The Mordida Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

uncommon grasp of the oil and natural gas industry because Bingo McKay had steered him into the business at twenty-two, turning him into a multimillionaire by the time he was twenty-eight. At thirty, Jerome McKay had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma’s Fifth Congressional District, serving with some distinction, or at least with considerable national attention, for two terms until he relinquished his seat to run successfully for Governor of his native state.
    Bingo McKay was fifty-one when he had lugged the huge map of the United States into his kid brother’s office in the Governor’s mansion on Northeast 23rd Street in Oklahoma City and propped it up on an easel. “What the hell’s that for?” the Governor, then only thirty-seven, had asked.
    â€œBasic political geography, lesson number one. How’d you like to be elected President?”
    â€œVery much.”
    â€œLemme tell you how we’re gonna do it.”
    They did it by paying extremely close attention to elementary politics and by running single-mindedly against OPEC and what Jerome McKay branded the oilogopoly—and the Russians. McKay vigorously damned the oil companies’ greed and avarice with unassailable facts and figures, thus confirming the darkest suspicions of 69.2 percent of the American voting public, who had long been hankering for just such a readily identifiable scapegoat.
    McKay offered apparently practical, eminently sensible solutions and presented himself as an expert on the oil business, which he certainly was, and also as a repentant sinner who had made his fortune by following the same villainous practices he now condemned. His campaign autobiography, which he wrote himself in three weeks, was called Plunder! and it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks and then did even better in paperback.
    The McKay brothers’ strategy was both excellent theater and sound politics. Jerome McKay whipped his rivals in nearly a third of the primaries, secured his party’s nomination on the fourteenth ballot at three o’clock in the morning, and went on to win the national election with 48.3 percent of the popular vote and an electoral vote margin of two. A little less than a year later he found himself caught up in a delicate, even desperate, gamble for oil.
    It had started with a whisper in the delegates’ lounge at the United Nations. Then a hint was dropped into the ear of the American Ambassador in Rome. There was nothing firm, of course, said the hinter, but it was just possible that the Libyan Arab Republic, a country rich in both oil and truculence, just might ( might now, you must remember) be willing to increase its production of oil and earmark it for the United States—a firm guarantee, of course—in exchange for the right to purchase some of the latest in American technological gadgetry, including just a few items that might be described as extremely sophisticated weaponry.
    Jerome McKay decided to nibble at the tempting bait and sent some murmurings and whisperings of his own to Tripoli by way of Lagos, Nigeria. The American signal in due course reached the ears of the leader of the new military regime in Libya, Colonel Youssef Mourabet, a jumped-up Army major who had come to power after the unexpected death six months before from a heart attack of the still young, often choleric Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. The heart attack, it was rumored widely, had been brought on by a fit of apoplectic rage.
    So an unofficial twelve-man delegation headed by Libya’s new Minister of Defense, Major Ali Arifi, had been dispatched to the United States on an informal exploratory window-shopping expedition. And since it was all totally and determinedly unofficial, the President had slipped his brother in as tour guide, thus separating the administration nicely from any official recognition of the junket, but pleasing the Libyans enormously