R.I.P. George Keller: A True Straight Talker

I was saddened this morning to see this obituary in the New York Times for George Keller, the former chairman of Chevron, who died at age 84 of complications from surgery. Way, way back when I was 25 years old and starting out with the Los Angeles Times business section, the paper assigned me to cover the oil beat, which meant I was dealing every day with companies that were notoriously hostile to the media. With most of them, I would count myself lucky if I could get the PR office to return my call.

But it was my great good fortune that one of the big, bad "seven sisters" of the industry was being run by a man who took a very different approach. A few years before I arrived on the beat, Keller had issued the order that there was to be no more "no comment" from Standard Oil of California. This kind of openness was a real culture shock to the company, and to the industry. Most remarkably, that order went right up to the top. I quickly discovered that the chairman himself was one of the most engaging, accessible, informative--and truthful--sources a reporter could have, whether the subject was drilling off the coast of California or the complexities of doing business in the Middle East. In 1984, Keller pulled off what was then the biggest merger ever, buying Gulf Oil--a company larger than Socal--for an astounding figure of $13.3 billion.

I always suspected that one reason he was so patient with my questions was the fact that he had a son who was also starting out in the news business. Often, at the end of our interviews, he would tell me with a father's pride about the latest story that Bill Keller had written for the Dallas Times-Herald. (Bill, it turned out, did okay for himself in this business. He got hired by the New York Times, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the breakup of the Soviet Union and now is the paper's executive editor.) I'd like to offer my condolences to the Keller family, and also my gratitude to George Keller.