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

mandatory retirement age, and though there was no question of his vigor-lately, he had been part of an expedition that had climbed partway up Mount Everest-come 1990, someone else would have to lead.

The most obvious candidate, if only in terms of experience, was Alden Yates, whom Steve junior had installed as company president after Shultz’ departure. The son of Bechtel energy chief Perry Yates, Alden, as one of his fellow executives put it, “was born with a Bechtel spoon in his mouth. “15 In addition, Yates, who had spent his entire career at the company, was counted as a solid construction boss and an excellent manager. But there was one thing Yates lacked: the Bechtel name. “Blood is blood,” said one senior executive. “There’s no way the Bechtels are going to turn over the company to a non-family member.”16

There were five children in the Bechtel brood-daughters Shana, Lauren and Nonie; sons Gary and Riley -and with one exception, Steve junior, who tended to be as remote as he was demanding, had had troubles with all of them.

The exception was the oldest girl, Shana, who had been born in 194 7. Described by one of her cousins as “Miss Goody Goody,” Shana had pleased her parents by marrying a hardworking, if lackluster, 234

THE NEXT GENERATION

former middle manager at Gates Tire named Clint Johnstone. They were pleased even more when, immediately following the marriage, Johnstone went to work for Bechtel, while Shana retired to the suburbs to begin having babies.

Nonie, the youngest daughter, was not so conventional. She had first irritated her father by going off to Paris for a year to improve her French, an undertaking viewed by Steve junior as irredeemably dilettantish. Better, he told friends, that she remain at home and study something practical like nursing, as her aunt Barbara Davies had before her. When Nonie did return home, she further offended her father by marrying Sheldon Ramsay, the scion of a socially prominent California family. Chary of bluebloods, Steve and Betty opposed the marriage, but to no avail.

They had even more difficulty dealing with their middle daughter, Lauren. A contemporary of Patty Hearst’s, “Laurie” was a strongwilled, idealistic young woman who rebelled early on against what she termed her parent’s “bourgeois values.” By her late teens, she had adopted a countercultural lifestyle, espousing views that Steve and Betty regarded as dangerously radical. Nor was she shy about making those views known. At a 1973 family party given by Steve and Betty to celebrate Steve senior and Laura’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, Laurie startled guests-and enraged her parents-by rising in the midst of the congratulatory toasts to deliver an impassioned speech on the need to aid Bangladesh refugees. “It was as though she had doused ice water on everyone in the room,” said a family friend. “For weeks afterward, all the Bechtel women could talk about was Laurie’s scandalous behavior.”17

The friction between Laurie and her parents intensified when she fell in love with Alan Dachs, a college student from Great Neck, New York, who’d come out to California on a visit. Dachs was not at all what the Bechtels had in mind for their daughter. Not only was he an outspoken left-wing activist, he also was Jewish. Neither fact, though, deterred Laurie, who announced that she was moving back east with Dachs, who attended Connecticut’s liberal Wesleyan University. In a fury, Bechtel, according to one family member, told his daughter that unless she broke off with Dachs, he would cut her off financially.

When Laurie held firm,