Jack Crichton

Who was Jack Crichton?

John Alston Crichton, known as Jack Crichton, was an oil and natural gas industrialist from Dallas, Texas, who was among the first of his ranks to recognize the importance of petroleum reserves in the Middle East. In 1964, he carried the Republican banner in a fruitless campaign against the reelection of Governor John B. Connally, Jr., then a Democrat, who in 1973 switched parties.

In 1990, Crichton wrote in an opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News, stating that he first realized the vastness of the Middle Eastern oil reserves prior to 1950. He and a coworker determined, he said, that the Burgan Field in Kuwait, for example, held ten billion barrels of crude oil. In 1951, he helped to establish San Juan Oil Company in Dallas, where he became the vice president of operations. During the 1950s, he took a group of American businessmen to Yemen to search for oil. During his long career, he was the president of the Yemen Development Corporation and the Dorchester Gas Corporation, Crichton was also involved in the mining of copper, zinc, gold, silver, and nickel through his Arabian Shield Development Company.