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) 📕

Bill Waste. T hough Waste and his confreres had landed several major contracts, none had produced any major profits, and by the end of 1946, Bechtel BrothersMcCone was foundering. 2 To continue, it needed a fresh infusion of cash. But more than anything, it needed Steve Bechtel.

He returned without much persuasion, and after buying out the interests of McCone and brother Ken** and pumping in several million dollars of his own funds, set out to turn the company around.

Steve made it a practice to buy large blocks of stock in companies like Socal that were Bechtel clients and over the y ears amassed a portfolio worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

*Following the war, Kenneth Bechtel took over management of the family’s insurance concern, Industrial Indemnity, and built it into one of the largest such firms in the country. As time went on, however, relations between Ken and his brother Steve became increasingly strained, in part because of Ken’s marriage to Elizabeth Hay, a wealthy San Francisco socialite. Among Steve’s objections to Betty was the fact that she collected Impressionist paintings. Steve viewed this as a frivilous and expensive practice and strongly disapproved. After growing irritation, Ken and Betty finally moved out of the Bechtelowned Lakeside apartment building, and thereafter refused to attend Bech-72

IN HIS OWN IMAGE

Rechristened Bechtel Corporation, the company soon snapped up several major contracts, including one to build a 200-mile portion of the Texas-California gas line, another to erect a $7 million oil refinery for Socal in Salt Lake City and still another to build several factories in California for Owens-Corning Fiberglas. “With Steve back as salesman,” said his friend and lawyer Bob Bridges, “the company took off like a rocket. “3

The men Bechtel gathered around him to build and guide that rocket were very much like himself. Virtually all had been born in California and educated at Berkeley, Stanford or USC. With few exceptions, they were hardworking WASP Republicans with equally hardworking WASP Republican wives. They sent their children to good public schools, attended church, played active roles in the Boy Scouts and PTA. In their personal habits, they were carefully temperate: they didn’t go to nightclubs or stay up late, and if they drank or smoked, it was never to excess. A rollicking good time for them was having over a few friends (invariably other Bechtel employees and their wives) and throwing some steaks on the grill, followed by a hand or two of canasta or bridge. A few, like Bridges, who could dictate complex contracts off the top of his head, and Jerry Komes, were extraordinarily bright; an even lesser few, like George Cooley, who was fond of regaling the office with demonstrations of how he fended off poison arrows with his bare hands, and who enjoyed taking in cases of whiskey and fresh-cut flowers as gifts to Bechtel managers and their wives in Saudi Arabia, were highly colorful in their own right. Most of the “Bechtelians,” though, were determineded middlebrow sorts: earnest, drab, decent, distinguished primarily in their work. In an era of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, they were archetypal Middle Americans.

Now and again, however, there was an exception, a figure not from the mold. One was Laura’s uncle and Steve’s chief confidant, John L.

Simpson.

A native San Franciscan and nine years Steve’s senior, Simpson pas-tel family functions. A rapprochement of sorts occurred in 1961, when Ken announced he was divorcing Betty (who collected a