Bryan Burrough (36 page)

When the new Hotel Del Charro—
charro
is Spanish for a costumed horseman—opened for the 1951 season, Murchison’s oilmen friends and their wives descended upon it en masse: Effie and Wofford Cain, Emily and Billy Byars, Jodie and Pug Miller, Sid Richardson. A Texas flag flew overhead, a Dow Jones ticker clattered in the lobby, and after the day’s races a gin game was always under way by the pool. Tuxedoed waiters drifted through the rarified crowd, carrying trays of mint juleps and bourbon; riffraff was kept away by room rates set at eight hundred dollars a night at today’s prices. (House rules excluded pets and, unofficially, Jews.) Within weeks the never-ending party was joined by a rushing tide of movie people, including John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor, William Powell, Jimmy Durante, Betty Grable, and Joan Crawford. Crawford, taking swigs from a flask of vodka, caused a stir on several evenings by focusing her attentions upon Richardson.

“Everyone around the country knew that Sid was a billionaire, and there had been a lot of press about him right at that time when we introduced Joan to him,” Ginnie Murchison remembered.
²²
“She followed him around so much that he finally came and sat on the couch between me and Effie Cain, so that Joan couldn’t get near him. He was very shy around women, and he didn’t like it at all when they flirted with him.”
^v
Irksome actresses aside, Richardson relaxed at Del Charro as nowhere else, drinking bourbon, playing cards around the pool, and cursing so loudly that when Eisenhower’s secretary of health, education and welfare, the Houston heiress Oveta Culp Hobby, was put in an adjacent cottage, she asked to be moved. Most mornings Richardson put in a call to Sam Rayburn before driving with Murchison to the track.
²³

Hobby and Rayburn were only the first in a stream of politicians to stay in touch with goings-on at Del Charro. Soon others, including Eisenhower and his vice presidential candidate, Richard M. Nixon, came to pay their respects to Murchison and Richardson. “They spoke to Nixon like he was an office boy,” the Del Charro’s manager, Allan Witwer, recalled years later.
²⁴
The Washington figure who most enjoyed the hotel, and who stayed the longest, was J. Edgar Hoover, who accepted Murchison’s invitation to Del Charro in 1952 and returned every summer until his death in 1972. The two men, who met at a California fund-raiser in July 1951, became fast friends. Hoover and his longtime aide Clyde Tolson stayed in Bungalow A, one of the cabins reserved for Murchison’s friends. The oilman looked after Hoover’s every need. When the director mentioned one night that he loved Florida because he could step from his hotel room and pluck fruit from a tree, Murchison had a grove of plum, peach, and orange trees planted on Hoover’s patio by the next morning. A sickly grapevine was hung, complete with healthy grapes the staff spent hours wiring to the vine.

Hoover was a famously buttoned-up man, but the oilmen around the Del Charro pool did their best to loosen him up. One evening, while dining on “caviar of chili” a Dallas millionaire had flown in from Ike’s Chili Parlor in Tulsa, Sid Richardson spied Hoover sitting quietly beside the buffet. Suddenly Richardson’s booming voice rang out across the poolside crowd: “Goddamnit, Hoover, get your ass out of that chair and get me another bowl of chili!”
²⁵
(Richardson, too, flew in his own food, including steaks, melons, fish, and mesquite charcoal.)

Hoover, like Murchison, loved the races, but what he appreciated most about Del Charro, one suspects, was that he stayed for free. At the end of Hoover’s initial monthlong visit, Allan Witwer recalled, “Hoover had made no attempt to pay his bill. So I went to Murchison and said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Put it on my bill,’ he told me. And that’s what I did.” In today’s dollars, Hoover’s bill came to almost twenty thousand dollars; Murchison, and later his successors, paid every single one for twenty years.
²⁶
The two men even collaborated in business, when Murchison’s publishing house, Henry Holt, distributed Hoover’s best-selling book about fighting communism,
Masters of Deceit.

In fact, as later became apparent, Murchison did more for the director than pay his bills and print his book. The extent of his favors remained secret until investigations into FBI corruption following Hoover’s death. “Hoover did have oil ventures with Clint Murchison,” a Justice Department attorney confirmed in 1988. “If the drilling company hit a dry hole he’d get his money back. Everything was a sure thing. It had to be a sure thing. If not, he’d get his money back, be it stocks, bonds or oil ventures. It was extraordinary.” Hoover, the former FBI assistant director William Sullivan later told an interviewer, “had a deal with Murchison where he invested in oil wells, and if they hit oil, he got his share of the profits, but if they didn’t hit oil, he didn’t share in the costs.” The Justice Department, it later turned out, had actually investigated the Murchison-Hoover dealings during the Kennedy administration, but “there wasn’t enough to make a criminal case,” remembered William Hundley, head of the department’s Organized Crime section at the time. “But it was wrong. He shouldn’t have done it.”
²⁷

In August 1952, the same month Hoover and Eisenhower visited Del Charro, Joe McCarthy joined the party. Reporters lurked in the bushes outside, forcing Murchison’s security men to shoo them away. At night, sipping drinks around the pool, the oilmen listened in rapt silence as McCarthy railed against Communist influences in the government. Murchison ate up every word, and soon began welcoming the senator to his home in Dallas. The following May McCarthy joined Murchison at his Mexican ranch for a weekend of hunting, then accompanied the oilman to a speech at the Dallas Petroleum Club. Murchison would later insist he was already developing doubts about McCarthy: “After Joe came out with that figure of 205 Communists in the government, and then wasn’t able to produce the names of more than thirty-five or so, I thought he ought to admit publicly that he’d been wrong. He could then have hammered hard on the right figures. I tried to get him to do this, but he wouldn’t—I guess he figured it would be bad tactics.”
²⁸

Whether Murchison knew it or not, he was playing with fire.

F
or five years, since the national spotlight first shone upon them in 1948, the Big Four had enjoyed unfailingly upbeat handling in the national press, one of the keys to their growing power in Washington. But the political winds shifted in the summer of 1953, as opposition to the tactics of Texas’s “third senator,” Joe McCarthy, began to mount. A turning point in McCarthy’s career came that July, when one of his aides published a scathing article charging that communism ran rife through the ranks of Protestant ministers. This was too much, even for many McCarthy supporters. Reporters who had remained mostly neutral toward McCarthy finally began questioning his methods. From the outset the Big Four were drawn into the controversy.

The first salvo came on July 6, when the
New York Post
began a series of four articles detailing Texas Oil’s support for McCarthy. For the first time Murchison and Hunt were identified among the senator’s principal financial backers; the
Post
suggested they were grooming McCarthy for the presidency—a notion Murchison was at pains to deny.

“I like Joe McCarthy,” Murchison told the
Post.
“I tell you, I think he’s done the greatest possible service to his country. He fears nobody and he’s certainly got those Communists feared to death of him. I hear complaints about the people [he] has hurt, not necessarily Communists, just people. Well, it’s a war we have with communism. In Korea, that war has cost us 135,000 casualties. In McCarthy’s war there are bound to be a few casualties too. They can’t be helped.”

The
Post
series, fueled by Murchison’s uncharacteristically boneheaded quotes, was the first negative publicity any of the Big Four had sustained. Chastened, Murchison’s ardor for McCarthy cooled in the following weeks, a period that saw the senator come in for increasing press criticism. When McCarthy returned to Del Charro that August, behavior that Murchison had once dismissed as playful he now found boorish. The senator was a heavy drinker; at breakfast he had a shot of whiskey with his orange juice. He drank all day at the races, then downed glasses of whiskey around the pool until three or four in the morning. When drunk, McCarthy told off-color jokes, sometimes in the presence of women, which offended Murchison. One evening, McCarthy challenged another guest to balance a marble on his forehead, then drop it through a funnel McCarthy inserted into the man’s pants. When the guest tried it, McCarthy poured bourbon into his pants.
¹

For Murchison the final straw came one night at the pool when McCarthy, deeply drunk, began insulting his new wife, Jean. Suddenly McCarthy rose and pushed her, fully clothed, into the pool. As friends told it, Murchison got up and stalked to his bungalow without a word. The next morning he had an attendant deliver a written message to the senator, ordering him to leave. “I finally had it,” a friend quoted Murchison saying, “when he pushed Jean into the pool.”
²

While making Murchison’s life uncomfortable, the
New York Post
series was also among the first to take note of Hunt’s burgeoning media empire. Soon other reporters began sniffing around. The most dogged was Ben Bagdikian, Washington bureau chief of the
Providence Journal,
who stumbled onto the story when one of Hunt’s men offered another
Journal
reporter $125 to conduct a Facts Forum interview, explaining that Hunt was willing to pay cash to elect “our kind of guy.” The reporter not only refused the offer, he wrote an article about it, which was picked up by the wire services. Bagdikian, who would go on to a lengthy career as an author and media commentator, spent weeks studying Facts Forum. The eight-part series he produced that November was a fiery exposé that laid out Facts Forum’s right-wing agenda and questioned whether it deserved its tax-exempt status as an “educational” foundation. The series was widely noted by, among others,
Time
magazine, which characterized Facts Forum’s worldview as “isolationism, ultraconservatism and McCarthyism.”

The
Post
and Bagdikian series drew a new wave of eastern writers to Texas, but where the first contingent in 1948 and 1949 had celebrated oilmen as cracker-barrel champions of free enterprise, this one came looking for bellicose right-wing nut jobs. The first of the ensuing broadsides erupted in the
Washington Post
on Sunday, February 14, 1954, when the newspaper’s White House correspondent, Edward T. Folliard, began a six-part series on what a front-page editor’s note termed “The Big Dealers, the fabulous money-men of Texas who have been pouring part of their millions into American politics. . . . They are also in the Texas tradition—more money, more issues, and more noise. The unique thing about them is public ignorance of their motives, purposes and ideas. [The public] knows scarcely anything of the Texans.” In his first article, “Lone Star Wealth Pours into Politics from Coast to Coast,” Folliard focused squarely on the Big Four; he then profiled Hunt on the front page Monday, Facts Forum on Tuesday, Murchison on Wednesday, Richardson on Thursday, and Roy Cullen on Friday.

The
Post
articles were kind to the Big Four as individuals—Folliard termed Murchison a “genius” and lauded Cullen for having the “courage” to admit being conservative—even as they portrayed their political views, especially those of Hunt and Cullen, as slightly left of Hitler. “Hunt,” Folliard wrote, “is convinced that the world situation today, with Russia having sway over 600 million people, was plotted in Washington, D.C., in the days of Roosevelt and Truman. . . . [I]f you didn’t agree with him—well, you had something missing upstairs.”

The only one of the Big Four to react to the
Post
was Hunt, who called a press conference that Wednesday—his sixty-fifth birthday—at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Before it began, as if to establish the oilman’s credentials, a spokesman told reporters Hunt was worth two billion dollars and enjoyed an annual after-tax income of fifty-four million dollars. When Hunt ambled to the podium, he began telling stories of his childhood. The reporters countered with questions about Facts Forum. Hunt handled himself with aplomb, denying that it—or he—was pro-fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, or anti-Negro. “There is a regular pattern to these charges,” Hunt said. “In the
Communist Daily Worker
the motive is obviously to call us fascists. In the responsible press, I do not think it is due to a deliberate smear, but rather a failure to listen to our programs and understand what we are doing.”

The
Post
series set Washington abuzz on the eve of what was destined to become Joe McCarthy’s most controversial inquiry, the Army-McCarthy hearings. Two weeks later, on March 9, came the television broadcast that heralded the end of the senator’s career, Edward R. Murrow’s primetime denunciation on CBS. After that the floodgates opened, as reporters, politicians, and ordinary citizens not only piled on the anti-McCarthy bandwagon but looked to smoke out those who had been pushing it all along. They found their villains in the Big Four.

In the following months everyone from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
to
Fortune
carried articles probing Texas Oil’s support for McCarthy’s American inquisition. The most thoughtful, and most influential, critique was written by Theodore White and published that May in a now-defunct magazine called
The Reporter.
White, who was on his way to becoming the dean of presidential-campaign historians, had toured Texas that winter, and while newspapers such as the
Washington Post
remained on mostly neutral ground, he pulled few punches. In his two-part series, “Texas: Land of Wealth and Fear,” White labeled Cullen “a genuine primitive,” Murchison “a successful neurotic,” and Hunt “mysterious” while gleaning “an almost monastic purity in Richardson’s single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth.”