Bryan Burrough (46 page)

Through it all, John worked sixty-hour weeks, and the stress and long hours began to take their toll. Never possessed of the strongest constitution—John’s wartime stresses and asthma were never far from his mind—his energy flagged. His eyes grew puffy. He began smoking. Lupe tried to divert him with weekend tours of Manhattan art galleries, which kindled in John a lifelong love for contemporary and avant-garde art. He began buying dozens of canvasses and shipping them back to Dallas. But art-collecting alone couldn’t revive him. He felt increasingly estranged from his children and finally, fearing a nervous collapse, John returned to Dallas for three full weeks to recover. In his absence, Clint Jr. did his best to keep the fight going.

By early April, with the vote a month away, the brothers could point to some encouraging signs. Several major shareholders, including two onetime Alleghany directors, had announced their support. Both sides were buying stock, and thus votes, as fast as they could—trading in Alleghany shares was the heaviest in any stock since the crash of 1929—but the betting on Wall Street was that Kirby would find a way to beat his upstart challengers. Then, just eleven days before the shareholder vote, Kirby blundered. Alleghany hadn’t declared a stock dividend in its thirty-two-year history, but Kirby now announced it would, five cents on every share. It was a transparent attempt to curry favor with stockholders, and a sign of Kirby’s desperation. John wasted no time capitalizing, taking out full-page advertisements in the
Wall Street Journal
and
New York Times
featuring a cartoonish Kirby tossing handfuls of “five-cent chicken feed” to Alleghany shareholders.

The shareholder meeting, held at the Lord Baltimore Hotel in Baltimore, proved anticlimactic. Kirby made polite remarks, refusing to mention the Murchisons by name. John stood in the audience and answered a question or two. Afterward, both sides told reporters they were confident of victory. It was supposed to take a full week to count the votes. It ended up taking three, but by then the word had leaked:

Texas won.

The final tally gave the Murchisons 54 percent of shareholder votes, a very tight race by Wall Street standards. For John and Clint Jr., the ensuing media acclaim matched anything lavished on the original Big Four. The coverage peaked when they followed their father onto the cover of
Time
. Much like NASA’s arrival in Houston two years earlier, the
Time
cover marked a turning point in the image of Texas and its oilmen. Where seven years earlier Big Clint had been portrayed in a rancher’s straw hat, John and Clint posed for
Time
in business suits; the only nod to Texas was the lasso-draped skyline behind them. According to the article:

 

 

After years in the shadows, the Murchison brothers now emerged as not only symbols of the “new” Texas, but its most visible young magnates, their next move a source of boundless speculation in the national business press. John was named Alleghany’s interim chief executive. The Murchison brothers now controlled five billion dollars of new assets, including IDS and the country’s largest railroad. John told Lupe he wanted to move to New York for good; he even had his eye on a Sutton Place town house. He loved everything about city life, the museums, the restaurants, the art. Lupe resisted. She loved Dallas. Most of all, she loved being a
Murchison
in Dallas. She was royalty in Texas, a nouveau riche housewife in Manhattan. And that, she saw, was the point. John didn’t want to be royalty. He wanted the anonymity only Manhattan could bring. In the end they put off a decision, shuttling between Dallas and New York while John searched for a permanent CEO.
⁷

If John foresaw a happy new life meandering between art galleries and his triumphant perch inside Alleghany’s boardroom, he was badly mistaken. It was almost as if he hadn’t thought things through. The Murchisons had won glory and acclaim and a sprawling new financial empire, but it was an empire in which the vengeful Allan P. Kirby still owned a full third of the stock. From the moment his defeat was announced, in fact, Kirby began a guerrilla campaign designed to thwart John’s wishes at every turn. During the proxy fight John had promised shareholders he would recapitalize IDS via a ten-for-one stock split, but when he proposed it Kirby sued and won. John wanted to sell off New York Central shares. Kirby opposed him. Kirby opened his doors to the press, sniping at John’s inability to boost the price of Alleghany’s stock, which was sagging in the face of the internecine warfare.

“The Murchison boys want me to sell out,” Kirby told one writer, “but I won’t. That’s one thing I won’t do.” With a smile, he added, “I’d say the Murchison boys are way, way out on a limb.”

John was trapped. He tried in vain to hire a top-flight CEO to run Alleghany—the man who Sid Richardson had helped become Nixon’s treasury secretary, Robert B. Anderson, was one rumored candidate—but Kirby’s scorched-earth insurgency turned the company into a battlefield no one was eager to navigate. A stronger man might have perservered, but John was simply overwhelmed. There was no way to rid himself of Kirby, and in the end he saw but one option. In September 1963, barely two years after taking control of Alleghany, John confirmed to reporters he was in talks to sell out. A few weeks later he followed through, selling most of Murchison Brothers’ Alleghany stock to a Minneapolis investor who promptly resold it to Kirby. Kirby basked in the glory of taking back the company he had lost. He did it for “pride,” he said. “Family pride. As nearly as I can remember, until the proxy fight with the Murchisons in 1961, I never got licked.”

And like that it was over, not just John and Clint Jr.’s dealings with Alleghany but their brief tenure as actors on the nation’s business stage. Though they would continue investing in dozens of American companies, never again would the Murchison brothers venture into the corporate spotlight in any serious way. John limped back to Dallas amid rumors that he and Clint Jr. were liquidating their non-Alleghany holdings. John wasn’t suited to be CEO of a major company; he loathed the attention, and for the rest of his life he would do his best to avoid it. Not so his brother. Clint Jr. still burned with the need to be noticed, and by the time John returned to Dallas, Clint was on his way to becoming a Texas icon. But it wasn’t the boardroom or the oil fields where he would make his mark. By 1963 Clint Murchison Jr. had only one thing on his mind: Football. Football, football, football.

Unlike the high-living Murchisons, or for that matter their own idiosyncratic father, the children of H. L. Hunt’s first family lived unremarkable upper-middle-class lives in the late 1950s. Margaret Hunt Hill was a home-maker who lived in Highland Park with her husband, Al, dined at the Brook Hollow Country Club, and was accepted into Terpsichorean, an exclusive dance club. Her sister Caroline lived just as quietly. Drab, stolid Herbert had earned a geology degree at Washington & Lee and joined Hunt Oil. Reliable, with a good head for numbers, he was leading the family’s first real diversification, buying up thousands of acres of real estate across North Dallas and its burgeoning suburbs. Herbert lived with his wife and family in University Park, drove to work in a Chevrolet, and mowed his own lawn.
⁸

Only the second son, Bunker, followed his father’s path into the oil fields. In later years everyone around Dallas would say it: of all the many, many Hunt children, only Nelson Bunker Hunt seemed to be his father’s second coming, a man of vision and dreams, ambitious, outspoken, combative, self-possessed, and, like his father, a bit odd. An enormous twelve-pound infant when born in Arkansas in 1926, Bunker had never outgrown his baby fat and, thanks to a steady diet of junk food over the years, never would. By adolescence he had already grown the big moon face that, with his thick glasses, would in time lead more than one writer to describe him with the word
porcine.
His favorite meal was a Texas delicacy: a can of chili poured over Fritos.

His father, who had invested so much in Hassie, showed little interest in raising Bunker and his brothers. When he was twelve, his mother handed Bunker a train ticket and told him he would be sent to Culver Military Academy, as Hassie had been. But Bunker, who was at best ambivalent about his appearance, never took to shining his shoes and creasing his bedsheets. When school officials sent disapproving letters to his mother, Lyda packed him off to the Hill School outside Philadelphia. There the rumpled teenager made a good living as the school bookmaker, running craps games and taking bets on college football games, a hobby that got him briefly expelled when he watched a game one Saturday instead of working off demerits. He dropped out of the University of Texas after one semester to join the navy, spending the last months of World War II washing decks on an aircraft carrier.

After the war Bunker married an SMU girl and took a job at Hunt Oil, where opinions of him seemed evenly split: some of H.L.’s people felt he showed real promise as an oilman; others thought Bunker, who was dyslexic, wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the pack. When Bunker, then only twenty-two, sniffed out a seven-million-dollar oil field in Scurry County, H.L. placed him in charge of Penrod, the family’s drilling contractor. But in truth, Bunker never had a chance. Maybe it was his weight, maybe his casual attitude toward work—he was known to take naps, and liked to stop by Las Vegas during business trips—but there was something about him that irritated his father no end. Bunker’s smallest infractions could drive H.L. to apoplexy, as when H.L. screamed at him the time someone at a ranch Bunker was overseeing stole a load of seed. According to family lore, H.L. fired Bunker from Hunt Oil, but he may have left of his own accord. Bunker knew, as only the sons of disapproving fathers can, that the only way to gain H.L.’s love, or at least his respect, was to make it on his own. That meant finding oil, and lots of it. But this was the 1950s. If he was to unearth a field even half the size of East Texas, Bunker realized it would mean looking overseas. He first hired a University of Illinois geology professor and asked him to prepare a report on the most promising places an “elephant” might be found. The professor’s report listed the leading candidates as the Middle East, where the most promising concessions had long been snapped up, North Africa, and Pakistan. Bunker, then twenty-seven, flew to Karachi in 1953, and two years later he reached an agreement with the government for a forty-two-million-dollar drilling program along the Makran Coast. He spent the next several years drilling dry holes. His losses were estimated at eleven million dollars. His father was not impressed.

In 1955, as Bunker began drilling in Pakistan, the North African country of Libya announced a drilling-rights auction. Bunker jumped into the thick of it, competing directly against the majors. He emerged with two tracts, a promising coastal stretch near the Egyptian border known as Concession #2 and a patch of remote desert three hundred miles inland, Concession #65, in an area known as the Calansho Sand Sea. Bunker drilled the coastal tract first. It was a nightmare. All his geologists had to guide them were out-of-date Italian maps. Worse, Bunker’s concession lay amid the World War II battlefields east of Tobruk, which remained pocked with land mines; one of his men was badly hurt when his Jeep hit one. By 1959, after three years of searching, Bunker had yet to find commercial amounts of oil. Worse, he had run through the money in his trusts. To keep going, he sold a 15 percent stake in his concessions to his brothers Herbert and Lamar.

Then, in 1961, with his money almost gone, British Petroleum offered to sink a wildcat in the distant Concession #65 in return for half of any oil it might find. Bunker agreed; he no longer had the resources to do it himself. It was the smartest decision of his career. In November 1961 the exploratory well blew in at a strong 3,910 barrels a day; it was the first gusher in what came to be known as the Sarir Field, whose reserves would eventually be estimated at eight to eleven billion barrels, almost three times as large as East Texas. It was one of the ten largest oil fields ever found to that point, and Bunker’s half interest, valued at six to eight billion dollars, made him, on paper at least, the richest man in the world—richer than his father.

And, much as happened with his father three decades before, almost no one knew it. Bunker’s windfall made no headlines in Dallas or anywhere else. It was, after all, the most tenuous of fortunes. To get the oil to market would require building a three-hundred-mile pipeline across open desert to the coast, where an oil port would need to be built. British Petroleum seemed to be in no rush; Bunker suspected it feared the sudden torrent of oil onto world markets would drive down prices. He reluctantly coaxed a five-million-dollar loan out of his father, but it would be years before he would see steady income from his Saharan bonanza.

When in Dallas, Bunker lived with his wife, Caroline, in a simple colonial in Highland Park, driving to work in a colorless American sedan adorned with a GO SMU MUSTANGS bumper sticker. Like his father, he was notoriously cheap, taking the subways when in New York and complaining about the cost; he favored hotel rooms the size of walk-in closets. Just as he was the only Hunt to follow his father into the oil fields, he was the only child to forge his way into right-wing politics. Bunker, in fact, embraced the very worst elements of his father’s harsh anticommunism, down to and including anti-Semitism; as he told more than one friend over the years, he actually believed there was a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to take over the world.