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

own and his partners’ money. Hoping to salvage the situation, even at the cost of embarrassing Bechtel, Six Companies persuaded a reluctant Henry J. Kaiser to finish the job. Kaiser, however, fared no better than Bechtel, and in an attempt to recoup his losses wound up taking the Department of Reclamation to court. After an abortive attempt at negotiations-Kaiser offered to finish the tunnel if the Works Progress Administration guaranteed to give Six Companies an addition $3 million in work, a proposal the government flatly turned down-the U.S.

District Court fined Kaiser $2 39,000 for defaulting on the contract and ordered him to complete the project.

The Broadway Tunnel fiasco, though bitter and embarrassing, was an important learning experience for Bechtel. He would be far more cautious from here on, especially in his dealings with the U.S. government, whose great Depression-era spurt of building was, in any case, winding down. “We [Ken and I] had come to realize that competitive work for the government was unpredictable,” he said in an interview half a century later. “More often than not it led to trouble, and many ·

contractors went broke pursuing it. “11

Neither Bechtel nor any of the Six Companies partners would ever go broke-on the contrary, all were to make millions more building government dams and roads-but they would increasingly seek work from the private sector, particularly the oil companies Steve Bechtel knew so well from his work in pipelining. In this effort, Steve Bechtel would join with an old college chum and business associate destined to become one of the pivotal figures in American foreign policy. His name was John A. McCone.

As presidents of both parties would come to realize, and Steve Bechtel knew already, John A. McCone was a man of considerable talents.

The child of Scotch-Irish parents, he had been born in Los Angeles and raised a devout-many would say dogmatic-Roman Catholic.

For a time there was some thought that he would be a priest, and no doubt McCone would have been a good one. With his dour demeanor and shrewd calculation, it was easy to imagine him as a hustling mon-

Frank Crowe, who had been boss at Boulder Dam and worked on many later mammoth construction projects both for Six Companies and for Bechtel, was involved in the Broadway Tunnel not as a builder, but as the source of some timely advice.

Seeing that there would be no end of lawsuits if Kaiser continued on his litigious path, Crowe, who could be as pithy as he was industrious, advised Six Companies to “Stop lawin’ and start diggin’.” They did, and the project was finally completed.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

signor, whispering in the bishop’s ear, even as he dispensed penance to those less straight and narrow. But somewhere in adolescence, priestly thoughts were put aside, and instead, McCone went on to the University of California at Berkeley, working his way through school as a part-time laborer in a steel factory. The exposure to the blast furnaces seemed to fire McCone’s soul. He was graduated with honors from the college of engineering, ranked 1Oth in his class.

At Berkeley, McCone developed a reputation as a grind, a humorless sort more at ease with slide rules than he was with people. But exacting as McCone was-and there were few on the Cal campus who seemed as sober-he occasionally allowed himself the company of a few likeminded friends. One of them, an engineering student a year ahead of him, was Steve Bechtel. The two socialized together, and by the time Steve dropped out of school to join his father, they had become if