I was cleaning out the cave (French basement or storage room) the other day. Besides a few bottles of wine, my stuff consisted of my old golf clubs (I played quite a bit in the US, not at all in France) and a few boxes from when I moved to France 18 years ago. One unopened box was given to me by CK even earlier when I moved away from San Antonio, TX in the 90s. CK was one of the main characters around my life at the Bombay Bicycle Club, a local bar in Brackenridge Park (see my description here). The bar, its owners, staff and patrons, made a lasting impression on me; perhaps more so than the faculty colleagues and students at the nearby university where I was a young professor. If my description of CK will seem vague it is because he was always very mysterious to me. Our conversations were certainly influenced by his scotch and my beer, but he had a truly mysterious past. He grew up in the Ukrainian community in Chicago. He entered the University of Chicago without a high school diploma, based on a long conversation with the department head of the Geography Department. In fact, CK had seen the world during his years in the military. I am sure he mentioned Vietnam and Turkey, gunshots and espionage. He eventually earned a PhD, did a tour in Washington, followed by an academic job. When I met him CK was doing well as a real estate “thinker,” not a developer. What this entailed I cannot say, but he had a fantastic apartment and could describe the wheeling and dealing behind the biggest projects in town.
CK’s box was filled with the notebooks and other materials gathered during his stint as a Washington bureaucrat for the US Synthetic Fuels Corporation. Read Remembering Synfuels, 35 Years Later for a short history; it begins,
The Synthetic Fuels Corporation (SFC) might be the biggest boondoggle you’ve never heard of. Established under the Energy Security Act of 1980 in response to the supply scares of the 1970s, the SFC was hailed by President Jimmy Carter as “the cornerstone of U.S. energy policy.” The now-defunct SFC was an independent federal entity that functioned “primarily as an investment bank to accelerate the commercialization of synfuels,” in the words of a February 1983 CRS report.
The fact that it is defunct is important. The New York Times wrote on April 19, 1986, “Government agencies are easily born, but they never seem to die. Rarely do they even fade away. But at 5 P.M. today the Government’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation closed its doors forever.”
The Synthetic Fuels Corporation was a topic of interest in those early days of the Reagan administration as a target for cutting government spending. This is described in a May 31, 1981 article by John A. Hill in the New York Times, Why Didn’t Reagan Simply Kill Synfuels?
The recent nomination of Edward E. Noble to head the synfuels corporation appears finally to answer the question of its fate. The President intends to keep the corporation and utilize its authorities to assist the synfuels effort in the United States. This curious outcome raises a number of questions. Why, for example, did the President decide to retain a program that is not only inconsistent with his own philosophy but is also one that could be terminated so easily in its embryonic state? What did the conservative Ronald Reagan find attractive about a program that a more moderate Republican President, Mr. Ford, found objectionable on conservative grounds and which took a more liberal Democratic President to get through the Congress?
Hill’s answer to the question is quite tepid, “The only answer to this question that I can find is that Mr. Stockman [the Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the start of the Reagan administration and a current writer for LRC] may have decided that he could not fight every battle at once and that the corporation was the least harmful of the budgetary evils since it threatened no near-term outlays. These arguments have obvious flaws.”
There was nothing I found in CK’s box regarding the answer to Hill’s question. Frankly, it was rather boring, typical bureaucratic nonsense. For example, in preparation for a Board Briefing CK prepared a memorandum and received, in part, the following: “I will readily admit to not having read in detail all of the background material attached to your memorandum of May 20, 1982. . . . I think that the presentation would be helped by a very short executive-type summary. . .” In today’s bureaucratic language this would read, “prepare a single slide PowerPoint presentation for the Board.”
But dredging the depths of my torpid memory I did find a treasure. CK told me that the whole of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation was a scam, but not against the people of the US. In fact, CK told me they returned most of the budget each year. The idea was to fool the Soviets that the market for oil would be depressed in part due to this initiative. I don’t know if anyone could say if this ruse had any influence on them. But for any government entity to return part of their budget and to eventually close down sounds like a fairy tale to me, just like that character in a tale CK. I cannot understand why he gave me this box and what I kept for so many years even transporting to France. Did he somehow know I would write about it? It is amazing to me.
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