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

a $20 million contract to build 200 miles of roadway through the interior of Cuba. And yet during the months he had been working on the project, which involved the employment of 6,000 people and the erection of no fewer than 500 bridges, Kaiser had been obsessed by one extraordinary notion concerning the American West: the building of a dam across the raging Colorado River. “I lay awake nights thinking about it,” he would say later. “I lay in my sweltering tent and dreamed it over and over. “1

Kaiser was not the first to have had such thoughts. Engineers had been talking for more than twenty years of damming the Colorado, harnessing its power to produce electricity and irrigate the West. But 29

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

though studies had been made and plans drawn up, nothing had come of them. Nothing, that is, until 1930, when a former engineer from California named Herbert Hoover decided, as president, that it was worth a go. Under his aegis, funds for the project had been allocated, and the U.S. Department of Reclamation had announced that it would soon be accepting construction bids. It was then that Kaiser had summoned Bechtel to Cuba.

As he heard Kaiser reveal his plans, though, Bechtel was less than optimistic. Unlike his sometime partner, whose dam-building experience was limited to a pair of small projects, Bechtel knew at first hand how demanding an undertaking like Boulder could be. For while Kaiser was building roads in Cuba, the W A. Bechtel Company had, among its other endeavors, put up Bowman Dam, the second-largest rock-fill dam in the world. The work, managed by Dad’s oldest son, Warren junior, had proved enormously taxing, not least because of the dam’s location, high in the Sierra Nevada. Cut off from the rest of the world for almost half the year by deep mountain snows, the site had required the Bechtels to import a large herd of beef cattle simply to feed the crew. A complete hospital had also been necessary, along with a slaughterhouse and self-contained work camp. Hellish as building Bowman had been, Bechtel knew it was nothing compared with what would be required to erect Boulder. W hen at last Kaiser paused for breath, Bechtel allowed cautiously, “It sounds a little ambitious. “2

Kaiser merely smiled. “Dad,” he said, “problems are only opportunities in work clothes.”

As the days went on, and Kaiser kept talking, Bechtel found himself gradually being swayed. Building Boulder would be the capstone to his career. More important, it would expose his sons to an endeavor beside which everything else would pale. In his ebullient fashion, Kaiser had told him that people someday would view Boulder as they did the pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, and that the dedication plaque at its base would list the W. A. Bechtel Company as one of its builders. Kaiser didn’t have to say anything more. Dad was in.

W ith the decision made, the two men hurried back to the United States-Kaiser heading east to begin raising additional capital, Bechtel returning to California to sniff out what other bids were being made.

He soon discovered that more than a few other builders were interested in Boulder as well, chief among them an old competitor from Boise, Idaho, named Harry J. Morrison.

A tall, sparely built man with a fondness for singing cowboy songs 30