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

Steve enlisted his father, with whom Laurie had always been close, in hopes that he could change her mind. Steve senior, however, had no better luck than his son. In reply to her grandfather’s entreaties, Laurie revealed she was marrying Dachs. If the fam-235

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ily didn’t accept the union, Laurie threatened she would sever all ties with them. Faced with Laurie’s ultimatum, Steve junior gave in and Laurie and Alan Dachs were married in Steve and Betty Bechtel’s garden in Piedmont by the Presbyterian pastor of the Piedmont Community Church. 18

Steve’s problems with Gary, his older boy, were of an altogether different sort. A striking look-alike of his father, Gary, according to family members, had all of Steve junior’s mannerisms, but little of his shrewdness and his aptitude for hard work. After graduating from the University of the Pacific in the late 1960s, Gary, at Steve junior’s urging, joined Bechtel. There, under the supervision of executive vicepresident Ed Gabarini, he was placed on the company fast track. He performed competently enough and was well liked by his colleagues.

The troubles began after Gary secured an annulment of a brief first marriage and married a second time. Gary’s actions created a rift with his father, who was a stickler for keeping marriages intact, however unhappy, and resulted in Gary’s quitting Bechtel to take a job as an ironworker. Later he returned to the fold and was given a job with Bechtelowned Becan Construction, where he recently was made a vicepresident.

Riley Bechtel, by all accounts the ablest of Steve junior’s children, had become estranged from his father in still another way. After picking up an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Davis, and an MBA and law degree from Stanford, he had embarked on a law career-not for Bechtel, but for Thelan, Marin. “Riley was the white hope, the brains of the family,” said a Bechtel family member. “When he decided to go into law rather than join the company, it broke his father’s heart.”

Through the 1960s and for most of the 1970s, the relations between Steve junior and his children remained tense. They began to change after the first of his grandchildren were born, an event which, according to a family friend, “mellowed Steve, made him warmer and more approachable.” With the passage of time, the children too had mellowed, especially Laurie, whose radicalism began to wane as her husband’s business career progressed. After their marriage, she and Dachs had moved to New York, where, following graduate business studies at New York University, he had obtained a job as a trainee at the Chemical Bank. Eventually Dachs took a job with Bechtel and, after working in Houston in a field capacity, returned to San Francisco with Laurie.

There Dachs took a financial job at Bechtel, and Steve junior, who was 236

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selling the family home in Piedmont, offered it to the couple if they were willing to match an offer that had been made by another party, which they did.

At Bechtel, Dachs quickly proved an able executive, and by 1983 he had become vicepresident of Bechtel International. “Alan could be abrasive at times, but he was very sharp, a quick study and a zealous worker,” said Ray Mayman, who supervised his