Islands of the Oil Kings: Part 1
Islands of the Oil Kings: Part 1
How FDR’s island visit helped birth an era of Texas power
Flush with new wealth, Clint Murchison Sr. and Sid Richardson impressed a president and cued the rise of Eisenhower and LBJ
Two isolated islands off the coast of South Texas became unlikely centers of power and influence after they were purchased by two of the richest men in the country. This first installment of a three-part series examines President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 visit that would affect the lives of future island guests Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson.
When the big tankers leave Corpus Christi bound for open water, they thread the jetties of Aransas Pass, where dolphins breach ahead of their bows. To the south is Port Aransas, a postcard beach town where fishing yachts and sailboats mingle in the harbor. To the north is the nearly empty barrier island of San Jose, which rolls out for more than 20 miles to a brackish bayou. On the opposite bank, under the deep salt grass, Matagorda begins.
Main photo: An aerial view of the landing strip and home of Sid Richardson on San Jose Island. Richardson and his friend Clint Murchison Sr. played hosts to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937. (G.J. McCarthy/Staff Photographer)
Part 2: A fortress of power built to lastPart 3: Toddie Lee Wynne and the reach for the stars
Of Texas’ five major barrier islands, San Jose and Matagorda are the last true islands. No causeways extend from the mainland. No power lines connect them to the grid. Ancient dunes are unmarred by condos, and spring break is a distant thunder.
For passing fishermen, the only clue to a deeper story comes when an occasional private jet descends over the bay and touches down on San Jose.
Before the jets, there were yachts. On one of the yachts was President Franklin Roosevelt.
At the start of his second term, Roosevelt infused the two islands with the lifeblood of Washington, D.C. — clout.
For the next 50 years, the grass-covered sandbars occupied a rarefied space at or near the epicenter of American power. Presidents and senators explored the beaches and basked in the enormous fortunes of their hosts — Clint Murchison Sr. of Dallas and his lifetime best friend, Sid Richardson of Fort Worth. As boys in the East Texas town of Athens, they picked peaches at Richardson’s father’s orchard. In the 1920s, they teamed up as lease hounds in the oil fields. And in 1933, the quiet, 5-foot-6 Murchison began a series of purchases to secure 9 miles of Matagorda, where he built a ranch and a sprawling home to host his friends.
Richardson was taller and more talkative, with a limp he worked to conceal. Following the lead of his friend “Murk,” he bought all 21 miles of San Jose, then called St. Joseph’s Island or just St. Jo.
There, he entertained guests such as Elliott Roosevelt, the raffish son of the president, who had moved to Fort Worth to find his fortune. What he found was his second wife, Ruth, and rich locals like Richardson and Amon Carter eager to help out the son of the president.
In May 1937, the 165-foot presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, anchored in the bay behind the two islands while FDR and Elliott spent eight days fishing the waters of South Texas. The president came ashore exactly once. Amid the white wicker chairs lining Murchison’s breezy veranda, Roosevelt spent an afternoon getting acquainted with Richardson, Murchison and Murchison’s partner Toddie Lee Wynne. (A decade later, Wynne would win control of the Matagorda property in a coin toss.)
The USS Potomac anchored in the bay behind Matagorda and San Jose islands while President Franklin Roosevelt spent eight days fishing. (Port Aransas Preservation and Historical Association)
The visit was more than a recognition of Texas oil as a rising power; it was a cosmic shuffle.
It changed the trajectories of Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower and put them on the road to the White House, and it cast Murchison and Richardson as the first oilman kingmakers.
The highest vantage point on San Jose is still the rooftop sundeck over Richardson’s bedroom. If he returned, he would find his home much as it was — immaculately maintained for decades by his nephew, the late Perry Bass, and by Bass’ sons.
But next door on Matagorda, the elements are on the march against the legacy of Murchison and Wynne.
In 1986, Wynne’s son, Toddie Lee Wynne Jr., sold all 11,502 acres to be used as a government wildlife refuge.
Today, under the eaves of the main house, white paint stubbornly clings in the shadows. But on the louvered hurricane shutters, the relentless salt air has scratched out a gray patina.
Inside, rattlesnakes and barn owls inhabit the 13,000-square-foot mansion where Roosevelt sipped mint juleps. Shafts of light penetrate the rotted ceiling where Billy Graham slept.
The projection room has no projector and the movie screen dangles limply from the rafters. The last flickering image of John Wayne faded decades ago.
Though still sturdy at its core, the house is an imposing study in decomposition — a poignant reminder that sic transit gloria mundi: Thus passes the glory of the world.
The former home of Clint Murchison Sr. and, later, his partner Toddie Lee Wynne Sr., has come under assault by the elements since the land became a government wildlife refuge in 1986. (G.J. McCarthy/Staff Photographer)
Through thick and thin
By the mid-1950s, Dwight Eisenhower and his affluent inner circle believed that their friend Sid Richardson was the wealthiest man in the country. Murchison was probably in the top five. “Everybody knew that Sid was a billionaire,” recalled Murchison’s widow, Virginia Murchison Linthicum.
Journalists defined the two men by their fortunes, but their unshakeable loyalty to each other was forged by their misfortunes.
Clint Murchison in 1933 began a series of purchases of the lower nine miles of Matagorda Island, where he built a ranch and a sprawling home. (Courtesy Murchison Collection)
In the early 1930s, Murchison was a grieving father of three young boys. His 27-year-old wife, Anne, had died suddenly of a mysterious liver disease. Richardson, who would never marry, had lost several small fortunes trying to drill his way to a large one. In the early ’30s, his debts topped $1 million.
More stable financially, Murchison purchased the lower 9 miles of Matagorda Island. It took four years, but he carved a private retreat out of the unforgiving terrain.
Heavy equipment and building materials were pulled across the bay on barges. Once a generator was installed, power tools arrived and the house rose from the land. Corrals were built for the Hereford cattle that Murchison introduced.
Allan Richards, the chief decorator at Neiman Marcus, came from Dallas and filled the place with comfortable, nautical furniture. A gallery-like veranda ran along the perimeter. Screens kept out the mosquitoes yet allowed the sea breeze to waft through the one-story mansion.
Many friends visited, but the most constant was Sid Richardson.
Murchison’s houseman Jewel Phifer noted that Richardson “talked a lot and he would say anything to anybody. He did not drink much but he held respect for no person. He and Mr. Murchison were always teasing one another.”
It was that brash irreverence that would endear Richardson to two presidents.
In the spring of 1936, Murchison had been preparing for a summer entertaining at the island when his 11-year-old son, Burk, was admitted to Dallas’ Medical Arts Hospital with pneumonia. Burk’s two older brothers, John and Clint Jr., would eventually be on the cover of Time magazine, portrayed as financial wizards, owners of the Dallas Cowboys. But Burk would not see his 12th birthday. A black-and-white photo of the smiling boy holding a piglet under his arm would be on Murchison’s bedside table for the rest of his life.
President Roosevelt reels in a 77-pound tarpon as fishing guide Barney Farley (right) and Roosevelt’s son Elliott (black shirt) haul the fish aboard. Fishing guide Ted Mathews (left) looks on. (Port Aransas Preservation and Historical Association)
Disorder in the court
In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt began his second term with a rare political miscalculation. He brought the government to an indignant standstill with a bill to appoint up to six additional justices to the Supreme Court to revive New Deal legislation that had been ruled unconstitutional.
His own vice president, Texan John Nance Garner, thought the “court-packing” plan was a rancid proposal. Though silent when Roosevelt sprang it on the Cabinet, “Cactus Jack” was seen later in the Senate lobby pinching his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
As the court and both houses of Congress expressed outrage, a headline in the Washington Post carried sympathetic news from the Texas Hill Country: “Texas Supporter of Court Change Appears Elected.”
In the 10th Congressional District, 29-year-old Lyndon Johnson had won his seat with a campaign that gave unconditional support for FDR and court reorganization.
“Now, Lyndon, of course it’s a bunch of [expletive], this plan,” former state Sen. Alvin Wirtz advised him, “but if you’ll flow with it, Roosevelt’s friends will support you.”
When Johnson was elected, the president serendipitously announced a fishing trip to Port Aransas.
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In Roosevelt’s “Trip File” was a staff memorandum: “When we get down to Texas, we have to arrange to have the Congressman-elect, who ran on a pro-New Deal, pro-Court Reorganization platform, to see the president.”
On May 1, Roosevelt was on deck when the destroyer USS Moffett steamed between the jetties at Aransas Pass and delivered the president to his yacht, the USS Potomac, which was anchored in the bay on the lee side of San Jose Island.
“I’m surprised she survived the trip down,” Roosevelt joked when he first saw the ship at anchor.
“The Potomac was geared for sedate voyaging,” noted Elliott Roosevelt. “In any kind of sea, the presidential yacht was likely to turn turtle.”
The term yacht was a slight misnomer. “The Potomac was, in fact, a Coast Guard patrol boat, the former Electra, which had been refitted at no great expense for Father’s use,” Elliott recalled. “He slept below decks in a stateroom that few admirals would have looked at twice.”
For FDR, its virtue was that it was metal. Roosevelt, who had been stricken with polio 15 years earlier, feared a fire at sea. The Potomac’s second smokestack was a dummy that contained an elevator to carry him between decks.
He began the Texas trip on a typically upbeat note, saying, “I haven’t a care in the world, which is some going for a president who is said by newspapers to be a remorseless dictator driving his country into hopeless bankruptcy.”
Murchison and Richardson homes
The Murchison/Wynne home on Matagorda Island is now part of a wildlife refuge. Meanwhile, on San Jose Island, the former home of Sid Richardson remains well maintained.
Fields of gold
The massive East Texas Oil Field had been discovered in 1930. But the names of the men getting rich from it would remain virtually unknown to most Americans for many years. Yet they were not entirely unknown to Roosevelt.
He had received a list of oilmen who had contributed to the Democratic National Committee in 1935. About the only promising name was that of Clint W. Murchison who, according to the memo, “came into the East Texas Field several months after it started with no money and [after] a little over three years … sold out … for about five million dollars.”
Of Richardson, the memorandum said he was “in debt and borrows money to develop leases.” But that was obsolete information. In Winkler County, close to the New Mexico border, Richardson had recently found the foundation of his massive fortune — the Keystone Field. Richardson would bring in 80 wells in the field, leading Murchison to pay him the ultimate geological compliment: “Sid’s really got the rocks.”
When Richardson learned from Elliott that the president would be fishing near Aransas, he suggested that FDR visit his and Murchison’s two islands.
Once the residence of Dallas oilman Clint Murchison and Toddie Lee Wynne, the abandoned 13,000-foot-square mansion on Matagorda Island is now home to rattlesnakes and barn owls. (G.J. McCarthy/Staff Photographer)
All ashore
On Wednesday, May 5, a wind blew out of the southeast and pushed up a swell that rolled under the Potomac as it sat anchored in the shallow bay water near the Aransas Pass lighthouse. Sailors in their tropical whites and black, knotted neckerchiefs stood at the side rail and guided Richardson’s big mahogany cabin cruiser, the Saltaire, to the four-step side stair. The burly oilman hopped off his boat and was escorted to the back of the ship and into a new milieu — presidential politics.
“The cushioned fantail provided a spot where visiting dignitaries could be entertained,” recalled Elliott Roosevelt, who would introduce Richardson to his father.
From the waist up, the 55-year-old president was the picture of virility. Bronzed from the Texas sun, he reached to give Richardson a firm handshake.
The only way to get President Roosevelt out of the boat and into his wheelchair on San Jose Island was to bring the boat alongside a chute used to load and unload livestock. (Port Aransas Preservation and Historical Association)
The oilman was a newcomer to great wealth, but the president’s other guest that afternoon, Houston Chronicle owner Jesse H. Jones, was not. He was FDR’s appointee as chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corp.
In private, Roosevelt derided him as Jesus H. Jones.
By contrast, the president took to Richardson immediately.
Roosevelt also received Gov. James “Jimmy” Allred. After the meeting, the governor dispatched a message to Lyndon Johnson. The president “will be very happy indeed to see you when he lands at Galveston. … He was intensely interested in the details of your campaign. … I suggested to him that you all should have your picture made together and this was entirely agreeable.”
Richardson’s first meeting with the president was brief and pleasant.
Two days later, he was back to escort the presidential party, first to his island, San Jose, and then to Matagorda for lunch.
On deck, two stout sailors made a bosun’s chair with their arms. Wearing a dark, short-sleeved shirt, Roosevelt reached around their shoulders. They carried him down the steps to a small twin-cockpit Chris-Craft and set him behind the wheel with his passengers Ruth and Elliott Roosevelt. The rest of the party boarded Richardson’s boat and a Potomac tender. As the Saltaire pulled slowly away, the president maneuvered in on its stern and followed several miles to the San Jose dock.
There, the challenge of bringing a paralyzed man to a largely undeveloped island became immediately apparent.
The only way to get Roosevelt out of the low-sitting boat and into his wheelchair was to bring it alongside the chute used to load and unload livestock.
“Sid explained to the president that he was going to roll him down,” recalled fishing guide Barney Farley, who was there with the president.
Roosevelt exploded: “What in the world — Sid, do you mean you’re going to roll me down that bull chute?”
“Why, Mr. President,” Sid said with a smile, “you’re the biggest bull that ever went down that chute.”
With the help of Potomac sailors, the president made his unceremonious landfall and took his place in the front passenger seat of an open car.
With Richardson behind the wheel, Ruth Roosevelt sat in the back and sipped a soft drink. Wearing sunglasses and a wide-brimmed white hat, FDR held his cigarette holder and posed for photos and home movies.
Leaving the dock, Richardson led the small presidential motorcade of vehicles down the dusty center road of San Jose while turkeys, jackrabbits and cattle scattered. Richardson enthusiastically turned into open grass to chase his herd of buffalo.
“They were pests,” says one longtime visitor to the island. “They’d graze everywhere. When they got to a fence, they’d go right through it and keep grazing.”
It was a warm South Texas day and most members of the party kept wide-brimmed hats on their heads.
When the road ended at the beach, the cars drove across it to the water’s edge, where the air was cool and the sand packed hard. As the waves broke to the right, Roosevelt’s procession rolled for miles along the isolated beach. Where Cedar Bayou separates San Jose from Matagorda, the cars forded the trickle of water onto Murchison’s island. Four miles later, they turned onto his ranch road.
Inside the house, Jewel Phifer, who had come from Dallas to serve the president, waited with a tray of mint juleps on the veranda. Some guests excused themselves to freshen and change for lunch.
“The bedrooms, done in excellent simplicity, were deluxe,” noted Roosevelt’s aide, Gen. Edwin “Pa” Watson, “offering every comfort.”
From the veranda, the group moved on to lunch at the big drop-leaf table in the dining room. A chandelier made from a wooden ship’s helm hung overhead.
Only one firsthand account of the lunch survives. In the official log of the trip, Pa Watson wrote simply, “The party had a grand time at table — lots of fun.”
From left: An unidentified man, President Roosevelt’s son Elliott, President Roosevelt, Dudley Golding and Sid Richardson preparing to leave Richardson’s dock for a tour of San Jose Island. (Courtesy Murchison Collection)
In the vacuum of any historical record, there has been uncharitable speculation about what was discussed.
Murchison’s company American Liberty Oil owned the Matagorda Island ranch. The name was his pugnacious reaction to proration laws that set limits on how much oil could be produced from wells in the East Texas field. Murchison believed those limits were an un-American infringement on his liberty. Oil produced above the legal limit was called hot oil.
“Clint was a hot oiler in every respect,” recalled oilman J.R. Parten. “Clint didn’t want any rules. He made a fortune disobeying the rules.”
“If I had been guilty of all the things they say I have done,” Murchison said years later, “I’d be under the jail, not in it.”
Several months before FDR’s Texas trip, a Murchison subsidiary company had been criminally charged for running hot oil. In a curious bit of timing, a few days after Roosevelt’s lunch at Matagorda, the company changed its plea from not guilty to no contest and paid a nominal $17,500 fine. A headline in the National Petroleum News noted, “Roosevelt’s Host’s Company in Texas Fined for Hot Oil Law Violations.”
In 1941, with World War II on the horizon, the federal government used its power of eminent domain to buy the northern two-thirds of Matagorda Island from a group of reluctant landowners. An air base was built and the island was used as a bombing range. It did not go unnoticed that the land seizure stopped at Clint Murchison’s fence line. Land owned by Roosevelt’s luncheon host and all of Richardson’s San Jose Island went untouched.
An aerial photo of San Jose (foreground) and Matagorda islands. During President Roosevelt’s visit in 1937, Sid Richardson led the presidential motorcade along this beach from San Jose across to Matagorda, where they had lunch at the Murchison residence. (G.J. McCarthy/Staff Photographer)
Picture-perfect LBJ
After lunch at the Murchison house, Roosevelt returned the hospitality with a dinner in the salon of the Potomac for Richardson, Murchison and Wynne. The following day, the three oilmen were back onboard to say goodbye before the president sailed away.
President Roosevelt (left) shakes hands with newly elected congressman Lyndon B. Johnson (right) as Gov. James Allred looks on. (File photo)
On Monday, he arrived in Galveston. With his steel leg braces under his suit, Roosevelt used his faux walk to swing down the gangplank. On the dock stood Gov. Allred with a tall, scarecrow-thin Lyndon Johnson. “Mr. President, I’d like to present our new congressman.” Roosevelt smiled and gave Johnson an extended handshake as cameras clicked. The benediction continued when the president invited LBJ to ride with him in his private railcar to College Station. And there, he invited him to continue on to Fort Worth, where Roosevelt was attending a barbecue at Ruth and Elliott’s Benbrook ranch with Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison.
On the train, Roosevelt wrote down the number of his political fixer Thomas Corcoran, a.k.a. Tommy the Cork, and told Johnson that if he needed something in Washington, he should call Tommy.
Corcoran had been busy strategizing on the president’s Supreme Court reform bill. But as soon as Roosevelt reached D.C., Tommy the Cork got a call. “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man,” Roosevelt said. “Now I like this boy and you’re going to help him with anything you can.”
When the favors came, Johnson was quick to repay them with interest. Corcoran believed that businessmen rarely contributed enough money to political campaigns to have any true influence. He would modify that view after the election of 1940 when the Democrats were in danger of losing the House for lack of funds. Three weeks before election day, checks rained down on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, Perry Bass and their friends. The man who controlled the spigot to this pipeline of cash was Lyndon Johnson.
A note on sources: For this narrative, Alan Peppard interviewed members of the Murchison, Wynne and Bass families as well as Sonny Perez with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Felipe Prieto with the Matagorda Island Unit of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.
In addition, he used the following sources: Log of the Cruise of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Gulf of Mexico, FDR Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, N.Y.; Archival film of Franklin Roosevelt’s visit to Port Aransas. Donated by Ruth Eidson, formerly Ruth Roosevelt, to the FDR Library; Archival film of Lyndon Johnson on San Jose Island, LBJ Library; Clint: A Biography, by Ernestine Orrick Van Buren, 1986; A Rendezvous with Destiny, by Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, 1975; Fishing Yesterday’s Gulf Coast, by Barney Farley, 2002; The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro, 1981, 1982; Life on Matagorda Island, by Wayne H. McAlister, 2004; The Big Rich, by Bryan Burrough, 2009; The Murchisons, by Jane Wolfe, 1989
![Sid Richardson and Dwight Eisenhower](images/part2.jpg)
Part 2: War, Eisenhower and LBJ
Five days after Pearl Harbor, Dwight Eisenhower boarded a train at Dallas’ Union Station and was invited to the drawing room of Sid Richardson. The chance encounter would change both of their lives. Read now
Author: Alan Peppard
Editor: Jerry Bokamper
Copy Editor: Clay Morton
Photos: G.J. McCarthy
Designer: John Hancock
Video Narration: Meredith Land, NBC5
Video Editors: David Guzman and Alan Peppard
Photo Editor: David Guzman
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