Bryan Burrough (39 page)

All through the 1950s the fundamentals of Texas Oil continued to deteriorate: rising production costs and competition from lower-priced Middle Eastern oil were slowly strangling the industry. Oil’s decline, however, was more than offset by the astronomic profits oilmen were making in natural gas. Thanks in large part to a malleable bureaucrat named Mon Wallgren, who had replaced Leland Olds as chairman of the Federal Power Commission, gas prices had risen steadily, from six cents per one thousand cubic feet of gas in 1948 to ten cents in 1955. Texas gas producers, chief among them Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt, saw their profits skyrocket, while the publicly held pipelines, such as the Brown Brothers’ Texas Eastern, watched as their stock prices doubled.

The impetus for the rise in prices was an FPC rule that excluded independents from controls on natural gas, which allowed Hunt, Richardson, and others to request higher prices simply by telling the commission their costs were rising. Their customers, however, were far from happy. By 1954 midwestern states, who were paying 40 percent more for gas than in 1949, could take it no more; Michigan and Wisconsin sued the FPC, demanding protection from further price increases. The matter landed before the Supreme Court, which held for the states, ordering the FPC to regulate the independents. When the FPC dragged its heels, Congress intervened. A bill to nullify the Court’s ruling was introduced in the House in early 1955 and was passed by a small margin that July. A companion bill—which held the future of Texas Oil’s gas bonanza—was introduced in the Senate, where a vote was scheduled for February 1956. Once again it appeared Lyndon Johnson, now Senate Majority Leader, held the fate of Texas Oil in his hands.

The Harris-Fulbright Natural Gas Bill, as it was called, heralded a gathering of Texas Oil power such as Washington had never before seen. The stakes had never been higher: if the bill went through, gas prices were expected to rise between two hundred million and four hundred million dollars a year, an increase that would boost the value of southwestern gas reserves between twelve billion and thirty billion dollars. Lobbyists from every gas producer in Texas and Oklahoma—Humble, Phillips Petroleum, William “Kill ’em” Keck’s Superior Oil, and many more—could be seen prowling the halls of the Capitol in search of arms to twist. Sid Richardson’s man, John Connally, orchestrated the campaign from a war room at the Mayflower Hotel, where he worked with one of Johnson’s oldest pals, the lobbyist Ed Clark. Even the oilmen themselves made appearances. “I saw Hunt here today,” Texans whispered in the Mayflower lobby. “Sid’s here, too. I saw him. And Old Man Keck in his wheelchair.”
¹⁵

From Connally and Clark on down, everyone in the Texas camp realized this would be a difficult battle to win. The media’s attacks on the Big Four remained fresh, and northern newspapers were up in arms over what they viewed as price gouging by gas producers; the
New York Times
termed the bill wrong “socially, economically and politically.” Keenly aware of public opinion, Johnson did everything possible to avoid anything remotely controversial that might provoke further headlines, ordering the oilmen to keep out of sight and urging his senatorial supporters to avoid any contentious debate. By the end of January, his strategy appeared to be working. With a vote scheduled for Monday, February 6, Johnson was sure he had enough votes to win.

Then, on Friday, February 3, as Senate debate was winding down for the weekend, one of the bill’s supporters, Francis Case of South Dakota, rose at his desk and made a stunning announcement: a lobbyist for the natural-gas industry, he said, had paid a visit to his office in Sioux Falls and left an envelope containing twenty-five hundred dollars in cash.
¹⁶
Down at the Mayflower, Ed Clark immediately knew what this meant: At the very least, a Senate investigation. At worst, the bill’s defeat. All that Friday afternoon and into the night he prowled the corridors of the Mayflower, pinholing lobbyists and urging them to leave town—
that night
—before subpoenas flew. Into the wee hours limousines ferried oilmen to the airport, where private planes waited to fly them back to Texas, Oklahoma, and, in Sid Richardson’s case, Palm Springs.

Somehow, despite the charge of bribery, Lyndon Johnson managed to get the bill passed the next week. But the taint lingered. Editorials across the country condemned oilmen for brazen corruption. Then on February 17, disaster struck: Eisenhower announced that while he favored the bill, he could not abide the “arrogant” behavior exemplified by the Case situation. In a show of courage that cost the Republican Party millions in oil-industry donations, he vetoed the bill. “There is a great stench around the passing of the bill,” he wrote in his diary. This is “the kind of thing that makes American politics a dreary and frustrating experience for anyone who has any regard for moral ethical standards.” In a letter to Sid Richardson, the president wrote, “I could not possibly sign the bill in view of the questionable aura that surrounded its passing, which was, of course, created by an irresponsible and small segment of the industry.”

Pleasant words aside, it was the worst reversal Texas Oil had sustained, and oilmen had no one to blame but themselves. In the wake of Eisenhower’s veto there were calls for an investigation into the role Texas Oil money played throughout the affair. A Senate committee was formed to look into the matter, but Johnson emasculated it, and the committee soon dissolved. Still, lasting damage had been done. The days when Sid Richardson could plot a vice president’s overthrow were over; for the rest of Eisenhower’s term, Richardson’s political involvement remained limited to funding a presidential library. Everywhere, oilmen made themselves scarce. All that remained of their power in Washington was Lyndon Johnson, but after 1956 their roles were to be reversed. It was Johnson, now with his sights on the presidency, who led the oilmen, who were thankful to have any friends in the capital at all.

The collapse of Texas Oil’s power in Washington coincided with the death throes of Cullen’s and Hunt’s political careers. Facts Forum was already flagging in 1955 when Dan Smoot left to head his own small media company. Hunt shuttered what remained in November 1956; outside Dallas, no one seemed to notice. In Houston, Cullen, now seventy-five, was still delivering the occasional fire-breathing speech—in a June 1956 address he called for the impeachment of the entire Supreme Court—but the press, even the Houston newspapers, rarely treated his remarks as news anymore. Cullen’s brand of ultraconservatism did not go away, nor did the political donations of wealthy Texans, but 1956 marked an end to the era in which Lone Star oilmen appeared poised to have a significant impact on the nation’s political direction. Never again would there be a presidential election as in 1952 in which they would be involved at such high levels. For the Big Four, and for their friends around the state, all their money, and all the adoring coverage they had enjoyed during their media honeymoon, had been squandered. It happened in large part because Murchison, Richardson, Hunt, and Cullen were not only politically naive but badly out of step with a postwar America that, like Texas, was fast maturing, where a majority of Americans were beginning to accept civil rights and the federal powers born during the New Deal. As for Hunt and Cullen’s desire to spread ultraconservatism, many of the same qualities that made them successful oilmen—self-reliance and a stubborn streak—hamstrung their political activities. Their need for personal control rendered them unable to build lasting political alliances, or to see the value in investing in any intellectual enterprises but their own. This shortsightedness was vividly illustrated by William F. Buckley’s strenuous efforts to build a partnership with Hunt. In 1954, as Buckley was planning the journal that would become the influential
National Review,
he appealed to Hunt for backing. Hunt refused, and his son Bunker agreed to invest ten thousand dollars but never paid. It is a measure of Facts Forum’s reach at the time that Buckley offered to excerpt its articles in
National Review
or vice versa. Already a rising star in the conservative firmament, Buckley even agreed to write for Facts Forum and appear on Dan Smoot’s show if Hunt would help fund
National Review
. Nothing, however, could pry open the oilman’s bankbook. Buckley, his biographer John B. Judis concluded, “was too Catholic, too eastern and too moderate for most of the Texas Right.”

“I talked to Hunt about
National Review
and he just wouldn’t do anything,” remembered Karl Hess, one of Buckley’s fund-raisers. “Dan Smoot was Hunt’s ideologue.
¹⁷
People like Smoot didn’t really want to change anything. They wanted to lay the curse on the beknighted. Buckley really wanted to change things.” As a result, while Buckley went on to become the champion of modern American conservatism, Cullen and Hunt, as political figures at least, were consigned to the dustbin of history. Had they built bridges rather than guarded them, they and other Texas oilmen might have eventually been embraced as prophets. Instead, historians have correctly dismissed them as fools.

The Golden Years

—VERBATIM QUOTE OF A TEXAS OILMAN AS HE STEPPED OFF A SANTA FE TRAIN IN HOUSTON, 1957
¹

T
he wave of publicity that inundated Texas Oil in the early 1950s surged late into the decade, feeding the nation’s appetite for insights into the strange and flamboyant new world of the Texas Big Rich. Much of the curiosity was spurred by depictions such as Edna Ferber’s
Giant,
offered to the nation a second time as the 1956 movie starring James Dean as Jett Rink. But the exploits of rich Texans encapsulated many of the changes the country was undergoing. There was a sense that America’s population and power were shifting south and west, and Texas oilmen presented a colorful window through which to view these changes. “Texas is such an alluring subject for New York writers,” George Fuermann wrote in the
Houston Post
in 1956. “First it was cowboys, six-shooters and longhorns. Now it’s millionaires.”

Any number of newspapermen, magazine writers, and authors wrestled with questions of what the new Texas wealth meant. For starters, all these new millionaires scrambled popular perceptions of the nation’s power structure. If H. L. Hunt was really America’s richest man, what did that make the Rockefellers? Or the Du Ponts? And did Hunt really have more money than Sid Richardson or, for that matter, Howard Hughes? Guessing who ranked where became a staple for authors touring Texas. Theodore White, writing in 1954, judged Richardson “far and away the richest American, with the possible exception of his Dallas neighbor H. L. Hunt, who may be his only rival in the billion-dollar bracket.”

In an attempt to introduce structure to the confusing new world of America’s ultrawealthy, a number of publications began compiling lists of the country’s richest people—the genesis of a phenomenon that continues today with lists such as the Forbes 400. The first two of these lists, appearing in 1957, codified the notion that Texas Oil had reshuffled the status quo.
Ladies’ Home Journal,
in an attempt to name the ten richest Americans, judged Richardson the country’s wealthiest man, pegging his net worth at seven hundred million dollars. Murchison, who ranked sixth, downplayed the idea that the Big Rich kept score. “After the first hundred million,” he quipped, “what the heck?”

The second list, in
Fortune
magazine, was far more comprehensive, naming the seventy-six Americans whose net worth topped seventy-five million dollars; more than a third, twenty-six, derived their fortune from oil, fourteen from Texas Oil.
Fortune
ranked H. L. Hunt the fourth-wealthiest American, behind J. Paul Getty and two others, relegating Richardson to fifteenth place, just below Howard Hughes and the Rockefellers. Richardson’s “downgrading” was subjective, the magazine noted; if oil reserves were counted, Richardson’s wealth topped seven hundred million dollars, rivaling Getty’s fortune as the nation’s largest. Murchison ranked just twenty-third, behind two Houston oilmen, John Mecom and Jim Abercrombie.

One message echoed through all the coverage. With the glaring exception of the all-but-forgotten Glenn McCarthy, the Big Rich seemed to be living proof that money could buy happiness. Because despite their political reversals, despite the fact that many in the nation didn’t believe they were to be entirely trusted, the one thing that came ringing through all the newspaper profiles and lavish magazine articles was that the Big Rich were having one heckuva good time.

The 1950s was the Golden Age of Texas Oil, an era when the Big Rich seemed to be swimming in money and the toys of wealth, when the headiest oilmen, intent on living up to every Ferberesque myth, collected airplanes and ranches and works of art as if they were candy. In Houston, where Jim West could be seen tossing silver dollars on the sidewalks, one oilman wore a hundred-dollar bill as a bow tie; when asked, he would take it off and throw it in the air, then tie another. Another took to riding a pet lion to meet the mailman; yet another tried in vain to keep penguins in a walk-in freezer. One wrote Pablo Picasso asking to buy ten paintings; he didn’t specify color or type, just the size of his wall. A Houston oilman’s wife wrote the Smithsonian to ask whether the Hope Diamond was for sale. Then there were the two oilmen who loved playing practical jokes on each other; the high point of their duel came when one took a European vacation and his rival erected a full-size roller coaster in his front yard.

There was the Houston heiress who always flew to Paris with two extra first-class tickets for her two toy poodles, each of whom traveled with jeweled collars and chinchilla furs—furs being something the ladies of Texas Oil knew lots about. In 1951, when a ranch home owned by the oilman L. M. Josey burned to the ground, the
Houston Press
reported that Mrs. Josey fought the fire while wearing her mink stole. Irked, Mrs. Josey had her secretary write the paper. “Your story says Mrs. Josey battled the blaze clad in nightgown, robe and mink stole,” the secretary wrote. “We wish to correct this. Mrs. Josey was wearing her marten furs.” When the ladies of a New England garden club toured Texas, one asked an oilman’s wife how she kept her azaleas so radiant. “Mink manure,” came the answer.