Bryan Burrough (48 page)

Not all Texas conservatives were right-wing nuts, of course; as George Bush’s ascendancy attested, the state’s population of mainstream conservatives was growing as well. By 1961, thanks in no small part to the organization-building Roy Cullen had initiated with Jack Porter in the 1940s, many Texas conservatives had defected to the Republican Party. That year, in fact, the state elected its first Republican senator, the conservative John Tower. The growth of the Texas GOP paralleled the emergence of a national conservative movement whose arrival, driven by the writings of William F. Buckley and his peers, had been but a twinkling in the eyes of Texas oilmen a decade before. At least initially, many liberals couldn’t tell the difference between the Buckleys and the Birchers, both of whom vaulted into public view to fill the vacuum left by Dwight Eisenhower’s retirement and the defeat of Richard Nixon in 1960. The status quo’s reaction was swift.

On November 18, 1961, during a fund-raising speech at the Hollywood Paladium, President Kennedy lashed out at what he termed “the discordant voices of extremism” emanating from the Far Right. The media, dominated by liberal-leaning journalists, smelled something new; the ensuing weeks brought a torrent of exposés into the new “Radical Right”—in
Time, Newsweek,
and the
New York Times Magazine
—that drew little distinction between moderate conservatives and the wild-eyed Birchers. None of this had any obvious connection to the “new” Texas—until December 4, when
Newsweek
adorned its cover with a retired major general named Edwin Walker, who had resigned from the army after being accused of teaching troops John Birch dogma.

Walker had settled in Dallas, where in speeches around the city he had drawn a small but vocal following. The
Newsweek
cover—“Thunder on the Right: The Conservatives, the Radicals, the Fanatical Fringe”—portrayed him as a would-be Mussolini preaching to throngs of ultraconservative Texans. In the blink of an eye, as only the American media’s herd mentality can make it appear, the country, and especially Texas, seemed awash in right-wing nut jobs. With the news that H. L. Hunt had been among Walker’s backers—Hunt, in fact, felt Walker should run for president in 1964—many in the press, recalling the McCarthy-era backlash against the Big Four eight years earlier, blamed the Radical Right’s “emergence” squarely on Texas Oil money.

In a special edition devoted to the “rise of the radical right,”
The Nation
came right out and said so: “Virtually every Radical Right movement of the postwar era,” it argued, “has been propped up by Texas oil millionaires.” In
The Nation
’s hands, all the old skeletons came tumbling out of the closet: John Henry Kirby, Vance Muse, Martin Dies, Roy Cullen, Facts Forum, Murchison, and Sid Richardson hobnobbing with Joe McCarthy around the Del Charro pool. According to the article:

 

 

The Nation
overstated its case against Texas Oil, and especially against Hunt, to whom it assigned much of the blame for the growth of the Radical Right. But this and similar reviews insinuated themselves into mainstream press coverage, and by 1963, almost a decade after the anti-McCarthy backlash, the entire state of Texas had been tarred with an image of right-wing extremism once reserved exclusively for the Big Four. Texans have a strange tendency to embrace their myths, even the dark ones, and so it was with the “new” ultraconservatism. That ultraconservatives remained a quarrelsome minority in the state didn’t matter. They were loud, and they wanted to be noticed, as Adlai Stevenson discovered when he visited Dallas in October 1963.

Stevenson was to speak on “United Nations Day,” in favor of an institution ultraconservatives loved to hate. General Walker mounted a counter-demonstration dubbed “United States Day,” and to the dismay of many, the state’s new governor, Texas Oil’s old friend John Connally, issued a proclamation saying so, too. Walker’s supporters infiltrated the Memorial Theater audience for Stevenson’s speech and attempted to hoot him down, while others picketed outside and waved American flags. When Stevenson tried to placate some of the demonstrators afterward, a woman struck him. A young man spit on him. As he wiped the spittle from his cheek, Stevenson muttered, “Are these human beings or are they animals?”

The incident was splashed across front pages around the country. The subtext was clear: Forget the astronauts. Forget those freshly scrubbed Murchison boys on the cover of
Time. This
was the new Texas, same as the old Texas. For the moment, no one gave much thought to the fact that it was exactly one month until President Kennedy was scheduled to tour the streets of downtown Dallas in an open limousine.

One month earlier, on the night of September 12, 1963, Clint Murchison Jr. finally opened his new home for guests. The party, almost ten years in the making, marked his fortieth birthday. Hundreds turned out to marvel at the great stone mansion, the largest in Dallas, probably the greatest in the state. The big-screen television, the robot bartender, the miles of walnut paneling that hid every electronic gadget out of sight—it was all worth it to Clint. Their elementary-school-aged children were now teenagers, but for one night at least, the long delay didn’t matter to his wife, Jane. The guests oohed at the swimming pool and its underwater viewing chamber, aahed at the intricate moldings and gorgeous live oaks, and tried not to dwell on the fact that Clint’s Cowboys were still mired in last place. It was a wondrous evening, the kind people would be talking about for years, and it was the last party anyone in Dallas would enjoy for a long time.

On the morning of November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy woke in a suite at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, where Sid Richardson had lazed away many hours talking with his bookies. Some of the president’s advisers had warned him about coming to Texas, but the crowds in San Antonio and Houston the last two days had been welcoming. Kennedy and Governor Connally were set to drive through the streets of downtown Dallas. They would pass near Clint Murchison’s headquarters at 1201 Main, then slide directly beneath H. L. Hunt’s office window, before rounding the Texas School Book Depository, recently purchased by D. H. Byrd.

As he left for the brief flight to Dallas’s Love Field, where demonstrators were waiting with signs that read YANKEE GO HOME and YOU’RE A TRAITOR—an aide handed Kennedy a copy of the
Dallas Morning News
and pointed to a full-page advertisement draped in a funereal black border. “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” it read. The text was an anti-Communist screed that broadly painted the president as a Communist dupe. “WHY” it asked, “has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party praised almost every one of your policies and announced the party will endorse and support your reelection in 1964?” One of the men who paid for the ad, it turned out, was Bunker Hunt.

The president read the ad, then turned to his wife, Jackie, grinned, and said, “Oh, we’re heading into nut country today.”

A
few minutes past noon, H. L. Hunt stood in his office window watching the presidential motorcade pass beneath him on Main Street. He lost sight of it as the cars rounded the Texas School Book Depository Building. As they eased down into Dealey Plaza, shots rang out. By nightfall John F. Kennedy was dead, a native Texan, Lyndon Johnson, had been sworn in as president, and Texas Oil had changed forever.

Hunt was the first oilman to be swept up in the ensuing pandemonium, but by no means the last. Within minutes his son Herbert and his security chief, Paul Rothermel, hustled into his office. As they did, the phone rang. It was an FBI agent advising Hunt that, as a vocal critic of Kennedy’s, his life might be in danger. He advised Hunt to leave Dallas. Hunt objected. Herbert and Rothermel urged him to go. Hunt relented, saying he planned to travel east. “I believe I can do better going to Washington to help Lyndon,” he said, as if Johnson would have anything to do with him. “He’s gonna need some help.”

Two days later a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at the Dallas County Jail, and it was the Hunts who needed help. Ruby had been outraged by the tone of LIFE LINE’s attacks on Kennedy, and police found two LIFE LINE scripts in his coat pocket when he was arrested, along with Lamar Hunt’s telephone number. Across the country, editorial writers, though careful not to criticize Hunt by name, lambasted LIFE LINE for fostering the “climate of hate” in Texas that many Americans came to believe had at least contributed to the president’s death. Hunt began receiving death threats. His phones rang in the middle of the night. At one point, someone even fired shots at Mount Vernon.

By Christmas the Hunts became targets of the federal investigation that would be subsumed by the Warren Commission. An FBI man interviewed Lamar, who denied knowing Jack Ruby; apparently Ruby had intended to call him but never had. Agents questioned Bunker about the “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” ad the following spring. Several people, including a convicted con man, came forward to say they had seen Ruby and H. L. Hunt together on more than one occasion, but Hunt himself was apparently never interrogated. Hunt, however, remained nervous about the Warren Commission probe, and directed Paul Rothermel to canvas his FBI and CIA contacts in an effort to monitor its work. In the ensuing months Rothermel’s memos were so thorough that, in many cases, Hunt was briefed on the commission’s findings before Earl Warren himself.

When issued in September 1964 the commission’s report mentioned H.L., Bunker, and Lamar by name, but effectively cleared them of wrongdoing or any substantive ties to either Oswald or Ruby. During the investigation Hunt ignored all threats to his security, keeping his home number listed in the telephone book and appearing on downtown streets without a bodyguard. But in both his public and private statements he underwent a complete reversal on Kennedy, lavishing praise on the dead president and excoriating his killer. “Thinking people,” he wrote in one internal memo, “know patriots had nothing to gain by this vile deed.” In a newspaper column he titled “The Assassination Must Not Be Forgotten,” Hunt wrote: “The assassination of President Kennedy was the greatest blow ever suffered by the cause of freedom. . . . This is part of the legacy left Americans by his Marxist assassin, and being a Marxist he would have wanted it that way.”
¹

While clearing the Hunts, the Warren Commission report did little to dissuade other investigators, private and professional, from reexamining possible ties between the family and either Ruby or Oswald. The most serious of these probes was launched by an ambitious district attorney in New Orleans, Jim Garrison, who in early 1967 suddenly opened his own investigation into the assassination, which Garrison claimed had been planned by Oswald during his time living in New Orleans. Garrison quickly arrested a local businessman named Clay Shaw, naming him as one of several shadowy conspirators behind Oswald. Those conspirators, Garrison remarked more than once, might have included certain unnamed Texas oilmen. Everyone knew whom he meant.

Once again Hunt sent in Paul Rothermel. Rothermel’s work tracking Garrison’s probe was even more thorough than before. He advised Hunt to avoid visiting New Orleans for fear of arrest, at which point Hunt canceled a meeting he had planned there with Senator Russell Long. At one point Rothermel procured a hand-drawn diagram in which Garrison’s people laid out what appeared to be their theory of the assassination. It consisted of a series of circles and boxes connected with dotted lines and arrows. At the very top was the name “H. L. Hunt”; below was the cryptic notation “screened three times by Paul Rothermel.” Below it a series of lines led to boxes containing the names of Ruby, Oswald, the Dallas police, and a host of bit players.
²
Hunt, it appeared, was squarely in Garrison’s crosshairs. In fact, he had little to fear. When Garrison finally put Clay Shaw on trial in 1969, Hunt’s name was never mentioned. Shaw was acquitted of all charges, ending the probe.

If Hunt thought that would squelch further inquiries, he was sorely mistaken. The late 1960s, in fact, began the heyday of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy literature, and many speculated openly of Hunt’s involvement. Starting with a book called
Farewell America
in 1969, authors of every political hue speculated how and why Hunt, among others, might have killed the president; the theories, each wilder than the last, persist to this day and have actually multiplied over the years, leading to an entire subgenre of oilmen-killed-Kennedy books and, in recent years, a profusion of Web sites. Many of the latter-day theories attempt to draw in even more oilmen, notably Clint Murchison, never mind that in 1963 the elderly Murchison could barely answer the telephone without a nurse’s help. In 2004’s
The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy,
author Harrison Livingstone argued that Murchison, Hunt, D. H. Byrd, and the Toddie Lee Wynne family conspired with the CIA and the Mafia to kill Kennedy. Other books, including 1991’s
The Texas Connection
by Craig I. Zerbel and
Blood, Money & Power
by Barr McClellan, advanced the case that Texas oilmen killed Kennedy to hasten Lyndon Johnson’s entry to the White House.