Bryan Burrough (74 page)

The site is located about one mile south of where the Houston Astrodome stands today.

The Murchison family pronounces the name “Murkison.”

Exactly how Richardson coaxed that much money out of a bank is unclear, but Richardson cited the two-hundred-thousand-dollar figure more than once in later life. Maybe he ran into a gullible loan officer. A more likely explanation is that he received help arranging the loan—a letter of recommendation, maybe even a loan guarantee—from the banker he knew best, John Murchison. If so, it wouldn’t be the last time he sought the Murchisons’ help in coming years.

Richardson drilled several of these first wells in partnership with an oilman named Eugene Kelsey.

Humble renamed Rabbs Ridge the “Thompsons” field, the name it is known by today.

Details of Richardson’s various loans and lawsuits are contained in records filed in the Winkler County Courthouse in Kermit.

What little is known of Richardson’s dealings with Charles Marsh can be found, in part, in various corporate files Marsh left after his death in 1966, and which are now deposited at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin.

In his 1989 biography of John Connally,
The Lone Star,
author James Reston Jr. gave another version of the Richardson-Marsh split. Reston quotes an unidentified “observer” of the deal who asserted that Richardson and Marsh had an agreement in which either partner could buy out the other in the event the second partner was unable to fulfill his financial responsibilities. According to this account, Richardson demanded $3.7 million from Marsh to develop leases around the Keystone Field; when Marsh couldn’t produce the cash, Richardson forced him to sell out. “When Sid got the chance,” the observer is quoted saying, “he screwed the guy who got him into business.”

The Reston account makes no mention of Marsh’s tax problems. Moreover, as Marsh’s private papers show, Richardson and Marsh continued an amiable correspondence for years afterward. If Richardson really did “screw” Charles Marsh, and there’s no documentation to support this assertion, Marsh apparently held no grudge. In later years Marsh regained his solvency and purchased a string of small eastern newspapers. He died in 1964.

The home is today the Lakewood Country Club.

Strake kept Glen Eyrie until 1951, when it was sold to the Navigators, a religious group then affiliated with the evangelist Billy Graham. The group uses the property as a summer camp and retreat to this day.

The bond between Kirby and Armstrong was strong. When Armstrong went bankrupt in 1923, it was Kirby who stepped in with nine hundred thousand dollars to buy his various companies and return them to Armstrong’s supervision. After Kirby’s bankruptcy, Armstrong repaid the favor by buying Kirby’s East Texas ranch and returning it to Kirby. Late in life, Armstrong would characterize Kirby as “the greatest man I have ever known.”

After their father’s death, West’s two sons eventually sold the Austin radio station to a freshly minted Austin-area congressman named Lyndon Johnson, for whom it became the basis of a substantial personal fortune.

Dies’s papers indicate he corresponded regularly with Kirby and Stewart; Stewart, in fact, wrote Dies a letter from his deathbed at the Mayo Clinic.

According to his IRS testimony, Elliott thought so highly of Richardson that he named him godfather of one of his children. He doesn’t say which one. In an interview with the author, Elliott’s son, Tony Roosevelt, says he believes the story is true, though he, too, isn’t sure which child was involved.

^†
In a foreword he wrote for a 1993 history of Aransas County, Texas, where St. Joseph’s Island is located, Perry Bass dated this incident to the afternoon of December 7, 1941. But in his 1945 testimony to the IRS, Richardson put the call the following Wednesday.

encounter that would shape his life in later years. His attorney, William Kittrell, spied an army general he had met arranging for soldiers to appear at the state fair. His name was Dwight Eisenhower, and he couldn’t find a seat on the crowded train. Kittrell invited Eisenhower to sit in Richardson’s drawing room. The three men ended up talking most of the way to Washington. “I thought he was a pretty good hand,” Richardson told the
Washington Post
in 1954. “The funny thing was, I didn’t pay any attention to the name. Later on, Bill [Kittrell] said to me, ‘Remember that fellow that shared your drawing room? He’s the fellow that’s in command over there in Europe.’ ”

Not long after, Murchison divested the last of his Southern Union stock, his last link to the company.

To be fair, oil had been associated with Texas in the public mind since Spindletop. Several novels and minor films had been issued about Texas oilmen in the 1920s. As late as 1940, the movie
Boomtown,
starring Clark Gable as a wheeler-dealer Texan, achieved wide notice. Tellingly,
Boomtown
was set during the Ranger-Breckinridge booms of the early 1920s. Hollywood, like the rest of America, had yet to learn of the state’s new wealth.

Interestingly, several of McCarthy’s high school and college transcripts list his date of birth as December 25, 1906, suggesting he may have lied about his age as he became older.

Richardson remained a quiet supporter of Graham’s the rest of his life, at one point bankrolling a white-tie dinner at London’s Claridge’s hotel in which Graham preached the gospel to almost two hundred members of the British social elite.

Porter was already a leader among Texas independents, having spearheaded, along with Glenn McCarthy, their opposition to the Anglo-American treaty in 1944. Porter and McCarthy went on to cofound one of Texas Oil’s largest lobbying arms, the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association.

Cullen wasn’t so wild about Kravchenko’s second book,
I Chose Justice,
which detailed his fight against a libel suit filed against him by communists in Paris. “The story of the libel suit is fine,” he wrote a Scribner’s editor who mailed him galley proofs, “but I think the man is a socialist.”

A Senate subcommittee later found that Murchison’s money, along with five thousand dollars contributed by Roy Cullen’s partner Jack Porter, were part of a sum not reported to the “appropriate authorities.” Instead the money had been used to help pay for a tabloid newspaper distributed throughout Maryland that carried a fake photograph of Senator Tydings posing with the American Communist leader, Earl Browder. Tydings was defeated.

Richardson’s Old Friend says Crawford chased Richardson so fervently that she actually flew to Fort Worth unannounced. Richardson refused to see her, and the actress ended up spending an awkward evening with Perry Bass’s family. “Sid so hated snobs,” the Old Friend said. “She was the kind of person he hated most.”

Richardson’s collection remains on display today at Fort Worth’s Sid Richardson Museum.

Glassell’s club was forced to close after a Peruvian military coup in 1968. Its clubhouse still stands, abandoned and decaying, the oilman’s first thousand-pound marlin still hanging over his crumbling fireplace.

Hunt maintained minimal contact with his “second family” by Frania Tye, who remained in Atlanta.

The work product of Kirby’s detectives can still be found among Drew Pearson’s personal papers at the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

Clint Jr. appears to have gotten help arranged by one of Lyndon Johnson’s aides, Bobby Baker. In 1973 Baker told
Playboy
that he arranged for Clint to pay the powerful Kansas senator Estes Kefauver a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe, ferried to him by Clint’s pal Robert Thompson. Kefauver, Baker charged, had then put pressure on George Marshall. Clint Jr. denied the story. Thompson didn’t. For years he delighted in telling the story to friends.

In later years the quote would be widely, and mistakenly, attributed to Lamar’s father.

It would later be alleged that Senator Eastland accepted a bribe of either fifty or sixty thousand dollars to intercede on Bunker’s behalf; a Dallas grand jury, however, declined to indict him. Bunker strongly denied doing anything improper.

A measure of Bunker’s anonymity was the
New York Times
headline announcing his nationalization: “Bunker Hill Nationalization Will Cause $4 Billion Loss.”

Bunker did manage to recoup twenty million dollars in costs from the Libyan government for the oil field equipment he was forced to abandon.

The Hunts’ victory gave them the upper hand in settlement talks that ensued over the federal obstruction of justice charges. Eight months later, prosecutors agreed to an exceedingly generous resolution. Charges against Herbert were dropped. Bunker pled no contest and paid a thousand-dollar fine.

The remaining fifteen million ounces of silver were said to be stored in warehouses in Chicago and New Jersey.

The Hunts always denied trying to corner the silver or any other markets. They characterized their silver efforts as simply a solid bet on a solid commodity.