by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
It wasn’t unknown for a major political contributor to donate money to elections in far-off states, but as 1950 dawned, Cullen took the practice to a new level. He and Porter drew up a list of every congressman up for reelection in 1950 and, where they felt a candidate wasn’t sufficiently tough on “creeping socialism,” began mailing checks to his opponent. Their money, in amounts from five hundred dollars to as much as ten thousand dollars, found its way into dozens of national campaigns. “I guess I’m supporting as many Democrats as Republicans,” Cullen told a reporter. “A lot of ’em may not expect my support, and some of ’em may not want it, but if they believe in our American system of constitutional government and the free enterprise system, they’re going to get it.”3
Cullen’s checks often came attached to a favorite book. One was I Chose Freedom, by a Russian refugee named Victor A. Kravchenko. After reading it, Cullen mailed a check for twenty-five thousand dollars to the publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, asking that the book be distributed to libraries and schools across the country. Librarians received the unsolicited book with a note from Scribner’s saying it had been donated “with the compliments of a believer in American freedom, who hopes this book will have the widest possible reading.”4t
The most influential book on Cullen’s thinking was The Road Ahead, a 1950 best seller written by John Flynn, a onetime liberal writer who argued that New Deal policies were transforming America into a totalitarian state. Cullen mailed thousands of copies of Flynn’s book to libraries and universities, and in time the two men became friends. Yet money and books and telegrams alone weren’t enough to spread the conservative cause, Cullen saw. He needed to make war on the battlefield of ideas. In late 1949 he and Jack Porter began scouting for a publication they could groom as a voice for Texas conservatives. That December they approached Ida Darden, the sister of John Henry Kirby’s onetime mouthpiece, Vance Muse. Darden, who practiced a paler version of her brother’s overt racism, had started a newspaper called the Southern Conservative, in Fort Worth; most of her seed money had come from Kirby’s crony, the Klan organizer George Armstrong.
The year 1949 was a very bad year to consider going into business with the ultraracist Armstrong, who, much like Cullen and so many other Texas oilmen, was taking his first steps into the public arena. That summer, after years evading FBI probes of his anti-Semitic pamphlets and books, the eighty-four-year-old Armstrong had made a startling proposal to a small school in his native Mississippi, Jefferson Military College. Armstrong offered the school half the mineral rights on twenty-six thousand acres of his oil fields, a proposal he valued at fifty million dollars. His only conditions, Armstrong said, were that Jefferson exclude blacks and Jews and teach its students white supremacy. The school turned him down flat. The resulting furor made headlines around the country and did nothing to further the portrait of Texas oilmen as enlightened businessmen.
Cullen made the approach to Ida Darden in partnership with H. L. Hunt, the only time the two are known to have worked in tandem. But the talks foundered, either because of concerns over Armstrong’s activities or, as Darden’s papers suggest, difficulties structuring a legal partnership between Cullen and Hunt. Still Cullen did not give up.
Eighteen months later, in the summer of 1951, he received a call from the writer John Flynn. Flynn had launched a program on the nation’s second-largest radio network, the Liberty Network of Dallas, which had leveraged its broadcasts of major-league baseball games into a news service carried in forty-three states. Its rapid growth, however, had plunged Liberty and its founder, the radio pioneer Gordon McLendon, into financial chaos. Flynn asked Cullen to come to Liberty’s rescue. He assured Cullen that McLendon was a “good conservative” and that, if Cullen didn’t help, a “radical element” might buy Liberty.
Cullen saw the opportunity. Fifty years before Fox News became a conservative media bellwether, he envisioned transforming Liberty into something similar. After a single meeting with McLendon, and without so much as examining Liberty’s books, Cullen paid one million dollars for 50 percent control. He was named cochairman, announced plans to move Liberty to Houston, and threw himself into a new calling. “I recently purchased controlling interest in the Liberty Network to keep it out of bad hands,” he wrote one of his newest pen pals, the presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. “This is the second largest network in the country, and soon will be probably the largest.”
Red flags, however, rose immediately. A New York newspaper reported that a local station had broken off talks about joining Liberty over concerns about Cullen’s political views. In November The Nation reported that Flynn had taken over Liberty’s news operations; “his official mission,” the magazine stated, “is to make sure the news is no longer given what he calls a ‘leftist’ slant.”5 In later years both Flynn and Gordon McLendon would deny that Flynn had done any such thing, but the rumors did nothing to attract the new advertisers Liberty badly needed. Liberty was forced out of business and declared bankruptcy just nine months after Cullen’s cash infusion, in May 1952, effectively ending the oilman’s attempts to create a national platform for ultraconservatism. In hindsight his defeat appears preordained. To succeed in politics, Cullen needed a support organization of some kind, but building one was something he was unwilling or incapable of doing.
It was a mistake H. L. Hunt would learn from.
III.
Much as publicity over his philanthropic efforts seemed to embolden Roy Cullen, his unofficial coronation as the nation’s richest man tranformed H. L. Hunt. All the resulting attention—the bags of mail, the interview requests—seemed to confirm what Hunt had long believed, that he was a unique intellect, a superman, a figure whose ideas could save the nation from the mounting perils of communism. More than one of his aides sensed a new messianic quality in Hunt. Said one, “He thought he was a second Jesus Christ.”6
If anything, Hunt was further to the right than Cullen; he believed deeply, in his bones, that communism and socialism were poised to overrun the world. He distrusted Jews, whose loyalty he questioned, and felt that anything that hurt American business, especially the oil industry, was anti-American. At first his political work paralleled Cullen’s. He wrote letters to congressmen, gave the occasional speech around Dallas and brought in a series of radical right-wing speakers, including Frederick C. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. (“Karl Marx was a Jew,” Schwartz told the Dallas rally. “Like most Jews, he was short and ugly, lazy and slovenly, and he had no desire to go out and work for a living. But he was also possessed of a keen intelligence, a superior evil intelligence like most Jews are, and his mission was to destroy all of Christian civilization.”)7
Unlike Cullen, who found his ideas in books and articles written by others, Hunt had original ideas and, fancying himself an author, decided to put them in print himself. In 1950 he published a pamphlet titled A Word to Help the World. The word he coined was constructive. Hunt detested liberals but never saw himself as conservative; there was nothing conservative about the way he built his business, he liked to say. “Constructive,” Hunt wrote, was a “trademark for the wholesome in government.” Hunt’s new philosophy was broadly pro-business and anticommunist, in favor of eliminating federal controls on all aspects of individual “freedom” and favoring smaller government in all areas but defense; others would term Hunt’s “constructivism” ultraconservative or reactionary.
In time, like Cullen, Hunt began to cast about for a broader platform from which to spread his ideas. In his pamphlet he called for “constructives” to form an “Educational Facts League,” whose purpose would be “to secure an impartial presentation of all the news through all the news channels concerning issues of public interest.” He envisioned an organization where ordinary Americans would be supplied the “facts” of political life, via a newsletter or maybe a radio program, which they could debate in small discussion groups. He decided to call it Facts Forum, and announced its formation in a speech in
June 1951. One of his aides approached a Dallas-based FBI agent he knew about heading the group, and the man suggested he hire an agent named Dan Smoot, who was retiring. On a long drive through East Texas, Hunt gently interrogated Smoot, found him to be an ardent anti-Communist who idolized J. Edgar Hoover, and spoke of his goals for Facts Forum. By the time they returned to Dallas, Hunt was convinced Smoot was his man. “The philosophy of the New Deal,” Smoot liked to say, “is also the basic philosophy of Communism, fascism and Nazism.”
At the Mercantile Bank Buildling, Smoot was given Hassie Hunt’s old corner office, an Oldsmobile, a secretary, a handful of files, and not much else; Hunt himself then disappeared on a three-week business trip. Unsure how to proceed, Smoot began telephoning names in the Facts Forum files, trying to organize discussion groups. Hunt had mentioned a radio broadcast, so he contacted a radio producer who arranged for him to host a fifteen-minute weekly discussion on the Dallas station WBAP. On his first broadcast, Smoot moderated a debate between two high school boys on the United Nations, “Should the U.S. get out of the U.N. and or get the U.N. out of the U.S.?” Returning from his business trip, Hunt was thrilled; on the spot, he decided to focus Facts Forum on radio broadcasts, eliminating the idea of discussion groups. After Smoot’s seventh broadcast, Hunt informed him he had arranged for Facts Forum to go national, broadcasting a thirty-minute show from a Washington studio to a handful of syndicated stations. Smoot began commuting to Washington, replaced the students with congressmen, and moderated their debates through the end of 1951.
In January 1952, after the resignation of the secretary who arranged his guests, Smoot switched to a format that became his trademark. He began arguing both sides of an issue himself, first blandly presenting the far-left viewpoint, then energetically advancing Hunt’s “constructive” alternative. Smoot’s early broadcasts tended to focus on threats against democracy and religion, but in time they became overtly political, branching out to “debate” the Korean War and the fight against communism. “Democracy,” Smoot observed on one broadcast, “is a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Christianity is essential to the creation of our democracy. We in Facts Forum know that American democracy is still the most nearly perfect expression ever made by man in legal and political terms of a basic ideal of Christianity.” Hunt was actually outraged by this statement; he considered America a republic, not a democracy, and lectured Smoot that democracy “was the handiwork of the devil himself,” a watered-down version of communism. “In an ideal society,” Hunt was prone to say, “the more taxes you pay, the more votes you get.”8
Hunt himself never appeared on Facts Forum, preferring to act as Smoot’s tutor and “research assistant,” shoveling books and articles his way. In time Smoot began filming the shows, and Hunt found a television station or two to broadcast them. For nine more months Facts Forum remained a modest operation, its annual budget barely one hundred thousand dollars. Then, in the fall of 1952, everything changed. Hunt found a new intellectual partner, and their collaboration would transform Facts Forum into a national phenomenon. His name was Joseph McCarthy.
IV.
While one camp of Texas oilmen plunged into national politics for ideological reasons, a second camp—Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, Brown & Root’s George and Herman Brown—remained primarily interested in laying its hands on the levers of powers. Their man in Washington, as he had been since 1940, was Lyndon Johnson, a congressman with little interest in anything at that point beyond scaling the political ladder. Theirs was the perfect marriage: Richardson, Murchison & Co. had only one thing to offer, and Johnson, who was running for the Senate in 1948, needed only one thing to get elected. Cash.
He got it. Johnson narrowly defeated Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Democratic primary, a contest memorably chronicled in Robert Caro’s 1990 book Means of Ascent, before besting Jack Porter that November. Both victories were fueled with vast quantities of illegal cash, much of it from Richardson and the Brown brothers, but also from Murchison, Amon Carter, and the Taylor independent Harris Melasky. Gathering it took a series of secret missions run by a half-dozen Johnson aides led by a sharp young attorney named John Connally. Whenever money was needed, typically for radio advertising, Connally or one of his men would charter a private plane to Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston or, in Richardson’s case, the airstrip on St. Joseph’s Island, returning with paper bags and briefcases packed with ten, twenty-five, or in some cases as much as fifty thousand dollars in cash. There was so much of it Connally couldn’t keep track of it all, at one point misplacing forty thousand dollars he had hidden at his home. The money was never found; Connally guessed he had left it in a suit he sent to the cleaners.9
Texas had never seen anything like it; no state had. “This was the beginning of modern politics,” Connally recalled. “It was the dawn of a whole new era.”10 The oilmen thought so, too and were dumbfounded when confronted by an honest politician who wouldn’t take their cash. During a Washington dinner for Sam Rayburn in 1949, Sid Richardson beckoned the Speaker to join him in the men’s room. Several minutes later, Rayburn emerged sputtering mad, only to encounter Creekmore Fath, chairman of the Democrats’ national finance committee. “Creekmore!” Rayburn snapped. “You go in there and talk to him.”
Fath pushed into the men’s room and found Richardson standing alone, confused. “I don’t know what gets into Sam sometimes,” Richardson complained. He reached into a pants pocket and withdraw a wad of five thousand dollars in cash. From a second pocket he fished out another five thousand. He handed it all to Fath.
“How am I going to list this contribution? ” Fath asked.
“I don’t know,” Richardson said. “Use the Bass boys.”11
Richardson, however, found more subtle ways to woo Rayburn. On a visit to the Speaker’s farm with his attorney, William Kittrell, Rayburn complained about his skinny cattle. “Goddamnit, Sam,” Richardson said, “what you need is a decent bull!”
“Well, I’ve got my eye on one bull,” Rayburn muttered.
“Listen,” Richardson said, “I’ve got this scrawny little old bull that’s no use to me. Goddamnit, Sam, I want you to have it.”
“Don’t do it, Sid.”
“Well, I’m going to.”
Rayburn shrugged. Afterward Richardson took Kittrell to a livestock dealer and scribbled out a twenty-thousand-dollar check for the man’s best bull. He had it delivered to Rayburn with a note apologizing for handing over such a pitiful specimen, figuring that Rayburn wouldn’t know the difference. “If you ever tell this to Rayburn,” Richardson warned Kittrell, “I’ll de-nut you.”12 In time Richardson realized he needed a more polished approach, and in 1951 he hired John Connally away from Lyndon Johnson. Connally became Richardson’s chief lobbyist.
Given all the cash Texas oilmen were funneling into Washington, it wasn’t long before they sought a return on their investments. Texas Oil’s new profit engine, natural gas, remained regulated by the Federal Power Commission, and in the summer of 1949, a liberal Roosevelt appointee named Leland Olds was nominated for a third term as the FPC’s chairman. To Texas oilmen, Olds was nothing short of the Antichrist, a hardworking anti-business economist who once wrote that only “the complete passing of the old order of capitalism” could liberate workers from the tyranny of corporate ownership. “Olds was the symbol of everything they hated,” recalled Posh Oltorf, George Brown’s lobbyist. “He was just anathema to them because of his philosophy.”13
As the FPC’s chairman, Olds had the power to set natural-gas prices. He had twice been confirmed, in 1940 and again in 1944, but the explosion in natural-gas demand—and profits—from the new pipelines changed everything. Oilmen bombarded Lyndon Johnson with letters demanding that his reappointment be blocked. Even Roy Cullen and others who had long been skeptical of Johnson—who voted against him in 1948, in fact—begged him to do something; Olds’s writings “are conclusive proof that he does not believe in our form of government,” C
ullen wrote in a telegram he sent to Johnson and twenty-one other senators.
“This transcended philosophy,” John Connally told Robert Caro. “This would put something in their pockets. This was the real bread-and-butter issue to these oilmen. So this would prove whether Lyndon was reliable, that he was no New Dealer. This was his chance to get in with dozens of oilmen, to bring very powerful rich men into his fold who had never been for him, and were still suspicious of him. So for Lyndon this was the way to turn it around: Take care of this guy.”
Johnson, after wangling the chairmanship of the Senate subcommittee that was to review the nomination, ambushed Olds in a hearing on September 28, 1949, in which a Corpus Christi congressman named John Lyle, a Johnson crony, using files borrowed from the House Un-American Activities Committee, broadly attacked Olds as a Communist. Attorneys for the Texas natural-gas industry piled on, and Olds, despite angry denials, was doomed. “Leland Olds Labeled Crackpot and Traitor,” read the Houston Post headline. Other papers followed suit. A week later the subcommittee voted 7-0 against the nomination.
It was a blatant smear, but by the time liberals realized what Johnson had done, it was too late. Eleanor Roosevelt and other allies rallied behind Olds, saying he was never a Communist. The Nation decried Johnson’s surprise attack as “a flagrant attempt by vested interests to exclude from office a man who proved too consumer-minded.” When the full Senate voted 53-15 against the nomination, the Texas newspapers, including those who previously attacked Johnson as too liberal, rained plaudits on him for saving the gas industry.
