Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (books to read to be successful TXT) 📕

impressed with the newcomer. On his return home, he told his sons he had found the ideal partner. “This Kaiser fellow is a hard worker,” he said. “He’s enthusiastic, and he has a lot of ingenious ideas. “9

Within a few months the two men had concluded a partnership deal. The terms were simple-a straight 50/50 split-and informal, concluded by no more than a handshake. “There are two principles he

[Bechtel] followed,” Kaiser said later. “He hated to sign papers, on the theory that if you couldn’t trust a man’s word, you couldn’t trust his signature. And his usual condition for entering any proposition was a 50/50 division. [He] had no patience with 51149 arrangements. He used to say, ‘No man with a sense of self-respect wants to be controlled on that kind of percentage.“‘10

Together, Kaiser and Bechtel were to build many of the major road-27

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

ways up and down the West Coast. At first, though, Kaiser was uncharacteristically cautious about his friend’s notion of entering the pipeline business. Warren would go through his by now well-practiced spiel about how big pipelining was going to be, and Henry J., who was short-necked and fat, would nod his glistening pate and agree that pipelining would be a lucrative enterprise, but someday, not now. For the present, there was money to be made quarrying rock and building roads.

W hen seized, though, by an idea, Bechtel was not an easy man to put off, and ultimately his arguments won out. As a result, Bechtel and Kaiser were among the first contractors in the United States to tackle major pipeline projects, first for Standard Oil, then for Continental Gas. By 1928, when Kaiser departed to take up a new venture, the two men had built thousands of miles of pipeline together.

The lines, which were electrically welded in the field with a process invented by a Bechtel engiqeer, were set down so quickly and efficiently that the rest of the oil industry soon took notice. As more and more contracts followed, the relationship between Bechtel and Big Oil forged into an alliance, one that in the years to come would have a profound impact not only on Bechtel Construction, but on the Middle East and the course of American foreign policy.

By the end of the 1920s, that process had already made the W A.

Bechtel Company one of the largest construction companies in America, and provided its founder with a fortune approaching $30 million.

Nearing his 60th year, and not in the best of health, Warren Bechtel”Dad,” as his men called him, in affectionate mimicry of his sonscould, if he chose, spend the rest of his years enjoying himself in the luxurious high-rise apartment building he and Clara had lately bought for themselves and their offspring on Oakland’s Lake Merritt. But for Bechtel and Henry Kaiser there was one more challenge still ahead. It was Boulder Dam.

28

CHAPTER

3

BOULDER

T he weather

the jungles was

of hot; the

Cuba,

air moist

remote as and

any sticky;

could the

be.

jobsite,

But if

deep

the

in

conditions bothered Henry J. Kaiser, he did not show it. Seated on a campstool, arms waving, voice booming, round body fairly bursting with enthusiasm and effervescence, he was describing to his friend Dad Bechtel what he called “the mightiest project of them all.”

It was two years since the two men had seen each other. Kaiser had accepted in 1928