, drafted a defense pact called the Libyan Producers Agreement, known as “the safety net.” In it, all oil companies working in Libya, including all seven major oil companies, agreed to negotiate any demands from Gadhafi as a united front. If the worst happened and one of their number was nationalized, the signees agreed to help offset the stricken company’s losses by supplying oil from other sources. Bunker, though skeptical of anything involving the Rockefellers and New York lawyers, reluctantly signed on. He thought of it as insurance.
Finally, after two years of posturing and threats, Gadhafi struck, seizing the Libyan operations of Bunker’s partner, British Petroleum, in December 1971; BP’s sin, Gadhafi announced, was the British government’s support for Iran in a border dispute with Gadhafi’s ally, Iraq. Gadhafi ordered Bunker to take over BP’s operations and market its oil. Bunker, hewing to the safety net, refused. Gadhafi retaliated by expelling Bunker’s drilling technicians and installing native Libyans in their place. In November 1972 Gadhafi increased the pressure yet again, demanding that all foreign companies turn over 51 percent of their fields to the state. At the Libyans’ mercy, Bunker tried to cut a deal, sending an attorney to Tripoli to propose that Gadhafi buy him out in return for two years of oil production. Gadhafi thundered that he wouldn’t pay a cent for his own country’s oil; a month later, he shut down Bunker’s production.
Bunker might yet have saved himself. But unlike the other oil companies, he had never tried to appease Gadhafi. Where Mobil and Occidental spent portions of their profits building schools and hospitals in Libyan cities, Bunker had resolutely refused, keeping all his profits for himself—a position that earned him no friends in Tripoli. When Gadhafi moved against his next target, nationalizing 51 percent of the Italian national oil company, ENK, he repeated his demand to Bunker: Turn over 51 percent, a telegram from Gadhafi ordered, or be nationalized. Bunker ignored the threat.
Instead he hired John Connally, who by then had resigned his position as Richard Nixon’s Treasury secretary, and sent him in to negotiate. Connally’s status as a confidante to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon was enough to persuade Gadhafi to free up Bunker’s wells. The reprieve, however, was only temporary. On May 17, 1973, two months after Bunker and Herbert were indicted on wiretapping charges in Dallas, Connally resigned as Bunker’s attorney to become an adviser to the Nixon White House. A week later Bunker’s wells were again shut in. Finally, on June 11, with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Idi Amin of Uganda at his side, Gadhafi held a press conference to announce he was nationalizing Bunker’s production. He characterized the move as “a slap on America’s cool, arrogant face.” Bunker took the call in his office. When he put down the receiver, all he said was “Fuck.”6ad
Gone, in a matter of hours, was a field throwing off $30 million a year in tax-free cash. Counting future production, Bunker put his losses at $4.2 billion. He had no one to blame but himself; if he had only tried to placate Gadhafi, he might have survived. The other Western oil companies did exactly that. After pledging to stand united against Gadhafi, the others handed over half their holdings and continued operating in Libya for years. Bunker was outraged, at Gadhafi, but also at seemingly everyone else; the American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, for refusing to intervene on his behalf; the other oil companies, who he felt had weakened his bargaining position by cutting side deals; and, bizarrely, the Rockefellers, whose secret hand he suspected was behind it all. Bunker’s ejection from Libya led to an orgy of litigation that took years to unravel. The centerpiece was the largest antitrust lawsuit in history to that point. Filed in the spring of 1974, Bunker’s suit demanded $13 billion in damages from Texaco, Mobil, Shell, Gulf, and nine other international oil companies. BP, in turn, slapped Bunker with a $76 million lawsuit for payments it was due.ae
Bunker had lost one of the world’s largest oil fields, a field far greater than the one his father had purchased in East Texas. Even so, he remained one of the world’s ten richest men, probably wealthier than his father at that point. With a net worth approaching two billion dollars, his only real decision was what to do with all his cash. It was then that Nelson Bunker Hunt made a fateful decision. He began buying silver.
V.
In February 1974 H. L. Hunt turned eighty-five. His health was failing. Chronic back pain forced him into a wheelchair, and his eyes were so clouded, he consented to be driven to his office by a chauffeur. He began to think about dying, and his sins. He believed that upon his death, God would judge him. At a reception for the singer Pat Boone, who Hunt had long regarded as a paragon of American virtue, the entertainer leaned down to hear something Hunt was trying to whisper.
“Pray for me, Pat,” Hunt said.7
On September 13, 1974, the old man collapsed at his desk. He was rushed to Baylor Hospital. After a week of tests, the doctors gathered everyone from both Dallas branches of the family into a single room to give them the diagnosis: advanced cancer, of the liver. Hunt never left the hospital. As he weakened, many of his children came to his bedside, taking turns holding his hand. He lost the ability to talk, bobbing in and out of consciousness. Finally, on November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, his heart gave out, and he died.
News of Hunt’s death prompted an outpouring of something approaching affection. For days lines of cars inched by Mount Vernon. All the Hunts were bombarded with flowers and phone calls. The national obituaries tended to be dismissive; the New York Times termed Hunt “a militant anti-Communist … and ultraconservative.” In his column William F. Buckley lamented “the damage Hunt did to the conservative movement” with his “silly books” and “simplistic literature.” Hunt, Buckley wrote, gave “capitalism a bad name, not, goodness knows, by frenzies of extravagance, but by his eccentric understanding of public affairs, his yahoo bigotry and his appallingly bad manners.”
After years of gleefully pillorying Hunt, the Texas press turned winsome at his death. “He was many men in one, multitudinous and contradictory,” a Texas Monthly writer judged. “Good and bad, but on a larger scale, right out of Ayn Rand. In an age of midgets and conformists, he was a rogue who broke rules and cut a large swath and then, at last, lay down with a smile and allowed the ubiquitous and unctuous preachers to make him a monument to nobility.” This and similar eulogies were an early sign of a developing Texas nostalgia, a harking to the days when giants walked the oil fields, when men like Hunt and Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson and Roy Cullen helped build something unique in midcentury Texas—an image and culture loud, boisterous, money-hungry and a bit silly to condescending northerners, but proud and independent to many Texans. With H. L. Hunt’s passing the last of the greatest Lone Star wildcatters was finally gone, and with him, one sensed, a foundation of Texas culture was eroding.
On December 2, 1974, more than eighteen hundred people filed by Hunt’s open casket at First Baptist Church. Each of Hunt’s remaining thirteen children were there. Heads turned as fifty-six-year-old Hassie Hunt, the spitting image of his father, paused before the casket and cried. The hymns and eulogies seemed to go on forever, until they slid the coffin into a limousine, then drove it to Hillcrest Memorial Park, where it was lowered into a hole in the dirt beside Hunt’s first wife, Lyda. It was then the troubles began.
SIXTEEN
The Last Boom
I.
By 1973 Texas Oil remained mired in its second decade of doldrums, an afterthought in a world of petroleum now ruled by the Ay-rabs. Its unlikely savior, in fact the last man on earth anyone in Dallas or Houston expected to come to the rescue, turned out to be Bunker Hunt’s nemesis, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. In October 1973, when Syria and Egypt attacked Israel in what came to be known as the Yom Kippur War, the United States and Netherlands supported Isra
el. The militant Gadhafi implored the organization of oil-producing Arab states, OPEC, to boycott both countries, and it did. Within six weeks, the price of Arab oil rose from seventeen cents a barrel to $5.40.
The Arab oil embargo was a nightmare for ordinary Americans. Prices on every conceivable oil-dependent product, from airplane flights to plastic bags, skyrocketed. In a matter of weeks gasoline, a product people thought as available as oxygen, was declared in short supply; millions of Americans simmered in around-the-block lines of Fords and Chevys and Mustangs waiting to fill their tanks. For Texas, however, the embargo represented a second coming. Suddenly all anyone was talking about was finding more American oil. Just as happened with the shortages after both world wars, the Arab oil embargo triggered a massive drilling boom across the country, and in Texas.
In West Texas wildcat activity leaped 22 percent in 1974 alone. Across the state, well completions rose by a third. All the majors poured money into exploration, spending three times more in 1976 than just two years before. Competition drove land-leasing prices into orbit; the University of Texas, which owned thousands of acres in West Texas, reported its bids rose 900 percent. Higher prices for oil suddenly made offshore exploration far more economical; all across the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico, drilling platforms rose from the waves. All through the mid-seventies, would-be oil finders poured into Texas. Some, like a young Harvard Business School graduate named George W. Bush, were sons of Texas oilmen who never expected to follow in their father’s footsteps; Bush formed a wildcatting outfit named Arbusto and began sinking holes around his native Midland.
In Washington, politicians browbeat the executives of Exxon, Mobil, and other major oil companies, demanding to know why their profits were soaring while Americans waited in gas lines; Congressman Henry “Scoop” Jackson coined the phrase of the day—“obscene profits.” But for once, no one got angry at Texas Oil. Everyone understood it was the majors who sold gasoline; Texas oilmen had been down so long they were now considered “the little guy.” Even when the Murchisons and a handful of other oilmen wandered into the margins of the Watergate scandal—Pennzoil’s Hugh Liedtke was caught flying a planeload of cash to Washington for Nixon’s reelection—no one blamed Texas Oil.
It was as if the Big Rich of Texas had come full circle, back to the honeymoon days of 1948 to 1953, when they were viewed as harmless, nouveau riche eccentrics. As the 1970s wore on, in fact, Texas oilmen would increasingly be seen not as dangerous but as entertaining, a function not just of the Hunts’ various soap operas but of a new television drama loosely based on the family, Dallas. The show, billed as the story of “dramatic feuds in the land of the big rich,” became the most watched series in America. As far as the outside world was concerned, the new face of Texas Oil was J. R. Ewing.
For the state’s actual oilmen, the party that began with the 1973 embargo ran for five solid years. Drilling boomed. Profits mushroomed. Then, in 1978, things got even better. The fall of the shah of Iran led to dramatic disruptions in Arabian oil exports, driving the price of oil into the stratosphere, to an average of $12.64 a barrel in 1979, then $21.59, then $30, then, finally, amazingly, to $34 a barrel in 1980. In just seven short years prices rose 2,000 percent.
The world had never seen anything like this—prices and demand and drilling and profits, all at historic, unpredecented highs. And neither had Texas. Suddenly, everyone wanted into the oil game. Geologists fled the majors to become wildcatters. Doctors and dentists pored money into discovery wells. In Houston, Dallas, and Midland new skyscrapers grew like grass. It was the ’50s all over again.
For the first time in twenty years, new millionaire oilmen began popping up across the state. There was Clayton Williams, the Midland oilman who flew Texas A&M flags over his rigs and hosted black-tie cattle auctions. And Sybil Harrington, the Amarillo heir who became the Metropolitan Opera’s preeminent backer, bankrolling more than a dozen major performances at Lincoln Center. Everywhere one listened, there were echoes of the golden age. Out in Abilene, an oilman named “Cadillac” Jack Grimm—a moniker bestowed by his friend Bunker Hunt—followed in Tom Slick’s footsteps by funding expeditions in search of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. A garrulous type who placed second in the 1976 World Series of Poker, Grimm made world headlines mounting three expeditions in search of the Titanic; his 1981 effort, using deep-sea submersibles, returned with a photo Grimm swore showed the sunken ship’s propeller. (It didn’t.) Another expedition, this one to find evidence of Noah’s Ark on Turkey’s Mount Ararat, returned with a sliver of wood Grimm swore was part of the ark. (It wasn’t.) Still later he tried, in vain, to find Atlantis.
II.
Texas Oil was back, but the days had long passed when any of the Big Four families depended on oil to put food on the table. By the early 1970s the Hunts and especially the Murchisons were thoroughly diversified. John and Clint had vacated their father’s old 1201 Main headquarters in 1965, taking the twenty-third floor of the new fifty-story First National Bank skyscraper, six floors below Hunt Oil. For the first time members of the two families could ride elevators together and exchange daily pleasantries. The Dallas Petroleum Club, where Herbert Hunt served as president in 1968, took the building’s top floor.
Few people in Dallas knew what the Murchisons were up to. In the years following the Alleghany debacle, the Murchison brothers all but disappeared from public view. While Clint’s Cowboys were famous around the world, the operator at Murchison Brothers answered calls with a polite, “Seven four one six oh three one.” The fact was, other than the Cowboys, there wasn’t much to talk about. For all the chatter around Dallas of how brilliant John and Clint were, their assets hadn’t changed much over the years: life insurance, construction, and real estate still formed the empire’s foundation, as they had for years.
Clint’s 1972 divorce signaled an era of unsettling changes for the Murchison family. He had built a shiny new headquarters for the Cowboys but, as with all his investments, he kept his hands out of day-to-day management, allowing Tex Schramm, personnel chief Gil Brandt, and coach Tom Landry to work their magic, and they did; Clint’s smiling face, usually displayed alongside a trophy or a sweaty Bob Lilly or Roger Staubach, became a regular feature of Dallas sports pages. What readers didn’t know was that as the Cowboys marched to championship after championship, their owner’s personal life was spiraling out of control. Clint thought nothing of downing a half dozen vodkas-and-crushed-ice in a sitting, and in the mid-1970s, egged on by the fast crowd he saw in California, he began using recreational drugs. What began with an occasional marijuana joint turned into a keen appetite for cocaine. “It got to the point where he needed drugs in order to perform in bed,” one of his mistresses recalled. “Without cocaine, sex was impossible for him.”1
Clint knew he was in trouble, and told more than one friend he needed to reduce his drinking. He began cutting back on women as well—affairs weren’t as exciting without someone to cheat on, he found—focusing his attention on a handful of mistresses; it was during this period that he bought the one in Los Angeles a Jaguar and a home in Beverly Hills. Then, in 1974, came the promise of salvation. Her name was Anne Brandt, and she was the freshly divorced wife of the Cowboys’ director of player personnel, Gil Brandt. Smart and focused, a petite brunette who kept her hair short, Anne had lived a hard life. Raised in Oklahoma, the daughter of a traveling salesman and his alcoholic wife, she ran away at sixteen and by twenty-one had two children and two ex-husbands. She made a career as a legal secretary, married and divorced Brandt, and was still only thirty-four when she began seeing Clint.
Eyebrows had barely had time to raise when the couple was suddenly married, in a small wedding at the Murchison mansion in June 1975; Anne had been divorced less than a year. When Dallas society finally digested what had happened, the new Mrs. Murchison was met with a resounding thumbs-down. The ladies of Dallas remained loyal to Jane, who had remarried one of her decorators and settled in New York, judging Anne
far too coarse for their tastes. Anne, it became clear, was no Jane. Among other things, she could be intensely jealous; anything that took Clint from her side, from his mistresses to the Cowboys, she disdained. Some of his oldest cronies now found themselves frozen out of Clint’s life. Worse, Anne had a violent streak, and when Clint did manage to sneak away for a weekend, the consequences could be hair-raising. Anne fought, struck, and even bit Clint during screaming tirades that sometimes went on for days.
Her behavior, Anne knew, was rooted in a deep-seated insecurity. At every party or Cowboys function they attended, she spent hours worrying over what to wear. She sank into depression, and when a girlfriend suggested she come to a meeting of the Dallas Christian Women’s Club, Anne went along, and that was it. Not a year into her new marriage, she pledged to become a born-again Christian, plunging into nine months of intensive therapy from which she emerged determined to devote her life—and her marriage—to God. Out the mansion door went the bottles of vodka and the vials of cocaine. Banished, at least from the Forest Lane mansion, were her husband’s oldest friends. While Clint met the onslaught of religious fervor with sighs and rolled eyes, Anne dived headlong into a new career speaking to religious groups all across Dallas, where she implored churchgoers to give themselves over to Christ. “I let Jesus handle even the littlest things,” she told People magazine. “Like I pray for parking spaces.”