Suite 8F Group

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The Suite 8F Group was a network of politically active businessman in Texas and other the southern states in the early 1960s. The name comes from the room in the Lamar Hotel in Houston, Texas where they held their meetings.

[edit] Membership

Among the luminaries of the conservative Democrat political landscape that could be found in Suite 8F's roster were the following:

George and Herman Brown of Brown and Root
Jesse H. Jones, an investor affiliated with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation
Gus Wortham of the American General Insurance Company
James Abercrombie of the Cameron Iron Works
Hugh Roy Cullen of Quintana Petroleum
Texas Governor William Hobby
William Vinson, Great Southern Life Insurance
James Elkins, American General Insurance and Pure Oil Pipe Line
Morgan J. Davis, of Humble Oil
Albert Thomas, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Defense
then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson
Texas politician (later Governor) John Connally
Alvin Wirtz, Thomas Corcoran, Homer Thornberry and Edward Aubrey Clark, were four lawyers who also worked closely with the Suite 8F Group.

Suite 8F helped to coordinate the political activities of other right-wing politicians and businessmen based in the South; these included Robert Anderson, president of the Texas Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of the Treasury; Robert Kerr of Kerr-McGee Oil Industries; Billie Sol Estes, an entrepreneur in the cotton industry; Glenn McCarthy of McCarthy Oil and Gas Company; Earl E. T. Smith, of U.S. Sugar Corporation; Fred Korth, Continental National Bank and Navy Secretary; Ross Sterling of Humble Oil; Texas oil magnates Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison, Sr., Haroldson L. Hunt of Placid Oil; Eugene B. Germany (Mustang Oil Company), David Harold Byrd, chairmain of Byrd Oil Corporation; Lawrence D. Bell, of Bell Helicopter; William D. Pawley (business interests in Cuba), Gordon McLendon of KLIF; Senators George Smathers, Richard Russell, James Eastland, Benjamin Everett Jordan; and lobbyists Fred Black and Bobby Baker, also affiliated with the Serve-U Corporation.

[edit] References

Robert Bryce, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate (PublicAffairs, 2004).
Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money