When Did Presidents of the United States Begin to Worry about Our Dependence on Foreign Oil Supplies?

In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush urged America to become energy independent. He remarked, “Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology.” He also noted that by improving our technology we could reduce the amount of Middle East oil imports.

When did presidents of the United States begin to worry about our dependence on foreign oil supplies?

In his 1957 State of the Union address, President Dwight Eisenhower noted the importance of a free Middle East as he stated that the economies of Europe could be adversely affected should the Middle East fall into enemy hands--a not so subtle allusion to our growing dependence on Middle East oil, which the president considered alarming. The region had been in turmoil for years. In 1953 the CIA sponsored a coup in Iran after the government there attempted to nationalize British oil interests. In 1956 Egypt seized the Suez Canal.

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did not mention oil in their State of the Union addresses. This may have been because the attention of the country was focused in those years on the civil rights movement and Vietnam. Also, the price of oil was relatively low, roughly around $15/barrel in 2004 dollars. The price was going down rather than up.

Gerald Ford’s first State of the Union address in 1975 had much to say about oil. OPEC had imposed an embargo on oil exports to the United States as punishment for our support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Said Ford:

Economic disruptions we and others are experiencing stem in part from the fact that the world price of petroleum has quadrupled in the last year. But in all honesty, we cannot put all of the blame on the oil-exporting nations. We, the United States, are not blameless. Our growing dependence upon foreign sources has been adding to our vulnerability for years and years, and we did nothing to prepare ourselves for such an event as the embargo of 1973.

Ford outlined the following solution to the problem:

First, we must reduce oil imports by 1 million barrels per day by the end of this year and by 2 million barrels per day by the end of 1977. Second, we must end vulnerability to economic disruption by foreign suppliers by 1985. Third, we must develop our energy technology and resources so that the United States has the ability to supply a significant share of the energy needs of the free world by the end of this century.

Oil was then selling for the temporarily inflated price of $30 to 40/barrel in 2004 dollars--up from $15 a year earlier (again, in 2004 dollars).

In .his 1976 State of the Union Address Ford noted that the price remained high and declared that our dependence on foreign oil sources was too great. Despite the passage of an energy bill the previous year our dependence was increasing: "In 1973 we were dependent upon foreign oil imports for 36 percent of our needs. Today, we are 40-percent dependent, and we'll pay out $34 billion for foreign oil this year.” He also noted that, “Of the major energy proposals I submitted 2 years ago, only half, belatedly, became law.”

Jimmy Carter echoed many of the same themes as Ford when he became president. Problems nonetheless continued. During the Carter administration, the world price of oil per barrel doubled from around $30 in 2004 dollars to almost $65. According to William DeGregorio: "In a protracted 18-month struggle with Congress, the Carter administration ... won a watered down version of its energy bill in November 1978, providing for decontrol of natural gas prices, tax credits for the installation of insulation and other fuel-conservation measures, and requirements for business and industry to convert from oil or gas to coal. In 198u0 Congress enacted the administration-sponsored windfall-profits tax on oil companies. Carter also promoted development of synthetic fuels." In 1977, fulfilling a campaign promise, he won congressional approval for the creation of the Department of Energy.

Ronald Reagan embraced deregulation as the solution to our oil problems. In 1982, he noted in his State of the Union Address that deregulation allowed us to “come closer to achieving energy independence and helped bring down the cost of gasoline and heating fuel.” Reagan did not mention oil in any other State of the Union address. Oil for the time being was plentiful and cheap. The price fell from about $65/barrel to around $20/barrel in 2004 dollars.

President George H.W. Bush made little mention of oil in his addresses noting merely that the decrease in oil prices after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 was beneficial. His successor, Bill Clinton did not mention oil at all in his state addresses.

Note on sources: For this article I utilized C-SPAN’s website on the State of the Union, which contained the transcripts for all State of the Union addresses since President Truman. It is found at http://www.c-span.org/executive/stateoftheunion.asp. Special thanks goes to Mike Westbrook, reference librarian at Illinois College who helped me find an Eisenhower speech from Vital Speeches of the Day (pp. 200-203). I also utilized a graph on oil prices from http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/oilprice1947.gif to obtain the price figures mentioned.