The Pickens Profile You Haven’t Read

Pickens likes to portray his years as a corporate buccaneer during the 1980s as "shareholder activism." When Mesa fell into a cash crisis in the mid '90s after the price of natural gas collapsed, there was no mercy for him on Wall Street. Pickens called in Texas financier Richard Rainwater, and his wife and business partner, Darla Moore, to help raise capital. (Rainwater helped another oilman, George W. Bush, escape his money problems by making him co-owner of the Texas Rangers, a deal that eventually made Bush a multimillionaire.)

Moore, a leveraged-buyout specialist dubbed "the Toughest Babe in the Business" by Fortune, tried to raise $1 billion on Wall Street for Mesa. "I found out there wasn't a bank in the country that would touch the deal if Boone was CEO," Moore told NEWSWEEK. "I tried to soften the message [but] he was really surprised. 'But I get along with all those guys,' is what he said." The Rainwaters worked out a deal for Pickens to retire as CEO, and bought him out, a deal that still rankles the billionaire. Moore whooped with surprise when told by a NEWSWEEK reporter that Pickens had compared her in his book to a "wolverine that pisses on everything it doesn't eat." Moore responds, "I think what people don't know about Boone is that deep down he is actually—I hate to say this—a nice man. And he knows more about energy than anybody in the world."

It's not as though Pickens doesn't have a few crafty deals on his own ledger. Five years ago he launched a controversial scheme to buy water rights around Roberts County, Texas, the same region of the panhandle where he plans to build his wind farm—and where he owns a 68,000-acre ranch. The idea was to pump water from the Ogallala aquifer to cities downstate. Though he never found a buyer for the water, Pickens did win the right of eminent domain for his pipeline. His attorneys applied to create an entity known as a groundwater-supply district, which was gerrymandered to include only two voters: his two ranch hands. The measure passed, to no one's surprise. Though Pickens says he has abandoned the water project, his lawyers want to use the water corridor to site a private transmission line from his panhandle wind farm to power-hungry cities. "You have to admire his guts and his gall," says Thomas (Smitty) Smith, director of Public Citizen, an advocacy group that opposed Pickens's water business.

Despite tangling with Pickens earlier, Smith supports his vision of transforming the great plains into the "Saudi Arabia of wind energy." Pickens says private investors will provide the $1 trillion or so to erect thousands of turbines through the wind corridor stretching from the panhandle to Canada. But it will take Congress and a new president to build a national power grid connecting the wind corridor—as well as the emerging solar corridor across the desert Southwest—to the nation's population centers. It's a challenge Pickens likens to creating the Interstate Highway system in the 1950s. The grid could cost about $200 billion, but compared with the $700 billion exported each year to pay the country's oil tab, says Pickens, "it's a bargain."

Whether the Pickens Plan is feasible—or affordable—is an open question. But his shrewd sense of timing is beyond doubt. Last year he correctly predicted that oil would reach $100 a barrel by mid-2008, a threshold it has hovered over since May. Months before that, Pickens was plotting his $58 million media blitz to push energy independence as a top-tier issue in the presidential campaign. His needling seems to be working. In new ads promoting their own remedies, Barack Obama, John McCain—and even Paris Hilton in her spoof—dutifully echo Pickens's message about energy security. "T. Boone Pickens is right," said Obama, who also wants the country to invest heavily in renewables and al-low "limited" offshore drilling. McCain, for his part, announced an "all of the above" approach, saying he supports offshore drilling, more nuclear power plants and the development of alternative energies such as wind, solar and biofuels.

When it comes to energy, Pickens bills himself as "bipartisan." He's disappointed that Republicans whose careers he's financed, including George W. Bush, have done little in his view to guarantee energy security (a supporter of Rudy Giuliani's during this year's GOP primary season, Pickens says, "I doubt we spent five minutes talking about energy"). He says he has no plans to donate to McCain, in order to avoid confusion about his motives.

And what, exactly are those motives? This being Pickens, they are complex. He says rebuilding the American energy system "is the most important work I've ever done." It's a message even his former opponents seem to buy. "He said, 'I'm 80 years old and I want to die recognizing that I've done something for my country rather than make a lot of money for myself,'" says Senator Reid, who admitted to NEWSWEEK he found the Swift Boat ads "repulsive" and was initially suspicious of Pickens's motives now. "To be a convert on energy at the age of 80? That's pretty good." Pickens says he's always been captivated by the imaginary headline THE OLD MAN MAKES A COMEBACK. If he pulls it off, Pickens's legacy play will be the biggest deal of his career.

With Daniel Stone in Washington and Ashley R. Harris in New York

© 2008