Bryan Burrough (33 page)

One thing Cullen didn’t announce, though it was clear to those few paying attention, was his plan for the Republican Party in Texas. The hapless Texas GOP was a second party in a one-party state, a cadre of nattering nobodies who hadn’t won a single statewide election since 1874; in the 1914 elections, the Republicans actually garnered fewer votes than the Socialist Party. What the party stood for was anyone’s guess; its reputation, as the political historian V. O. Key Jr. noted of Southern Republican parties in general, wavered “somewhat between an esoteric cult on the order of a lodge and a conspiracy for plunder.”

Change had begun in the late 1930s when a number of Texas oilmen, most notably Cullen’s friend Marrs McLean of Beaumont, joined the party to fight Roosevelt. Cullen had voted Republican off and on since 1938 but, as a practical man, kept his hand in Democratic politics because it remained the only politics that mattered in Texas. Yet as far back as 1938 Cullen had a vision, of a Republican Party shoved sharply to the right, a party of onetime conservative Democrats fed up with FDR and creeping socialism, a party to be reckoned with. He took to discussing his ideas with an energetic young oilman whose offices adjoined his own, Jack Porter, and found him in agreement.
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In December 1946 Cullen took Porter to Washington, where they met with the new Republican Speaker of the House, Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts, who replaced Sam Rayburn when the Republicans took Congress that November. Cullen had been courting Martin for years, throwing him a fund-raiser in Houston that fall, and Martin was seemingly among the few in Washington who took Cullen seriously. Probably not expecting much, Martin encouraged the two in their plans to take over the Texas party. Porter got himself appointed head of a committee seeking a Republican challenger to Lyndon Johnson’s senatorial bid in 1948, and when one couldn’t be found, he ran himself.

Cullen publicly endorsed him. That November, backed by cash from Richardson, Murchison, and other oilmen, Johnson beat Porter easily, but Porter did far better than most observers expected. The senatorial bid instantly made Porter the best-known and most active Texas Republican, although insiders accepted that he was essentially a proxy for Cullen. In 1949 Porter began a far-reaching effort to recruit new Republicans, focusing on the resuscitation of the dormant Young Republicans organization, which became a power base for the Cullen-Porter forces.

As Jack Porter laid the groundwork for a takeover of the Texas GOP, Cullen decided to step up his efforts on the national level. In late 1949, livid over Truman’s nomination of a liberal economist named Leland Olds to head the Federal Power Commission, Cullen and Porter announced a “grass roots campaign” directed at defeating the reelection efforts of the fifteen senators who had supported Olds or, as Cullen dubbed them, “the inner sanctum of the New Deal-Fair Deal politburo” in Washington. The resulting storm of letters and telegrams to editors and congressmen had little obvious effect, at which point Cullen appears to have realized that words alone wouldn’t change the status quo. In American politics, the Texans were slowly learning, arguments only mattered when they came clipped to a check.

It wasn’t unknown for a major political contributor to donate money to elections in far-off states, but as 1950 dawned, Cullen took the practice to a new level. He and Porter drew up a list of every congressman up for reelection in 1950 and, where they felt a candidate wasn’t sufficiently tough on “creeping socialism,” began mailing checks to his opponent. Their money, in amounts from five hundred dollars to as much as ten thousand dollars, found its way into dozens of national campaigns. “I guess I’m supporting as many Democrats as Republicans,” Cullen told a reporter. “A lot of ’em may not expect my support, and some of ’em may not want it, but if they believe in our American system of constitutional government and the free enterprise system, they’re going to get it.”
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Cullen’s checks often came attached to a favorite book. One was
I Chose Freedom,
by a Russian refugee named Victor A. Kravchenko. After reading it, Cullen mailed a check for twenty-five thousand dollars to the publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, asking that the book be distributed to libraries and schools across the country. Librarians received the unsolicited book with a note from Scribner’s saying it had been donated “with the compliments of a believer in American freedom, who hopes this book will have the widest possible reading.”
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The most influential book on Cullen’s thinking was
The Road Ahead,
a 1950 best seller written by John Flynn, a onetime liberal writer who argued that New Deal policies were transforming America into a totalitarian state. Cullen mailed thousands of copies of Flynn’s book to libraries and universities, and in time the two men became friends. Yet money and books and telegrams alone weren’t enough to spread the conservative cause, Cullen saw. He needed to make war on the battlefield of ideas. In late 1949 he and Jack Porter began scouting for a publication they could groom as a voice for Texas conservatives. That December they approached Ida Darden, the sister of John Henry Kirby’s onetime mouthpiece, Vance Muse. Darden, who practiced a paler version of her brother’s overt racism, had started a newspaper called the
Southern Conservative,
in Fort Worth; most of her seed money had come from Kirby’s crony, the Klan organizer George Armstrong.

The year 1949 was a very bad year to consider going into business with the ultraracist Armstrong, who, much like Cullen and so many other Texas oilmen, was taking his first steps into the public arena. That summer, after years evading FBI probes of his anti-Semitic pamphlets and books, the eighty-four-year-old Armstrong had made a startling proposal to a small school in his native Mississippi, Jefferson Military College. Armstrong offered the school half the mineral rights on twenty-six thousand acres of his oil fields, a proposal he valued at fifty million dollars. His only conditions, Armstrong said, were that Jefferson exclude blacks and Jews and teach its students white supremacy. The school turned him down flat. The resulting furor made headlines around the country and did nothing to further the portrait of Texas oilmen as enlightened businessmen.

Cullen made the approach to Ida Darden in partnership with H. L. Hunt, the only time the two are known to have worked in tandem. But the talks foundered, either because of concerns over Armstrong’s activities or, as Darden’s papers suggest, difficulties structuring a legal partnership between Cullen and Hunt. Still Cullen did not give up.

Eighteen months later, in the summer of 1951, he received a call from the writer John Flynn. Flynn had launched a program on the nation’s second-largest radio network, the Liberty Network of Dallas, which had leveraged its broadcasts of major-league baseball games into a news service carried in forty-three states. Its rapid growth, however, had plunged Liberty and its founder, the radio pioneer Gordon McLendon, into financial chaos. Flynn asked Cullen to come to Liberty’s rescue. He assured Cullen that McLendon was a “good conservative” and that, if Cullen didn’t help, a “radical element” might buy Liberty.

Cullen saw the opportunity. Fifty years before Fox News became a conservative media bellwether, he envisioned transforming Liberty into something similar. After a single meeting with McLendon, and without so much as examining Liberty’s books, Cullen paid one million dollars for 50 percent control. He was named cochairman, announced plans to move Liberty to Houston, and threw himself into a new calling. “I recently purchased controlling interest in the Liberty Network to keep it out of bad hands,” he wrote one of his newest pen pals, the presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. “This is the second largest network in the country, and soon will be probably the largest.”

Red flags, however, rose immediately. A New York newspaper reported that a local station had broken off talks about joining Liberty over concerns about Cullen’s political views. In November
The Nation
reported that Flynn had taken over Liberty’s news operations; “his official mission,” the magazine stated, “is to make sure the news is no longer given what he calls a ‘leftist’ slant.”
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In later years both Flynn and Gordon McLendon would deny that Flynn had done any such thing, but the rumors did nothing to attract the new advertisers Liberty badly needed. Liberty was forced out of business and declared bankruptcy just nine months after Cullen’s cash infusion, in May 1952, effectively ending the oilman’s attempts to create a national platform for ultraconservatism. In hindsight his defeat appears preordained. To succeed in politics, Cullen needed a support organization of some kind, but building one was something he was unwilling or incapable of doing.

It was a mistake H. L. Hunt would learn from.

Much as publicity over his philanthropic efforts seemed to embolden Roy Cullen, his unofficial coronation as the nation’s richest man tranformed H. L. Hunt. All the resulting attention—the bags of mail, the interview requests—seemed to confirm what Hunt had long believed, that he was a unique intellect, a superman, a figure whose ideas could save the nation from the mounting perils of communism. More than one of his aides sensed a new messianic quality in Hunt. Said one, “He thought he was a second Jesus Christ.”
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If anything, Hunt was further to the right than Cullen; he believed deeply, in his bones, that communism and socialism were poised to overrun the world. He distrusted Jews, whose loyalty he questioned, and felt that anything that hurt American business, especially the oil industry, was anti-American. At first his political work paralleled Cullen’s. He wrote letters to congressmen, gave the occasional speech around Dallas and brought in a series of radical right-wing speakers, including Frederick C. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. (“Karl Marx was a Jew,” Schwartz told the Dallas rally. “Like most Jews, he was short and ugly, lazy and slovenly, and he had no desire to go out and work for a living. But he was also possessed of a keen intelligence, a superior evil intelligence like most Jews are, and his mission was to destroy all of Christian civilization.”)
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Unlike Cullen, who found his ideas in books and articles written by others, Hunt had original ideas and, fancying himself an author, decided to put them in print himself. In 1950 he published a pamphlet titled
A Word to Help the World.
The word he coined was
constructive.
Hunt detested liberals but never saw himself as conservative; there was nothing conservative about the way he built his business, he liked to say. “Constructive,” Hunt wrote, was a “trademark for the wholesome in government.” Hunt’s new philosophy was broadly pro-business and anticommunist, in favor of eliminating federal controls on all aspects of individual “freedom” and favoring smaller government in all areas but defense; others would term Hunt’s “constructivism” ultraconservative or reactionary.

In time, like Cullen, Hunt began to cast about for a broader platform from which to spread his ideas. In his pamphlet he called for “constructives” to form an “Educational Facts League,” whose purpose would be “to secure an impartial presentation of all the news through all the news channels concerning issues of public interest.” He envisioned an organization where ordinary Americans would be supplied the “facts” of political life, via a newsletter or maybe a radio program, which they could debate in small discussion groups. He decided to call it Facts Forum, and announced its formation in a speech in June 1951. One of his aides approached a Dallas-based FBI agent he knew about heading the group, and the man suggested he hire an agent named Dan Smoot, who was retiring. On a long drive through East Texas, Hunt gently interrogated Smoot, found him to be an ardent anti-Communist who idolized J. Edgar Hoover, and spoke of his goals for Facts Forum. By the time they returned to Dallas, Hunt was convinced Smoot was his man. “The philosophy of the New Deal,” Smoot liked to say, “is also the basic philosophy of Communism, fascism and Nazism.”

At the Mercantile Bank Buildling, Smoot was given Hassie Hunt’s old corner office, an Oldsmobile, a secretary, a handful of files, and not much else; Hunt himself then disappeared on a three-week business trip. Unsure how to proceed, Smoot began telephoning names in the Facts Forum files, trying to organize discussion groups. Hunt had mentioned a radio broadcast, so he contacted a radio producer who arranged for him to host a fifteen-minute weekly discussion on the Dallas station WBAP. On his first broadcast, Smoot moderated a debate between two high school boys on the United Nations, “Should the U.S. get out of the U.N. and or get the U.N. out of the U.S.?” Returning from his business trip, Hunt was thrilled; on the spot, he decided to focus Facts Forum on radio broadcasts, eliminating the idea of discussion groups. After Smoot’s seventh broadcast, Hunt informed him he had arranged for Facts Forum to go national, broadcasting a thirty-minute show from a Washington studio to a handful of syndicated stations. Smoot began commuting to Washington, replaced the students with congressmen, and moderated their debates through the end of 1951.

In January 1952, after the resignation of the secretary who arranged his guests, Smoot switched to a format that became his trademark. He began arguing both sides of an issue himself, first blandly presenting the far-left viewpoint, then energetically advancing Hunt’s “constructive” alternative. Smoot’s early broadcasts tended to focus on threats against democracy and religion, but in time they became overtly political, branching out to “debate” the Korean War and the fight against communism. “Democracy,” Smoot observed on one broadcast, “is a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Christianity is essential to the creation of our democracy. We in Facts Forum know that American democracy is still the most nearly perfect expression ever made by man in legal and political terms of a basic ideal of Christianity.” Hunt was actually outraged by this statement; he considered America a republic, not a democracy, and lectured Smoot that democracy “was the handiwork of the devil himself,” a watered-down version of communism. “In an ideal society,” Hunt was prone to say, “the more taxes you pay, the more votes you get.”
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