The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Had the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement any future without its champion, Harold Ickes? Support for the agreement now came from an unlikely source: Navy Secretary James Forrestal. A driving, ambitious and politically conservative former investment banker from Dillon, Read, Forrestal was one of the first senior policymakers to conclude that the United States had to organize itself for a protracted confrontation with the Soviet Union. Oil held a central place in Forrestal’s strategy for security in the postwar world. “The Navy,” he said, “cannot err on the side of optimism” in its estimates for what supplies might be available. The largest known oil reserves outside the United States were in the area of the Persian Gulf. “The prestige and hence the influence of the United States is in part related to the wealth of the Government and its nationals in terms of oil resources, foreign as well as domestic,” he said. “The active expansion of such holdings is very much to be desired.” The State Department should work out a program to substitute Middle Eastern oil for American oil, he added, and use its “good offices” to “promote the expansion of United States oil holdings abroad, and to protect such holdings as already exist, i.e., those in the Persian Gulf area.”