Bryan Burrough (23 page)

The Roosevelts became high-profile members of Fort Worth society. Sid Richardson became one of Elliott’s closest friends, a bond that strengthened after Richardson struck the Keystone Field in 1935. A turning point in their relationship, and in Richardson’s political career, came in May 1937, when the president announced he was coming to Texas to visit Elliott and do some tarpon fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Roosevelt’s trip was historically significant because it marked the president’s introduction to the young Lyndon Johnson. Historians, however, have overlooked a forgotten controversy involving Roosevelt’s introduction to Texas Oil.

The president cruised to Galveston on the presidential yacht
Potomac,
where Elliott, with Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison in tow, met him for several days of fishing. On Wednesday, May 5, the
Potomac
anchored off Matagorda Island; the president dined ashore at Murchison’s compound. Roosevelt’s fishing was interrupted the next day by a disaster: the destruction of the German zeppelin,
Hindenburg,
in New Jersey. Friday the fishing resumed. At lunchtime the
Potomac
anchored off St. Joe’s—its buildings still under construction by Perry Bass’s crews—and everyone prepared to disembark.

“We went from the
Potomac
to the island by a small boat,” one of the guides, Barney Farley, recalled in his 2002 memoir,
Fishing Yesterday’s Gulf Coast,
“but when we got there, we were faced with the problem of how to get the president, in his wheelchair, from the boat to the island. Sid didn’t have any way to unload him. He didn’t have a dock for that. But he did have a cattle chute. So we pulled alongside the cattle chute and Sid explained to the president that he was going to roll him down. Mr. Roosevelt exploded, “What in the world—Sid, do you mean you’re going to roll me down that bull chute? ” Sid replied in a good-natured Texas drawl, “Why, Mr. President, you’re the biggest bull that ever went down that chute!”
⁴

On Saturday Roosevelt again lunched at Murchison’s spread on Matagorda, then headed into Galveston, where he met Lyndon Johnson and boarded a train to Fort Worth. That night Richardson and Murchison, along with the crème of Fort Worth society, attended a barbecue in Roosevelt’s honor at Elliott’s ranch. On the surface it was a typical presidential trip, a chance for Roosevelt to visit his son and rub elbows with the new Texas millionaires. Not until eight years later, when Elliott Roosevelt underwent a five-day grilling by Internal Revenue Service attorneys examining his taxes, was it hinted that something more was afoot. The problem was Murchison.

Seven months earlier, in November 1936, a federal grand jury had indicted one of Murchison’s largest subsidiaries, the pipeline that took East Texas crude down to the ports around Houston, for running hot oil. Murchison himself escaped charges; neither of his biographers even mention the episode. What Elliott Roosevelt’s IRS interrogators suggested, and this was the story that leaked to columnist Westbrook Pegler in November 1945, was that a secret deal had been struck between Roosevelt, Richardson, and Murchison, apparently, the IRS believed, in a late-night meeting following the barbecue. The following week Murchison’s subsidiary suddenly changed its plea from not guilty to no contest and paid a nominal fine of $17,500. The mainstream press didn’t make the connection, but oil-industry periodicals did. “Roosevelt’s Hosts Company in Texas Fined for Hot Oil Law Violations,” read the
National Petroleum News
headline. Eight years later an IRS attorney pressed Elliott during a deposition whether he had interceded with the White House to go easy on not only Murchison but on Richardson and Charles Roeser, who the IRS suggested had been under investigation for hot oil violations.

 

 

The inference was that President Roosevelt had persuaded federal prosecutors to go easy on Murchison. If so, the IRS attorneys clearly believed, the favor had been returned by Sid Richardson. Richardson gave two depositions in Elliott’s tax case. As he told the IRS, he developed a new appreciation for Elliott in the wake of the president’s visit to Texas. “Up to the time I had an opportunity to visit with Elliott on the island,” he said, “I thought that he was more or less wild in his ideas, and after I had a chance to visit with him there I changed my opinion and thought the boy had something that I hadn’t even had a chance to see in him before, and I thought it was worthwhile.”

Two weeks after the president’s visit, Richardson lunched with Elliott and listened as he sang the praises of several Texas radio stations he would love to buy—that is, if he had the money. “He told me one of them was a wonderful buy, not trying to sell me on it but merely discussing the situation,” Richardson said. “[So] a few days after that I called [Elliott] myself and suggested to him that I loan him the money and to see if he could buy the station.”

Which is how Sid Richardson, barely two years out of poverty, found himself bankrolling the president’s son in the radio business. In July 1938, a year after President Roosevelt’s visit, Richardson loaned Elliott twenty-five thousand dollars, which Elliott used to buy a Fort Worth station, KFJZ. Several months later came two more loans, totalling fifteen thousand dollars, which Elliott used to buy additional radio stations that soon formed his own network, the Texas State Network. Richardson became a major shareholder in Elliott’s business.

Whether or not Richardson’s dealings with Elliott Roosevelt had anything to do with Murchison’s indictment, the relationship gave Richardson immediate entry to the White House. Just two weeks after agreeing to invest in Elliott’s radio network, Richardson was invited to chat with the president in Washington. He used the occasion to complain about a proposal, backed by Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau, to eliminate the oil industry’s all-important 27.5 percent depletion allowance, a tax loophole that allowed oilmen to write off nearly a third of costs associated with dry holes. “Mr. Richardson did ask me on several occasions whether there wasn’t something I could do to stop Mr. Morgenthau from trying to ruin every individual oil operator in the country by eliminating the [allowance],” Elliott testified in 1945. “He was always complaining to me during the entire time of our acquaintance about that particular feature.”

Though neither man ever described their meetings, Richardson and the president got along well, for Richardson was invited to the White House several more times. Richardson characterized his advice to the president as a counterpoint to the opinions of major oil companies, whom Roosevelt did not trust. Whatever his counsel, the oil depletion allowance stayed put. Richardson didn’t get everything he wanted, however. On the only occasion he mentioned Richardson publicly, in his 1975 book
A Rendezvous with Destiny,
Elliott recounted a 1940 trip Richardson made to the presidential retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. With war looming, the White House was poised to block oil shipments to Italy, one of Richardson’s major customers. During a two-day visit, Richardson refused to stop supplying Italy with oil. It did him no good. Not long after, shipments were indeed blocked. Years later Elliott made clear he felt Richardson had used him. “I became the tool of the oil lobby in Washington,” Roosevelt wrote.

Richardson’s relationship with Elliott ended during the war, when Elliott took an army assignment in North Africa and his radio network foundered; Richardson’s loans were never repaid, and he ended up owning one of Elliott’s radio stations the rest of his life.
ⁿ
By all accounts, however, Richardson remained friendly with Elliott’s father. In mid-1941, concerned with the nation’s oil supply in the event of war, the president asked Richardson and Charles Roeser to examine the situation. Their report was to be delivered during a Thanksgiving dinner at Warm Springs, but at the last moment Roosevelt was called back to Washington.

Two weeks later, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Richardson, Perry Bass, and Bass’s new wife, Nancy Lee, trudged into the house on St. Joseph’s Island after a morning of quail hunting to find the servants glued to the radio: Japanese airplanes were bombing Pearl Harbor. St. Joe had no phone at the time, but four days later, on Wednesday, December 11, a boat arrived from Freeport with an urgent message from the White House.
^†
When Richardson managed to return the call, “the president’s message,” Perry Bass recalled, “in essence was, ‘Sid, I want you to have lunch with me next Sunday and tell me what shape we are in for petroleum. I don’t trust those major company bastards.’ ”

The next day Richardson was on a train heading east. One of his favorite sayings was that it was better to be lucky than smart, and when the train stopped in the North Texas town of Denison, Richardson had a chance

In the presidential election year of 1940, most Washington politicians, much like the rest of the country, hadn’t the slightest idea how very rich Texas oilmen had become. Not one of the Big Four had received significant publicity, even in Texas itself, and national publications remained largely ignorant of the state’s new riches. Typical of Washington’s view was a memo Harold Ickes forwarded to President Roosevelt in August 1935, summarizing what Ickes termed an “interesting document . . . handed to me by a man in the oil game who thought it ought to reach you.” The paper was a list of Texas oilmen who had given that year to the Democratic National Committee.

Of Herman Brown, the Brown & Root cofounder and millionaire oil investor, the memo noted, “Do not know of him.” Sid Richardson—this was a month before he hit the Keystone Field—was described as “in debt and borrows money to develop leases from Charles Marsh.” Only two names appeared promising: Clint Murchison and Dudley Golding. “Golding & Murchison,” the memo concluded, “came into the East Texas Field several months after it started with no money and a little over three years [later] sold out . . . for about five million dollars.”

Rarely in history can one name the single man who identified and single-handedly developed a source of political power as vast as that afforded by the new Texas fortunes. In this case you can. His name was Lyndon Johnson, and he would ride the wave he discovered in 1940 all the way to the White House. No one, not even his most heralded biographer, Robert Caro, has been able to say where or how Johnson had his epiphany. In fact, it appears it simply arose from the small coterie of businessmen who had backed Johnson in his Texas elections. Chief among these was Sid Richardson’s partner Charles Marsh, who introduced Johnson to his neighbor in Austin, Herman Brown.

It began in the fall of 1940, when Johnson, then a second-term Democratic congressman, used Texas Oil’s cash to start his march to the apex of American power. His vehicle was the Democratic Congressional Committee, charged with raising money for campaigns nationwide. All that summer Johnson had pestered Sam Rayburn to allow him to lead the committee, but Democratic leaders judged him too young and inexperienced for such a high post. Finally, in September, with Democratic coffers almost empty, Johnson got the job.

Johnson left the White House that morning and hit the phones. His first call went out to his primary backers, George and Herman Brown of Brown & Root. Individual contributions were capped at five thousand dollars, but the Browns had six five-thousand-dollar checks on Johnson’s desk by Friday afternoon; that single donation of thirty thousand dollars was more money than the Congressional Committee had received all that year from its principal benefactor, the Democratic National Committee. Charles Marsh prevailed upon Sid Richardson to donate five thousand dollars that same Monday, in the name of Perry Bass; Marsh’s publishing partner chipped in another five thousand dollars. Richardson, in turn, reached out to Clint Murchison, who sent five thousand dollars on Wednesday. By Saturday, October 19, five days after his first phone call, Johnson was able to walk into Democratic National Headquarters with a check for a jawdropping forty-five thousand dollars. “We have sent them more money in the last three days,” he wrote an acquaintance a week later, “than Congressmen have received from any committee in the last eight years.”

You could almost see the lightbulb going on over Johnson’s head. As Robert Caro wrote, “A new source of political money, potentially vast, had been tapped in America, and Lyndon Johnson had been put in charge of it.” It would take years for the relationship between LBJ and Texas Oil to develop, but when it did, all of America would notice.

O
n Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, H. L. Hunt, Lyda, and most of their family were in Denton County, north of Dallas, for a well test. Hassie was scanning the car radio for a weather report when he heard the news flash. It was war, a horrible thing, and though few said it at the time, the Big Four sat atop the liquid assets that would win it.

The families did their part. Clint Murchison’s son John signed up the very next day. He ended up flying P-38s in Burma and China. His brother Clint Jr. entered officer-training school. Hassie Hunt ignored his father’s pleas and signed up, too; he was sent to Washington as an oil “adviser” to the Chinese government. Perry Bass enlisted in the navy and began building shipyards in Florida. In Houston, Roy Cullen chaired bond drives. A few years earlier Cullen had reluctantly assumed chairmanship of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, which took to serenading him with one of his favorite songs, “Old Black Joe.” For one bond drive, Cullen arranged a fund-raiser bizarre even by Texas standards, a professional wrestling match staged during a symphony concert, body slams and grunts to the gentle strains of Mozart.