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
