Bryan Burrough (35 page)

Once Eisenhower declared his candidacy, every one of the Big Four boarded his bandwagon. Despite their dalliances with MacArthur and others, Texas oilmen smelled a winner in Eisenhower and, during his campaign against the Democrat Adlai Stevenson, pulled out all the stops to get him elected. By one estimate Richardson funneled about one million dollars into the campaign, not including two hundred thousand dollars to cover Eisenhower’s various stays at the Commodore Hotel in New York or his expenses during the Republican convention in Chicago. Roy Cullen, meanwhile, implored Texas’s governor, Allan Shivers, to lead Democrats into the Eisenhower camp. Murchison assembled a group of oilmen to hire a public-relations firm, Watson Associates, which created and distributed six hundred thousand copies of an authentic-appearing anti-Stevenson newspaper called the
Native Texan.
It featured headlines such as “Adlai’s Ideas Aid Kremlin” and “Truman Stays Faithful to Stalin” along with a cartoon of a maniacal-looking Stevenson sneering at a classroom of Texas school-children. The
Native Texan
was mailed exclusively to rural Texas communities. “Whatever you might think about it, [these farmers] are anti-Negro on the equality thing anyway,” Murchison told a reporter. “My paper kind of catered to these feelings.”
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Eisenhower was elected to the White House that November, and while Texas Oil money alone didn’t put him there, it certainly helped. Washington noticed. “When senators returned to Washington after the 1952 elections,” Robert Caro has written, “there was a new awareness on the north side of the Capitol. There was a vast source of campaign funds down in Texas, and the conduit to it—the only conduit to it for most non-Texas senators, their only access to this money they might need badly one day—was Lyndon Johnson.” This was only partly true. While Johnson’s influence over the flow of Texas Oil’s donations was important, it was not total. Four years later a University of North Carolina professor named Alexander Heard finished an exhaustive study of political giving in 1952, and reported that by far the largest single American donor that year not only wasn’t one of Johnson’s oilmen; he wasn’t even a Democrat. It was Roy Cullen.

The 1952 election was the dawning of a new age, one in which American political power, heretofore centered in the Northeast, began to flow, along with many Americans themselves, into the West and Southwest, especially to Texas. “The first sense of the tilt in national leadership from Northeast to Southwest can probably be dated sometime between 1952 and 1954,” Theodore White wrote twenty years later, “when imperial New York sensed a serious financial trespass. The trespass came from Texas. There, a handful of uncouth oilmen had begun to invest in congressional candidacies across the nation. . . . The Texas intrusion, at least in New York, seemed outrageous.”

As the oilman closest to Eisenhower, Sid Richardson found himself once again a guest at White House dinners. Richardson, however, was less interested in selecting entrees than cabinet members. (When a White House aide called to invite him to dine with the president, Richardson would quip, “Well, what’s for dinner?”) The most important post, for Richardson and other oilmen, was secretary of the navy. The navy was the largest purchaser of oil in the world, while overseeing millions of acres of oil-bearing land, from Alaska to Colorado. Richardson prevailed upon Eisenhower to name as navy secretary an obscure Fort Worth attorney named Robert B. Anderson, who for the previous decade had run the estate of the rancher W. T. Waggoner, on whose lands both Murchison and Richardson had drilled wells. A rare glimpse of the benefits Richardson accrued during Anderson’s tenure came in 1955, when a busboy at a California hotel found an envelope Richardson had left at poolside. Inside was a letter from Perry Bass. “Dear Sid,” it read. “As you will see, we have a glowing report this month on our sales to the Navy”; it went on to list a monthly breakdown of Richardson’s steeply rising sales of oil to the navy.
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No doubt it was with similar windfalls in mind that other Texas oilmen tended to Eisenhower’s private interests. The president owned a farm in Pennsylvania, and after his election, to avoid potential conflicts, he leased it to George Allen. Allen, in turn, allowed two oilmen, including Murchison’s pal Billy Byers of Tyler, to pay the farm’s bills. During Eisenhower’s years in the Oval Office, Allen and Byers transformed the farm into a presidential retreat, erecting a thirty-thousand-dollar show barn, three other barns valued at twenty-two thousand dollars and six thousand dollars in landscaping—all of which was later made public by the columnist Drew Pearson. Meanwhile Murchison, along with Byers and Wofford Cain, paid the upkeep on a 550-acre Virginia horse farm for Mamie Eisenhower’s brother-in-law, Gordon Moore, who to that point had lived on a salary of eighty-five hundred dollars a year. Murchison maintained a stable of prize show horses at the Moore estate and paid Moore a large commission for his role as a middleman in Murchison’s purchase of a West Virginia racetrack.
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While accepting their money and their favors, Eisenhower in private could be scathing about his new friends in Texas Oil. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again,” he wrote his brother in 1956. “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [and] a few other Texas oil millionaires....Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
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Much to their eventual chagrin, the national politician who became most closely identified with Texas Oil during the 1950s was not the statesmanlike Eisenhower but the blustery junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. After an unremarkable four years in the Senate, McCarthy streaked into the national consciousness in February 1950 in the wake of a speech he made in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he alleged that the State Department was riddled with Communists. It was a purely political ploy—McCarthy had no record of fighting communism, and was searching for an issue to buoy his reelection—but in the wake of the spectacular trial of Alger Hiss, his charges caused a national uproar. McCarthy’s subsequent ascension to Martin Dies’s old chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and HUAC’s ensuing crusade against Communist “infiltrators,” transformed the senator into a polarizing figure across the country.

The Big Four immediately embraced McCarthy—except for Sid Richardson. “I don’t see how I could be friendly with Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson,” Richardson told a reporter, “and be friendly with Joe McCarthy too.” Cullen, who had met McCarthy in 1948, was the first to bring him to Texas, introducing him at a speech at Sam Houston Colosseum in September 1950. “Senator McCarthy has done more than anyone [else] to throw the pinks and Reds out of the country,” Cullen declared. “I hope [he] keeps all the Communist spies running until they get to Moscow.” Many Texans agreed. Dallas held a hundred-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser in his honor, only the second such gathering in the state’s history. In Houston a group of citizens raised money to give McCarthy a Cadillac when he married his former research aide, Jean Kerr, who by then had gone to work for Facts Forum. McCarthy was so popular in Texas, the media began referring to him as the state’s “third senator.”

Of the Big Four, it was Murchison who initially drew closest to McCarthy. The senator had telephoned him in 1950 at the suggestion of a mutual friend and asked him to donate ten thousand dollars to help defeat a McCarthy rival, Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland.
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Murchison agreed, ponied up another ten thousand dollars in 1952 to defeat another McCarthy opponent in Connecticut, then began placing his personal planes at McCarthy’s disposal. In time he took to coaching the senator on his finances, slipping him stock tips. “I’m for anybody who’ll root out the people who are trying to destroy the American system,” Murchison told a writer in 1954. “Then along came this Marine, a man with a tough hide, I sized him up as the best tool in sight to fight Communism.”
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McCarthy’s most tangible impact, though, was on H. L. Hunt. When McCarthy came to Dallas in April 1952 to deliver a speech sponsored by the American Legion, Facts Forum aggressively promoted his appearance. Hunt telephoned McCarthy at the Dallas Athletic Club, where the senator was staying, then dropped by. The two men hit it off, taking off their coats and starting a game of gin rummy; McCarthy accepted Hunt’s offer to have Dan Smoot introduce him that night. Reporters soon arrived—apparently alerted by a Hunt aide—and as Hunt pinned a MACARTHUR FOR PRESIDENT button on McCarthy’s lapel, the two posed for a photo that appeared on page 1 of the
Dallas Morning News
the next day.

The two men met again that fall, and this time discussion centered on the common ground Facts Forum and McCarthy were plowing. Within weeks Hunt hired three onetime McCarthy assistants: Victor Johnson, an administrative aide; Robert E. Lee, a former FBI agent and one of McCarthy’s most persistent investigators; and Jean Kerr, the researcher who the senator would soon marry. In short order the McCarthyites transformed Facts Forum into the very nationwide multimedia enterprise Hunt had dreamed of. They oversaw an eruption in new Facts Forum programming, including two syndicated radio shows and three television shows produced by a television veteran named Hardy Burt in a studio Hunt acquired on East Fortieth Street in New York City.

All the shows were essentially the same: moderated discussion programs purportedly devoted to airing “both sides” of a public issue. In fact, all copied Dan Smoot’s format, skewing their “debate” heavily toward the right, strongly backing McCarthy even as they broadcast views that amounted to thinly veiled appeals to racism and anti-Semitism. In one program, for instance, the commentator argued against fair-employment legislation by stating: “Remember that the Negroes when first brought to America by Yankee and English merchants were not free people reduced to slavery. They were merely transferred from a barbaric enslavement by their own people in Africa to a relatively benign enslavement in the Western Hemisphere.”

The broadcasts were augmented by a group of anti-Communist books and pamphlets Hunt mailed to hundreds of Facts Forum “participants.” Typical was
We Must Abolish the United Nations,
by a man named Joseph Kamp, whose previous works included a book titled
Hitler Was a Liberal.
Wrote Kamp: “I pull no punches in exposing the Jewish Gestapo or any Jew who happens to be a communist.” Hunt eventually pulled the Kamp book under pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, but replaced it with McCarthy tracts and books written by other well-known anti-Semites, including one by a retired general named Bonner Fellers, who once observed that “Hitler did Germany a world of good.”

Facts Forum News
, meanwhile, was a Hunt-funded newsletter that urged its readers to buy Facts Forum materials and join other right-wing groups. With a claimed circulation of sixty thousand, most of its articles were reprints, though a few were original, including one called “The Liberal Mind” by the up-and-coming William F. Buckley. Facts Forum also circulated a monthly poll of its readers, which McCarthy and other conservative politicians took to brandishing, sometimes without explaining who the poll’s participants actually were. Hunt draped it all in patriotic rhetoric that, in the days before its real opinions became widely known, succeeded in drawing the support of not only leading right-wingers but a handful of nationally known moderates; its board included not only Norman Vincent Peale but the actor John Wayne.
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During the early months of 1953, few media critics took notice of Facts Forum’s new direction. One who did was a fellow conservative, E. M. Dealey, president of the
Dallas News.
The
News
had been favorably disposed toward Hunt’s activities until the day an aide brought an unexplained fifty-dollar check from Hunt to Dealey’s attention. Upon investigation Dealey discovered that Hunt had been sending checks to
News
reporters whose articles pleased him, and to letters-to-the-editor writers who mentioned Facts Forum. Outraged, Dealey not only returned Hunt’s check, he announced to the newsroom that, unless absolutely unavoidable, Hunt was never to be mentioned in the paper again.

Hunt, however, was not so easily deterred. He turned up one day at Dealey’s office with a bizarre proposition that the paper split its reporters into two camps, “pinks” and conservatives, who could write side-by-side articles on major news events. Dealey all but threw him out. For months afterward, though, Hunt bombarded Dealey with tear sheets of
News
pages with overlays showing how his “pinks vs. conservatives” approach would look. When a magazine writer learned of the incident a year later, Dealey let Hunt have it with both barrels, terming him a “latent fascist.” Asked about Facts Forum, Dealey growled, “That kind of stuff reminds me of the Ku Klux Klan.”
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All the gaudiest elements of Texas Oil’s new prominence—the Hollywood stars, the political maneuvering, and especially the developing albatross that was Joe McCarthy—came together in a single place, a new hotel Clint Murchison opened as a personal retreat in La Jolla, California, north of San Diego. Clint and his wife, Ginnie, often accompanied by Sid Richardson, had been summering in La Jolla for several years to bet the thoroughbreds racing at the Del Mar Turf Club, whose season ran from July until Labor Day. They usually arrived at the track at midmorning with friends and stayed all day, downing mint juleps and ham sandwiches between races. Murchison loved La Jolla so much, he tried to buy the landmark Casa Manana hotel; when its owners wouldn’t sell, he decided to build his own. He bought a riding academy on the edge of town, tranformed it into a fifty-room hotel, and turned the stables into eight two-bedroom cottages around a pool.