Bryan Burrough (42 page)

In time Bush tired of working for others and, after raising a half million dollars from an uncle, Herbie Walker, and family friends—one was the owner of the
Washington Post
—he and a partner opened an office in the Midland Petroleum Building to trade oil leases. A neighbor, Hugh Liedtke, also eastern-educated, persuaded him the real money was in finding the oil itself, so in 1953, with still more money from Uncle Herbie and friends in the Astor and Rockefeller families, Bush merged his company into Liedtke’s and renamed it Zapata Petroleum, after a Marlon Brando film,
Viva Zapata.
On its very first well, in nearby Coke County, Zapata struck oil. Five more strikes followed, then sixty-five more in the next eighteen months. By 1955 Zapata was producing 1,250 barrels a day, making Bush and Liedkte, on paper at least, minor millionaires.

While Liedtke and his brother Bill searched for oil on land, Bush started a new subsidiary, Zapata Offshore, and with bonds sold on Wall Street by his Uncle Herbie, bought two experimental drilling rigs whose designers promised they could find oil in a new frontier: underwater. Bush’s offshore rigs, leased to large oil companies, were among the first to begin drilling the shallow floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next several years Zapata acquired more rigs and sent them farther and farther afield, off the shore of Cuba, the Persian Gulf, even the coast of Borneo. Bush’s success, however, led to an amicable parting with Hugh Liedtke, who wanted to focus on land drilling. Liedkte took Zapata Petroleum, Bush Zapata Offshore. It made sense, friends said. Liedtke was all about money. Bush saw other mountains to climb.

In the summer of 1959 Bush, now CEO of his own company, moved Barbara and their sons to Houston, where George joined the Houston Country Club and the exclusive Bayou Club. There he began amassing a clutch of friends who would remain at his side for decades. He met Jim Baker, a Princeton man whose grandfather founded Houston’s giant Baker & Botts law firm, on the tennis court at the country club. Bob Mosbacher was a young wildcatter who had struck oil in South Texas. In time Bush befriended two prominent attornies, Leon Jaworski and Bob Strauss. He had always known he would try politics someday, and with the help of friends he began testing the waters in Houston.

Bush did so at a turning point in Texas political history. After almost twenty years of ultraconservative rule, the last of the true hard-liners had been swept from state office just two years earlier, in 1957, the same year Lyndon Johnson finally secured control of the state Democratic Party, the same year Texans actually voted into office a liberal senator, Ralph Yarborough. The era of Pappy O’Daniel and Roy Cullen and Joe McCarthy was ending, people said, swept away by new ideas, new people, new times. These were the years of the Organization Man, and George Bush was an Organization Man for Texas, an eastern-bred country-club Republican who didn’t want to change the status quo so much as run it. Not for Bush hillbilly bands and bags of cash; he looked silly in a ten-gallon hat and knew it. The cities of Texas were filling with gray-suited executives who thought the way Bush did, and they would boost him to his first political post, chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, in 1964. The rest was history.

If George Bush represented the future of Texas politics, Hugh Liedtke was the future of Texas Oil. Liedtke became an oilman in the Murchison model, a Wall Street-savvy CEO who over the next twenty years used Zapata Petroleum as a battering ram to engineer a series of mergers and hostile acquisitions that produced Pennzoil, one of the largest independents in Texas, housed in a glittering glass tower in downtown Houston. Liedtke was the consummate example of what
The New Yorker
’s John Bainbridge in 1959 called the Texas “wheeler-dealer,” a man who found oil on the telephone and the stock market. (The tag eventually gained wide usage, inspiring a 1964 movie of the same name, a lark starring James Garner as a high-rolling Texas oilman.) Like Bush, Liedtke could adopt the good ol’ boy style when needed. But unlike the Roy Cullens and Sid Richardsons who made their fortunes tromping through marshes and deserts looking for oil under the ground, Liedtke was simply a businessmen—whose business happened to be oil.

And then, suddenly, it was over.

It’s difficult to select a date or any one event when it happened—the selling of the Shamrock in 1954, the uproar over the 1956 natural gas bill, the first decline in Texas oil production in 1957—but by the late 1950s the golden age of Texas Oil had come to an end. Stylistically, the backlash against the excesses and political extremism of the Big Four had taken its toll. In 1957 the
Houston Post
published an entire series of front-page articles exploring why so many Americans hated Texas. In 1958 Big John Mecom and a group of oilmen took out a full-page advertisement in the
Post
defending Texas Oil and declaring that attacks on it were un-American—an early sign of an industry-wide persecution complex that would endure for decades.

It wasn’t just the rest of America that was tiring of the Big Rich’s gaucheries. The George Bushes and Hugh Liedtkes of the new Texas were frankly embarrassed by the Silver Dollar Jim Wests and Glenn McCarthys and D. D. Feldmans. By the late 1950s, while ranches and airplanes and exotic wildlife were still prized, the days when they were brandished with unabashed pride were fast falling away. “Evidence of individual Texas wealth was being secluded by the middle 1950s, and there are fewer anecdotes to feed the ‘Big Rich’ legend,” George Fuermann wrote in 1957. “The legend has become obnoxious; being from Texas has become a distinction for some to worry about.”

But for Texas Oil, the real problem wasn’t image. It was economics. The days of Texas fortunes “hatching like mayflies,” as
Time
memorably observed in 1950, were quickly fading. Never again would one man working alone find a major oil field in Texas; they had all been found. By 1960 costs to drill in the continental United States had risen so high, a solo operator could barely afford to sink a wildcat well. A number of deep-pocketed wildcatters had begun looking overseas, John Mecom in Honduras, Colombia, Jordan, and Yemen, H. L. Hunt’s son Bunker in Pakistan. Worse, competition from Middle Eastern oil was slowly strangling the industry. The majors saw little reason to buy more Texas crude when they could buy Saudi oil for half the price. European demand, long a foundation of Texas sales, peaked during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and fell sharply thereafter. In a bid to buoy prices, the Railroad Commission ordained that no Texas field could pump oil more than twenty-one days a month. It reduced this allowance again and again, until in 1962, Texas wells could operate only seven days a month. Needless to say, no one was looking too hard to find new oil in Texas.

The titans of the golden age, meanwhile, had begun passing from the stage. Sid Richardson’s close friend, Amon Carter, the Fort Worth newspaper publisher who struck the Ellenberger Lime, died in 1955; some said Richardson was never the same after that. Patillo Higgins, the man who started it all, died in 1956. Silver Dollar Jim West died of diabetes in 1957. They found $290,000 in a vault beneath his River Oaks home, much of it in silver dollars; it took seven armored cars to haul it all out. The old West family ranch, sold to Humble years earlier, was deeded to the federal government as the new headquarters of NASA’s manned space program. Big Jim West’s Italianate mansion on Galveston Bay became the new Lunar Science Institute. Outer space, not oil, appeared to represent the future of Texas.

Nothing marked the end of the golden age so much as the dimming of the men who had created it, the original Big Four oilmen. Clint Murchison was the first to retreat. In February 1956, while visiting Bob Young’s Palm Beach mansion and spending his days with Ginnie at Hialeah, Murchison began complaining he didn’t feel well. He had trouble maintaining his balance, and his speech was slurred. He and Ginnie flew to New Orleans, where he checked into the Ochsner Clinic. Doctors there deduced he had suffered a slight stroke, the result of a partial blockage of an artery in his heart. Afterward Murchison went to Baylor University Hospital in Dallas to have the artery cleared.

The stroke signaled the end of Murchison’s active business career. In the months to come, while he remained engaged in the day-to-day supervision of his investments, his memory began to fail. He asked his secretary to listen in on his phone calls and take notes, in case he missed something. It was embarrassing, and by 1957, when he turned sixty-two, Murchison was spending more and more time away from the office, all but moving to his East Texas ranch, Gladoaks. There, splayed before a card table in his pajama bottoms, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he began each morning around five with a call to Sid Richardson. “What’s the dope?” were usually Murchison’s first words, and the two would spend an hour discussing everything from investments to the Gladoaks peach crop.

There was a second stroke in 1960. At that point, Murchison passed his last management duties to his sons, John Dabney and Clint Jr., and moved into Gladoaks full-time, where he busied himself buying cattle, a dozen more ranches nearby, and the odd company, a chain of supermarkets one year, a group of feedlots the next. He and Ginnie still traveled, spending the summers in La Jolla and betting the horses at Del Mar. But after another series of strokes in 1965 Murchison was relegated to a wheelchair. He stopped flying down to Acuna then; it was too cold. Instead they bought a cliffside mansion in Acapulco, but in time even that became a burden. Murchison spent his last years mired at Gladoaks, many days sitting in a battered old station wagon as a chauffeur drove him through the fields and orchards of his many ranches. He finally died, of pneumonia, in June 1969.

They buried him in Athens, next to his parents. There was a massive funeral at the Methodist church, a thousand mourners or more. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon called with condolescences. The
New York Times
ran his obituary on page 1, terming Murchison a one-man conglomerate. “His entire life was devoted to making money,” the
Times
wrote, but it wasn’t really true. Clint Murchison had torn through life with gusto, and those he left behind were uniformly thankful to have known him. At Acuna the peasants built a fifteen-foot cross of solid ebony and hauled it to the ranch’s tallest peak, where they anchored it to the rock and bowed their heads. Then they buried a pair of Big Clint’s mangy old boots, and returned down the mountain.

Sid Richardson spent his twilight years alone, shuttling between a new bungalow at the Thunderbird Club in Palm Springs, his retreat at St. Joe’s, and his rooms at the Fort Worth Club. Wherever he was, his routine rarely varied. He arose around five and spoke to Murchison, a talk that inevitably began with one saying he had been awake for hours waiting for the other to get up. Mornings he lolled around, typically attired in boxer shorts, pajama tops, a ratty gray sweater, and a bathrobe, sipping coffee between calls. In Palm Springs he would retire after lunch to a lounge dubbed the Snake Pit, where he spent the afternoon playing poker with a group whose members included the actor Phil Harris and Ray Ryan, the gambler who had played with H. L. Hunt.

There was scant new business to be done. The glut of Middle Eastern oil meant there was little need to drill, but he did some anyway, at one point partnering with John Mecom on what was then the deepest well ever drilled, a dry hole bored nineteen thousand feet beneath a Louisiana swamp. The growing aversion to American oil, in fact, almost cost Richardson his Louisiana fields. He couldn’t sell all the oil, and his leases, even in the giant Cox Bay and Port-la-Hache fields below New Orleans, remained alive only so long as he pumped: if the fields stopped producing, the leases could be voided. In the late 1950s, his Old Friend says, Richardson avoided disaster only by cutting a deal to sell all his Louisiana production to Ashland Oil at cost. In 1957
Time
magazine reported speculation that he was poised to cash out, selling his empire to one of the majors. “A damn lie,” Richardson snapped.

His health was failing. He had high blood pressure. The doctors at the Ochsner Clinic told him to quit drinking and cut the salt from his diet. They made him stop smoking. President Eisenhower sent a condolensce letter or two. Richardson seemed happiest when he could fly back to Fort Worth, where his first call would inevitably go to Perry Bass’s wife. “What’s for dinner?” he would ask. She always fixed him his favorite East Texas meal, sliced tomatoes, black-eyed peas, collared greens, and a single ham hock.

Still, he was lonely. A longtime Fort Worth newspaper reporter, Carl Freund, remembers seeing Richardson many days on the sidewalk outside the Texas Hotel, chatting with bookies about a horse race. On Saturdays he would summon Bass and his teenaged grandson Sid down to his office just to shoot the breeze; later, on the way home, Bass would tell Sid the old man just didn’t want to be alone. When the Basses were busy, Richardson had trouble finding people to join him for dinner. “He’d get lonesome, and he’d call me up; he’d want me to come get him,” remembers the Texas Hotel’s manager at the time, Andy Anderson. “He loved to go to a Mexican café or some . . . rib joint. And he never would have any money in his pocket. He always expected me to pay for it. He knew, of course, that I would charge it to the company.”
⁶

A few days before Christmas 1958, Richardson sent his DC-3 to Washington to ferry his lawyer, John Connally, to Palm Springs. Connally sensed trouble. He had taken a call from Perry Bass, who had seen Richardson’s will. To his dismay, it left almost nothing to the Bass family. Richardson’s share of their oil fields was to go to a new Sid Richardson Foundation. In Palm Springs, Connally fell into Richardson’s easy rhythms of coffee and cards, and after a few days brought up the matter. “Mr. Richardson,” he said one morning, “you need to leave some substantial money to your family and Perry’s children.”