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

it. Steve wouldn’t. Instead, he would deal with customers who financed their own projects with big advance payments and had a record of pay ing their bills on time. He wanted the biggest clients with the biggest projects-projects Bechtel would not only build, but conceive and design; and with his own contacts and those provided by Simpson, he could afford to be selective. “We’d rather be known to a hundred key people than to a hundred million,” he told his executives, “because those hundred are the ones from whom we could obtain business. “8

The hundred key people came to be known at the Bechtel Corporation as “the sweetheart clients”; and one of the sweetest and most helpful was James B. Black, chairman of Pacific Gas & Electric.

A native San Franciscan, Black had excellent ties in the East, where he had spent fifteen years in high-level government and corporate positions before returning to California to take over PG&E, the fastestgrowing utility in the country. As PG&E’s chairman, Black soon became close to Bechtel, who had been a prime construction contractor for the utility since the days ofBechtel-McCone. In the company of 76

IN HIS OW N IMAGE

Jack Horton, chairman of Southern California Edison, another Bechtel customer, the two men socialized and, eventually, became members of the same Bohemian Grove lodge. As the friendship deepened, Black began doing important favors for Bechtel, like arranging for him to become a director of New York’s J. P. Morgan & Company, a position that provided Bechtel with entree to the world of East Coast finance. Black was also responsible for Bechtel’s becoming one of the few California members of the Business Council, a Washington-based organization composed of the leading businessmen in the country.

Soon Bechtel was fly ing frequently to the East, returning, often as not, with a contract in his pocket. “Steve … would come back and say,

‘I agreed we’d do this, and now it’s up to y ou guys to do it,” Komes recalled. “Usually, the project was something that at the outset, we would regard as impossible. But then Steve would start talking and we’d realize that as long as he said it, we could do anything. “9

In pursuing the clients who gave these contracts, Bechtel was the master of the soft sell. He shunned advertising, and rarely, if ever, made an overt sales call. Instead, over a long lunch or a round of golf, he’d ask about a CEO’s business, what his problems were, what he thought the future held. Seemingly casual, he would then listen as the man unburdened himself of whatever difficulty was bothering him. It usually didn’t require much before Bechtel devised a way his company could help. “Steve had incredible intuition,” his attorney Bob Bridges noted. “If there are ten relevant facts that relate to a decision, most men need to have at least six or seven of them in their grasp before they can make up their minds. Not Steve. He’d make a decision based on two or three facts-and most of the time he would be right. “10

How the Bechtel method worked was demonstrated in 1949 when Steve found himself sitting next to Robert L. Minckler, president of General Petroleum, the West Coast subsidiary of Socony Mobil, at a lunch at the California Club in Los Angeles. During the course of the meal, Minckler began describing a major oil discovery that had been made near Edmonton, Canada, an area Bechtel knew well from building the illfated Canol project. “If I could ever run a pipeline from that field to the West Coast,” Minckler said offhandedly, “I’d build