Where are you? he said. What are you? Who were you? What sort of person?
Nice, I said. Kind of quiet.
But what were youlike,he said.
Well, that was the sad part.
I didn’t really know.
Having only just gotten started.
I don’t know about any speech, I said.
But his thoughts were already elsewhere.
Certain memories were moving happily in him: long working evenings in the cold months of a distant year; a delivery boy who, lingering too long in the doorway, had needed to be rebuked; a growing sense between him and some fellow (Dell? Right: Ed Dell) that the thing they were working on together was finally falling into place. Dell was good. Dell was shy, obsequious, a bit in awe of him, sort of a kiss-up, really, but every now and then Dell would rise to the occasion and pop out a line that nicely sidestepped a too-blunt statement of a thing and reworded it in a way that both managed to assuage the concern and slyly debunk it, leaving the audience feeling they were in the hands of someone who, having examined all sides of the thing, had come genially down on the side of keeping the extant system chugging along in the interest of the common good.
Out in the far distance, on those long-ago winter work evenings (across the mesquite grove, past the Western-style split-rail fencing quaintly enclosing the corporate compound), would be downtown Dallas, looking like a miniature toy town over which strings of Christmas lights had been draped. The snowflakes on the Bank of America building were big as cars but you could cover one up with your thumb from out here. Ditto thefifty-foot candy cane hanging down from the sky deck of the Praetorian. Over the course of the evening, he and Dell would slip into what they chummily called “mind meld,” passing marked-up pages back and forth, adding this phrase, taking that one out, and then, at one point, Dell would say, “Try,” and my charge would stand up and read the thing aloud.
One night Dell nodded, my charge nodded back, and they were done, and that was it: the speech he’d give a week later, at Aarhus, to the ISPP, the International damn Society of Petroleum frigging Professionals.
What an honor. Keynoting that big bear? They didn’t ask just anybody to do that. And not just anybody could have knocked it out of the park like he had.
Like they had.
Like he and Dell had.
Good little speech, that.
What a triumph. Jesus Christ. Calls rolled in from all over. Marie had a whiteboard on which she’d tape up the latest clippings, the most special letters of congrats. Imagine that: small-town guy from Bumfuck gives a little seven/eight-page talk, offers a few modest insights, and pretty soon his logic, his examples, are showing up all over the world, altering the path down which the whole shebang—
Could one speech really be that major, have that big an influence?
Well, he only knew what people told him.
Ha.
But yes.
It could.
It had.
To wit:
Not long after, the new administration changed tack, decided to double down on the more traditional, time-tested energy strategy (sensible decision there), withdraw from that Kyoto debacle. The EPA head (bit of a greenie), feeling ignored, resigned in protest. Rory “Red” Randall (“our” lobbyist, sure, but also a damn fine scientist) urged the new administration to shit-can Mick Watson, chair of the (as Red called it) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Crap. And Watson, perceived to be standing in the way of the more robust approach favored by the vice president (a good friend to this day, by the way), got, guess what? Shit-canned. Two other greenies with hostile agendas, Sprunt and Briley, holdovers from the previous administration, left the IPCC on their own, under pressure, almost as if—now, this was just his interpretation, mind you—the scales had fallen from the eyes of those running the country.
They’d seen the light, reversed course.
And the course had stayed reversed to this very day.
Because of that speech.
Best part? It gave his enemies fits. Threw them into absolute conniptions. Lord, what a hoot. Some Luddite idiot had characterized it as “one of the most irresponsible speeches any American has ever delivered.”
Ha.
What a hyperbolic statement.
