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

$4 million settlement) to marry Nancy Slusser, until then the wife of Bechtel’s popular chief counsel, Willis Slusser. Almost as quickly as family peace was restored, though, it began to unravel, in large measure over Ken’s growing involvement in the environmental movement, one of whose principal targets was the Bechtel Corporation. After a number of conflicts, Ken resigned from the Bechtel board in 1971, and shortly thereafter retired from Industrial Indemnity to devote himself full time to the cause of conservation. He died in February 1978.

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sessed a worldliness and sophistication no one else in the Bechtel organization, including its president, could match. After graduating from Berkeley, he had gone to work for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a joint U.S.-British project that provided food and clothing for Belgian refugees during World War I. He spent five years in Europe schooling himself in Continental finance, making the social rounds (most notably in Vienna, where he married a well-connected socialite, Margarete Mandel), and developing a close friendship with CRB’s head and his fellow San Franciscan, Herbert Hoover.

On his return to the United States, Simpson joined the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, a leading New York investment house with branches throughout Europe.*

One evening during the mid-1930s, as Simpson was thrashing through an especially difficult contract, his friend and boss, Prent Gray, dropped by his office and suggested that the two of them seek advice from Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm headquartered in the same building. During the Paris Peace Conference, Gray had met one of the firm’s partners, who had impressed him as a “very smart fellow. “4

His name was John Foster Dulles. Perhaps, Gray suggested, he could help.

“Foster” did help, not only that night, but on many days and nights in the years ahead. Dulles, in fact, proved so helpful that he and his brother, a rather owlish fellow named Allen, were subsequently awarded all of Schroder’s legal work. Schroder, in turn, began arranging financing for a growing number of Sullivan & Cromwell clients. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, and during the course of it the brothers Dulles became fast friends with the bank’s rising young executive vicepresident, John L. Simpson.

Simpson himself, meanwhile, was continuing to prosper. Named a

J. Henry Schroder was something more than an ordinary Wall Street investment bank. It was owned by the wealthy, titled SchrOder family of Germany who, following World War I, moved to renew commercial ties with Great Britain and the United States. Baron Helmut von Schroder moved the bank’s headquarters to London in 1914, and later opened major operations in New York, Switzerland, Central and South America, Canada and Lebanon. While Helmut von SchrOder was building his banking empire, a cousin, Baron Bruno von Schroder, was gaining notoriety as a close associate of Adolf Hitler. In 1932, Bruno brought Hitler and Germany Army chief of staff Franz von Papen to his home for a meeting that helped clear the way for Hitler’s becoming German chancellor the following year. Bruno’s activities and the bank’s German origins produced accusations during World War II that the bank was tied to the Nazis.

Fact was that the J. Henry Schroder bank gave valuable assistance to the Allies, including affording cover for a number of agents of the Office of Strategic Services.

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Schroder director, he became the firm’s international contact man, and as war clouds gathered over Europe, he began shuttling between Washington, New York and Central and South America. Officially his missions were undertaken for the bank, but at the suggestion of his friends the Dulleses, he began doing the government favors as well, including “smoking out,”