Bryan Burrough (38 page)

During the mid-1950s the only Americans who weren’t laughing at Texas oil millionaires seemed to be those who found their right-wing politics ominous, a view that soon brought a new caricature into Broadway shows and Hollywood movies. “Have you noticed the way Texas millionaires are being used as villainous types lately in fiction stories and television dramas?” the
Dallas News
asked in 1955. It was hard not to. A popular 1957 novel,
The Promoters,
told the story of a conniving Texas oilman’s efforts to take over a railroad—an allusion to Murchison’s bid for the New York Central. A 1959 Broadway musical,
Happy Town,
featured four evil Texas oilmen attempting to swindle the inhabitants of a small town. The 1957 movie
Written on the Wind
starred Robert Stack as a drunken Texas oilman who fights Rock Hudson over a girl and ends up shot—the
Times
reviewer termed it “another harsh inspection . . . of those Texas millionaires whose sad psychoses are subject for frequent literary concern [these days].”

By the end of the decade Texas editorialists had given up trying to rebut these stereotypes. “The rest of the nation demands a whipping boy,” the
Dallas Morning News
grumped, “and the distorted image of Texas as ten million blowhards wallowing in wealth from oil or cattle will not go [away] easily. It means too much to night-club comics, hack columnists, novelists and Eastern politicians who delight in lumping Texas in with the big rich to push their own liberal schemes.”
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As its image in American popular culture began to darken in the spring of 1954, few Texans were laughing. In Washington the backlash against “Texas oil money” was very real. Democrats, in fact, began testing attacks on Texas oilmen for use in the midterm elections that November. In May the
Houston Post
’s Washington correspondent, Elizabeth “Liz” Carpenter—later a presidential press secretary and author—reported that rumors in the capital had “Texas oil money” funding campaigns against Democratic senators in Alabama, Michigan, and other states. Noting the “epidemic” of bad publicity afflicting the Big Four, Carpenter wrote: “The smart talk in Washington political salons is to attribute every political trend most anywhere in the country to ‘Texas oil money.’ If you say it mysteriously enough, it sounds sinister and as though you have the inside dope.” The publicity was so bad, she speculated, that unless reversed it might endanger Texas Oil’s Holy Grail, the depletion allowance. “The link between the ‘Texas oil money’ and Sen. McCarthy,” Carpenter wrote, “makes a vote for the depletion allowance [appear] a vote for maintaining McCarthyism.”
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That summer each of the Big Four felt the sting of the new skepticism. For Hunt, it meant mounting attacks on Facts Forum, which became snarled in a congressional investigation into whether certain foundations deserved tax-exempt status. A House committee chaired by the conservative B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee was using the probe to “investigate” Communist influence in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Each time Reece requested documents from those foundations, however, his Democratic opponent, Wayne L. Hays of Ohio, requested data from Facts Forum. During hearings that May, and again in a report he issued in September, Hays demanded an IRS probe of Hunt’s activities. Hunt’s producer, Hardy Burt, denounced Hays for “the violent campaign of vilification against Facts Forum [that] was triggered by the Communist press.” The squabbling dragged on for months, until an IRS review cleared Facts Forum of wrongdoing.

Roy Cullen, meanwhile, found himself the target of senators who didn’t appreciate the checks he was mailing their opponents. As in 1952, Cullen was again the largest donor to American politicians in 1954. One of his most vocal critics was a senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, a McCarthy opponent who was facing an unusual primary challenge from a political unknown named Bob Jones. That spring Cullen’s son-in-law, Douglas Marshall, received a letter from an editor in Maine. The editor wrote that while interviewing Bob Jones,

 

 

Similar scenes were being repeated across the country, in Montana and Alabama and Maryland. After the primary, which she won, Senator Smith emerged as a focal point of anti-Texas sentiment in Washington. “H. R. Cullen and his Texas oil and gas associates sent money into Maine in 1954 to try to destroy me politically,” she wrote an oil lobbyist. To a man in Dallas, she added: “The Texas oilmen have a perfect right to contribute to the national Republican party and to the Eisenhower campaign. But they are reaching just a little too far when they send their money into Maine to attempt to buy the Maine Senate election and to dictate to the people of Maine who their Senator should be. You can be sure that the people of Maine have never attempted to tell the people of Texas who should be the Texas senators.”

It was into this tempest that Cullen had the bad timing to drop his authorized biography,
Hugh Roy Cullen: A Story of American Opportunity.
He had been noodling with the idea of a book ever since Glenn McCarthy had published his own authorized biography, a windy mishmash called
Corduroy Road,
in 1951. Two writers, including one who authored fiery right-wing editorials for the
Houston Post,
interviewed Cullen at length; their book, while steering clear of its subject’s more infamous views, was a straightforward telling of his life story. A few reviews were kind. But many favored the tone of Stanley Walker’s withering take in
The Nation.

 

 

Thanks to articles like that, by mid-1954 the new stereotype of the ignorant, ultraconservative Texas oilman had taken firm hold in the American imagination. It was Clint Murchison, the oilman most attuned to public opinion, who tried to turn the tide. On July 12 Murchison announced that he and Richardson were buying their beloved Del Mar racetrack and transforming it into a nonprofit foundation, Boys Inc., that would channel 90 percent of its profits to Boys Clubs in California and elsewhere; it was a measure of the Big Four’s notoriety that the
New York Times
carried the story on page 1. The purchase of five more tracks around the country was under way, and Murchison hoped to lure J. Edgar Hoover to head the foundation if and when he retired.

The Texans’ philanthropy, however, was met by a gale of protest, most of it from a group of fundamentalist Christians in California, who told reporters that the nation’s youth shouldn’t be sullied with gambling profits. The real problem, though, was the IRS, which launched a multiyear investigation into whether profits earmarked for Boys Clubs should in fact be taxed. The IRS review killed Murchison’s plans to buy additional tracks in Michigan and Illinois, but the Del Mar foundation eventually channeled more than one million dollars to Boys Clubs—that is, after the four years it took to repay Murchison and Richardson for purchasing the track. The relationship lasted until 1968.

Murchison’s bid for media approbation, however, did little to halt the flow of vitriol aimed at Texas Oil. And if the Big Four could brush it off, a number of Texas politicians worried what it meant for the state’s future. “National politics is where the Texas reputation has suffered most severely,” a former aide to Lyndon Johnson wrote in the
Houston Post
in 1955. “Some Washington advisors regard it as ‘unsafe’ for political figures to let it be known that they number Texans among their friends. . . . It may be unpleasant to face, but a long list of positions of importance in national affairs could be drawn which, under prevailing conditions, no Texan is likely to fill simply because he is a Texan.” Congressman Brady Gentry told the East Texas Chamber of Commerce the backlash was hamstringing all efforts to help the state. “One of the contributing causes to the deplorable state in which we find ourselves,” Gentry said, “is caused by the tremendous publicity that has been given the Big Rich of Texas. . . . If it still continues, I feel certain that the time will come when the tax depletion will be greatly lessened, if not entirely eliminated.”

One of the few journalists to analyze the anti-Texas backlash was George Fuermann of the
Houston Post.
In his third book in six years on the “new” Texas, 1957’s
Reluctant Empire,
Fuermann defended most oilmen, blaming the rise of anti-Texanism squarely on the political activities of Cullen, Murchison, and Hunt. “The increasing suspicion of Texas oil has made it seem to others that oilmen are dishonest and crafty, yet the customs and [honesty] of independent oilmen are among their chief merits,” Fuermann wrote. Of Cullen, Murchison, and Hunt, he noted, “[these] three men, with little help from others, have made Texas oil, and thus Texas, a national antipathy.”
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The year that followed 1954’s surge of anti-Texan sentiment was not an election year, so the Big Four’s withdrawal from public view in 1955 could be viewed as either a return to normalcy or a respite to lick their wounds. Their retreat from the headlines, however, didn’t mean they had scaled back their political ambitions. It was in 1955, in fact, that Sid Richardson—a man who just twenty years earlier could not afford to buy groceries—conceived of a coup that would represent the apex of the Big Four’s influence in Washington: the replacement of Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon.

Carping about Texas oil power meant little to Richardson. Unlike Hunt and Cullen, he was on the
inside
-
inside
the Oval Office,
inside
the inner circle,
inside
Eisenhower’s head. No one could touch him there. In the autumn of 1955, Richardson fell in with a group of Eisenhower friends, including George Allen, who felt that Nixon would hamper chances for the president’s reelection in 1956. Dark and dour, Nixon had long been unpopular with many of Eisenhower’s advisers, and Eisenhower himself had real doubts whether he was presidential material. “The fact is,” Eisenhower told his speechwriter Emmet Hughes, “I’ve watched Dick a long time, and he just hasn’t grown. So I just haven’t been able to believe that he
is
presidential timber.” Among Eisenhower loyalists, both inside and outside the White House, there was already mumbling about replacing Nixon on the Republican ticket when, in September 1955, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Overnight the notion of a Nixon presidency became much more concrete, a possibility any number of Eisenhower’s friends wanted to squash.

Among them was Richardson, who had a man he thought perfectly suited to replace Nixon: his old friend, the Texas Oil attorney Robert B. Anderson. After serving as secretary of the navy for two years, Anderson had retired as assistant secretary of defense just months before, complaining that it was difficult to live on a government salary. In a conversation in late 1955, Richardson mentioned to Eisenhower the possibility of Anderson replacing Nixon on the 1956 ticket. Eisenhower agreed Anderson would make a fine vice president. There was just one problem: Anderson wasn’t willing to return to Washington, even as vice president, if it meant a government salary.

At that point, Richardson put in motion a complex scheme whose sole purpose was to make Bob Anderson a very rich man. A group of four oil companies, including one owned by Clint Murchison, was drilling wells on land owned by Richardson in Texas and Louisiana. Richardson asked each of these companies to assign royalty interests to one of his oldest friends, the onetime Gulf Oil executive Jay Adams, now an independent oilman based in Fort Worth. Acting purely as a go-between, Adams then assigned his interests to Anderson. Anderson then sold them to a company owned by Murchison’s friend Wofford Cain, who later returned them to Richardson’s hands by selling them to his nephew Perry Bass. Though little more than an exercise in paper shuffling, Richardson’s scheme made Anderson $970,000.

A few days before Christmas 1955, Richardson flew to Washington in one of his DC-3s laden with steaks, quail, and ducks for Eisenhower. During the visit he made clear that Anderson was now willing to accept a spot on the ticket; Eisenhower agreed to consider it. In a face-to-face meeting that spring, in fact, Eisenhower suggested to Nixon that he step down and become a cabinet member, the better, he argued, to run for president in 1960. According to both men’s biographers Nixon declined, and Eisenhower didn’t have the heart to push him out. In the end, in June 1956, Eisenhower named Anderson secretary of the Treasury, a position where he remained a great friend to the men of Texas Oil.
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