Customer Reviews

The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book takes on a subject that has been neglected for far too long. To understand conservative Texas today, you really need an education on the men that shaped it, namely ..Hunt, Cullen, Murchison, and Richardson. All four of these men are uniquely Texan, good and bad. Cullen is by far the most philanthropic, but in many ways the least enteresting, he lived a mostly quite life in Houston's enclave of wealth, River Oaks, and gave away 90 percent of his fortune. What I find most interesting, is that this most conservative of men, gave millions to Texas Southern, Houston's traditionally African American university; he also funded the University of Houston, it's not an understatement to call him Mr. Houston. H.L. Hunt is by far the most interesting, but by far the least philanthropic, Im not sure he ever gave to anything but the Klan, but his three families and all his silly ideas are so hilarious, you really have to give it to the guy for being colorful..Hurt's book on H.L. Hunt is fantastic..his meantion of H.L.'s "creeping" is the limit. As for Richardson, he was in may ways the quenticential Wildcatter, he had the look, the charm, and the bravado, and his collection of Western memorabilia is amazing. Murchison, on the other hand, was more like a brilliant accountant, and look liked one, he was the least like a traditional Wildcatter. This book also delves into the lives of the offspring of these iconic men. Murchisons son, of course founded the Dallas Cowboys, the subsequently, partied all the money away, Richardson's Bass family, has had their share of scandel, divorces et.al. and of course Hunts son's tried to corner the silver market in the 80's..talk about chutzpa and his son Lamar co founded the American Football League and owned the Kansas City Chiefs. Even the staid Cullen had an interesting grandson, the simply ridiculous Baron "Ricky" Di Portenova, he claimed to be an Italian Count on his father side, nobody bought it in Houston, but alas he was colorful, and threw some amazing parties at his mansion in River Oaks and his palace on a hill in Acapulco. Overall, this is a fun read, well written and researched, if you have any interest in Texas history and the Texas Oil Rich, then I cant imagine you not loving this book...as for the unhelpful vote..it just shows that on Amazon there is always at least one person who will find a black cloud on a sunny day..I mean how on earth is this review not helpful?

The rich Texas oil people have always been a source of fascination to most all of us. In this new book, Bryan Burrough gives us the history of the oil rich. He was a co-author, with John Helyar, of the exciting book"Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco." He is also a native of Texas.

He leads us through the lives of the Texan oil rich, Roy Cullen of Houston, Sid Richardson of Fort Worth, and Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt of Dallas.

"If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it," Burrough writes. "A good ol' boy. A scold. A genius. A bigamist. Known in their heyday as the Big Four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America's wealthiest man."

You'll enjoy the stories that can only happen in Texas. For example, you'll see Hunt going between his three families, Cullen in a a war bond drive that and another wealthy Texan wearing and throwing away $100 bills as bow ties.

I found this to be a well researched book. It's fast and exciting reading. It gives you a look at contemporary history but, at the same time, a personal look into the lives of those who lived large from the fruits of the black gold that poured from the Texas landscape.

Highly recommended.

- Susanna K. Hutcheson

This book provides considerable detail about an important slice of 20th Century Americana viz., the emergence of Texas as a economic, social, and political influence in America. In the classic sense of fact be stranger than fiction, this story almost tells itself and Bryan Burrough does an admirable job of synthesizing the various elements of the story into an American epic tale. I found the book at times too heavy on detail, as though the author insists on sharing all the research he worked so hard to obtain. The book also suffers from a bit of temporal arrogance as it looks back on early and mid 20th Century history with a 21st Century sensibility, which tends to depict everything in a critical light rather than a contemporary context. Certainly a worthwhile read.

You might be tempted to read this book to better understand the oil industry or how Texas went from populism to conservatism or even how one might go about cornering the world market on a precious metal. Certainly you would learn about all these topics by reading The Big Rich. But you would be missing the point. The point of The Big Rich is a Texas-size good time. Why? Because the crazy factor is through the roof.

The Big Rich in question are mainly the Big Four: Sid Richardson, Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison and H.L. Hunt and their families with occasional appearances by a "lesser" oil millionaires. Not a single one of them acquired their wealth in a boring manner. Physical derring-do, financial brinkmanship and fantastic luck all play a role in striking oil and amassing incomprehensibly large fortunes. There's something innocent and charming about the antics of the Big Four - opening fancy hotels in the middle of nowhere or creating their own private clubhouse for the boys, at age 30 - at least the antics that don't involve H.L. Hunt and his bigamous desire to propagate his genes at widely as possible. H.L. is quite the character or "crank" as he describes himself. I'd substitute "creep" in place of "crank" but there's no doubt that he'd be happy to drink someone else's milkshake given the opportunity.

The fun hits the stratosphere when the second generation of big rich takes the stage. Bunker and Lamar Hunt are nearly as loony as dear old dad in their wacky hi-jinks such as the actual physical storage of a large percentage of the world's silver and their freelance wiretapping. Baron "Ricky" di Portanova seems to have been Patient Zero when it comes to the disease of EuroTrash complete with wife named Ljuba, pet monkey and marital pep talks from Kirk Douglas.

In any other book they'd be the most entertainingly crazy characters. But in this book has Clint Murchison Jr and he will take your crazy and raise it ten times. In the space of a mere ten years he's launching a new company, building a resort and funding a pirate radio station in the Baltic Sea, and starting the Dallas Cowboys. And that's just his day job, Clint also has some fascinating hobbies: drugs (cocaine) and stewardesses (Braniff). As Burroughs explains, Braniff Airways

"became one of his obsessions. In the early '60s Clint actually began attending their graduation, sitting in a back row eyeing his would-be conquests."

Clint Murchison, I never met you and I'm amazed that your first wife didn't take an axe to your head on multiple occasions but for living a life that allowed such a sentence to be written I salute you, sir. You're the most crazily trashy person in a book filled with trashy crazy people. You go, Clint Murchison, wherever you are. (Also, way to cut out the middleman!)

Clint was called to glory in 1987 and today most of the entertainingly crazy scions of the Big Rich are also gone or bankrupt. The tales of their declines aren't nearly as much fun to read but that's hardly surprising. You can't top Joan Crawford trying to bag Sid Richardson with excerpts from bankruptcy proceedings.

Bryan Burrough has done his homework and explains the oil industry, the efforts to regulate it, and the intricacies of several lawsuits in a surprisingly accessible way. Still, as with all his books, what Burrough does best is tell a complex, wide-angle story with enough energy and just sheer enjoyment to fill out a half dozen summer blockbusters. It's like the Life cereal commercials used to say: "It's good tasting and good for you."

Kindle note: no photographs or linked index in the Kindle edition. The footnotes and sources are linked.

The late David Halberstam, one of the more esteemed and prolific journalists of the twentieth century, in commenting on the convergence of "contemporary history and serious journalism" lauded Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe for their reporting which seemed to contain "the texture and originality of fiction." Halberstam wrote about journalists who left their secure jobs to write books which had obsessed them, making the important distinction between traditional historians who work in the archives and journalists who do "saturation interviews . . . the better the legwork, the richer it was in detail and anecdote, the better the writing always seemed to be." Halberstam may have been describing himself, he was not writing about Bryan Burrough.

"The Big Rich" is a sloppy, cynical, highly promoted book about Texas and its four rich families. The editing is abysmal; e.g., Joe McCarthy did not ascend to the leadership of the House Un-American Activity Committee (HUAC)(see page 222), Joe McCarthy was a senator. The US Senate is a separate body from the House of Representatives. Its committees are different and HUAC was a House committee. Joe McCarthy was the chairman of a subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee of the U.S. Senate. This is sophomore year high school stuff.

The index is flawed; Francis Case, Senator from South Dakota,is noted in the body of the book but not but in the index, Tom Webb, Murchisons' long time Washington lobbyist is mentioned in the body of the book but not in the index. Two Wynnes are mentioned in the book; only one is mentioned in the index. On this quicksand of inexactitude, the reader ventures forth in this purported history. Burrough offers six pages of skimpy generalized footnotes; the Bob Woodward "trust me kind."

This is Vanity Fare writing par excellence sans the leggy women and alluring color; a book based on slippery interviews, rewrites of many society page scandals and old magazine articles and liberal quotes from the Nation magazine. He cites as authority Robert Caro to cuddle up to a real historian which adds a credible veneer to the that portion of the book but when he writes that LBJ canceled a Senate investigation in to the big rich he leaves it there hanging. Robert Caro, being the master historian, would have identified the hows, whys, wherefores, culprits and the time of day. Here is then the essential difference between a historian and a magazine writer who relies on magazines and society pages. Business success and oil discoveries are two lines away from Burrough's cynical comments about Texas and amount to set up pieces for lifestyle critiques. Bunker Hunt "waddles" into a room and Clint Murchison lifestyle is to "party hard... [and have] tequila fueled weekends, [a] long boozy lunch." Every reference is aimed towards that derogatory and demeaning critique of these families. Burrough's book has interesting yarns about Spindletop, the founding of the professional football leagues, the fight for IDS, tales of the lifestyles of the Murchisons and the Hunts' silver cornering and their wiretapping prosecution. But, the negativity drowns out the positives.

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Reading about the boom-or-bust wildcatters throughout the last century was incredibly fascinating. This is a great read whether you love history, are interested in oil, like business books, or just enjoy dramatic stories.

I am about halfway through this book and I find it intriguing, informative and entertaining.

But I'm a little concerned about Bryan Burrough's research.

In one chapter about the construction of the Big Inch and the Little Inch pipelines built from Texas to the East Coast during WWII, he notes that the largest pipeline ever built to that date (early 1940s) was only 8 inches in diameter. The Big Inch, he said on page 148 dwarfed that, in that "it was twenty-four inches around." Now I'm no whiz at math but I know you divide the circumference of a circle by pi to get the diameter and 24 inches divided by pi is a tad less than 8 inches. Could he have meant 24 inches across (inside diameter, perhaps)?

I'm also no cattleman, but when Burrough writes about oilman Glenn McCarthy going to the Houston Fat Stock Show (page 185) and purchasing "the champion steer, an eight-hundred pound heifer," well, something ain't right. It would be an odd animal indeed to be both a steer and a heifer. Even more puzzling in that Burrough goes out of his way to explain in the introduction that he grew up in Texas. It would seem that a Texan would be a little more thoroughly versed in the difference between a steer and a heifer.

The most glaring error I've found, however, is the chapter on the relationship between the Texas oilmen and Sen. Joe McCarthy. One sentence (page 222) is particularly egregious: "McCarthy's subsequent ascension to Martin Die's old chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and HUAC's ensuing crusade against Communist 'infiltrators,' transformed the senator into a polarizing figure across the country."

In his own words, in a single sentence, he refers to a senator as chairman of a House committee. Wouldn't a decent researcher know that the House and Senate are two distinct bodies? McCarthy was chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, but that is a distinction the writer certainly should have picked up on.

This ground's been covered many times before: the legends of the larger-than-life Texas wildcatters dripping with oil and money, hard-living millionaire rubes who spent extravagantly and scandalized polite socitey, etc. This book probably provides a more sober account of it all than "The Lusty Texans of Dallas" (certainly more than the "Dallas" TV show), but it has its problems. I bought the book on a recommendation, looking for something that would describe the genesis of the the handful of rich folks who seem to run Texas (Dallas, anyway). I did get some useful basic information from it--I at least now know the stories behind the most prominent names.

But I wouldn't call this a history book, at least not a very satisfying one, because its scope doesn't really extend to how these oil men and their families fit into and influenced the societies they lived in. Dallas is infamous (I hear) for being ruled by a handful of powerful rich folks who, by fiat, dictated how Dallas would develop, and who made it the corporate haven it is today. I thought that this would play into the story more, and that there might be more on how the rich of Houston shaped that city as well. There are stories of big hotels and museums and hospitals being built, but no real recounting of how these folks affected their communities in other, less obvious ways. These may have been more complex issues than the author wanted to address, choosing instead to focus on four families and limit the focus to their personal lives. It's more like the kind of pop business book that's making the rounds lately, a detailed narrative of the business deals that made rich folks rich, snazzed up with vignettes of outsize living, scandal, and economic collapse. The author is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and it shows. He's a decent writer, but I found my interest flagging about 2/3 into the book. As the author launched into yet another recounting of the financing and partnership structure of another oil deal, I felt like I was grinding through a business school casebook.

This pairing of gossip with business reportage places the book squarely in the catgegory of breezy best-seller. This might be okay, take the book for what it is, but the author unfortunately makes some failed attempts at larger sociological pronouncement: he proclaims that Texas oil made modern Amercian conservatism what it is today. I think his discussion and reasoning in the book is really simplistic and he's way out of his league when writing about politics. I would contrast his one-dimensional portrayal of LBJ (as a venal lackey of Texas oil) with the complex character brought out by Robert Caro in his LBJ biographies. Sure, Caro has more room to expand on the details, but I get the feeling the author of Big Rich wouldn't want to be bothered even if he had the time.

Other reviewers here have noted some factual inaccuracies in the book, many of them trivial to my mind, but what to make of the colossal gaffe of referring to the immortal Slim Pickens in "Doctor Strangelove" (one of my all-time favorite movies) as a Hollywood image of a Texas millionaire?? Pickens was playing an Air Force pilot. I don't know how you could confuse that with a millionaire.

Anyway, the book's not bad, just a little glib and a little tiresome with all the business detail, but it gives a decent introduction to its topic.

The Texas oilmen were certainly a fascinating bunch, but in chronicling their ups and downs Bryan Burrough seems to have been sleep-writing half the time, and his editors sleep-working. The standard of editing and proofreading in this book is scandalously low... page after page contains bad grammar and typographical errors. The tale starts well, and Burroughs shows that he can do pacing, when he's awake. But it drifts into a weird morass of anti-Republican waffle that attempts to cast all the Texans as right-wing nut jobs even when they supported the Democratic party--LBJ, for example, is right-wing whenever Burrough wants him to be--or when the only nut job available was the best friend of the nephew of an oilman. Disappointing and, for the hardcover edition, a waste of money.

The Big Rich covers this history of four Texas oil familys--the Hunts, Murchisons, Richardsons, and Cullens--and the author, Bryan Burrough doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good story. Like several other readers, my complaint with this book concerns the extensive factual errors seeded throughout. For example, on page 105 the author states that "McCarthy broke his own American record by purchasing the champion steer, an eight-hundred-pound heifer, for $15,400." A steer is a male bovine castrated before sexual maturity; a heifer is a female that has not had a calf. Another mistake is found on page 222 where the author states that Senator Joseph McCarthy ascended to Congressman Martin Dies's old chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Senators do not sit on House committees. McCarthy, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations used the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to investigate alleged communist activities.

Despite the sheer number of mistakes, the story Burrough tells is as captivating as Giant (Two-Disc Special Edition) (Keepcase) or the TV series Dallas: The Complete Seasons 1-8.