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

by Daniel Yergin

Paul Walton, the geologist, had come down with amebic dysentery while negotiating in Saudi Arabia in 1948. It took him three years to recover. Getty gave him a $1200 bonus, and Walton returned to Salt Lake City to work as an independent geologist. In the early 1960s, more than a decade after he had first spotted that small mound in the Neutral Zone from the air, Walton was visiting England. He telephoned Getty from London, and the billionaire invited him to Sutton Place. Getty demonstrated the positive effects of his devotion to physical fitness; well into his seventies, he regularly lifted weights, which he kept in his bedroom. The two men reminisced about how furious Getty had become at the refusal of the Aminoil people to drill in the little mound that Walton had spotted from the air. Finally, they had given way, vindicating Walton—and Getty. The Neutral Zone was by far, Getty said, his largest single asset. “He was very favorably impressed with the whole operation,” Walton recalled. And well he should have been. It was estimated that his company still had more than a billion barrels of recoverable reserves in place there. The Neutral Zone had made him not only the richest American, but also the richest private citizen in the world. As for Walton, the man who had spotted the site, he continued to put together quite ordinary drilling deals back in Salt Lake City. When Getty died in 1976, age eighty-three, the eulogy at his funeral was delivered by the Duke of Bedford. “W...