T. Boone Pickens: The Man (2 of 3)

Thomas Boone Pickens, Jr. was born May 22, 1928 in Holdenville, Oklahoma. He was the son of a landman, a middleman whose job it is to find landowners willing to lease mineral rights and then sell their leases to oil companies. After oil took a downturn, the Pickens family left Oklahoma and moved to Amarillo, TX while Thomas, Jr. was in high school. He attended Texas A&M for a year on a basketball scholarship, but left and continued his education at Oklahoma A&M where received a degree in geology in 1951.

Business
1951 – graduated with degree in geology from Oklahoma A&M (renamed Oklahoma State University in 1957); employed by Phillips Petroleum
1954 – left Phillips Petroleum
1956 – founded Mesa Petroleum
1997 – founded BP Capital Management (formerly BP Energy Fund), hedge fund management company that invests in petroleum and natural gas; founded Clean Energy (formerly Pickens Fuel Corp.)
1999 – founded Mesa Water

++Mesa Petroleum is the nation’s largest independent producer of domestic oil and gas and one of the largest gas producers.
++Pickens Fuel Corp., founded 1997, later reincorporated as “Clean Energy” in 2001 (taken public in 2007) is the largest provider of vehicular natural gas in North America.
++Mesa Water has purchased 200,000 acres of water rights in Roberts County, TX. Mesa Water wants to pump 200,000 acre feet of groundwater annually from the Ogallala Aquifer and send it to water deprived El Paso, Lubbock, San Antonio, or Dallas-Forth Worth.

Pickens rise in the oil industry has more to do with acquisitions than drilling. He obtained notoriety in the 1980s for several hospitable and some hostile takeover attempts over other petroleum companies. He has been accused of taking over companies, breaking them up, and putting people out of work. He has been called an entrepreneurial populist, corporate raider, and greenmailer. T. Boone Pickens amassed wealth is estimated at $3 billion and is the 117th richest man in America (Forbes).

Philanthropy
$400 million to Oklahoma State University (OSU)
$50 million to U. of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas
$50 million to U. of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at Houston
$7 million to American Red Cross following Hurricane Katrina
$6 million to University of Texas at Dallas Center for Brain Health

Pickens has donated $400 million to OSU to date, 66% of which has been given to athletics for a remodel of the football stadium that now bears his name and the creation of an athletic village. Pickens and OSU believe that improving the athletic facilities will create a platform, or base, in which to encourage better athletes to come to the university in order to improve the school’s athletic teams. This has been done at many campuses and I have no doubt this plan will improve the calibur of athlete coming to OSU, but my advice: Pickens better include some paid tutors and tailored majors to keep the hulks academically eligible.

Pickens’s donation of $165 million to OSU Cowboy Golf Inc., an endowment set up to benefit the golf program, is the single largest charitable gift ever to a university’s athletic department. But the circumstances surrounding the gift raise a few eyebrows. See… Pickens sits on the board of the OSU golf charity and took advantage of a provision in Hurricane Katrina relief legislation that allowed him to deduct for a charitable gift equal to 100 percent of his adjusted gross income, double the normal limit. The money, under his authority, was then reinvested in BP Capital Management, Pickens’s hedge fund. The arrangement offered Pickens a huge tax break and the ability to continue to control the cash.

Pickens’s fortune is his to do with as he wishes, but I have never been a fan of glorifying the big man on campus above the rest of the student body. Despite my fondness for athletics, extra-curricular activities are just that, extra and secondary to education. It is disappointing that OSU students are not receiving an equal monetary gift from Pickens as the athletes have received. I guess this is another example of the misplaced emphasis in our schools.

Politics
Pickens has been a generous donor to Republican campaigns, including infamous names like Tom DeLay (TX), Jesse Helms (NC), Strom Thurman (SC), Larry Craig (ID), Conrad Burns (MT), John Ashcroft (MO), and Rick Santorum (PA). He contributed to George W. Bush’s Texas gubernatorial campaign in which Bush defeated popular Democratic incumbant Ann Richards in 1994. During the campaign, Karl Rove, Bush’s senior political advisor, was accused of using a poll technique in which voters were asked if they would be "more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians." Rove denies having been involved in circulating these rumors about Richards during the campaign.* This is not the first time smear tactics have been utilized by the Bush men. H.W. in his 1988 presidential bid used the infamous Willie Horton ad and Tank ad to raise fears concerning Michael Dukakis’s ability to keep Americans safe. Pickens obviously does not have a problem with sleezy win-at-all-costs maneuvers such as these. As a matter of fact, he not only funds them, he participates also.

In 2004, Pickens contributed $3 million to Republican 527 group Swift Vets & POWs for Truth, a group of military vets from the Vietnam War that opposed John Kerry’s nomination for president. The group stated that "Kerry's phony war crimes charges, his exaggerated claims about his own service in Vietnam, and his deliberate misrepresentation of the nature and effectiveness of Swift boat operations compel us to step forward" (link). It is interesting to note that Pickens contributed a series of donations totaling $3000 to John Kerry from 6/99 to 6/01, interesting not only because of the subsequent Swift Boat attack ads, but because it is one of the few monetary contributions given to a Democrat by Pickens. Kerry in a written letter took up Pickens’s challenge, but as of yet no money has changed hands. ABC News thought the Swift Boat allegations suspect and John McCain condemned the Swift Boat ads as “dishonest and dishonorable.” The Swift Boat ads were in reality, nothing more than an incredibly successful smear campaign and had nothing to do with Kerry’s presidential credentials.**

An interesting and humorous piece of legislation that Pickens’s has lobbied for is the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (HR 503), undeniably influenced by Madeleine Pickens, T. Boone’s third wife and widow of racehorse owner Allen Paulson. This legislation would permanently prohibit the slaughter of horses for human consumption as well as the exportation of live horses intended for the same purpose. It is humorous because a horse is really no different than any other farm animal. Some will be put to work and some may end up on a dinner plate. If so many were not kept as pets they would be treated no different than a steer. I’ve never eaten horse before, but I’m sure it tastes like chicken.

So now we understand a little about T. Boone Pickens’s businesses, philanthropy, and politics. This should give us a little insight into his motivations for creating and publicizing the Pickens Plan. Remember, things are not always as they seem.

*Interesting tidbit of information: Karl Rove was on George H.W. Bush’s staff during his failed run at re-election in 1992. He was fired in the middle of the campaign for leaking information to the press. Fast forward to today and the Valerie Plame CIA leak case. Hmmm… it makes you wonder.

**If it is unpatriotic to say that McCain’s “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is [not] a qualification to be president,” as former Gen. Wesley Clark surmised, then why is it okay to smear John Kerry’s service record in the military? I guess turnabout is not fair game with Pickens and Republicans.