BY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH WAr :rillY g. :N NEW YDiik c.r«, and eighty-year-old T.Boone Pickens was, once again, the toast of the town. Wearing wraparound Ray-Bans and agraypin-striped oxford suit, he strolled into the ornate Palace Hotel, stopped to shake hands with some well-wishers in the lobby- "Hey, Mr. Pickens, what an honor!" bellowed one businessman, his eyes widening as if he were meeting ahead of state-and bounded upstairs to a banquet room, where a couple dozenjournalists and photographers were gathered to hear his plan to save America from its addiction to foreign oil. Boone had spent more than an hour that morning chatting about the plan on CNBC, and he had also appeared on ABC's Good MorningAmerica and NPR'sMorning Edition. Later that day, he was scheduled to meet with CNN, Fox, and the BBC, followed by visits to the offices of the Associated I111 Left: Pickens with his fourth wife, Madeleine, photographed at their 68,OOO-acreranch, outside Pampa, on July 24, 2008. The couple met after he had made-and lost-his first fortune in the oil and gas business. none of my best ideas have been perfect." will generate enough electricity to power The reporters started grinning. Sitting more than 1.3million homes. in the back of the room, I couldn't help but And now there is his $58 million national grin too. I found myself thinking about an- advertising campaign to promote his energy other occasion more than a decade agowhen policy, which he is calling the Pickens Plan. I had watched Boone. He was eating dinner You'veno doubt seen Boone's full-page news- with some business associates at the popu- paper advertisements or watched his tele- lar Dallas restaurant Bob's Steak and Chop vision commercials in which he states, "I've House, and his trademark boyish smile was been an oilman my whole life, but this is one wiped from his face. Just afew months ear- emergency we can't drill ourway out of."You lier, he had been forced out of Mesa Petro- probably have seen him on his Web site or on leum, the oil and gas exploration company television shows, standing before a white- he had started in 1964. He had formed BP board, scribbling all over it like a mad pro- Capital, ahedge fund that specialized in oil fessor as he declares that the United States and natural gas commodities, shortly af- is spending $700 billion a year on foreign ter his Mesa exit, but it was already on the oil- "the largest transfer ofwealth in the his- rocks. Younger investors considered him a tory of mankind," he always points out. And has-been. Even Bea, his wife of24 years, had if nothing is done, the country could very given up on Boone. She had launched a full- well be spending $10 trillion on foreign scale assault on his $78 million fortune in oil within a decade. divorce court, going so far as to demand full You've also heard about his solution, in custody oftheir dog, abrown-eyed papillon which he wants other entrepreneurs and named Winston. That night, as I watched energy companies to build wind farms like Boone walk out of the restaurant carrying a the one he's constructing in the Wind Belt: little bag containing his half-eaten steak, I the vast corridor that extends the length of found myself shaking my head, actuallyfeel- the Great Plains, from Texas to the Cana- ing sorry for him. I leaned over to a friend dian border. He wants the power that will and said, "The great titan has fallen." come from those wind farms to replace the Boy, did I get it wrong. Just about all of natural gas that we now use to make elec- us did. Due largely to some audacious bets tricity. (About 22 percent ofAmerica's elec- he started making in 2000 with his hedge tricity comes from natural gas, 50 percent fund, throwing almost all of his and his cli- from coal, 20 percent from nuclear power, ents' money into long-term oil and gas fu- and the rest from other sources.) In turn, he tures contracts well before energy prices wants to use that natural gas as fuel for au- began to take off, Boone is now wealthier tomobiles-all ofwhich, he says, will lead to than perhaps even he thought possible, his a significant drop in gasoline use and a30 to net worth at a stunning $4 billion. He is also, 40 percent reduction in our oil imports, sav- in the words of one of his colleagues, ''back ing close to $300 billion a year. Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the CBS to making more deals than there are days For aman who's known for his right-wing Evening News, where Katie Couric herself of the week." Besides his usual oil and gas leanings-he is the guy,after all,who in 2004 had decided to interview him forthat night's plays, he's bought nearly 400,000 acres of helped fund the campaign by the Swift Boat newscast. water rights in the Panhandle, giving him Veterans for Truth to discredit John Kerry- "Now,listen to me, we're in aditch," Boone control of billions of gallons ofwater, which Boone is suddenly acting like the greenest told the reporters in his slow,gravelly drawL he hopes to sell to Dallas and Fort Worth and of Democrats. What's more, he's putting his "We've got all these politicians talking about their surrounding suburbs at aprofit oftens money where his mouth is. In addition to better health care and what all, but believe of millions of dollars a year. What's more, his wind farm, which will cost $10 billion me, we're not going to have the money to he's started work on what he calls "the big- to build, he's also the founder and majority take care of sick people-or anyone else as gest deal" of his career: the construction of stockholder of California-based Clean En- far as I'm concerned- ifwe don't fix our en- the world's largest wind -energy farm, con- ergy Fuels, which markets natural gas for ergyproblem right now. I've got an idea what taining as many as two thousand turbines buses, airport shuttles, and taxis. "There to do. It might not be aperfect idea, but hell, spread over five Panhandle counties that are more than seven million natural gas- powered vehicles on the road worldwide, but only 150,000 or so in the United States, M~Il"I9IS which doesn't make a lick of sense whatso- ever,"he told me. "Natural gas is cheaper and cleaner than gasoline, and it all comes from fields right here in our ownbackyard, not over there in the Mideast." The Boone is even willing to talk about a sub- ject that is considered heresy in his line of Takeover work: global warming. "Oh, what the hell, what would be all that bad about reducing Game our carbon footprint?" he asked me one day, which prompted me to think, "Did I really just hear Boone Pickens use the phrase 'car- bon footprint'?" Although he insists he is not turning into aDemocrat- "I've never voted for aDemocrat for president, and I'm not go- ingto start now,"he said, looking at me as if! were an idiot when I dared to suggest that he might mark his ballot for Barack Obama-he does say that he would be more than happy to sit down with both Obama and John Mc- Cain to tell them about his plan. "Sofar, nei- ther one ofthem seems to have any idea that energy has got to be the number one issue of this election," he said. "So if they're not " ~ ;~/. , ..fJ!~ going to talk about it, then I guess I better damn well start." SO FA~ .:/(ClHIZ ~ .v» In addition to the advertising campaign, Boone is also laying out his energy mani- Nf:fHfR. ONf OF 'n' nomattertheobstacles,"hewrites,adding festo in his latest memoir, The First Billion A 1 that the president should appoint an energy Is the Hardest, which Crown is releasing this [ T~r p~HiOrNT; l CANDiDATfS czar who "would be empowered to be deci- month. (His first memoir, Boone, was pub- SE£"'t! TD HAVE" sive, to act fast, and to fix this problem." lished in 1987.)"The times require a George AN y :orA TII AT And does Boone believe thatthis particu- Patton, someone who can lead us to victory lar Patton should be none other than Boone A EN"'." \I himself? In every interview he gives, he ad- ~ V. ~ I\.~ , amantlysays no, but alot of people are con- b vinced that the old wheeler-dealer would be 1 Y HAs ~O r T{) BE' perfectfortherole. In fact, when I was with ()l~ TUr NtlMB R him in NewYork,Iwasamazedbytheway ~ 1 r he enthralled a new generation of report- ~.,....!' ON€: S~IJE OF ers-almostexactlythesamewayheen- .~ '":! a cCr'-OM" thralleda.generati~nofre~lO~erswhenhe £.~., , was running Mesa in the eighties and com- B DD N E" SA" S ing to New York to make his quixotic take- • over attempts of such Big Oil behemoths as t.t So r ~ U' Gulf. On Good Morning America, after he , T G'I fiE spouted off one of his well-known Boone- ND r Go' II (} To TAtk isms, as he refers to his folksy sayings, he , told host Chris Cuomo about America's ex- ABDfJT •.r.