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

to the capital each partner had put in. “This has always been a strict investment proposition,” Felix Kahn said of the arrangement. “The sponsor’s one advantage of doing the work was being allowed to make a little more money by taking on a larger share of the project.”

An example of Six Companies’ new way of doing things occurred shortly after Boulder’s completion, when Henry ]. Kaiser, who seemed determined to assume the mantle of Six Companies’ paterfamilias, proposed that the partners build Bonneville Dam in the state of Washington. To his surprise, the others were reluctant to follow his lead, but offered, nonetheless, to provide financial backing. W ith his son, Edgar, as project manager, Kaiser built the dam on his own, improvising as he went along. The job was finished ahead of schedule, and Kaiser and his partners divided profits of $3

million.

Kaiser’s independence did not sit well, however, with all the men at the Six Companies-particularly Steve Bechtel, who came to regard him as a self-promoting egotist.

Eventually, the two parted ways and became rivals. Working alone, Henry]. Kaiser was to become one of the great industrialists and philanthropists in American history. He once said of himself, “Our real job is not the building of dams, ships, factories and hospitals; our job is to build and develop people, to bring out their courage, their talents, their zeal and their will to work.” By the time of his death in 1967, at the age of 85, Henry]. Kaiser had done all of that, and more.

*On the Bay Bridge project, the Six Companies partners divided into two competing camps. The Kaisers and Bechtels formed Bridge Builders, Inc., while Morrison, Kahn, Shea and the others created the Transbay Construction Company. Though rivals, at 44

STEVE

the earth today,” Frank Crowe boasted. “You get the work lined up-we’ll build it. “1

And so they would, altering the Western landscape with their handiwork. One of their number, however, would be missing.

In 193 3, with work on Boulder well under way, Dad Bechtel had received a most unusual invitation. Still not recognized by the United States, the fledgling Soviet government was then in the midst of a crash industrialization program, a key facet of which was building giant hydroelectric dams on all the country’s major rivers. The largest of them all was on the Dnieper, near Kiev. Proud of Soviet handiwork, and in need of some outside engineering advice, the Stalin government asked Bechtel if he would come to inspect it. The invitation was one that Warren Bechtel, a leading bete noire of American labor, couldn’t refuse. Informing his partners that “this is a good time to see what the rest of the world is doing, “2 Dad, accompanied by Clara and Alice, set sail from New York in early August.

On arrival in Cherbourg, they went on by train to Vienna, where Clara and Alice had planned to attend the opera and do some shopping. Dad journeyed on to Russia alone-one of the few times in thirty-five years of marriage he had been separated from Clara.

He was 61 now, overweight and a diabetic, and his doctors in California had warned him against making the trip. At first, however, all went well. Arriving in the Russian capital, Bechtel took an instant liking to his hosts and they to him, and the next three days and nights were spent touring Moscow and conferring with leading technocrats and engineers. But on the night before he was to depart for Kiev, Bechtel suffered a severe