Bryan Burrough (37 page)

Alone among the writers who visited the state that season, White attempted to take stock of the changes the Big Four and their brethren had wrought upon Texas since oilmen had thrust their first ultraconservative governor, Pappy O’Daniel, into the state house in 1938. White judged the state a paranoid right-wing fortress, run by an oil-supported governor, Allan Shivers, whose signature piece of legislation had been a proposal to make membership in the Communist Party punishable by death. Everywhere White looked, Texas appeared to be taking McCarthyism to new levels, enforcing loyalty oaths and promoting a campaign by housewives organized into chapters of “Minute Women” who hunted “pinks” in the public schools with the same zealotry McCarthy hunted Communists in the federal government. As White wrote:

 

 

This new portrait of Texas, of secretive oil billionaires plotting an ultraconservative takeover of America, sank deeply into the country’s emerging post-McCarthy mind-set. That it no doubt overstated the Big Four’s reach was no matter; the nation suspected a powerful cabal behind McCarthy and the new conservatism, and Texas oilmen fit the bill. This shift in public opinion, apparent in press coverage, comments of congressmen and letters to the editor, was immediate and powerful. The first to encounter its strength was Hunt, who on April 22 staged a second press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, this time to announce that he was negotiating with a national television network—NBC—for a daily fifteen-minute program that would once again air “both sides” of an issue. A Socialist politician, Norman Thomas, fired off a letter of protest, and one week later NBC’s chairman, David Sarnoff, announced that the network had declined to run Hunt’s program.
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Hunt now found Facts Forum’s every move closely monitored.

Roy Cullen confronted a more visceral reaction when, near the height of press interest that spring, he announced he was inviting McCarthy to deliver a speech on San Jacinto Day, April 22, at the San Jacinto Monument on Houston’s Ship Channel. The news provoked outrage among liberal students at the University of Texas. Two, Bob Kenney, editor of the campus newspaper, and Ronnie Dugger, who went on to found the state’s only progressive newspaper, the
Texas Observer,
circulated a petition calling on Cullen to retract the invitation. By the time the two young men headed to Houston to deliver it, the petition was forty feet long and contained fifteen hundred signatures. When Cullen agreed to see them, the two students faced him across his desk. There was a long pause. Finally, Cullen turned to Kenney.

“Are you a communist?” he asked.

“No,” Kenney said.

Cullen turned to Dugger. “Are you a communist?” he asked.

“No,” Dugger said.

“All right,” Cullen said, “let’s talk about this thing.”

“So we talked about it,” Dugger recalls in an interview, “and he said he couldn’t withdraw the invitation, that it was too late, but he saw our point, and we left on pretty good terms. After he got his blood question out of the way, he was a southern gentleman.” A gentleman, however, who still adored McCarthy. Afterward Cullen told a reporter he considered the senator “one of the greatest men in America.”

For all the controversy, McCarthy’s San Jacinto speech proved anticlimactic. It was a sad scene. A beautiful day, children off from school, the papers had predicted forty thousand people. Up on the dais, there was a nervous glance or two; the
Post
counted forty-two hundred in the crowd. Cullen, in a bow tie sitting beside McCarthy, looked tired. He had been hospitalized for a kidney stone two years earlier, during a vacation in Vancouver. It had been front-page news in the Houston papers—“H.R. Cullen Is Seriously Ill in Canada,” read the
Press
’s banner headline—and photographers were at the airport when he was carried off the plane in a stretcher. Later, when he entered Hermann Hospital for a checkup, reporters wrote that up, too. He was seventy-three now, still feisty as ever, but that day at the monument, his gray hair tousled by the breeze, was a sign that winds of change were blowing.

The central question running through media coverage of the Big Four’s political activities was simple: “What do they want?” The nation’s business community was wondering the same thing. Only Murchison had aggressively diversified outside oil, and while his investments in real estate, insurance, and publishing had been quiet affairs, any of the Big Four could threaten General Motors or U.S. Steel if so inclined. These vague concerns turned to reality on February 26, 1954, just a week after the
Washington Post
series, when Murchison stunned Wall Street by confirming that he and Richardson were plunging into the nation’s largest takeover battle, the fight to control the country’s second-largest railroad, the $2.7 billion New York Central.

It was a tangled affair, at the time the largest proxy fight in American history, initiated by a suave Texas-born Wall Street financier named Robert Young, who had traded in his cowboy boots for a Park Avenue apartment and mansions in Palm Beach and Newport. That January Young, who with a partner controlled a competing railroad, the Chesapeake & Ohio, known as the C&O, had suddenly severed all ties with the C&O in order to satisfy federal dual-ownership laws and mount an attack against New York Central. Young left behind the C&O’s 12 percent stake in New York Central—the largest single block of the railroad’s shares. If he was to have any chance to win the shareholder vote scheduled at New York Central’s annual meeting that May, Young had to get that block of shares into friendly hands. He called Murchison.

Murchison was happy to help, especially once he and Young structured a loan package that allowed Murchison to buy the shares with money borrowed from Young and his partners. To spread the risk, Murchison telephoned Richardson in Palm Springs, reaching him as he was heading out to play cards. It wasn’t until he read the newspapers that Richardson realized that in his haste he had agreed to a twenty-million-dollar deal instead of one worth five million dollars. “What the hell did you say was the name of that railroad? ” he called and asked Murchison. Kidded about it later, Richardson said, “Well, Clint mumbles so.”

The investment drew Murchison into Bob Young’s rarified East Coast world, a milieu in which he was never entirely comfortable. While visiting Young’s mansion in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which was decorated with the paintings of Young’s sister-in-law Georgia O’Keeffe, a valet shadowed Murchison everywhere, even drawing his bathwater and hovering beside the tub. “That’s okay, you can wait outside the door,” Murchison quipped. “I’ve been bathing myself since I was three.” Chatting with socialites at Young’s Palm Beach mansion, Montserrel, he squirmed uncomfortably in an antique French chair as he tried to balance finger sandwiches and a cup of tea on his knee. Sensing his discomfort, Young asked if he would prefer something else to drink. “Yeah,” Murchison snapped. “A double martini.”
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All through the media tumult over the Big Four’s backing of McCarthy that spring, the New York Central fight grew nastier, captivating the business press. The publicity catapulted Murchison onto the cover of
Time
in May, making him the second Texas oilman to be so honored in four years; the magazine’s lead story—“Those Texas Millionaires”—focused on the Big Four’s business rather than political ambitions. Murchison, it noted, “is the first of a brand-new breed of Texas oilmen. Having made his millions in oil, he is now using them to further the popular Texas ambition of buying up the rest of the U.S.”
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The liberal
Nation
got angry: the New York Central fight, it said, was pursued “much the same way that Murchison and others have backed McCarthy’s challenge to the top leadership of the Republican Party.” The Texans, it concluded, “are determined to muscle in on all the great roulette games where power is won and lost in our society. [They] will not take backseats; they demand front-row center.”
⁶

The New York Central fight raged through May. The railroad sued to block the transfer of its shares to Murchison and Richardson; it lost. It appealed to the Interstate Commerce Commission; it lost. It refused to hand over the shares until a judge forced it to do so on the eve of the annual meeting, at which point the writing was on the wall. With the backing of Murchison and Richardson, Young was victorious. The Texans sold their shares back to him just two months later, prompting a Senate investigation into the whole affair. Litigation dragged on for months, eventually forcing Murchison into a New York courtroom, where he politely told the judge he did not represent the views of Richardson, who he referred to with a smile as a “rich, fat old man.”

The scathing coverage the Big Four suffered in the wake of McCarthy’s reversals led to a backlash against Texas Oil whose sting would be felt for years to come; its image, in fact, never really recovered. One can draw a straight line from that spring of 1954, when reporters who once painted the Texans as fun-loving and adventurous began portraying them as racist, ravenous, and conspiratorial, to the alternately kooky and villainous portrayals of Texans in
Dallas
and movies such as
Doctor Strangelove
and Oliver Stone’s
JFK.

At the beginning, at least, this new image owed as much to Elmer Fudd as to Simon Legree. An early signal came the same week in May that Murchison appeared on the cover of
Time,
when the Woman’s National Press Club lampooned the Big Four at its gridiron show in Washington. That evening, as a band played Noel Coward’s “The Stately Homes of England,” four female reporters danced onto the stage at the National Press Club. Dressed as cowboys, flashing wads of money, they sang:

 

 

Texas has always been the butt of jokes, mostly focused on its penchant for braggadocio, but in 1954 the media’s focus on the Big Four unleashed a wave of unprecedented ridicule aimed at Texas millionaires who were seen as unlettered, uncouth know-it-alls. A
New York Times
reviewer, for instance, suggested a book of oil field photography “would make a wonderful Christmas present for a Texas oil millionaire who has not yet learned how to read.”
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Texas, a
Times
writer quipped in 1955, “is the place where oil millionaires overnight become experts on subversive books, atomic warfare, and how to get into heaven.”
⁹

Jokes about Texas millionaires began receiving wide currency in the television skit shows of the day. In one,
Mr. Peepers,
a group of tourists ogled Buckingham Palace as a Texan among them said, “I wonder if they’d sell. I’m looking for a country place.” One of America’s favorite comedians, Milton Berle, made Texas a regular target on his variety show. In one skit, set at a racetrack, Berle queried a boy singer from Texas named Charles Applewhite. “Well, Charlie,” Berle asked, “how much money you gonna bet?”

Charlie: “Oh, Mr. Berle, where I come from in Texas everybody has so much money there’s no fun betting money. We bet people.”

Berle: “You bet people?”

Charlie: “Dad did real good last year. I had four mothers.”

Berle then encouraged Charlie to sing.

Berle: “Don’t be nervous, Charlie. Don’t think of it as singing in New York. Think of it as singing in your own backyard in Texas.”

Charlie: “That’s easy. In Texas, New York IS our backyard.”

Berle wasn’t alone; during the mid-1950s every comic seemed to have a store of Texas-millionaire jokes. The radio personality Fred Allen had several favorites. One concerned the Houston millionaire who took away his son’s pogo stick; the boy was jabbing oil wells in the backyard. “The Texas joke material is of enormous variety, ranging from the low-down to the exceedingly high-toned, and growing all the time,” a Texas-born New York writer named Stanley Walker wrote in a
Times
feature on the phenomenon. “For the gag miners, it may turn out to be the Mother Lode, a Golconda of infinite resources.” Walker advised Texans to grin and bear it: “The citizens of Texas . . . must, in this crisis, keep their shirts on. Things could be worse, though it’s hard to see how. . . . If Texans have really forgotten how to laugh at themselves . . . then Heaven help them. The going will be even rougher.”