Daniel Yergin, Turning a Prophet; How a Historian

华盛顿邮报1998年对Yergin的采访，大部分篇幅讲述了他怎样从一个历史学者成为能源政策分析权威

Daniel Yergin should be the easiest guy in the world to hate.
It's not enough that he's smart (Yale BA, Cambridge PhD, Harvard post-doc), rich (his business grosses $ 75 million a year), talented (six well-reviewed books, one Pulitzer Prize) and well connected (he advises the U.S. and foreign governments on strategic issues). He's also lucky as hell.
His second book hit the stores in 1979 just as Americans were queuing up for gasoline and panicking about the years ahead. Called "Energy Future," it sold 300,000 copies in six languages.


His fourth book came out in 1991 just as Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait and threatening to choke off oil from the Middle East. That book, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," sold some 700,000 copies in 13 languages, won the Pulitzer and was made into a PBS series seen by some 20 million people.
His latest book, "The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World," is following suit. The New York Times, leading a chorus of critical hosannas, described it as "extraordinarily ambitious" and "brilliantly successful" history that reads "like a novel."
It's emerged just as capitals from Washington to Jakarta have begun to discover they are not as central and powerful as they might once have thought -- that in fact, the powers of presidents and parliaments are nothing compared with that wielded by vast sums of money swirling around the globe at the touch of a computer key.
Yergin was asked to a special "Thinker's Dinner" at the White House on the strength of "The Commanding Heights." It's already in its fourth printing.
By rights, then, the author should affect the lofty disdain of one of Washington's many kiss-my-ring pooh-bahs, dropping names and credentials around like coins scattered to beggars.
This is not the case.
"I'm really not very organized," he sort of apologizes, a slightly rumpled figure wandering jet-lagged through his seven-room suite of offices on Connecticut Avenue like he might be lost. "Writing is just what I do to relax."
With his steel-rim glasses, beatific smile and weedy hairline battling hard against recession, the 51-year-old mega-author-tycoon comes across like nothing so much as the genial professor who keeps misplacing the faculty lounge. His house in Northwest Washington is modest and unremarkable, his study looks like the wreckage from a terrorist bombing and his efforts to explain his success keep wandering off into sunny vales of academic woolgathering.
Charles Dickens is a major hero. Yergin might be one of his creations.
The extraordinary timing of his best-known books, he insists, is "entirely due to my inability to meet deadlines. If I had finished my books on time they would have been too ahead of the news to attract notice. And they would probably have been quite different as well because books lead me in all sorts of different directions. You know, you never really finish a book. The publisher just finally takes it away from you."
Yergin's obsessive and endless rewriting, updating and general fiddling with manuscripts and galley proofs is so notorious that Simon & Schuster has banned him from badgering compositors and proofreaders. He has been known to sneak almost into the pressroom in an effort to retool just one more sentence. His publishers no longer tell him where his books are printed.
Not every businessman cares that much about language, particularly one who may be on the next plane to Abu Dhabi or Baku to counsel some finance minister. But then not every businessman is an ex-police reporter's son from "the wrong side" of Beverly Hills.
"My father never played catch with me," Yergin explains. "But he talked to me endlessly about writing. Maybe it all has something to do with that."
A Man on the Go
For a guy who travels 250,000 miles a year and spends half his time in some distant hotel room, Yergin appears remarkably omnipresent in Washington. If he's not speaking at a think tank or testifying on Capitol Hill, he's signing books or playing talking head. What sets him apart from the average author-consultant in town is his reputation for being able to see a bit further over the global horizon. In the process, he glimpses meaningful and strategically useful patterns among the political events and data-blizzards of the day.
His books "reveal a remarkable degree of insight and freshness," says James R Schlesinger, former head of the CIA and energy and defense departments. "His approach is totally non-ideological. His only substantive agenda is analytical. He regards the free market as a tool, not as an altar."
When the OPEC nations announced plans to cut oil production recently, Yergin popped up on "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" to suggest there was probably less to the development than might appear. Then he flew off to Cambridge, Mass., headquarters of his 170-employee Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), with offices in Oakland, Paris, Oslo, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Calgary and Seoul. CERA just merged with an outfit that analyzes the world's financial markets for 2,400 institutions in 57 countries. Yergin, its president, is also a member of the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board and a fellow of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
He deals with all this by trying to pretend he's Uriah Heep.
He says he's not a regular at the White House. Before the Thinker's Dinner in January he hadn't seen the president "since the state dinner for Yeltsin." He insists he's happiest when collapsed alone after midnight in his tan leather living room chair off Reno Road, writing out his books in longhand. He normally rises at 7 or so, writes a few hours before heading to the office, works all day there, comes home about 7 p.m. for dinner and a brief nap, then awakens "in something of a dreamlike state" to write from 9:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. But that's when he's not on a plane.
"The most fascinating aspect of the business side of my life is that it's global," he sighs. "The pain is also that it's global." Asked how many days a year he's away from home and from writing, he laughs a little nervously. "I think I've repressed that," he says. "But clean shirts are always a problem."
In fact, he seems embarrassed that his life keeps overflowing the neat vocational categories that seem to encompass most people in Washington. "I suppose I'm a historian that tries to help people grapple with the way the past informs the immediate future," he says thoughtfully. "I just get these obsessions. And they lead to other obsessions." Books and business result.
"The Commanding Heights" started out to be a 60,000-word essay on privatization. "I remember just when I started work on it," he says with a smile. He and his wife, Georgetown professor Angela Stent, and their two children were on vacation in Jamaica with the usual family baggage of computers and research material. "And I was the only person on the beach reading a biography of Clement Atlee."
Traveling the world, he'd become intrigued with how many governments were following Britain's lead in shedding state-owned enterprises in order to make them more efficient and to gain the taxes they would pay as private businesses. But observation of the privatization phenomenon, he says, turned into a fascination with how and why it was happening at the same time in so many different ways in so many different places.
Before long, he says, he and his business partner and co-author, Joseph Stanislaw, realized they were witnessing one of the great watersheds of history -- more significant than Europe's great revolutionary year of 1848. Like a giant crustacean shedding the once-protective carapace now restricting its growth, the world was sloughing off central economic controls it had worn in various forms for most of the 20th century. And it was rediscovering the dynamism -- and the dangers -- of the free market.
In 1922, Lenin had stated that any government must control "the commanding heights" -- the most important elements of a state's economy. But now, all over the world, governments were agreeing it was preposterous for the state to be running things like steel mills and telephone exchanges.
It was happening in Russia and in Bolivia, in Argentina and Ghana, in India and in the United States. Different people were leading the march in each country, though free-market economist Milton Friedman's footprints seemed to be everywhere. It was a revolution born less of ideology than of pragmatism. In places as different as China and Peru, people were finally admitting not only that the theories of Karl Marx didn't work, but that those of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, had been overtaken by reality as well.
Though ideas were driving the global revolution, Yergin discovered, there were fascinating characters whipping the horses of change -- former leftist Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil, China's Deng Xiaoping, who had owned a bean curd shop while studying communism in Paris, and Russian economist Yegor Gaidar, who would bring down the very Soviet system his grandfather had helped create.
Most of all there was Margaret Thatcher and her far less-known "minister of ideas" Keith Joseph in Britain, leading the rollback of a half-century of socialism in the very homeland of Keynes.
"When we started," Yergin says, "we had no real concept of how thoroughly Keynes and his advocacy of government spending had moved from the stage. It still rather amazes me."
Some historians see great events shaped by great personalities, others see people dwarfed by massive impersonal forces of economics or class. Yergin sees both schools dwarfed by the power of ideas. But what his book captures best are the fascinating hinge points of history.
When Margaret Thatcher began her drive to privatize and decentralize Britain's state-run economy, for example, her efforts were so unpopular she was on the brink of rejection by the voters. What won her the people's allegiance -- and the mandate to carry forward her economic reforms -- was her prosecution of the 1982 Falklands War. But that war might never have been started by Argentina's military junta had not that country's state-run economy been in even worse shape than Britain's.
Where the frontier between the state and market is to be drawn has never been a matter that could be settled, once and for all, at some grand peace conference. Instead, it has been the subject, over the course of this century, of massive intellectual and political battles as well as constant skirmishes. . . . Today the clash is so far-reaching and so encompassing that it is remaking our world -- and preparing the canvas for the 21st century. -- "The Commanding Heights"
Born to Write
It probably really did all start with his father. The senior Yergin was a publicist for Warner Bros. and later editor of the Hollywood Reporter, and in his later years "puttered around in various unsuccessful business ventures. Like, he started a yogurt business in the 1950s. Bad timing."
But the high point of his father's life, at least in stories to his son, was his years as "the quintessential police reporter in the 1920s and '30s in Chicago. I was pretty old before I discovered there were other people besides my father who covered the St. Valentine's Day Massacre."
If he was raised on newspaper stories, however, Yergin also learned that journalism didn't pay the bills. "My mother was always anxious about money," he remembers. "My father was sort of like Mr. Micawber -- there was always some great deal just around the corner." Money was always short, particularly in comparison with other families in "extremely southern" Beverly Hills, where the Yergins lived.
"I was always working," Yergin says. "I had my first paper route at 9. By 11 I had three other kids delivering papers for me."
And though he was raised as a "pretty typical American liberal" -- at age 9 he organized a group called the Pint-Sized Democrats and remembers going out to cheer Adlai Stevenson -- "I was always in some kind of business as well. I have always been fascinated by the human energy of capitalism."
He went to Beverly Hills High "assuming I would one day become a journalist," and on to Yale in 1964 "because that was where I could get the most financial aid." At Yale he majored in English, wallowed in British writers and found joy in making his hero Dickens the centerpiece of a major research paper on the 19th-century English novel.
He also wrote for the Yale Daily News and started a publication called the New Journal, which was designed as a showcase of Tom Wolfe-style magazine writing.
"But in my junior year I took a course on diplomatic history and wrote a really long research paper on the Spanish Civil War," Yergin remembers. "That convinced me I wanted to write a PhD in history. But I didn't want to go to any more classes." So on a Marshall Scholarship, "I went to Cambridge where it was all tutors and independent study."
His work at Yale with the New Journal had brought him to the attention of Clay Felker of New York magazine, and while in Cambridge was still pursuing a journalistic career, writing regularly for New York, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine and various British papers, particularly personality profiles that taught him "how to shape a story."
When he returned from England in 1970 to teach at Harvard, he talked with the New York Times about joining its staff. But though he had an "enormous number of opinions on all sorts of subjects" and kept churning out columns, "by then I'd become interested in the academic world. I really anguished over whether to pursue an academic career or a journalistic one. As it turned out I didn't go in either direction."
He did teach at Harvard, first in the government department, then in the business school, then at the JFK School of Government. He turned his doctoral thesis into his first book, "Shattered Peace -- The Origins of the Cold War," which, when he was 30, caught a front-page review in the New York Times book section.
But Harvard, he suggests, never took him terribly seriously. "I think they sort of disdained me as a popularizer," he says with a small smile of amusement. "I wrote in short declarative sentences, for example . . .
"They couldn't understand how a faculty member could want to write cover stories for New York magazine on the business implications of some new frozen pizza. . . . And when I told them I wanted to join the business school because I was interested in capitalism, the interviewer looked at me strangely and said, 'Oh, we don't talk about capitalism here.' "
Yergin, however, was undaunted. After the Arab oil boycott in the early 1970s he had joined what became the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School, surveying the global prospects for future fuel. "Energy Future," authored with Harvard Business School professor Robert Stobaugh, took a somewhat more optimistic outlook than the doomsday mood of the times, and correctly forecast the enormous differences even modest energy conservation could make.
"Energy Future," Yergin says, "changed my life. It projected me out of the academic and foreign policy world in which I was something of a junior member, and into the business world where they measure you somewhat differently."
When the trust department at Manufacturers Hanover in New York approached him in 1982 about consulting on energy, he and former research assistant Jamie Rosenfield decided to set up CERA.
"We still argue over just how it started. I say it was with a $ 2 file cabinet from the Salvation Army. Jamie steadfastly maintains it was a $ 7 cabinet. But whatever it was, we sort of made up the business as we went along."
Traveling from the Middle East to the Gulf Coast to the North Sea to Venezuela searching out answers to strategic energy questions for his growing list of clients inevitably led Yergin to ask himself where the chase for oil started, who started it and why, who the great winners and losers were and where it all was heading.
The huge success of "The Prize," both as a book and as a PBS television series, really put him on the map. By then, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, his obsession had morphed from the politics of oil into how global politics shapes a nation's economy.
Meanwhile, CERA was booming as increasingly free markets heated up the global economy, and business executives here and abroad discovered not only that there was more information they needed to know, but that it was coming at them faster and faster. The technology for retrieving and delivering that information was advancing from book and journal to fax and Internet to creations undreamed of when he started.
"The great untold story," he says with smile of delight, "is that the 3-D seismic technology which has cut the cost of oil exploration nearly in half in recent years is basically the same computer program that produced the animation in 'Jurassic Park.' "
Is that the next Yergin book?
"Well, actually," he says, "My wife's forbidden me to write any more books for three years. But I have a half-finished screenplay that deals with medieval England . . . "