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

One of the effects of Dachs’s rapid rise was to stir other family members from their lethargy. That was especially true of Shana’s husband, Clint Johnstone, whose early career at Bechtel had, in the words of one associate, been marked by an attitude of “Why should I bust my ass? I’ve got it made.” With Dachs impressing the Bechtel hierarchy, Johnstone now began to catch fire as well, working late hours and taking on additional responsibilities. His efforts paid off in 1984, when he was named a group vicepresident and charged with turning around Bechtel’s troubled Minerals and Mining Group.

Though remaining in North Carolina, Gary too came back into his father’s good graces, not so much because of his professional brilliance

-“He’s never going to be a world-beater,” conceded one sympathetic cousin-as for the way he was conducting his second marriage, which had thus far produced three children.

But it was young Riley who was making the most accelerated push for power. Bright, ambitious and like his father, a workaholic, he had, in 1981, abandoned a promising career at Thelan, Marin and, at the age of 30, joined Bechtel, where he was given a crash course in running the family store. His first assignment was to handle the legal chores on a coal-fired power plant Bechtel was building outside Detroit. After that, he had been posted to Indonesia to work on a liquidnatural-gas plant Bechtel was building for Pertamina. When that job was over, he moved to New Zealand, where Bechtel was building a huge synthetic-fuels plant. His arrival did not sit well with the project manager, a hard-nosed Bechtel veteran named Donald Hassler. “I already had someone perfectly capable,” Hassler recalled. “I told San Francisco the last thing I needed was another goddam attorney. “20 San Francisco took a different view: Hassler was fired and Riley named his replacement. A year later, in 1984, young Bechtel was on the move again, this time to London, where he was promoted to Managing Director of Bechtel, Ltd., a post that in the view of company insiders 237

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

signaled his grooming for Bechtel’s top slot.

By 1986 it was clear that one way or another, command of Bechtel would remain inside the family however the succession worked out. It was becoming equally clear that the worst of Bechtel’s financial troubles were, if not completely over, at least well on their way to resolution. Heartened by both developments, Steve junior that spring flew to Washington for a gathering of the powerful friends who had done so much to make Bechtel the company that it was.

The occasion was a black-tie dinner given by the University of Chicago in honor of George Shultz, for whom a chair was being named at the university’s business school. Bechtel was in an excellent mood, made all the more so by Ronald Reagan’s recent appointment of yet another Bechtel executive-civil engineering and mining chief Richard Godwin-to a newly created post of almost unimaginable power: under-secretary of Defense for Acquisition. Among Godwin’s other chores would be awarding contracts for the Strategic Defense Initiative, a multibillion-dollar program in which Bechtel already had an active interest.

As Steve Bechtel, Jr., gazed about the ballroom of the Hay-Adams House, his smile widened. He was in good company here, with friends like David Rockefeller and W illiam Simon, Henry Kissenger and Milton Friedman, Charles Percy and David Packard. And,