Word: oiled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Bush merged his company with Spectrum 7, an oil-drilling firm run by two supporters of his father, Bill DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. It was a good fit. Arbusto had oil prospects; Spectrum had a network of investors. The merger doubled the size of Bush's operation, and the Spectrum people wanted to upgrade his image with fancy furniture and a company car, but Bush wouldn't hear of it. "Those were the doodah days in Midland," says O'Neill's wife Jan, "and a lot of people couldn't resist--jets, boats, cars. George didn't go for that...
...weren't warranted had come in late 1983, when the First National Bank of Midland collapsed under the weight of bad loans. "We had a saying that year," says oilman Don Evans, now national finance chairman for Bush's exploratory committee: "'Stay alive till '85.'" But '85 was worse. Oil prices sagged, and investments dried up. By December, rumor had it that oil prices were about to plunge, and it happened right on schedule in January 1986. As prices cratered, those who had been using their oil reserves as collateral defaulted to the banks. Midland's economy folded like...
...confronted the problem once and for all during a three-day weekend in late July 1986 at the Broadmoor, a grand old resort in Colorado Springs. The Bushes and their closest friends had gone there to escape the Oil Patch and celebrate a communal 40th-birthday party: George and Don Evans both turned 40 that month, and their wives would reach the milestone in the fall. Joe and Jan O'Neill (she was also nearing 40) were there as well. The men made for the links--"George plays golf like it was soccer," says O'Neill, "chasing after the ball...
After the oil-price crash, Bush had begun looking for a bigger fish to swallow his little one. His "bail-out strategy," as he calls it now, was to have Spectrum bought out by a publicly traded company so his investors would have a shot at getting their money back. Texas-based Harken Oil & Gas (now known as Harken Energy Corp.) had been buying up troubled independents on the cheap, and Spectrum fit the profile. In one six-month period before the acquisition, Spectrum lost $402,000. It was $3 million in debt, with no hope of attracting a dollar...
What did the Harken bosses see in Spectrum? Some productive oil wells, to be sure, but mostly they saw the son of the sitting Vice President. "His name was George Bush. That was worth the money they paid him," says Harken founder Phil Kendrick, who sold the company in 1983 but stayed on as a consultant. Whatever the motivation, it was liberating for Bush. He had money and no day job, a combination that let him accept an offer that had been lurking in the back of his mind for more than a year--a job that would provide action...