PICKENS| NOONAN | TOOBIN | STEIN

2009-2010 Series

T. Boone Pickens
Entrepreneur, author, philanthropist

The breadth of T. Boone Pickens' career is staggering. He built the largest independent oil company in the United States and flourished as an entrepreneur after leaving it, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Among his lengthy accolades, Financial World named him CEO of the Decade in 1989 and the Oil and Gas Investor listed him as one of the “100 Most Influential People of the Petroleum Century.

“The thing you have to understand about Boone is that it’s all about action,” longtime associate Bobby Stillwell told Grant’s Interest Rate Observer in 2004. “There’s no sitting around.”

Pickens is afflicted with the inherent restlessness that drives most entrepreneurs. That restlessness manifested itself early in his life. While he was still a teen, the Holdenville, Oklahoma, native expanded his newspaper route sales by acquiring surrounding routes one by one.

Traditional corporate life chafed Pickens. The Oklahoma State University graduate left his first adult employer, Phillips Petroleum, and started what would become Mesa Petroleum with $2,500 and a healthy dose of moxey. He built his company into an independent powerhouse that challenged and changed the good-old-boy corporate culture in America.

During this time, his face appeared regularly on every significant business publication in America. He put a spotlight on the rights of the true owners of American businesses, its shareholders. He pounded on the doors of Japanese boardrooms, demanding that American investors have the same access to Japan and other foreign markets as foreign investors have in the United States. When at 68 he left the independent oil company he had nurtured for forty years, he reinvented himself, built a new, highly successful company, and made more money than he ever had before. During the past few years, his uncanny on-the-mark forecasts on the price of oil have made him the focus of major news programs and led CNBC to label him the "Oracle of Oil."

During the span of his career, Pickens has made hundreds of millions of dollars— for others as well as himself — and he isn’t timid about spreading it around. “I like making money. I like giving it away,” he has often said. The breadth of his philanthropy — nearly $700 million — includes medical research, athletics, and academic projects. In 2006, his charitable activities, which included $175 million and the establishment of the T. Boone Pickens Foundation, placed him on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of top U.S. philanthropists for the second straight year. His Foundation is focused on improving lives through grants supporting educational programs, health and medical research and services, athletics and corporate wellness, the entrepreneurial process, at-risk youth, and conservation and wildlife initiatives.

“Entrepreneurs search for — and create — value,” Pickens wrote in Boone Pickens: the Luckiest Guy in the World. “That underlying value is what my life is all about — whether the focus is the energy business or some other endeavor. Today, we enjoy a robust economy and significant shareholders’ say in the companies they own. Takeovers, solicited or otherwise, have become an accepted business practice; today, the Business Roundtable does not attack the acquirers, win or lose. Countless gambles played a part in bringing that combination together. Our role in the journey was worth the risks.”

His life, stunning achievements and stinging losses alike, is chock full of lessons, most of which he has readily shared over the years. His impact on American culture reflects his many interests and passions, including his unyielding belief in the entrepreneurial spirit, his leadership in corporate fitness, the need for alternative fuel development, and his prudent stewardship of American lands. Pickens, a proud alum of OSU (it was operating as Oklahoma A&M when he graduated), has donated the gist of his professional papers to his alma mater.
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Peggy Noonan
Writer, political commentater, historian

Peggy Noonan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the best selling author of seven books on American politics, history and culture. Her essays have appeared in Forbes, Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times and other publications. She is a frequent guest on political talk shows. She has also been nominated for Emmy Awards for the writing of a post-9/11 television special and for her work on the television drama The West Wing. Noonan is a member of the board of the Manhattan Institute.

Her most recent book, “John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father,” was published by Viking in November, 2005. Her collection of post-9/11 columns, “A Heart, a Cross and a Flag: America Today,” was published by Free Press in June, 2003. “When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan,” published by Viking in November, 2001, was a New York Times bestseller.

Noonan is also the author of the best selling “The Case Against Hillary Clinton” (HarperCollins, March, 2000). Her first book, “What I Saw at the Revolution” was called “A love letter to the American political process,” by Time Magazine. Her second book, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was called “the voice of our times” by USA Today. Noonan’s third book, “Simply Speaking,” was published in paperback as “On Speaking Well,” in 1999; Forbes magazine said of it, “Peggy Noonan packs a wallop of practical wisdom and insightful tips for rookie and veteran speechmakers alike…this wee volume, written by one of this century’s premier presidential speechwriters, will guide you correctly.”

In 1996, Noonan was one of ten historians and writers who contributed essays on the American presidency for the book, “Character Above All.” In 1995 she wrote and hosted a PBS series on the debate over American values. Noonan was a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986. In 1988 she was chief speechwriter for George Bush when he ran for the presidency.

She holds honorary doctorates from Adelphi University, St. John Fisher College, Miami University, and her alma mater, Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Before entering the Reagan White House, Noonan was a producer at CBS News in New York, where she wrote and produced Dan Rather’s daily radio commentary. She also wrote television news specials for CBS News. As editorial and public affairs director at WEEI-AM, the CBS owned station in Boston, she won the Tom Phillips Award for broadcast commentary. In 1978 and 1979 she was an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.

She lives in New York City.
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Jeffrey Toobin
CNN senior analyst, writer, attorney, author

Jeffrey Toobin is a senior analyst for CNN Worldwide. Based in the network's New York bureau, Toobin joined CNN in April 2002.

Toobin joined CNN from ABC News, where, during his six-year tenure as a legal analyst, he provided legal analysis on the nation’s most provocative and high profile cases, including the O.J. Simpson civil trial and the Kenneth Starr investigation of the Clinton White House. Toobin received a 2001 Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elian Gonzales custody saga.

Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has been covering legal affairs for the magazine since 1993. He has written articles on such subjects Attorney General John Ashcroft, the 2001 dispute over Florida’s votes for president, the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the trial of Timothy McVeigh. His article, An Incendiary Defense, published in the July 25, 1994, issue of the magazine, broke the news that the O.J. Simpson defense team planned to accuse Mark Fuhrman of planting evidence and to play "the race card."

Previously, Toobin served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. He also served as an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, an experience that provided the basis for his first book, Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case—United States v. Oliver North.

Toobin has written several critically acclaimed, best-selling books including A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President; The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson; and Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election. All three books were published by Random House.

His most recent book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, was published by Doubleday and spent more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list and earned the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Prize for Nonfiction from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Toobin earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
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Ben Stein
Right here is everything you'd ever want to know about Ben, excluding his shoe size and length of his left arm.  Now read until your eyes start getting all foggy and stuff. 

Ben Stein (Benjamin J. Stein) was born November 25, 1944 in Washington, D.C., (He is the son of the economist and writer Herbert Stein) grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Montgomery Blair High School. He graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with honors in economics. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1970 as valedictorian of his class by election of his classmates. He also studied in the graduate school of economics at Yale. He has worked as an economist at The Department of Commerce, a  poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C., a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., a university adjunct at American University in Washington, D.C., at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. At American U. He taught about the political and social content of mass culture. He taught the same subject at UCSC, as well as about political and civil rights under the Constitution. At Pepperdine, he has taught about libel law and about securities law and ethical issues since 1986.

In 1973 and 1974, he was a speech writer and lawyer for Richard Nixon at The White House and then for Gerald Ford. (He did NOT write the line, "I am not a crook.") He has been a columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner (R.I.P.) and King Features Syndicate, and a frequent contributor to Barrons, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew major national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, E! Online, and most of all, has written a lengthy diary for twenty years for The American Spectator. He currently writes a column for The New york Times Sunday Business Section and has for many years, a column about personal finance for Yahoo!, is a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, and for Fox News.

He has written, co-written and published thirty books, including seven novels, largely about life in Los Angeles, and twenty-one nonfiction books, about finance and about ethical and social issue in finance, and also about the political and social content of mass culture. He has done pioneering work in uncovering the concealed messages of TV and in explaining how TV and movies get made. His titles include A License to Steal, Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation, The View From Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights, DREEMZ, Financial Passages, and Ludes. His most recent books are the best selling humor self help series, How To Ruin Your Life. He has also been a longtime screenwriter, writing, among many other scripts (most of which were unmade ) the first draft of The Boost, a movie based on Ludes, and the outlines of the lengthy miniseries Amerika, and the acclaimed Murder in Mississippi. He was one of the creators of the well regarded comedy, Fernwood Tonight.

He is also an extremely well known actor in movies, TV, and commercials. His part of the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was recently ranked as one of the fifty most famous scenes in American film. From 1997 to 2002, he was the host of the Comedy Central quiz show, "Win Ben Stein's Money." The show has won seven Emmies. He was a judge on CBS's Star Search, and on VH-1's "America's Most Smartest Model."  

He lives with his wife, Alexandra Denman ( former lawyer,) six cats and three large dogs in Beverly Hills. He is active in pro-animal and pro-life charitable events.
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