Bryan Burrough (34 page)

Hunt himself never appeared on Facts Forum, preferring to act as Smoot’s tutor and “research assistant,” shoveling books and articles his way. In time Smoot began filming the shows, and Hunt found a television station or two to broadcast them. For nine more months Facts Forum remained a modest operation, its annual budget barely one hundred thousand dollars. Then, in the fall of 1952, everything changed. Hunt found a new intellectual partner, and their collaboration would transform Facts Forum into a national phenomenon. His name was Joseph McCarthy.

While one camp of Texas oilmen plunged into national politics for ideological reasons, a second camp—Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, Brown & Root’s George and Herman Brown—remained primarily interested in laying its hands on the levers of powers. Their man in Washington, as he had been since 1940, was Lyndon Johnson, a congressman with little interest in anything at that point beyond scaling the political ladder. Theirs was the perfect marriage: Richardson, Murchison & Co. had only one thing to offer, and Johnson, who was running for the Senate in 1948, needed only one thing to get elected. Cash.

He got it. Johnson narrowly defeated Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Democratic primary, a contest memorably chronicled in Robert Caro’s 1990 book
Means of Ascent,
before besting Jack Porter that November. Both victories were fueled with vast quantities of illegal cash, much of it from Richardson and the Brown brothers, but also from Murchison, Amon Carter, and the Taylor independent Harris Melasky. Gathering it took a series of secret missions run by a half-dozen Johnson aides led by a sharp young attorney named John Connally. Whenever money was needed, typically for radio advertising, Connally or one of his men would charter a private plane to Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston or, in Richardson’s case, the airstrip on St. Joseph’s Island, returning with paper bags and briefcases packed with ten, twenty-five, or in some cases as much as fifty thousand dollars in cash. There was so much of it Connally couldn’t keep track of it all, at one point misplacing forty thousand dollars he had hidden at his home. The money was never found; Connally guessed he had left it in a suit he sent to the cleaners.
⁹

Texas had never seen anything like it; no state had. “This was the beginning of modern politics,” Connally recalled. “It was the dawn of a whole new era.”
¹⁰
The oilmen thought so, too and were dumbfounded when confronted by an honest politician who wouldn’t take their cash. During a Washington dinner for Sam Rayburn in 1949, Sid Richardson beckoned the Speaker to join him in the men’s room. Several minutes later, Rayburn emerged sputtering mad, only to encounter Creekmore Fath, chairman of the Democrats’ national finance committee. “Creekmore!” Rayburn snapped. “You go in there and talk to him.”

Fath pushed into the men’s room and found Richardson standing alone, confused. “I don’t know what gets into Sam sometimes,” Richardson complained. He reached into a pants pocket and withdraw a wad of five thousand dollars in cash. From a second pocket he fished out another five thousand. He handed it all to Fath.

“How am I going to list this contribution? ” Fath asked.

“I don’t know,” Richardson said. “Use the Bass boys.”
¹¹

Richardson, however, found more subtle ways to woo Rayburn. On a visit to the Speaker’s farm with his attorney, William Kittrell, Rayburn complained about his skinny cattle. “Goddamnit, Sam,” Richardson said, “what you need is a decent bull!”

“Well, I’ve got my eye on one bull,” Rayburn muttered.

“Listen,” Richardson said, “I’ve got this scrawny little old bull that’s no use to me. Goddamnit, Sam, I want you to have it.”

“Don’t do it, Sid.”

“Well, I’m going to.”

Rayburn shrugged. Afterward Richardson took Kittrell to a livestock dealer and scribbled out a twenty-thousand-dollar check for the man’s best bull. He had it delivered to Rayburn with a note apologizing for handing over such a pitiful specimen, figuring that Rayburn wouldn’t know the difference. “If you ever tell this to Rayburn,” Richardson warned Kittrell, “I’ll de-nut you.”
¹²
In time Richardson realized he needed a more polished approach, and in 1951 he hired John Connally away from Lyndon Johnson. Connally became Richardson’s chief lobbyist.

Given all the cash Texas oilmen were funneling into Washington, it wasn’t long before they sought a return on their investments. Texas Oil’s new profit engine, natural gas, remained regulated by the Federal Power Commission, and in the summer of 1949, a liberal Roosevelt appointee named Leland Olds was nominated for a third term as the FPC’s chairman. To Texas oilmen, Olds was nothing short of the Antichrist, a hardworking anti-business economist who once wrote that only “the complete passing of the old order of capitalism” could liberate workers from the tyranny of corporate ownership. “Olds was the symbol of everything they hated,” recalled Posh Oltorf, George Brown’s lobbyist. “He was just anathema to them because of his philosophy.”
¹³

As the FPC’s chairman, Olds had the power to set natural-gas prices. He had twice been confirmed, in 1940 and again in 1944, but the explosion in natural-gas demand—and profits—from the new pipelines changed everything. Oilmen bombarded Lyndon Johnson with letters demanding that his reappointment be blocked. Even Roy Cullen and others who had long been skeptical of Johnson—who voted against him in 1948, in fact—begged him to do something; Olds’s writings “are conclusive proof that he does not believe in our form of government,” Cullen wrote in a telegram he sent to Johnson and twenty-one other senators.

“This transcended philosophy,” John Connally told Robert Caro. “This would put something in their pockets. This was the real bread-and-butter issue to these oilmen. So this would prove whether Lyndon was reliable, that he was no New Dealer. This was his chance to get in with dozens of oilmen, to bring very powerful rich men into his fold who had never been for him, and were still suspicious of him. So for Lyndon this was the way to turn it around: Take care of this guy.”

Johnson, after wangling the chairmanship of the Senate subcommittee that was to review the nomination, ambushed Olds in a hearing on September 28, 1949, in which a Corpus Christi congressman named John Lyle, a Johnson crony, using files borrowed from the House Un-American Activities Committee, broadly attacked Olds as a Communist. Attorneys for the Texas natural-gas industry piled on, and Olds, despite angry denials, was doomed. “Leland Olds Labeled Crackpot and Traitor,” read the
Houston Post
headline. Other papers followed suit. A week later the subcommittee voted 7-0 against the nomination.

It was a blatant smear, but by the time liberals realized what Johnson had done, it was too late. Eleanor Roosevelt and other allies rallied behind Olds, saying he was never a Communist.
The Nation
decried Johnson’s surprise attack as “a flagrant attempt by vested interests to exclude from office a man who proved too consumer-minded.” When the full Senate voted 53-15 against the nomination, the Texas newspapers, including those who previously attacked Johnson as too liberal, rained plaudits on him for saving the gas industry.

After the Senate vote Johnson returned to Houston on a Brown & Root airplane, where he took a Brown & Root limousine to the Brown & Root suite at the Lamar Hotel. There, in Suite 8-F, he accepted backslapping thanks from the Browns and a crowd of oilmen. Afterward he flew to St. Joseph’s for a week with Richardson, Murchison, and others. It was a joyous victory lap for Texas Oil’s man in Washington. Johnson was now on his way to real political power; the assembled oilmen could be forgiven for mistakenly thinking they were, too.

The defeat of Leland Olds was the first indication of the political power Texas Oil could wield, and of the lengths it was willing to go to further its aims. The vast amounts of money the Big Four were plowing into national politics for the first time made Texas a regular destination for American politicians with higher aspirations. Some came holding their noses, especially those forced to sit through Roy Cullen’s lectures. All had an eye on the 1952 election, when just about every Texas oilman was determined to defeat any reelection drive by the liberal Harry Truman. The first to arrive was the junior senator from Georgia, Richard Russell, an ally of Johnson’s, whom Johnson brought to the weeklong fete at Sid Richardson’s spread on St. Joe’s in October 1949, a week after the Olds victory. There the men spent the days shooting ducks and strolling the sandy beaches, the nights sipping bourbon and talking about politics, the oilmen trying to measure whether Russell had what it took to defeat Truman. He didn’t.

Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of D-day, was next to arrive, two months later, in December 1949, for the first of several visits. Roy Cullen, who was intrigued by Eisenhower, invited him after dining with the general in New York. In Houston the Cullens held a luncheon for Eisenhower at their home, and at a dinner the general surprised Cullen by awarding him the Freedom Foundation’s medal of honor, an honor the oilman had been unable to accept in person. After Cullen showed him around the University of Houston the next morning, Eisenhower flew to St. Joe’s for a weekend with Sid Richardson.

Eleven months later, in November 1950, Eisenhower accepted Cullen’s invitation to return to Houston, to speak at the University of Houston. This time the general stayed overnight at the Cullen mansion, which gave Cullen time to sound out the general about his rumored run for the White House. Over cigars in the living room, Eisenhower remained cagey about his political ambitions. Cullen pushed hard. “General, the people of this country want you as their next president,” he said. “I can assure you of this.... But there is one thing I can tell you. You can be nominated and elected if you refuse to talk politics with anyone. Remain just what you are, a soldier.”

After both his visits with Cullen, Eisenhower headed to St. Joe’s to see Sid Richardson, who soon emerged as his wealthiest single backer. Where the general tolerated Cullen, he genuinely enjoyed Richardson. The Old Family Friend confirms rumors that Eisenhower invested with Richardson beginning sometime during World War II. “I know he did, Sid told me,” says the Friend. “There’s an old game in oil, you know, where your friends, they only invest in your good wells, not the bad wells? You understand? It was that way with Eisenhower. You could never prove it. But he did it.”

While Eisenhower’s visits to Texas did wonders for oilmen’s egos, it did little to push the general toward the White House. All through 1951, in fact, Eisenhower wavered whether to seek the presidency. As he did, the Big Four joined Republicans around the country in reviewing suitable replacement candidates. That spring they thought they found one in another World War II hero, General Douglas MacArthur, who Truman “fired” that spring as head of American forces in the Korean War. H. L. Hunt had been championing a MacArthur candidacy for years. On the general’s return from Korea in the spring of 1951, Hunt, Roy Cullen, and Glenn McCarthy all sent MacArthur invitations to visit Texas. A MacArthur aide responded to Cullen, saying the general could visit Houston in June. Cullen replied he would be attending his granddaughter’s graduation that particular day. When the general’s aide suggested a visit from the Hero of the Pacific might be more important, Cullen replied, “I admire General MacArthur very much, but I wouldn’t break my word to my granddaughter for a dozen MacArthurs.”
¹⁴

MacArthur delayed his visit by a day. When the trip was announced, McCarthy mistakenly assumed it was a result of his own invitation and issued a press release that said so. Cullen was not pleased. When MacArthur arrived in Houston, checking into the Shamrock, the city threw an impromptu parade; Cullen, in a white summer suit, rode beside the general in an open car, McCarthy in the backseat. A photograph captured Cullen shooting a baleful glance at McCarthy sitting behind him. The real fireworks, however, began after the general left, when it was disclosed that twenty-three thousand dollars of his hotel and restaurant bills hadn’t been paid. When the matter hit the newspapers, McCarthy claimed ignorance. Reached at his ranch, Cullen hit the roof. “This is embarrassing to Houston and to Texas,” he barked. “Find out how much the bill is—I’ll pay it.” And he did. (The incident was later lampooned at the Houston press’s gridiron dinner, with reporters portraying Cullen, McCarthy, and Houston’s mayor squabbling over a dinner check; the skit ended with the mayor and McCarthy shouting “Roosevelt! Roosevelt! Roosevelt!” at Cullen until he fainted.)

All through late 1951 speculation ran rife as to whether Eisenhower, who had left his post as president of Columbia University to command NATO forces in Europe, would run; a Draft Eisenhower movement had sprung up in New York, and had begun holding rallies. Sid Richardson was among those determined to push him off the fence. That November Richardson invited George Allen, one of the general’s closest friends, to St. Joe’s to discuss ways they might push him into the race. They decided they would need to confront Eisenhower in person—in Paris. When they boarded the
Queen Mary
in early February 1952, Richardson carried with him two letters for Eisenhower, one from Clint Murchison, the other from Billy Graham.

Richardson and Allen arrived in France as speculation about Eisenhower’s plans approached its zenith. They joined a growing crowd of well-wishers lingering at NATO headquarters. Among them was the famed aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, who had brought a film of a massive Draft Eisenhower rally to show the general. When she aired the film for Eisenhower on the night of February 11, Cochran later claimed, Eisenhower became tearful and told her he would, in fact, seek the White House. A more plausible version of Eisenhower’s decision comes from his longtime aide, General Lucius Clay, who told his biographer that Eisenhower had still not made up his mind when the two conferred after the funeral of England’s King George, on February 16. Richardson and Allen, neither of whom left accounts of the trip, traveled to London with Eisenhower and were present at the home of a British general when General Clay took Eisenhower aside and urged him to make his decision. Glimpsing Richardson and Allen in the living room, Clay guided Eisenhower into an anteroom where, he said later, Eisenhower firmly stated his plan to run. Afterward Eisenhower emerged and told Richardson and Allen. While no account of the incident suggests Richardson’s maneuvering played a role in Eisenhower’s decision, he could claim to be the first civilian to learn of it.