The Texas Right: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Conservatism

The Paranoid Style and Its Limits: The Power, Influence, and Failure of the Postwar Texas Far Right

The Paranoid style and its Limits The Power, Influence, and Failure of the Postwar Texas Far Right seaN P. CuNNiNGhaM D uring one particularly memorable scene in Oliver Stone’s 1995 pseudobiographical film Nixon, the title character finds himself in a dark, smoke-filled room on a ranch somewhere outside Dallas in 1963. There, he is confronted by a cabal managed by ultraconservative Texas businessmen—ostensibly real-estate tycoons and oil millionaires, subsequently identified in the film as “Birchers” and “extremists.” Led by “Jack Jones”—a fictional composite archetype of Texas power and wealth (played, appropriately, by Larry Hagman)—the cabal tries to pressure Nixon into challenging John F. Kennedy in a 1964 rematch of their famed razor-thin presidential contest of 1960. It is his patriotic duty as an anticommunist, they say, but it is also his opportunity to make the right kind of friends in the Lone Star State. The room grows quiet, filled with unspeakable tension. Cautious and sweating through his response, Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins, suggests that Kennedy will be virtually unstoppable in 1964,but he receives a jarring vote of confidence from the men who insinuate that JFK might not live to see 1964. The following scene splices newsreel footage and artful moviemaking to depict Kennedy’s arrival at Love Field in Dallas on November 22, 1963, his fate already tragically sealed.1 In Nixon, as well as in the Oscar-nominated JFK (1991), Stone depicts a Texas Far Right willing and able to manipulate the nation’s democratic processes and culpable not only for the death of John F. Kennedy but also for the destruction of rational,sane,democraticAmerican liberalism.Later 102 • seaN P. CuNNiNGhaM in Nixon,Stone reestablishes the relationship between Nixon and the Texas Far Right,this time through a meeting set in 1972 following the president’s trip to China.During that encounter,the fictional Jones lamentsAmerica’s loss in Vietnam and threatens to destroy Nixon’s reelection prospects if something is not done to thwart left-wing (always “communist”) influence both at home and abroad. Jones’s specific concerns include federal price controls on oil,the Environmental ProtectionAgency,court-ordered busing, Henry Kissinger’s soft-headed internationalism, difficulties with “ragheads”in the Middle East,and the Allende regime in Chile.The scene further reinforcesthenotionthat Nixon owes his presidencyto thefictional Jones and the Texas Far Right cabal that put him there.2 Few would question the filmmaking talent of Oliver Stone, a Vietnam veteran and outspoken critic of American foreign and domestic policy during the post–World War II era. However, the care with which he seeks to responsibly retell history is another matter. Stone is hardly the only pop culturalist to capitalize on the stereotypical image of a criminally connected Texas Far Right.In fact,the image of greedy Texas oilmen conspiring to do all manner of evil in an effort to line their own pocketbooks has not only maintained resonance in the nation’s popular consciousness but has actually gained momentum in recent years as a result of actions taken and accusations made during GeorgeW.Bush’s presidency,primarily surrounding the administration’s oil connections and military interventions in the Middle East.3 Perhaps more fairly than conservative critics might care to admit,such images reinforce stereotypes that conflate Dick Cheney and J.R.Ewing.But broadly speaking, are these stereotypes accurate? What, precisely, was the postwar Texas Far Right? Who was involved, how, why, and to what ends? Was Texas conservatism dominated by the Far Right in the decades after World War II? What is the legacy of the postwar Texas Far Right and does the modern Texas Republican Party stand as a testament to that influence? This chapter contends that a Far Right element did exist in powerful and influential ways in Texas during the 1950s and early 1960s. During that time,the Far Right worked against national liberal Democrats as well as local ones,and sometimes advanced the cause of a conservative Democratic establishment, but it also contributed to the eventual destruction of one-party politics in the Lone Star State. Through all of this, the Texas Far Right reflected aspects of a radicalism with deep roots in the early twentieth-century Texas experience. However, while acknowledging these realities, it is quite possible to The Paranoid style and its Limits • 103 overstate the influence of a Texas Far Right,particularly if trying to...