To Nelson Bunker Hunt, the world was full of enemies. There was inflation. It was running as high as 13 percent in the 1970s, like a thief threatening to steal the family fortune earned by his father, H.L., in the oil fields of East Texas. There was Muammar Qaddafi and the American oil men who collaborated with him. When Hunt and his brothers William Herbert and Lamar had refused to pay Qaddafi half their earnings from the Libyan oil fields, like their competitors had, Qaddafi had simply snatched the Hunts’ 8 million acres. There were the communists, the liberals, the proponents of the welfare state. If inflation ... (full story)