It was good to see James R. Schlesinger, former secretary of both the US Department of Defense and Department of Energy, at a recent energy industry outlook conference in Houston.
Not that Schlesinger and I are close buddies. In fact, he wouldn't even recognize me among the thousands of reporters who have peppered him with questions in interviews and at press conferences over the years.
But he and I both attended for the first time an annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in Houston back in 1977.
I was there as the new energy reporter for a major Houston daily newspaper. Schlesinger was there in the somewhat more exalted—or at least better-paying—position as the first secretary of DOE and keynote speaker at the API event.
Schlesinger had been named to the new cabinet position shortly before the API conference.
It was to be his first meeting in his new capacity with top officers from all of the major US oil companies and a great many independents.
Under the circumstances, I think most API members were expecting—or at least hoping—that Schlesinger would reach out to them at that session in an effort to identify and address problems confronting both the energy industry and the nation.
What API members got from Schlesinger at that meeting was quite different, however.
Inauspicious beginning
We reporters covering the conference got the earliest indication that Schlesinger's initial contact with the industry he supposedly was to oversee might not come up to expectations when the DOE public relations person informed us there was no text available for Schlesinger's speech.
Now I've known press liaisons for much lower-ranking government officials who would chase reporters down and practically cram copies of speeches down our throats, to make sure their guy was quoted. But Schlesinger, we were informed, had not prepared any written remarks for that meeting. "He likes to speak off the cuff," we were told. I was incredulous. "You mean that the first energy secretary ever comes to his first mass meeting with energy industry leaders without a single note in his pocket?" I bawled. "Heck, even Abe Lincoln scrawled a few lines on the back of a used envelope during his train ride to Gettysburg!"
Schlesinger's speech to the API may have been even shorter than Lincoln's. And although not as poetic, his words were just as memorable to me. "You people know as well as I do that oil and gas is a dinosaur industry, on its way out," he told API members. "Even if we were to open up to exploration all the land you keep asking for, you don't have enough rigs to drill them."
There was probably more of his speech, but I think the rest was drowned out by the noise of oil industry members' jaws dropping to the floor. I was in an aisle seat just two rows behind John Swearingen, the irascible CEO of then-Amoco Corp., who looked like he was going into spasms, shaking his head in violent disagreement with Schlesinger's predictions. I was afraid for a moment that he would leap to his feet and charge Schlesinger in anger; I didn't want to have to write a headline like "Oilman belts new DOE head." Still, as soon as Schlesinger left the podium, ending that session, I grabbed Swearingen to get his reaction to the speech.
I can't recall now 26 years later exactly what he said, but I do remember it was a strong disagreement in words that I later had to paraphrase in a family newspaper.
It was not an auspicious beginning for either Schlesinger or the industry.
Learning curve
However, I have to give Schlesinger credit—he did learn a lot about the oil and gas industry as the US rig count grew over the next couple of years until he left DOE in 1979. By 1981, more than 4,000 rotary rigs were working in this country, proving that while Schlesinger is certainly smart, he's no great shakes as an oil patch prophet.
When I next encountered Schle- singer in Houston in his postgovernment days, he was working as a consultant to the energy industry and backing producers on the same issues on which he had once opposed them as head of DOE.
It put me in mind of when I left home to join the Army and then came back home to see my dad after I got out: I was surprised at how much the guy had learned in just a few short years.