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

12. Harold Ickes of the New Deal: His Private Life and Public Career, Graham White and John Maze, Harvard University Press, 1985.

13. The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Library of Congress, 445.

C H APT ER FOUR

The account of W A. Bechtel’s death and Stephen D. Bechtel’s early career and rise to power is based primarily on many of the same sources that were used in Chapters Two and Three. In addition, the privately printed The Bechtel Story by Robert L . Ingram, 1968, provides an account of the Bechtel company’s history under Stephen D. Bechtel and his son, Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr.

1. Fortune, September 1943.

2. A Builder and His Family, 36.

3. San Francisco Chronicle, 8/29/33.

4. Interview, Robert L. Bridges, July 1984.

5. Oral history of John L. Simpson, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley .

6. A Builder, 42.

7. Interview, Stephen D. Bechtel, July 1984.

8. Bridges interview.

9. Off-the-record interview with Bechtel family member.

10. SDB interview.

11. Ibid.

12. Fortune, August 1958.

13. SDB interview.

242

NOTES

14. Ibid.

15. Fortune, March 1951.

CHAPTER FIVE

The account of Bechtel’s far-flung activities during World War II is derived from interviews with a number of the principals involved, including Robert L. Bridges, who negotiated many of the wartime contracts for Bechtel; Jerome W Komes, who worked under John McCone at Calship, and Stephen D. Bechtel, Sr.

For an overview of the efforts of Bechtel and its Six Companies partners during the war, I also relied on a number of newspaper and magazine accounts, the most comprehensive of which is the aforementioned Fortune series “The Earth Movers.”

Details on the Canol Project were obtained from the papers of Harold L. Ickes on file at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and from a series of columns Ickes wrote in July 1946 for a New York Post Syndicate. In addition, Ickes and other government and military figures such as Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell testified at length before the U.S. Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program in November 1943. Records of these hearings are on file at the Library of Congress.

The library also has on file a seven-volume history of the Canol project, The Canol Project and the History of the U.S. Army Eastern Defense Command During World War II, and The Canol Project, 1945, a declassified report that was prepared by a Committee Representing the Central Division, Office of the Chief of Engineers, Office of the Quartermaster General and Commanding General Northwest Service Council.

Commissioned by Stephen D. Bechtel, Sr., The Canol Project by Richard Finnie (printed privately in 1946) also provides a perspective of the project from the builder’s viewpoint.

Bechtel’s involvement with the war effort in the Pacific is best chronicled in Builders for Battle: How the Pacific Naval Air Bases Were Constructed by David 0. Woodbury (E. P. Dutton, 1946). The privately published company history A Builder and His Family is also a useful guide to Bechtel’s activities in the Pacific and elsewhere in the war effort.

243

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Records of the Birmingham project are available in the transcripts of the civil suit (U.S. of America ex rei. George B. Alexander v. BechtelMcCone-Parsons) on file at the General Services Administration, Region 4, Federal Archives and Records Center, East Point, Georgia.

Detailed records of Bechtel’s activities at Calship and Marinship appear in the transcripts of the Hearings before the Committee on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries, House of Representatives, in Investigation of the National Defense Program. These