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

executives. In the mid-1950s, while on assignment in the Amazon, he acquired the nickname “Shoot-from-the-Hip” for downing an attacking ocelot with a revolver. In 1958, however, during a bloody revolution in Iraq, Cooley’s luck ran out. Attempting to escape from Baghdad with a small party of Europeans and Americans, Cooley was dragged from his car by a mob, beaten, bludgeoned and dismembered. Despite the personal efforts of then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, Cooley’s body was never recovered. The loss was particularly devastating to Steve Bechtel, Sr. Cooley had been his closest friend, and even y ears later, Bechtel could not talk about his death without becoming emotional.

70

CHAPTER

SIX

IN HIS

OWN IMAGE

T he same

had

war

also

that

drained had enriched

them. After Steve Bechtel

five-plus

and

years of John McCone

eighteen-hour

days, seven days a week, they were burned-out and exhausted, each looking forward to nothing so much as a long rest. It would mean dissolving the BechtelMcCone Corporation and divvying their profits, and this they accomplished quite amicably not long after the war. By now, both men could well afford it. In addition to the money they had earned together, each had made millions through a series of shrewd wartime investments-the bulk of them in Bechtel’s case with the oil and steel companies with which he would later do business.

He was one of the wealthiest men in San Francisco now, with a fortune that put him in the same league as the Huntingtons, Crockers and Stanfords and the rest of the city’s moneyed elite. Dad Bechtel had never been able to get through the door of clubs like the Pacific Union and Bohemian; by 1946, his son was a leading member of both. He had become a power in California, and before long, his quiet reach would stretch across the country and the globe as well. For the moment, though, he was content to play golf, dabble in real estate and 71

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

acquaint himself with the family he’d nearly forgotten.

Laura, his wife of twenty-five years, knew their peaceful life couldn’t last. It was fine having Steve lounging around the house, or puttering around “Villa Bechtel,” the oceanfront estate he’d bought not far from Monterey, and it was better still seeing him develop a relationship with his children, particularly his pride, Steve junior. But within months, she knew, Steve would be getting restless. And within months, so he was. His weekly golf games with friends like Cooley and McCone or his luncheons with brother Ken, who now was running the fast-growing family-owned insurance company, no longer seemed to engage him. He was getting bored collecting dividends and watching over real estate. For all his protestations of enjoying retirement, Steve Bechtel missed the action.

His company missed him as well. Largely for tax reasons, Bechtel and McCone had liquidated their corporation and sold off its assets. Its place had been taken by a new entity titled “Bechtel BrothersMcCone,” which put under one corporate roof all the Bechtel and McCone interests that had existed before and during the war. While Bechtel controlled the lion’s share of the stock, he-along with McCone and the rest of BechtelMcCone’s senior executives-was deterred by tax considerations from playing an active management role. 1

Instead, the company was being run by a coterie of former Bechtel middle-managers, led by Steve’s Berkeley classmate and Boulder colleague