Bryan Burrough (43 page)

Richardson appeared startled. “Why should I?” he snapped. “Bass is rich. He could leave them plenty.” But Connally pressed, and when Richardson returned to Fort Worth he agreed to change his will. In the new will he left two million dollars to Perry Bass and each of Perry’s four sons, along with St. Joe’s Island and stock in several corporations. His share of the oil fields, however, still went to the foundation.

On September 30, 1959, Richardson flew down to St. Joe’s. He planned to fly on to tour a pair of ranches he and Connally had purchased near San Antonio. The next morning a servant found him dead in his upstairs bed beneath one of his beloved Remingtons. He had suffered a massive heart attack and died in his sleep. He was sixty-eight.

Sid Richardson received far more headlines in death than he ever had in life. His body was flown to Athens for burial. President Eisenhower sent a cross adorned with white carnations, along with regrets that he was unable to attend. His sister Annie was there. She cried. His chauffeur was there, and the cattle wrangler from St. Joe’s, and the houseman and his family, and his pilots. Perry Bass stood by with his four boys as Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and John Connally watched Billy Graham deliver the eulogy. “He was a loyal American and passionately loved his country and maintaining the American way of life,” Graham said, because he couldn’t say much about oil or money or cattle or playing cards, the things Sid Richardson loved most.

Roy Cullen spent his last years paying more attention to his growing crop of grandchildren than politics or oil. His time had passed. He knew it. In their seventies now, he and Lillie spent more time at their ranch north of Houston, playing cards and dominoes on the back porch and driving out at dusk to watch the deer. They built homes there for their daughters and their husbands, and in time even acceded to their son-in-law Corbin Robertson’s desire to purchase a family plane, an old converted DC-3 the grandchildren nicknamed “Big Red.”

Most of their brood had taken the plane to a Gulf Coast beach vacation in February 1957 when they got the call. “Gampa” had suffered a stroke in his sleep at his River Oaks mansion. Rushed to Hermann Hospital, Cullen lingered for four months but never regained consciousness. He died in June 1957, Lillie at his side. She died two years later, never adapting to her beloved husband’s absence.

In Houston the coverage of Cullen’s death dwarfed that of any Texas oilman before or since; it was as if a president had died. The stories took up every inch of every front page, and entire sections inside. Much of it dwelled on his philanthropy; no one wanted to talk too much about his political views. Indeed, for all the sorrow and warm eulogies, there was a sense, however slight, that Houston was in some way relieved the days of Hugh Roy Cullen were over. A new Houston was blooming, and a new Texas, and crusty old oilmen who griped about liberals and New York Jews were irksome anachronisms, reminders of a time men like George Bush and Hugh Liedtke would just as soon forget.

B
y the autumn of 1959 H. L. Hunt, who turned seventy that year, was the only one of the Big Four still active, and even he was passing off his corporate responsibilities to aides and his sons Bunker and Herbert, who by then had reached their thirties. It had been a long, tumultuous decade for Hunt, lived now in the spotlight; whether it was accurate or not, he was widely regarded as the world’s richest man. But he was an oilman now only on paper. His men sensed he had lost all interest in oil. “He enjoyed looking at the old wells and remembering the primitive methods employed to bring them in,” his nephew Tom Hunt recalled. “But he never cared to look at anything that Hunt Oil had done without him. . . . We had new wells that were producing ten or twenty thousand dollars a month but to him they weren’t his.”
¹

The year 1955 was a turning point, when Hunt not only closed his beloved Facts Forum but suffered the wrenching loss of his wife, Lyda. She had suffered a stroke. Not trusting Texas hospitals, he had her flown to the Mayo Clinic, but she died within days. Despite the other women in his life, Lyda had been Hunt’s rock. He wept on the plane back to Dallas. “I don’t know how I’ll ever get by without her,” he said. Afterward Hunt disappeared on a six-month tour of Latin America, where he later said he had studied local governments. In all likelihood he simply needed time to deal with his grief. “Daddy went downhill from the day Mother died,” his daughter Margaret remembered.
²
Bunker tried to get him to play cards, but he wouldn’t. Nothing interested him.

To the dismay of his first family, what saved Hunt was the love of his mistress, Ruth Ray Wright, and his secret “third” family.
^y
He and Ruth had been together almost fifteen years by then. A simple, sweet, religious woman, Ruth still lived in her house on Meadow Lake Avenue, as did the couple’s four children. Their son Ray, who bore a striking resemblance to Hunt, turned thirteen in 1956; they also had three girls, aged twelve to seven. With Lyda gone, Ruth began demanding to be recognized as Hunt’s wife; Hunt procrastinated, knowing it would mean rumors about their secret life. By the mid- 1950s a handful of Hunt’s sons, including Bunker and Herbert, appeared to have learned of Ruth; others, notably the oldest sibling, Margaret, did not. When she first encountered Ruth at Mount Vernon after Lyda’s death, Margaret thought she was a secretary. Margaret’s husband, Al Hill, who was close to Hunt, wasted no time pulling her out of the house into their car.

As Margaret recalled the moment years later, she demanded to know why they were leaving. “Sweetheart,” Hill began, “now, I know this is going to make you unhappy—”

“Al,” Margaret demanded, “what is going on?”

“Ruth Ray,” he said, turning toward her, “is your father’s, well, she’s his wife without being married to him. They have four children together.” As Margaret recalled her thoughts: “I was astounded, disbelieving, horrified, brokenhearted. As I was about to demand, ‘Al, why didn’t you tell me?,’ I heard Mother asking me the same thing (twenty years before) and my reply:
Why would I?
”

After Lyda’s death, Ruth and her children all but moved in to Mount Vernon, fixing Hunt’s meals, packing his brown-bag lunches, and singing to him when he became depressed. Neither branch of the family was happy with the new arrangement; Margaret, for one, stopped speaking to her father. The first family, led by Margaret and Bunker, considered Ruth’s family interlopers and wanted nothing to do with them. Ruth’s family, especially teenaged Ray, thought it high time their parents were finally married. As Hunt later told the story, Ray came to his office one day to lay down the law. “You
will
marry my mother,” he told Hunt. “She is a good, religious person, and you
will
marry her.”

In time he did, sneaking off one Sunday afternoon in November 1957 to the home of Ruth’s minister, who wed them. The six children of Hunt’s first family only learned of their father’s marriage when a short item appeared in the
Dallas Times Herald.
All across Dallas, tongues clucked. Nobody knew of Hunt’s bigamist past, but reading between the lines, it was clear the world’s richest man had been up to
something.
When Hunt adopted Ruth’s four children, changing their last names to Hunt, everyone in Dallas knew the truth. Hunt didn’t care. He was happy with Ruth, who now joined him full-time at Mount Vernon.

His new life with Ruth changed Hunt. She considered gambling a sin, and tended to cry when Hunt spoke of his wagers. Soon after their marriage he gave up gambling altogether—to placate her, Hunt said. Another motivation, however, might have been a federal investigation linked to the gambler Ray Ryan. Hunt was among dozens of gamblers subpoenaed before an Indiana grand jury, though he avoided testimony when his doctor claimed he had a throat ailment. A rumored probe into whether Hunt had paid taxes on his winnings never reached a court.

The biggest change, though, was Hunt’s embrace of religion. Ruth had joined the Dallas Baptist Church, the South’s largest Baptist congregation, and had taken to holding prayer meetings at Mount Vernon. In time Hunt began joining her at services, though it was a right-wing minister named Wayne Poucher who later took credit for Hunt’s turn toward Christ. As Poucher told the story, Hunt was dining at the minister’s home in suburban Washington one evening in 1959 when the family invited him to join their nightly prayer service. Hunt said he’d rather observe, but as the prayers wore on he slid from his chair and kneeled on the floor beside Poucher. By the time the prayers came to an end, Poucher said, tears were sliding down Hunt’s face.

Afterward, “I took him to [his] hotel and for two hours we talked about him and his soul,” Poucher recalled. “I finished by telling him that I wanted to take him to the church building and baptize him.” Hunt was torn. “Wayne, I want to,” he said, “but I have been an evil person and I don’t feel I can ask God to forgive me until I have lived better for a little longer time.” Soon after, Hunt was baptized at Dallas Baptist. Finding God, Hunt said later, “was the greatest trade I ever made. I traded the Here for the Hereafter.”

Though Facts Forum had been defunct for four years by then, Hunt had never given up the idea that he was destined to educate America about the dangers of communism and liberalism. His religious conversion obliged him to incorporate Christianity into his philosophies, and the more he studied the Bible, the more Hunt felt it held the key to solving America’s many ills. And so, in the summer of 1958, Hunt announced he was resurrecting his old Facts Forum apparatus, infusing it with religion and renaming the new organization LIFE LINE. While LIFE LINE’s pamphlets and radio broadcasts would essentially cloak Hunt’s right-wing propaganda in Christian robes, LIFE LINE was in many ways ahead of its time. Its wedding of fundamentalist Protestantism and right-wing politics, not to mention its crusades against “big government” and Wall Street greed, came twenty years before the Christian Right’s emergence in the late 1970s.

LIFE LINE’s offices, staffed by two dozen clean-cut young conservatives, each throughly vetted, were tucked away on two stories of a downtown Washington building. Hunt’s staff quickly got to work selling right-wing books, pamphlets, and a three-times-weekly newspaper,
Life Lines,
now augmented with religious writings, but the centerpiece of LIFE LINE’s efforts was the fifteen-minute daily commentary it offered radio stations for a minimal fee; the Sunday show was free. Typically, half a LIFE LINE broadcast was composed of traditional hymns and sermons, but the remaining commentary, delivered by Wayne Poucher and other right-wing ministers and onetime FBI agents, consisted of straightforward ultraconservative, John Birch-style rhetoric—visceral attacks on Socialists, Democrats, liberals, the United Nations, Wall Street, and anyone who criticized the oil industry. Hunt, like the Birchers, believed the secret hand of Communist Russia and China was everywhere, in American universities, pulpits, government offices, even hospital wards. In one memorable memo, Hunt told Poucher to use one broadcoast to expose a conspiracy in which wealthy Americans were being subverted by Socialist nurses and mistresses.

Hunt’s ideas were classic paranoid right-wing fantasies, but the fact his ideas were stupid didn’t mean he was. Hunt kept his name out of all of LIFE LINE’s published materials; he realized he had become a lightning rod for criticism. Moreover, by wrapping himself in Christianity, he was able to attract to LIFE LINE’s advisory board a number of leading ministers and others who had backed Facts Forum, including John Wayne. Concerned that too many right-wing organizations undercut their credibility on communism with attacks on blacks and Jews, Hunt warned Poucher and his other commentators to avoid criticizing both groups. In at least one case, he told them to go on the air with kind remarks about a well-known Jew, so that “LIFE LINE would be given the credit of extolling and memorializing a Jew.”
³

However silly LIFE LINE’s message appears today, it struck a chord in the late 1950s, especially in the rural South, where dozens of small radio stations were happy to accept its cut-rate commentary.
Life Lines
debuted on twenty outlets in 1958 but grew steadily; by the early 1960s its broadcasts could be heard on 354 stations in forty-seven states. Fifty stations ran them twice a day. Hunt was always LIFE LINE’s biggest backer, but its tenuous status as a tax-exempt “educational” foundation—the same status Facts Forum had so assidulously defended—secured donations from others as well, chiefly oil companies, wealthy right-wingers, and Hunt’s bank, First National of Dallas, all of whom were able to deduct their gifts from their federal income taxes.

Under IRS guidelines, an “educational” foundation was only allowed tax-exempt status so long as it avoided partisan political commentary, a staple of
Life Lines
broadcasts. A 1962 review by the IRS’s Baltimore office found LIFE LINE in clear violation, but the case went nowhere. The Federal Communications Commission launched a similar review in 1963, but its case languished as well, frustrating Democratic congressmen bewildered by Hunt’s ability to deduct the money he was spending on ultraconservative causes. “There is probably no one,” declared Senator Maurine Meuberger of Oregon, “who gets more right-wing propaganda for his tax dollar than Haroldson Lafayette Hunt.”

LIFE LINE’s rise coincided with Hunt’s reemergence as a public figure. He had been firing off letters to newspapers for years, but in the late 1950s his output began to soar. He dictated them to secretaries, sometimes five and six a day, then dispensed them to newspapers from the
Duluth Herald News Tribune
to the
Alabama Baptist.
He began giving speeches, often to small religious and right-wing groups, and in time developed a certain following among what is today called the religious right. But even his most ardent supporters, one suspects, were left scratching their heads at the project he unveiled in January 1960, a self-published novel.