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

W hether through unfamiliarity or. grogginess, Warren overdosed and slipped into insulin shock. 3

Russian doctors and nurses crowded round his bed at the National Hotel, worried looks on their faces. Then, briefly, Bechtel seemed to rally. Relieved, the medical personnel departed, leaving him in his hotel suite, sick, old and alone. That night, August 28, 1933, Warren A. Bechtel died in his sleep.

least on this job, the two organizations worked on the bridge together, with Bridge Builders, Inc., concentrating on the East Bay work and Transbay focusing on building the western portion of the crossing.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

The death of the family patriarch staggered the Bechtels. Clara and Alice* had to arrange to get Dad’s body out of Russia and back to America, where they were met by Warren, Steve and Ken. Though by now each of Dad’s sons was involved in the family business, their father had left no plans for succession. Moreover during the last months of Dad’s life there had been a dispute in the family over ownership of stock.4 At the time of the company’s incorporation, in 1925, Dad had given each of his sons 5 percent of his holdings. Initially, it had seemed a generous gift, but as the years went on and the boys began taking on more and more responsibility, Steve and Ken had begun demanding a larger share. Dad had resisted, and by the time of his death, a legal battle was in the works.

It was against this backdrop that Dad was buried and the boys began sorting out the tricky question of which of them would lead.

Of the three, Warren junior seemed to have the clearest claim. Not only was he the oldest and most experienced, but he had also been his father’s favorite. In personality, Warren was aggressive, boisterous, charming-the archetypal hail-fellow-well-met. Though not a college graduate (like his brothers, he dropped out of Berkeley before graduation), Warren was well read and intuitively bright. What he lacked, however, was seriousness of purpose. Work for Warren was work, and he preferred to have fun. By the time of his father’s death, he’d already begun to lose interest in the family business.

W hile in Vienna, Alice had a brief romance with a well-connected but penniless Austrian count named Zucatur, who was on the verge of proposing marriage when Dad died in Moscow. The count was helpful in getting Dad’s body out of Russia, but the romance cooled, and shortly after returning to the United States, Alice married Brantley M. Eubanks. Eubanks had worked for W. A. Bechtel on the Boulder Dam project in the finance department, but Steve viewed him as weak and eased him out of the company. Later Eubanks set up his own investment firm and Steve let him manage some of the Bechtel family fortune.

**In battling his father for a larger share of the company, Steve relied on the legal advice of Robert L. Bridges, a then-young attorney working in the San Francisco law firm of Thelen, Marrin (later to become Thelen, Marrin, Johnson and Bridges). The alliance with Steve put Bridges in a difficult position, as the firm’s lead partner, Paul Marrin, had long represented Dad Bechtel’s legal interests. Steve, however, was to reward him for his troubles. After Dad’s will cleared probate,