A Letter From the Publisher: Mar. 4, 1985

Before setting out to report this week’s cover story on Texas Oilman T. Boone Pickens, Senior Correspondent Frederick Ungeheuer did some preliminary interviews. “Everyone I talked to,” he says, “told me, ‘One thing about covering Boone–you’ll enjoy yourself.’ And they were absolutely right.” Ungeheuer retraced Pickens’ life from its beginnings in Holdenville, Okla., to his early days as a geologist and wildcatter in the Southwest’s Anadarko Basin, to Denver, Houston, Wall Street and Amarillo, Texas, his present home and headquarters.

For more than a week, Ungeheuer observed Pickens at work. Traveling with Pickens was part of the fun. “He uses a corporate jet the way other people use taxis, flying from Texas to New York City for a noon meeting and getting back to Amarillo for dinner.” Ungeheuer also had the rare opportunity to attend private sessions with Pickens and his associates. “One of Pickens’ most remarkable qualities is his openness,” says Ungeheuer. “Very few corporate chieftains would let a reporter sit in on meetings of his operations committee as such confidential matters as marketing strategies or personnel problems are discussed. You ask about one of his known adversaries, and he will say, ‘Why don’t you talk to him?’ before he tells you how the relationship or case looks from his side. You never feel that he is holding back or trying to cover up. That is a large part of what makes him so engaging.”

The biggest reporting problem Ungeheuer had was holding back the flow of Pickens’ Texas yarns, usually told with full sound effects and gestures. “To Pickens a question was like a match put to tinder,” Ungeheuer says. “Asking about a financial arrangement would elicit an anecdote about a nouveau riche Texan and his interior decorator, and then other stories. It was hard to lead the conversation back to the answers I needed.” Ungeheuer’s dispatches, anecdotes and all, went to Associate Editor John Greenwald, who wrote the cover story with assistance from Reporter-Researchers Lawrence Mondi and Richard Bruns.

Ungeheuer, who first joined TIME as a correspondent at the Paris Bureau in 1963, began to specialize in business and economic reporting ten years later. He was based in Brussels as European economic correspondent from 1977 to 1980, then moved to New York as financial correspondent. Compared with the hundreds of top executives he has interviewed, Pickens, Ungeheuer says, “impressed me as a man who has grown with his job and his ambitions, someone who would have fun even if he weren’t rich and powerful. He is the epitome of the American self-made corporate buccaneer.”