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In 1961, shortly after George Bush moved to Houston, his company, Zapata, joined a consortium with Dresser Industries and General Dynamics to bid on the Mohole Project, which was awarded to Brown & Root. *
In 1950 Dresser Industries (headed by Neil Mallon, namesake of one of the Bushes' sons who helped loot Silverado Savings in Denver during the 1980s) had relocated its headquarters to Dallas with a large branch office in Houston--the center of the oil and gas industry. Before the 1961 bid on the Mohole project, Dresser had rejected the opportunity to acquire Brown & Root, whose chairman, Herman Brown, was the organizer of Houston’s political action committee known as the "Suite 8-F Crowd" because of its informal meeting place in Herman's 8th floor suite of the Lamar Hotel in Houston; Herman’s brother George R. Brown, was for many years chairman of the Rice Institute board of governors and was Lyndon Johnson’s biggest contributor and fund-raiser. In addition to the university's endowment, created by the death of W.M. Rice in 1900, fortunately for his attorney "Captain" James A. Baker, the Rice board controlled the assets and companies of Howard Hughes, not the least important of which was the patent for the three-cone rolling cutter rock bit. According to the history of Dresser, written by Darwin Payne:
A lawyer and inventor named Howard R. Hughes, father of an even more famous son who by now had expanded the family enterprises into the motion picture and aircraft industries, had invented this unique bit, with three revolving cutting elements, before World War I. It was one of the most important contributions of the century to the art of drilling. The company he formed, Hughes Tool Company, now controlled some 80 percent of the bit business. Dresser inquired into the possibility of acquiring the company, sought persistently but in vain to win an audience with the younger Hughes, and finally realized that the firm was not available under any circumstances. Neither was the second most important company in the field, Reed Roller Bit, although a deal had seemed imminent until its principal owner balked at the last moment.**
So Dresser had to settle for the third company, a small one in Whittier, California. Reed Roller Bit, incidentally, was also controlled by the same group in control of the Hughes empire—the Rice and Farish families in Houston, whose lawyers were the Baker family--in the firms of Baker & Botts and Andrews, Kurth. The patent for the Reed bit was filed in 1913, and the company which manufactured it was begun four years later by Niels Esperson and one other stockholder. All the stock was purchased in 1925 by a syndicate formed by Stephen Farish, brother of W.S. Farish. Prior to the investment in Reed Roller Bit, Stephen Farish had formed Navarro Oil Co., which was sold in 1945 to Continental Oil Co. Steve Farish was married to Lottie Baldwin Rice, cousin of Libbie Rice Farish, wife of W.S. Farish.
*Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc. 1880-1978 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 270.
**Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy, p. 194.
