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Bunker, the leader of the six children of H.L.'s first marriage, they feud incessantly with the four children of the second marriage, seems to have inherited some of his father's traits. Like H.L., Bunker is a zealot for far-right causes. He is on the national council of the John Birch Society and is said to have angrily quit the University of Texas after one semester because one of his professors suggested that the Government should control all natural resources. Like H.L., Bunker has a penchant for controversy; he is almost constantly enmeshed in lawsuits. In 1975 Bunker and his brother Herbert were tried in federal court on charges of Bunker's having tapped the phones of their father's business associates. The brothers protested that they had not known wiretapping was illegal and were acquitted, but two private detectives whom they had hired went to jail. Most of all, Bunker shares his father's passion for trading. Says he, speaking of race horses but expressing a philosophy that also governs his business dealings: "It's a thrill to watch one turn into a winner."
Bunker started in the 1950s with an oil-drilling program in Pakistan that yielded nothing but dry holes, more than $11 million worth. Undaunted, he sank $250 million into exploration ventures in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1961 he discovered the Sarir field in Libya, one of the biggest single oil finds ever. But in 1973 Libya nationalized his holdings, depriving Hunt of potential future profits that could have run into the billions. For a while, one biographer believes, he was not even a billionaire.
Hunt then developed a passion for silver. His bland understatement of the reason:
"Silver looked safer than overseas oil concessions, the way things were going. And precious metals were a good hedge against paper money."
There were other factors: world demand for silver, spurred largely by its use in photographic materials, regularly exceeds new production from mines, and Hunt believed silver was greatly undervalued in relation to gold. Bunker and his brother Herbert bought in 1973 an astonishing 35 million oz. in futures contracts. Their buying drove prices up for a while, but when the brothers stopped their purchases, prices fell again. The Hunts lost an estimated $25 million to $50 million on paper. Undeterred, Bunker called for actual delivery of the metal, a rare occurrence in commodity markets, and just kept it.
Last year Bunker and his syndicate began buying silver again, this time on a truly gargantuan scale. They were soon imitated by other speculators shaken by international crises and distrustful of paper money. It was this that sent the price of silver from $6 per oz. in early 1979 to $50 per oz. in January of this year. Chairman Walter Hoving of Tiffany & Co., the famous jewelry store, was incensed. Tiffany ran an ad in the New York Times last week asserting: "We think it is unconscionable for anyone to hoard several billion, yes billion, dollars worth of silver and thus drive the price up so high that others must pay artificially high prices for articles made of silver from baby spoons to tea sets, as well as photographic film and other products."