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

gorge and chopped away at loose rocks, the staccato clatter of their drills interrupted from time to time by the rumble of dynamite blasts. The army of workers below had to be on constant watch for falling rocks or, on occasion, the plummeting body of a comrade who had slipped or misstepped.

After the canyon walls had been cleared of silt, Crowe and his men began what was the most difficult phase of construction: the laying dry of the entire riverbed, which, in turn, required diverting the Colorado’s course. Crowe’s plan was to drill two milelong tunnels, one on the Nevada side of the river, the other on the Arizona side. Each would have the approximate diameter of the Lincoln Tunnel and would start several thousand feet above the damsite, emerging nearly half a mile below it. The tunnels were the key to the project, and by midsummer, work on them had progressed to the point where Crowe could report to Bechtel and the other Six Companies partners that Boulder was well ahead of schedule.

The partners were pleased, and so was Crowe, who was rapidly living up to his reputation as the best dam-builder in the business. But though the work was going smoothly, there was trouble on the horizon: not from the Canyon or the River, but from the partners themselves.

They were, in their personalities and ways of doing things, a highly disparate bunch, and though they were united in wanting to build Boulder, each had distinct notions of how it ought to be done.* The result, during the first few months of construction, was a welter of

Years after Boulder was built, Frank Crowe described to Fortune magazine what working for the Six Companies partners was like. “They were just about as different as men could be,” he said. “Charlie Shea hated to write letters. If he wrote one a week, he thought that was too much. But Morrison… thought nothing of dictating a hundred letters in a morning. Morrison never drank, never smoked, never gambled; he was a Puritan. Charlie Shea didn’t drink either, but he was crazy about gambling. I used to meet him and Felix [Kahn] at the [Southern Pacific] station when they came up from San Francisco and drive them across the desert to the dam. All the way-five hoursthey’d shoot craps on the floor of the Lincoln.

“One day,” Crowe continued, “I was driving down Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Kahn spotted Dad Bechtel headed for the bank. ‘Drive over,’ he said. ‘This is going to cost Dad some money!’ I pulled alongside the curb and Felix shouted, ‘Dad, I’m matching you a double-eagle.’ Dad didn’t even say good morning. He just gave Felix a quick, disapproving look, dug into his vest pocket for a coin and slapped it on the car window. He took his hand off all.d said to Felix, ‘You lose’ and walked off without another word.

“They were a great bunch to work for,” Crowe concluded, “because they stuck together. Charlie and Felix used to say to each other, to settle an argument, ‘Right or wrong, you’re right you son of a bitch.’ They really felt that way toward one another.”

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

conflicting orders to Crowe, who became sufficiently exasperated to begin seriously considering whether to quit. The problem was finally resolved when the partners agreed to leave the running of Boulder to an executive committee of four: Bechtel, Kaiser, Shea and Kahn. As Six Companies’ president, Bechtel headed the committee, and