by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
Though Facts Forum had been defunct for four years by then, Hunt had never given up the idea that he was destined to educate America about the dangers of communism and liberalism. His religious conversion obliged him to incorporate Christianity into his philosophies, and the more he studied the Bible, the more Hunt felt it held the key to solving America’s many ills. And so, in the summer of 1958, Hunt announced he was resurrecting his old Facts Forum apparatus, infusing it with religion and renaming the new organization LIFE LINE. While LIFE LINE’s pamphlets and radio broadcasts would essentially cloak Hunt’s right-wing propaganda in Christian robes, LIFE LINE was in many ways ahead of its time. Its wedding of fundamentalist Protestantism and right-wing politics, not to mention its crusades against “big government” and Wall Street greed, came twenty years before the Christian Right’s emergence in the late 1970s.
LIFE LINE’s offices, staffed by two dozen clean-cut young conservatives, each throughly vetted, were tucked away on two stories of a downtown Washington building. Hunt’s staff quickly got to work selling right-wing books, pamphlets, and a three-times-weekly newspaper, Life Lines, now augmented with religious writings, but the centerpiece of LIFE LINE’s efforts was the fifteen-minute daily commentary it offered radio stations for a minimal fee; the Sunday show was free. Typically, half a LIFE LINE broadcast was composed of traditional hymns and sermons, but the remaining commentary, delivered by Wayne Poucher and other right-wing ministers and onetime FBI agents, consisted of straightforward ultraconservative, John Birch-style rhetoric—visceral attacks on Socialists, Democrats, liberals, the United Nations, Wall Street, and anyone who criticized the oil industry. Hunt, like the Birchers, believed the secret hand of Communist Russia and China was everywhere, in American universities, pulpits, government offices, even hospital wards. In one memorable memo, Hunt told Poucher to use one broadcoast to expose a conspiracy in which wealthy Americans were being subverted by Socialist nurses and mistresses.
Hunt’s ideas were classic paranoid right-wing fantasies, but the fact his ideas were stupid didn’t mean he was. Hunt kept his name out of all of LIFE LINE’s published materials; he realized he had become a lightning rod for criticism. Moreover, by wrapping himself in Christianity, he was able to attract to LIFE LINE’s advisory board a number of leading ministers and others who had backed Facts Forum, including John Wayne. Concerned that too many right-wing organizations undercut their credibility on communism with attacks on blacks and Jews, Hunt warned Poucher and his other commentators to avoid criticizing both groups. In at least one case, he told them to go on the air with kind remarks about a well-known Jew, so that “LIFE LINE would be given the credit of extolling and memorializing a Jew.”3
However silly LIFE LINE’s message appears today, it struck a chord in the late 1950s, especially in the rural South, where dozens of small radio stations were happy to accept its cut-rate commentary. Life Lines debuted on twenty outlets in 1958 but grew steadily; by the early 1960s its broadcasts could be heard on 354 stations in forty-seven states. Fifty stations ran them twice a day. Hunt was always LIFE LINE’s biggest backer, but its tenuous status as a tax-exempt “educational” foundation—the same status Facts Forum had so assidulously defended—secured donations from others as well, chiefly oil companies, wealthy right-wingers, and Hunt’s bank, First National of Dallas, all of whom were able to deduct their gifts from their federal income taxes.
Under IRS guidelines, an “educational” foundation was only allowed tax-exempt status so long as it avoided partisan political commentary, a staple of Life Lines broadcasts. A 1962 review by the IRS’s Baltimore office found LIFE LINE in clear violation, but the case went nowhere. The Federal Communications Commission launched a similar review in 1963, but its case languished as well, frustrating Democratic congressmen bewildered by Hunt’s ability to deduct the money he was spending on ultraconservative causes. “There is probably no one,” declared Senator Maurine Meuberger of Oregon, “who gets more right-wing propaganda for his tax dollar than Haroldson Lafayette Hunt.”
LIFE LINE’s rise coincided with Hunt’s reemergence as a public figure. He had been firing off letters to newspapers for years, but in the late 1950s his output began to soar. He dictated them to secretaries, sometimes five and six a day, then dispensed them to newspapers from the Duluth Herald News Tribune to the Alabama Baptist. He began giving speeches, often to small religious and right-wing groups, and in time developed a certain following among what is today called the religious right. But even his most ardent supporters, one suspects, were left scratching their heads at the project he unveiled in January 1960, a self-published novel.
It was called Alpaca, and it told the story of Juan Achala, citizen of a mythical Latin American country called Alpaca. A slim, volume, just 158 pages, printed on cheap paper and cheaper binding, Alpaca chronicled Juan Achala’s long trip through Europe in search of love and a new constitution. Its centerpiece was Hunt’s idea of a utopian constitution, one in which each citizen received a number of votes in line with the amount of taxes he paid. The book got a smattering of reviews, mostly scathing, and though Hunt claimed it had somehow been responsible for democratic reforms in, of all places, Iraq, the general reaction was eye-rolling ridicule. Newspaper readers across the nation chuckled at a book signing he held at Dallas’s Cokes-bury Book Store. While Hunt looked on, smiling, his youngest daughters by Ruth, eleven-year-old Helen and ten-year-old Swanee, bowed and, as newsmen flashed their cameras, sang a ditty Hunt had written:
How much is that book in the window?
The one that says the smart things …
How much is that book in the window?
The one that my daddy wrote… .
After Alpaca, while Hunt continued his barrage of letters and mailings, it was difficult to find anyone outside the Far Right who took him seriously. Still, he had enough money to cause trouble when he wanted to. One of his most renowned adventures came during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, when Hunt arrived determined to defeat John F. Kennedy’s nomination. Hunt loathed Kennedy, who had vowed to “review” the depletion allowance. Worse, Hunt deeply believed in a sermon delivered by his Dallas minister, Reverend William Criswell, who thundered that the election of a Catholic president would mean “the end of religious freedom in America.” Hunt believed a Kennedy White House would be run, in essence, by the pope.
During the convention, Hunt was seen wandering in and out of Lyndon Johnson’s and other hospitality suites, a sad, vaguely pathetic figure looking for someone to listen to him. But he had a plan. As the convention climaxed, more than two hundred thousand pamphets carrying copies of Reverend Criswell’s anti-Catholic sermon arrived at newspapers and Protestant churches around the country. Hunt expected it to trigger an anti-Kennedy outcry. The only thing it triggered was a Senate investigation. The pamphlets carried no hint of who had paid for or printed them, an apparent violation of federal campaign laws. When word leaked in Washington that a certain unnamed Dallas oil millionaire was behind the mailing, Hunt and his top security man, a onetime FBI agent named Paul Rothermel, disappeared, actually slipping out of Dallas and shuttling among a series of West Texas hotels for several weeks. When Hunt’s name finally surfaced publicly, the ridicule was withering. “Come out, Big Daddy, wherever you are,” one Texas editorial writer chided.
In time the whole thing blew over—the pamphlets turned out to be technically legal, after all—but the damage had been done. The stereotype of the dim-witted right-wing Texas oil millionaire lived on, and H. L. Hunt was viewed around the world as its embodiment. He was an embarrassment, to Dallas and to Texas at large. In time even some of the religious commentators at LIFE LINE began to veer away from him. By 1963 Reverend Criswell felt Hunt’s far-right-wing views had come to dominate LIFE LINE’s offerings at the expense of religion and said so, publicly. The same year, one of LIFE LINE’s most loyal commentators, Wayne Poucher, refused Hunt’s order that LIFE LINE publicly criticize a piece of oil-
industry legislation. Hunt promptly fired him.
“I thought I knew Mr. Hunt, but I didn’t,” a frustrated Poucher told a reporter afterward. “No one does.”
II.
From 1959 on, the most notable exploits of the Big Four families would belong to their second generations, ambitious young men struggling to escape their fathers’ shadows. In the short run, only two sets of brothers were to lead public lives. The Cullen daughters, their fortune diminished by their father’s philanthropy, withdrew from view, as did Perry Bass, a worn man in his forties by then, left with a fraction of Sid Richardson’s riches. For the next decade Bass would settle into a caretaker’s life in Fort Worth, raising his boys and dreaming of ways to return to his first love, sailing. He and his wife, Nancy Lee, were close friends with Margaret Hunt and her husband, Al.
For the moment, the mantle of the Big Rich fell to five men, all in or approaching their thirties: Clint Murchison Jr., who turned thirty-six in 1959, his older brother John, thirty-eight, and the three sons of Hunt’s first family, Bunker, thirty-three; Herbert, thirty-one; and Lamar, twenty-six. At least initially, it was the Murchisons who attracted the wider notice, especially the gifted Clint Jr., a man who by all rights should have become a titan of commerce but never would. Clint Jr., people said, was almost too much like his father. He inherited Big Clint’s gift for numbers, scoring genius level on IQ tests, but also his social awkwardness. Like so many sons of successful families, Clint Jr. spent years searching for something to make his own, but when he found it something went out of him, as if he no longer had to work at life, and his later years would devolve into the most sordid of any of the second-generation Big Rich.
Father and son certainly looked alike. Clint Jr., like Big Clint, grew up to become a squat, roundish man, five feet six, given to flattop haircuts, and the same horn-rimmed glasses his father wore. As a teenager he had been sent to the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he maintained an A-plus average and impressed the faculty; after his freshman year, the headmaster wrote Big Clint that his son might be the brightest in the school’s history. Clint Jr. spent much of World War II in a Marine Corps officer-training program at Duke University, graduating from college there, and afterward enrolled in the master’s program in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he talked of pursuing a career in academics. He was married in 1945, to a vivacious girl named Jane Coleman whose mother grew up in Athens. The two had dated since they were teenagers, and with Clint at MIT they settled outside Boston, where in 1946 Jane gave birth to their first son, Clint III. They later added three more children.
During those postwar years Clint Jr. wrapped himself in a rarified world of scientists and their equations, poring over technical journals the way his father studied stock-market tables. He was a gifted student who remained uncomfortable with strangers. Jane watched her husband many evenings at dinner or a party at a professor’s house, talking only of math while other students joked and argued about Truman or Alger Hiss or any headline of the day. Clint Jr.’s insecurity was more than a Middle American swimming in eastern waters. It was, like his father’s intellectual insecurities—the big words, the dictionary hunts—something deep within him, always there, always nagging, a sense that no matter what he achieved he might never measure up to expectations.
Clint Jr.’s dreams of mathematics greatness ended in late 1949 when he received a note from his father. “Dear Clint W.” it read. “Come on home. Dad.” It was time to join the business. A similar message went out to Clint Jr.’s older brother, John Dabney. The two siblings were nothing alike, then or ever. Tall, dark, and tightly controlled, John looked nothing like the other Murchison men. At sixteen he had gone to Hotchkiss and then Yale, leaving school the day after Pearl Harbor to enlist. He became a fighter pilot, flying more than fifty missions over the skies of China, North Africa, and Italy. The war took its toll on John. The stress, and a poor diet, caused him to lose weight, and by late 1945 he was released from service on the edge of nervous collapse. Big Clint met him with a present: his own fighter plane. One weekend John flew it to a party on Matagorda, now owned by the Wynne family, where he was smitten with a pretty Hockaday girl, Louise Gannon, known as Lupe. They were married in 1947 when John returned to Yale. Like all the Murchison wives, Lupe was everything her husband was not, outgoing, outspoken, and bursting with life.
When John graduated the following year, the couple returned to Dallas, but Big Clint thought his eldest still seemed somehow nervous; he had developed asthma as well. Clint had a Mayo Clinic doctor come down to El Toro one weekend to discretely observe John, and the doctor said that while his nerves would heal, the asthma wouldn’t. John needed a dry climate. Back in Dallas, Big Clint put John and Lupe on the first flight to Santa Fe, New Mexico, telling them to take it easy for a while. The newlyweds bought a small house outside town and John, as his father had done forty years earlier, took his first real job as a bank teller. While in Santa Fe, Lupe gave birth to the couple’s first son, John Dabney Murchison Jr., known as Dabney. Like Jane and Clint Jr., they later added three more children.
When the Murchison brothers returned to Dallas in 1949, they began their apprenticeships alongside their father at 1201 Main. John turned twenty-eight that year, Clint Jr. twenty-six. Big Clint hadn’t been around his sons much since they were teenagers. John had grown to be kind, careful, and intellectual, given to studying a business opportunity so long that he sometimes lost it. Clint, happy to be home and freed from the constraints of academia, emerged as just the opposite, freewheeling and cocky, given to jumping into deals he barely understood. “We’ve got vice and versa,” Big Clint took to saying. “One of my boys makes up his mind too fast, the other one won’t make it up at all.”4
Clint Jr.’s impetuous nature, his father saw, masked a complex personality. By his mid-twenties his son had developed two distinct personalities, in fact, one for friends, another for everyone else. He could be warm and witty in the bosom of family, though it would take years to develop the appetite for jokes and pranks he displayed in later life. At work he could be insufferably full of himself; years before he had anything to boast of, Clint Jr., no doubt mindful of his MIT education, seemed convinced he was the smartest man in Dallas. Around strangers he was typically uncommunicative; if he said anything at all, it was often rude. Asked why he hadn’t acknowledged an employee he passed in the hallway, he said, “Why should I? I said something to him yesterday.” He cared nothing for niceties, especially on the phone, and he had his father’s gift for the put-down. To an investor he disliked, Clint Jr. remarked, “You have all the characteristics of a dog but loyalty.” His wife, Jane, knew his brusqueness was a mechanism to cope with his terrible shyness, but over the years more than one outsider walked away from a chat with Clint Jr. muttering “asshole.”
Big Clint felt a job in sales might draw his youngest out of his shell, so he put him to work selling modest-priced homes in a subdivision one of his subsidiaries was building eight miles north of downtown. The tiny cement-block homes had been an idea Big Clint had during the war; they were intended for returning soldiers and their families. To guide his son, Big Clint had him work alongside a party-hearty character named Robert Thompson, a onetime Washington lobbyist who had known the family since the 1930s. Thompson was the life of every party he entered, the type of man who tap-danced on tabletops.
Under Thompson’s tutelage Clint Jr. didn’t sell many houses—the exact number appeared to be zero—but he did begin to loosen up. Between the war, an early marriage, and his years buried in books at MIT, the young heir hadn’t taken much time to explore life’s hedonistic side. Thompson took care of that, introducing him to taverns high and low, from Mexican dives on the east side of Dallas to New York’s ‘21’ Club, which in later years became Clint Jr.’s home away from home. Some suspected it was Thompson who introduced Clint Jr. to the secret thrills of extramarital sex, a pastime with which the youngest Murchison would grow increasingly p
reoccupied as the years passed.
Big Clint intended his sons to use 1201 Main as an incubator to start their own businesses, and in 1952 Clint Jr., at the age of twenty-nine, took the plunge, purchasing the City Construction Company of Dallas for thirty-two thousand dollars and a promissory note. He renamed it the Texas Construction Company, known as Tecon, and brought in Thompson as his partner. Tecon started small, repaving Dallas-area streets, but Clint Jr. had dreams of building it into an international construction conglomerate. He bought a string of competing companies, and in time Tecon grew to ten million dollars in assets. Clint began bidding on projects all around and outside the country, and in early 1954 outbid seven of the world’s largest construction companies to win the prize job he needed to advertise Tecon’s services: a contract to remove two million tons of dirt and rock from a hillside slowly crumbling into the Panama Canal. It was a risky undertaking. The job required one million tons of dynamite, and any debris that fell into the canal would be removed at the contractor’s expense. More than one of Big Clint’s men warned him Clint Jr. was risking everything he had. Big Clint stayed out of it. “If he makes a mistake,” he said, “he’ll learn from it.”5
Tecon survived the Panama Canal job, and under Clint’s leadership busied itself building subdivisions and highways across the country. His brother John, meanwhile, more comfortable with banking and finance, spent the early 1950s under the guidance of one of Big Clint’s men buying insurance companies. To Atlantic Life, a seventy-one-million-dollar insuror Big Clint had bought in 1941, John added Lamar Life of Mississippi, then Life and Casualty Insurance of Tennessee. Bit by bit, Big Clint began turning over assets to the boys, and it was often John who watched over them, taking a seat on Henry Holt’s board and supervising the half dozen rural Texas banks Big Clint had picked up over the years.
