Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

the rapid, large-scale development of the West’s oil and gas resources. Once the oil was drilled, it would have to be refined, and after refining, transported, which would require the building of pipelines stretching across the country. A boom was coming, and Bechtel meant to be part of it.

Before he could get under way, though, Bechtel needed help, a partner who could share both his work load and his enthusiasm for the opportunities he saw emerging in the postwar West. It had always been his intention that one day his sons would fill that role; but with Warren junior and Steve pursuing their studies at the University of California at Berkeley and Ken still in high school, that day was still some years off. Bechtel had to have a partner now, an experienced builder he could rely on completely. He found his mart in the summer of 1921.

His name was Henry J. Kaiser.

Ten years Bechtel’s junior, and at least his equal in optimism and salesmanship, Kaiser had a self-made background not unlike Warren’s own. He had begun his career at the age of 12, when, with $5 borrowed from a sister, he left his home in Whitesboro, New York, and set out to make his fortune. After a miscellaneous series of low-paying jobs, he bought a photographic studio and supply store and, by the time he was 21, owned a chain of them up and down the East Coast.

But like Bechtel, Kaiser was restless. Selling off his business in 1906, he headed west with hisfamily (like Bechtel, he had three sons) to start over again, winding up in Spokane, Washington, where he worked as a 26

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salesman for a gravel-and-cement company. From there he drifted to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he found employment as a road contractor. Living out of an automobile, Kaiser scrambled from job to job, underbidding the competition merely to get work. Kaiser’s lowballing tactics did not endear him to his rivals, and by the time he reached California, where another low bid had won him a contract to build a 30-mile stretch of highway between Redding and Red Bluff, he was regarded as something of a pariah by most of the construction industry.

Bechtel, however, was intrigued. Whatever Kaiser’s methods, there was no disputing his doggedness, nor his burbling effervescence. He was a born promoter and instinctive, near-habitual risk-taker. “They tell me I go out on a limb too often,” he said of himself years later, when he had become one of the country’s leading industrialists. “Well, that’s where I like to be.” Bechtel, who had gone out on a limb or two himself, could appreciate that outlook. Moreover, Kaiser possessed the same sort of driving ambition. “I always have to dream against the stars,” as he put it. “Ifl don’t dream I’ll make it, I’ll never get close. “8

Increasingly curious, and prompted further by instructions from the San Francisco chapter of the Association of General Contractors, a construction-trade group of which he was then president, Bechtel dropped in on Kaiser’s work site unannounced and asked if he could look around. “Be my guest,” Kaiser said with a shrug, wondering who this big, self-assured visitor was. When he finished his inspection, Bechtel, who prided himself on the tidiness of his own work sites, congratulated Kaiser on his housekeeping. They began talking and found they had much in common. Bechtel was