Wind, Sand, and Stars

Cape Wind

Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for America's Energy Future
on Nantucket Sound

by Wendy Williams
and Robert Whitcomb

PublicAffairs, 304 pp., $26.95

David McCullough's face contorted with anger.

That is the first line of Wendy Williams's and Robert Whitcomb's account of one man's possibly misguided attempt to build a wind farm off Cape Cod. My first thought was: Oh, goody. Something snippy about Saint David. I am going to enjoy this.

On page one, McCullough is fulminating about Cape Wind, the 24-square-mile, turbine-powered electrical power project that energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon wants to build in Horseshoe Shoal, not far from McCullough's Martha's Vineyard home. McCullough sputters in fine company, with Walter Cronkite, Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, and all manner of Kennedys. Because, as everyone knows, it is one thing to speak out in favor of homeless shelters, affordable housing, and "clean" energy projects. It is quite another thing to gaze at them from your front door.

Authors Williams and Whitcomb-she is a veteran Cape Cod reporter, he is editorial page editor at the Providence Journal-dispense with objectivity in their treatment of the Cape Wind project. Who can blame them? They're having too much fun. The Cape and Islands, as we Bostonians call them, have indeed become a "devil's triangle of entrenched, often inherited wealth," providing targets aplenty for our intrepid writers.

How unsurprising that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a stalwart contributor to Vanity Fair's perfume-scented "green" issue, vociferously opposes a wind farm in the hallowed waters where he learned to sail. For rhetorical effect, the Kennedys like to call the shoal a "national marine sanctuary," and "one of the richest fisheries in North America." Neither statement is true. The local paper, whose former publisher hobnobbed with the yacht set, often serves as a megaphone for Camelot-on-the-Cape, and has suggested that the benighted city of Fall River would be better suited for wind turbines.

Another Cape Wind opponent, former Phelps Dodge Corp. capo Douglas Yearley, explains to an interviewer that, yes, his mining business may have despoiled parts of the American West, but let's face it, New Mexico isn't as pretty as Nantucket. And Yearley doesn't summer in New Mexico, after all.

The Mellons and the DuPonts have summered on the Cape for a lot longer than former cable TV salesman Jim Gordon has been a millionaire, and, naturally, they have powerful friends. Cue the pathetic marital opportunist Sen. John Warner, who nominally represents the people of Virginia. Blubbering to the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, Warner invokes his first, pre-Elizabeth Taylor, wife: "A wonderful person who is still a very dear and valued friend. . . . She does have a home on the Cape. I was actually married there."

The wonderful woman in question is Catherine Mellon, daughter of Bunny, the widow of Paul Mellon. Bunny, who is the first person named in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's will-Jackie left her two Indian miniatures, by way of thanks for Bunny's help in redesigning the White House Rose Garden-is an ardent Cape Wind opponent. In the book, she accuses a lawyer who does not hate Cape Wind assiduously enough of being a "traitor to your class." That's language you expect to hear on Masterpiece Theater, not in George W. Bush's America.

The aggrieved plutocrats do what aggrieved plutocrats everywhere do. For starters, they fill the campaign coffers of politicians willing to do their bidding. Predictably, Teddy Kennedy and former Massachusetts governor and current presidential candidate Mitt Romney receive special attention. (Inconveniently for the gotrocks, the state's current governor, Deval Patrick, has a palatial second home in the faraway Berkshires; he supports Cape Wind.) Yearley, alongside a local moneybags named Richard Egan, who purchased the ambassadorship to Ireland under Bill Clinton, and the ubiquitous William Koch, among others, have also bankrolled a phony "grass roots" pressure group called the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

Williams and Whitcomb feign surprise that the Alliance and its powerful backers don't play fair. "In my 30 years as a journalist, I had never seen such a brazen attempt to obstruct the democratic process," Williams tells us in a breathy Author's Note. What? Just because they're dressed for croquet doesn't mean they won't swing the mallet at your head. The Alliance litigates, filibusters, and successfully packs regulatory hearings with its supporters. They have been effective. Time equals money in the business world, and in April, a federal agency announced yet another delay in Cape Wind's environmental review, pushing the project into its sixth year of pushmepullyou legal wrangling.