Word: oiled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...short memory of man. The downtown buildings, which rise 20 stories above the West Texas scrub, sprang up during the good years--mid-'50s, late '70s, early '90s--and stand half-empty during the bad. In 1973, Midland's most feverish era was touched off by the Arab oil embargo, and suddenly everyone who had ever lived in or passed through the place came looking for oil. When George W. showed up in 1975, not yet 30, he was a curious amalgam of West Texas and East Coast--a Midland childhood mixed with schooling at Phillips Academy and Yale, then...
...friend O'Neill told him he should learn the oil business by working for an established company a few years. George was too impatient for that. He hired himself out for $100 a day as a landman, searching mineral-rights titles in county courthouses around West Texas. "I basically taught myself," he says. Bush's move to Midland is at the heart of his official myth. Driving out in an old Cutlass with $20,000 and a dream, scraping by in tatty chinos and beat-up shoes. It's as close as the son of a President...
Bush went back into oil. He started hiring for his own company, Arbusto (Spanish for bush), raising money from a network of East Coast backers who were close to his father and uncle, money manager Jonathan Bush. Among them were drugstore tycoon Lewis Lehrman, who lost a bid for Governor of New York in 1982; venture capitalist William H. Draper III, who would become president of the U.S. Export-Import Bank during the Reagan Administration; and Celanese CEO John Macomber, who later landed the same post...
...Arbusto, Bush developed the same management style he uses today, a flat structure with easy access to the boss who guides but doesn't sweat the details. "He hires good men, and lets 'em do their job," says McAninch. "He had a lot of oil-field savvy even though he didn't have a technical background." In its first five years, Arbusto drilled 95 wells, hitting oil or gas about 50% of the time, an average performance. "George used to say, 'Man, we need a company maker,'" recalls Dickey, who discovered some vast oil fields in later years, working...
...Bush stumbled by trying to go public with a drilling fund just as oil prices dipped. That year he also sold 10% of his company to a Panamanian company run by Philip Uzielli, a longtime friend of Vice President Bush's top adviser James A. Baker III, who later became Secretary of State. What raised eyebrows was the price Uzielli paid: $1 million in exchange for 10% of Bush's company, whose total worth at the time was $382,000. Bush says the infusion wasn't a bailout. Arbusto, he says, "wasn't in trouble. We were in growth mode...