H.L. Hunt

Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. (February 17, 1889 to November 29, 1974) was a Dallas oil producer whom Fortune named the richest man in the United States in 1948. He owned Hunt Oil Company and founded Placid Oil Company, and from 1951 he paid for two tax-exempt broadcasting operations, Facts Forum and Life Line, that carried anticommunist commentary to several hundred radio stations. He fathered fifteen children in three concurrent households. He wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover from 1951 until 1971, and hired former FBI agents as his commentators and as his chief of security. On November 21, 1963, Jack Ruby drove a young woman to the Hunt offices in the Mercantile building for an appointment with Hunt's son Lamar Hunt. Hunt did not testify before the Warren Commission.¹²³

Arkansas and the East Texas Field

Hunt was born near Vandalia, Illinois, the youngest of eight children, and was taught at home. He ran a cotton plantation in Arkansas until floods ended it in 1917, and in 1921 joined the oil boom at El Dorado, Arkansas, as a lease broker. He claimed a fortune of 600,000 dollars by 1925, lost money in the Smackover field and the Florida land boom, and was reportedly broke again by 1930. An internal FBI memorandum of February 26, 1964, summarized the Bureau's file on these years: Hunt "was reportedly a professional gambler years ago, won an oil lease in a card game, and is also alleged to have operated prostitution activities in Arkansas several years ago." The same memorandum recorded an allegation that in 1943 he ran "a private horse race and gambling bookie establishment within his office in Dallas."¹⁴

On November 26, 1930, Hunt bought the discovery well and surrounding leases of the 70-year-old wildcatter Columbus Marion "Dad" Joiner, whose Daisy Bradford No. 3 had opened the East Texas Oil Field seven weeks earlier. Hunt had watched the drill-stem test at the well in September. He paid 50,000 dollars in cash, 45,000 dollars in notes, and a guarantee of 1.3 million dollars out of future production, and the first payment came from 30,000 dollars belonging to P.G. Lake, an El Dorado clothier. The field proved to be 43 miles long and as much as nine miles wide, and Hunt's share of it eventually exceeded 100 million dollars. His Panola Pipe Line was carrying oil by December 1, 1930, and by 1932 Hunt Production Company operated 900 wells in East Texas. In 1935 H.L. Hunt, Inc., became Placid Oil, and its shares went into trusts for his six children by his first wife.¹⁵

In late 1936 Hunt bought the Excelsior Refining Company in Rusk County and renamed it Parade Refining. Residue gas from the Parade plant was piped into the New London school, which exploded on March 18, 1937. Most of the families involved worked for Hunt.¹

Three Families

Hunt married Lyda Bunker in Arkansas on November 26, 1914. Their children were Margaret, Haroldson Jr., Caroline, Nelson Bunker, William Herbert, and Lamar. On November 11, 1925, under the name Franklin Hunt, he married Frania Tye in Florida. They lived in Shreveport and then Dallas and had four children. Tye learned of the first marriage in May 1934, and Hunt sent her to New York. He created trusts for her children in 1941, she signed a release in 1942, and she later married a Hunt employee, John Lee, who gave the children his name. The FBI's 1964 summary of its file states that "in 1953 it was also alleged that Hunt made a settlement of several million dollars with a woman claiming to be his wife." The memorandum does not name her.¹⁴⁶

Lyda Hunt died in 1955. In November 1957 Hunt married Ruth Ray, a former Hunt Oil secretary, and adopted her four children, who had been born between 1943 and 1950. The Reverend W.A. Criswell baptized Hunt and the third family into the First Baptist Church of Dallas, then the largest Baptist congregation in the world. Criswell mailed Life Line material to his members, and Hunt mailed Criswell's sermons to other ministers.¹⁷

MacArthur and Facts Forum

After President Harry Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his Korean command in 1951, Hunt accompanied MacArthur on a flight to Texas for a speaking tour. Hunt and Clint Murchison, Sr. were the chief organizers of the pro-MacArthur movement in Texas. Hunt established a MacArthur-for-president headquarters in Chicago and spent 150,000 dollars of his own money on the general's reluctant 1952 campaign, which faltered as MacArthur adopted the strident rhetoric of the right wing.⁸

Hunt founded Facts Forum in 1951 as a tax-exempt educational foundation. It produced radio and television panel programs, a magazine, and public-opinion polls, and spent about 3.5 million dollars before it closed in 1956. On August 9, 1951, about six weeks after its founding, Hunt wrote to Hoover enclosing Facts Forum poll cards and asking the director to supply "two or three of the fine questions" for its polling committee. The Dallas lawyer Robert H. Dedman was its president. Its board of advisers included General Robert E. Wood, General Albert C. Wedemeyer, John Wayne, and Norman Vincent Peale. Its commentator was Dan Smoot, who had been an FBI agent from 1941 to 1951. After Lyda Hunt died in 1955, Cartha DeLoach recorded information from the American Legion's Americanism Commission that Hunt, "reportedly believing that his wife would outlive him, placed most of his investments in his wife's name," that he was "having great difficulty in financing many of his projects in view of the legal entanglements in which he finds his wife's estate," and that he had forced Smoot out of his 18,000 dollar post.¹⁴⁷⁹¹⁰

Robert E. Lee, a former FBI man who as an investigator for the House Appropriations Committee had helped compile the list of 205 names that Senator Joseph McCarthy took to Wheeling, joined Hunt's staff and moderated the first three Facts Forum television programs. Jean Kerr, McCarthy's assistant and later his wife, who had worked with Lee on the list and raised money to defeat Senator Millard Tydings, joined the staff at about the same time. Facts Forum endorsed McCarthy in 1952. Lee was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission under McCarthy's sponsorship, and Hunt testified at his confirmation that Lee would grant him no favors. Lee was still a commissioner in 1964.¹⁴⁷

On March 10, 1953, the FBI's New York office opened a memorandum captioned "H.L. Hunt, Facts Forum, Security Matter - C," which noted that Hunt had been the victim in a 1948 extortion case. In 1954 Representative Wayne Hays of Ohio, a member of the House committee investigating tax-exempt foundations under B. Carroll Reece, demanded that the exemption be lifted. "Facts Forum is not only a propaganda machine," Hays said, "but it puts up money to defeat people for Congress like me." The Internal Revenue Service gave Facts Forum what the trade weekly Broadcasting-Telecasting called a clean bill of health. A Facts Forum spokesman, Hardy Burt, wrote to Hays asking whether his antagonism was connected to the Daily Worker's endorsement of his 1948 candidacy. Hunt put 5,000 dollars on Hays's opponent in a later race and lost.⁷⁹

Life Line

Hunt revived the operation in 1958 as Life Line, a fifteen-minute daily program that reached more than 400 stations, financed through the tax-exempt Life Line Foundation and sponsored on the air by his food company, HLH Products. By February 1964 more than four million dollars had been spent on it. Its commentators included Milton Eugene Scudder, a former FBI agent, and Wayne Poucher, a Church of Christ minister from Tennessee. Poucher later broke with Hunt over the slanting of scripts and the foundation's exposure to the tax authorities. He said that Hunt wept when urged to be baptized and declined, saying he had been an evil person. "Everything I do, I do for profit," Hunt told a reporter.¹⁷

In October 1957 Hunt's office asked Hoover for comments and suggestions on the content of the new program. Hoover replied on November 5 that he could offer none. Hunt's office afterward sent the director tapes of commentary attacking the Supreme Court. Hunt's representative in Washington was Booth Mooney, a former aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, who lobbied the executive branch under four presidents and carried what he called a snowstorm of memoranda to the Johnson White House at a rate of four or five a week.⁴⁷

Richard Arens, the staff director of the House Un-American Activities Committee, told a reporter in March 1960 that he advised Hunt on grants to patriotic causes, a service he also performed for the eugenics financier Wickliffe Draper and the drug manufacturer Smith Richardson. Arens left his congressional post that year.¹¹

From June 28 to July 7, 1960, according to FBI headquarters serial 62-105010-18, Hunt's aide John Curington paid 23,000 dollars to have anti-Kennedy, anti-Catholic material mailed to the public. The same year Hunt published Alpaca, a novel about a republic whose citizens receive additional votes according to the taxes they pay.¹³

In 1961 the FBI's Dallas office opened a file on a loan from the Teamsters pension fund, arranged by Jimmy Hoffa, to a company connected with Hunt. On May 4, 1961, an informant told the Bureau that a "Mr. Rieker" had met three Texas financiers to raise 25,000 dollars to kill Fidel Castro and that "Hunt gave a 'chunk' towards this cause." On December 21, 1961, another informant said Hunt was financing a group called the Third Party, which "plans to take over the government," and that arms were cached in a house in Dallas. The Dallas office closed the second matter on January 12, 1962, after it judged the informant emotionally unstable, failed to find the house, and interviewed Hunt's security chief, Paul Rothermel, who said he knew nothing about it. Rothermel had been an FBI agent from December 1950 to December 1954.³¹²

In September 1964 a House subcommittee examining some 15,000 tax-exempt foundations, which had already found one that served as a conduit for CIA money, described the Life Line Foundation as more political than educational and asked whether it should keep its exemption.¹³

In October 1966 an FBI informant reported that the leader of a Dallas and Fort Worth paramilitary group called WASP, which he said General Edwin Walker headed, claimed the group had invited Hunt to a meeting and asked him for a loan of one million dollars to train its members in Colorado. Hunt "listened to their program, but said he would not loan any money unless he thought he could realize a profit." The reporting agent described the group's spokesman as "a 'big talker'" and "apparently some kind of a 'crackpot.'"¹⁴

Dallas, November 1963

The full-page advertisement headed "Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas," bordered in black, ran in the Dallas Morning News on November 22, 1963, over the name of the American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, chairman. Weissman testified that the committee was "solely a name" and that the money, 1,462 dollars by his count, came from Joseph P. Grinnan, a Dallas oil broker and John Birch Society coordinator, who "had to get $300 here and $400 there." The contributors included Nelson Bunker Hunt, H.R. Bright, and Edgar R. Crissey. Bunker Hunt was represented in the matter by Ivan Irwin Jr., a lawyer for Hunt Oil interests. Larrie Schmidt, who organized the advertisement, wrote to Weissman that one of his recruits, Warren Carroll, was a scriptwriter for H.L. Hunt "and a former CIA man (don't worry)." Carroll, later the founder of Christendom College, worked for the CIA during the 1960s, according to the college's biography of him.¹⁵ A copy of the advertisement was found in Ruby's car after he shot Lee Harvey Oswald.²¹⁶¹⁷

On the morning of November 21, Ruby drove Connie Trammell, a young woman he knew, to the Mercantile building, where she had an appointment to ask Lamar Hunt for a job. The FBI report of the visit spells the name "Larmar Hunt." The same day Eugene Hale Brading, a California parolee with a record for mail fraud who had told his parole officer he would be in Dallas from November 21 to 25, went to the Hunt offices to see Lamar Hunt about oil business. Brading, using the name Jim Braden, was detained in the Dal-Tex Building on Dealey Plaza minutes after the shooting and released. He was staying at the Cabana Motel, which Ruby visited that night. Both men denied the visits to the Hunt offices. Lamar Hunt's name was in Ruby's notebook, and Lamar Hunt told the FBI he could think of no reason for it. The Life Line broadcast heard in Dallas on the morning of November 22 concerned the confiscation of firearms under communism.²⁷¹⁶

The FBI interviewed members of the family. Its headquarters file on the Hunts contains four records that the Assassination Records Review Board later classed as relevant to the assassination. On February 24, 1964, The Nation published Robert Sherrill's "H.L. Hunt: Portrait of a Superpatriot," which quoted an editorial writer's remark that "the brooding Oswalds of the left or right wing" listened to Life Line. Two days later a memorandum to Assistant Director DeLoach reviewed the article, identified Lee, Smoot, and Scudder as former agents in Hunt's employ, and recommended "that the Director not see H.L. Hunt." It added: "Hunt features himself as a king maker."³⁴⁷

The Letter to Mr. Hunt

In 1975 assassination researchers received from Mexico City a photocopy of a handwritten note dated November 8, 1963, and signed Lee Harvey Oswald: "Dear Mr. Hunt, I would like information concerning my position. I am only asking for information. I am suggesting that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else." Penn Jones published it in 1977. Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News had three handwriting examiners compare it with Oswald's writing, and they agreed it matched. The newspaper asked whether the addressee might be H.L. Hunt. On March 4, 1977, Hunt Oil's spokesman, James C. Oberwetter, issued a statement that Hunt never "knew, ever communicated with or ever received communication from Lee Harvey Oswald." On April 1, after the Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans repeated statements by George de Mohrenschildt, a second release for the Estate of H.L. Hunt said Hunt never met de Mohrenschildt and noted the latter's "history of mental problems." In May 1977 Hunt's son Ray L. Hunt wrote to FBI Director Clarence Kelley about the coverage. Kelley replied that Bureau policy barred him from saying what the FBI did or did not know and suggested a request under the Freedom of Information Act.³⁴¹⁶¹⁸

The handwriting panel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations examined the letter in 1978. Joseph P. McNally, a former commander of the New York police laboratory, testified that the copy was a photographic reproduction "so fuzzy that an accurate examination could not be made of it," that it was "much more precisely and much more carefully written" than the authenticated Oswald documents, and that the signature differed "significantly in the 'H'" of Harvey. All three panel members regarded it with suspicion, and none would certify it as genuine or forged. Committee counsel said it "stood out, quite frankly, like a sore thumb."¹⁹ The former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin later reported that the letter was a forgery prepared by the KGB to implicate the CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. Curington, who worked in the office adjoining Hunt's from 1960 to 1969, said in 2018 that the letter arrived in the Hunt company mail shortly after the assassination and that Hunt had him give it to the FBI. The original has not been produced. Curington told the National Enquirer in 1977 that Hunt sent him to check the security around Oswald at the Dallas jail and was elated to hear it was lax.¹⁶¹⁸²⁰

The Wiretaps

In 1969 Hunt's nephew Tom Hunt, a Hunt Oil executive, found that HLH Products was losing large sums. Hunt Oil had put about 45 million dollars into the food company, and investigators described six separate schemes against it, among them property bought at inflated prices from sellers who split the difference through post-office-box companies, and the purchase for 185,690 dollars of a century-old pecan plant whose machinery was fused with rust. Hunt refused to act. Rothermel resigned as his administrative assistant on November 15, 1969. Bunker and Herbert Hunt hired a Houston detective agency, which tapped the telephones of Rothermel and three other executives.¹²²¹

The FBI arrested one of the detectives, Jon Joseph Kelly, on January 16, 1970, after a suburban policeman who had stopped him for running a stop sign noticed recording equipment in his car. On February 3, 1970, DeLoach reported to Clyde Tolson that Senator James Eastland of Mississippi had been called by Hunt's sons, who told him they were trying to have their father declared incompetent on grounds of senility, that Hunt Oil had lost about 80 million dollars over several years, and that Rothermel, on a salary of 20,000 dollars, lived in a 65,000 dollar house with two Cadillacs. Kelly and Patrick McCann were convicted and sentenced to three years, and then named Bunker and Herbert Hunt as the men who ordered the taps. In April 1971 Rothermel wrote to Senator John Tower, with a copy to Hoover, denying that he had said someone had bought off the FBI.⁴⁵¹²

In the autumn of 1972 H.L. and Bunker Hunt attended a barbecue for President Richard Nixon at John Connally's ranch at Floresville. People close to the Hunts said afterward that Bunker Hunt met Richard Kleindienst at Eastland's Mississippi plantation and was promised immunity in exchange for a list of Al Fatah agents in the United States, and that the information helped stop a plot against Golda Meir in New York in March 1973. Kleindienst resigned in April 1973, the brothers were indicted, and both were acquitted in 1975.⁵

Hoover

Hunt's letters to Hoover ran to the end of the director's life. In 1970 he described spending 35 days in Washington in 1967 lobbying against Senator Birch Bayh's amendment to abolish the Electoral College. On December 6, 1971, he proposed a mailing to governors and sheriffs' associations under the slogan "DISMISS KISSINGER," predicted that Governor George Wallace "may fully proceed along the DISMISS KISSINGER lines," and asked whether FBI agents might identify young orators for his youth speakers program. In an undated letter he wrote that "the majority of the anti-communists have quit" and urged Hoover to help "get them back in the saddle."⁴

Death and Estate

Hunt died in Dallas on November 29, 1974. Criswell preached the funeral and Sidney Latham, Hunt's lawyer and a retired Hunt Oil vice-president, gave the eulogy. "He said he had traded the here for the hereafter," Latham said, "and he was pleased." The will left all of Hunt's stock in Hunt Oil to Ruth Hunt, named her son Ray sole executor, divided the rest among ten children, and disinherited any heir who contested it. William F. Buckley wrote that Hunt "left capitalism a bad name, not, goodness knows, by frenzies of extravagance, but by his eccentric understanding of public affairs, his yahoo bigotry and his appallingly bad manners."¹⁵

On November 11, 1975, the fiftieth anniversary of the Florida wedding, Frania Tye Lee sued the estate in federal court in Shreveport. After her lawyers obtained certified copies of the 1925 entry in the Hillsborough County marriage ledger, the page was cut out of the book. Testimony at the trial put the family's worth at two to three billion dollars on liquidation and more than five billion with the trusts. The parties settled. Her son Hugh S. Hunt received 7.5 million dollars for giving up any claim as an heir, and in December 1983 sued Ray Hunt and the estate's lawyer over the classification of Tye's children as "natural but not legitimate" for Louisiana inheritance tax.¹⁶²²