Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog
Oilman Oscar Wyatt reveals how his world really works—from freeing the hostages in Iraq to doing deals with China and keeping up with his jet-set marriage.
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Just as suddenly, the shadow disappeared. Wyatt looked up and rummaged around his desk, looking for his Zantac. He suffered from a herniated esophagus, and the thought of Jordan siding with Iraq against the U.S. had aggravated his pain. He pawed his desk like an angry lion, pushing aside the bottle of Listerine, the jar of Vicks, the can of dog deodorant, Tylenol, and several prescription drugs. Finally he located the Zantac, but before he could take it, nature called. “Excuse me,” he said, dashing off to his executive toilet. “I took a diuretic this morning, and I’ve been pissin’ all day.”
Wyatt’s friends and enemies had at least three theories on why he was so opposed to the war in the Gulf: his own economic self-interest, his self-image as an underdog, and his long-standing personal dislike for President Bush. Wyatt thought that Bush had made a fundamental mistake in drawing a line in the sand not in Saudi Arabia, which Wyatt believed was worth fighting for, but in Kuwait, a country he held in contempt for its cowardice. “Almost all of the Kuwaiti casualties thus far have come from auto accidents of people fleeing the country,” growled Wyatt, disregarding reports of Iraqi atrocities. “What a bunch of cowards.”
Certainly he wanted this war over with so he could get back to business as usual in the Middle East. Before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait last August, Wyatt had been negotiating with Iraq and other countries to sell 50 percent of Coastal’s oil-refining and marketing business. The idea was that Iraq would provide low-cost crude in exchange for equity interest in the refineries. Wyatt had been looking for such a linkup with an oil-producing country since 1988. Even more to the point, Coastal had been buying 250,000 barrels of oil a day from Iraq. But Wyatt was enraged at the suggestion that his opposition to the war was motivated by Coastal’s need for Iraqi oil and money. “Baby, don’t be so stupid!” he screamed, jumping to his feet and leaning over the desk. “The world is awash in oil. We’ve got more oil than we know what to do with.”
The day after Bush ordered the embargo on trade with Iraq, Coastal’s top executives met to discuss where they could buy the oil that they were previously getting from Iraq. But Wyatt wasn’t present at the meeting—the moment he heard about the embargo, he flew to Mexico and negotiated a deal to replace the lost Iraqi crude. “I’m going to make money on this war, not lose it,” he said. In fact, Wyatt did make a killing on the low-priced Iraqi crude oil that was at sea en route to the United States when Bush halted all trade with Iraq.
Still, Wyatt admitted that he liked doing business with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “It’s a straight business deal,” he said. “You don’t have to go through any member of the royal family. You don’t have to pay any princes. They operate like an independent oil company. It’s just one price—take it or leave it.” Unlike Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other monarchies, which have historically preferred to deal with large American oil companies, the nonmonarchical countries of the Middle East—Iran, Iraq, Algeria—have always sold some of their production to independents like Wyatt. “Nothing has changed in the oil business in the last one hundred years,” Wyatt said. “It’s still the big guy versus the little guy, the Seven Sisters versus the independent oil company. The Seven Sisters like the Saudis. Guys like me like Iraq.”
Wyatt insisted that it was primarily the emir of Kuwait who was responsible for the oil recession in Texas because it was Kuwait that had defied OPEC oil quotas in the early eighties and overproduced until the price of oil dropped so low that Texans went broke. “Now we’re pulling his chestnuts out of the fire with the lives of our own troops, while the rich young Kuwaitis ride out the war dancing in the discos of London,” said Wyatt. “It makes me positively ill.”
Part of his opposition to the war is based on his animosity toward President Bush. Like rich people everywhere, the Texas rich have always split into two camps: those who made their money and those who inherited it. Nowhere is the distinction between the two any sharper than in the lives of Bush and Wyatt. Bush grew up rich and classy in Connecticut and came to Texas to seek his fortune in the oil fields of West Texas as an adventure. He started at the top. Wyatt grew up poor and rough-edged in Navasota and went to the oil fields in South Texas as a matter of survival. He started at the bottom. “I knew from the beginning George Bush came to Texas only because he was politically ambitious,” said Wyatt. “He flew out here on an airplane owned by Dresser Industries [an oil-field services company based in Dallas]. His daddy was a member of the board of Dresser. That told me all I needed to know to hate him.” Wyatt was one of the few oilmen in Texas who opposed Bush in 1964, when he ran against Ralph Yarborough for the U.S. Senate, and he opposed Bush again in 1970, when he ran against Lloyd Bentsen. Wyatt doesn’t have any more fondness for Bush’s cultural roots than Saddam Hussein has for the monarchs of the Middle East.
Nonetheless, as the air war gave way to the ground war, even Wyatt was impressed by Bush’s handling of the campaign. “The fact that we bombed them for so long saved our lives,” Wyatt told me during a telephone call from Venezuela after the war was over. “Thank God Bush hit ‘em as hard as he hit ‘em.” His statements after the war were consistent with what he had told me before. During an earlier interview, Wyatt had said that having made the bad decision to wage war against Iraq, Bush owed it to the ground forces to use everything in the U.S. arsenal—including nuclear weapons—to protect them.
On the day Wyatt was scheduled to give his speech to the Corpus Christi Chamber of Commerce, he got a call in the early afternoon from John C. White, the former Texas agriculture commissioner who is now Coastal’s lobbyist in Washington. White had read an early draft of Wyatt’s speech and had only one small request. “Do you think,” White asked Wyatt, “that you could tone down your criticism of the president?” After all, the president enjoyed an 80 percent approval rating in most polls. Wyatt’s face reddened in anger. “No, John, I just can’t,” wailed Wyatt, throwing his pencil down on his desk like a spear. “I’ve been as gentle as I could, considering how pissed off I am at him.”
THE TRADER
In 1974, when coastal lawyer Tracy DuBose was stuck for weeks in a district courtroom in Bryan defending Wyatt and Coastal’s business practice, DuBose noticed an old man sitting in the last row of the courtroom. Day after day the old gentleman showed up in court. Finally, the man introduced himself. “I was Oscar Wyatt’s football coach at Navasota High School,” he told DuBose, “and I was hoping that he’d show up in court to testify, because I haven’t seen him in years.”
After assuring the coach to sit tight because Wyatt would show up soon, DuBose asked, “By the way, what kind of football player was Wyatt?” The coach broke into a smile and said, “He was the strongest player I’ve ever coached. He could block like nobody else. The only problem with Oscar was I never could get him to quit holding.”
Everyone who has ever known or done business with Wyatt tells a similar story. His tenacity is legendary, and so is his disregard for the rules of whatever game he’s playing. Thirty years ago, when Wyatt first joined the Corpus Christi Yacht Club, he attended a planning meeting for the annual sailboat competition. “Now, tell me,” he asked, always wary of others, “how would anyone know if one of these guys started their motor during the race?”
His ruthless business tactics—one of his early mottoes was “Leave nothing on the table”—have won him many enemies in the oil industry. In the early years some gas producers were convinced that Wyatt shortchanged them on meter readings; some even resorted to double-metering when doing business with him. In 1980 Wyatt pleaded guilty to federal charges that Coastal had violated oil-pricing regulations. The charge was that Coastal had sold domestic oil at a higher level than that allowed for foreign oil. Wyatt maintains that he pleaded guilty only to stop lengthy court proceedings, but the plea cost him a personal $40,000 fine. However, it was his willingness to fight that allowed him to survive both the seventies, when his business gambles almost caused Coastal to go bust, and the eighties, when he emerged from the worst decade in the history of Texas oil as one of the richest and most influential oilmen left in the state.
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