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

Inevitably, the differences produced friction and, on Steve’s part, a certain resentment. It had been Steve, for instance, who took the lead in pressing his father for a greater share of the company’s stock, and when Dad refused, it had been Steve who called in the lawyers. Such enterprise did not always make him beloved. It did, though, make him a force to reckon with.

No one seemed to know that better than his brothers, who shortly after Dad’s death named him president of Bechtel’s operations. Later, Steve commented, “They wanted me to lead, and naturally, I was glad to do it. “7

Despite the amicability of the settlement, Steve and Warren were to become increasingly estranged, largely over what Steve viewed as the 49

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dissoluteness of his older brother’s ways. “Warren was a helluva nice guy,” said a senior Bechtel executive who was friendly with both brothers, “but he had a penchant for liquor and he liked girls and the girls liked him. By 1936, when Dad’s will cleared probate, Steve had become goddam angry with him. “8 So much so that in 1936, Steve, along with Ken, formed a new company, the S. D. Bechtel Company, leaving Warren to go off on his own. Concentrating on his father’s railroad work, Warren would not be reunited with his brothers until World War II, and then only indirectly, through his management of Arizona copper projects in which both Steve and Ken had an interest.

After the war, Warren retired from business and spent the rest of his life living off his inheritance, a move which succeeded only in alienating Steve all the more. 9

Steve himself, meanwhile, had his hands full running the business.

Like his father, he was eager to demonstrate what he could do on his own, and in 1936 he got his chance when the Department of Reclamation put up for bid a contract to build the Broadway Tunnel, a highway pass through the hills between Berkeley and Oakland. With financial backing from his Six Companies partners, Steve won the contract and became the project’s prime contractor. It seemed a simple and straightforward job. Almost as soon as Bechtel’s crews began to dig, however, they hit a quagmire of rock, water and mud. Work quickly ground to a near standstill. As the days wore on and costs mounted, Steve’s frustration turned to anger and alarm. For under the terms of the $3.9 million contract, the S. D. Bechtel Company was required to pay all construction costs, and no money at all would be forthcoming until the job was done. Hiring a battery of lawyers to go over the contract’s fine print, he charged that the Department of Reclamation’s district engineers had grossly misrepresented underground conditions, and he threatened a lawsuit. Unfazed, the Department of Reclamation’s engineers countered that the Bechtel organization was merely dragging its heels. In fact, the fault was largely Bechtel’s. Ground conditions at the tunnel were horrendous, but Steve Bechtel, in his haste to secure the contract, had failed to properly “scope” the work. The result, he admitted years later, was a bid that was “too damn low … half of what it should have been. After Boulder,” he added, “we were overly confident of our ability to do anything …. We should have protected ourselves against something like this. But we learned a lot from that tunnel. We learned we didn’t have all the answers. “10

At that moment, however, Bechtel was on the hook. Worse, Steve 50

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was, thanks to his carelessness, about to lose $2.4 million of his