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

***Warren was active during World War II in managing copper projects for BechtelMcCone, but had nothing to do with the family-owned business thereafter. He lived on his inheritance from Dad and later got by on funds provided him by Steve and Ken. A heavy drinker and womanizer much of his life, Warren was finally warned by his 46

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Ken, the youngest son, was the quietest, most bookish and most reserved of the brothers, and also the most attached to his mother. In demeanor, he was cool, almost cold-hardly a quality suited to the rough-and-tumble of the jobsite. Ken, in fact, seemed always vaguely uncomfortable around his father’s workers, and stuck to the office most of the time. Often on the occasions when he did appear at a construction project, he came dressed in a three-piece suit. For Bechtel’s men, it was a uniform of his aloofness.

Which left the middle son, Steve.

Of medium height and slender build, with a soft-spoken manner that contrasted markedly with his father’s boisterousness, Stephen Davison Bechtel was outgoing, intuitive and highly intelligent. He was also intensely ambitious. “Steve Bechtel,” one of his father’s friends put it, “must have climbed out of his crib determined to do something active and important. “5

After graduation from Oakland’s Technical High School, Steve had enlisted in the Army and gone to France with the 20th Engineers, American Expeditionary Force. Following his wartime service, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1918. He seemed set on picking up a degree in engineering. But three months into his sophomore year, tragedy struck. While driving a earful of his classmates to a country-club dance, Steve ran down three pedestrians, kill-

. ing two of them and seriously injuring the third.

The incident, which the Bechtel organization would go to great pains in late.r years to cover up-including, for a time, concealing the fact that Steve had even attended Berkeley* -was, according to friends, a deeply scarring one for Bechtel, and accounted for much of his subsequent obsession with secrecy. At the time, it also placed him in serious legal jeopardy, since the police arrested him and charged him with manslaughter. Then, something odd happened: the charges were dropped.

There was no explanation, either then or later, why Bechtel was not brothers not to touch another drop of liquor or they would cut him off without a nickel. This threat was significant motivation for Warren to remain sober until he died at his Napa home in January 1976.

The company’s vagueness about Steve’s academic background is evident in the BechtelMcCone-Parsons performance record BMP published in 1942. It describes Steve simply as a graduate engineer-not saying that he attended UC (and failed to graduate). His partner, John McCone, on the other hand, is described as “a graduate mechanical engineer from the University of California.”

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prosecuted, and all that remains to account for it is a brief, suggestive story in the November 17, 1919, edition of the Oakland Tribune: Failure of the police or anyone else interested to file a complaint against Stephen D. Bechtel, University of California student, booked by the Oakland police on a manslaughter charge, caused the charge to be stricken from the docket in Police Judge Smith’s court.

Bechtel’s car crashed into Dr. H. G. Chappel, Oakland dentist, Mrs. Jessie Chappel and Elizabeth Chappel, their daughter, causing the death of the