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) 📕

Bechtel displayed the same hardball approach in 19 54 in building the Joppa steam plant for the AEC’s weapons-manufacturing installation at Paducah, Kentucky. The $830 million plant had been begun by one of Bechtel’s rivals, Ebasco Services, Inc., but was only a third finished when a jurisdictional fight between local workers and the AFL

brought the project to a standstill. Invited to take over by the AEC, Bechtel promptly shut down the operation and fired the entire work 105

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crew. The strikers responded by accusing the company of importing goon squads to intimidate them, and there followed a series of lawsuits, threats and violent confrontations. Bechtel, however, refused to budge.

Unless labor peace was soon restored, the company warned the unions, the Joppa project would be abandoned.12 The unions eventually buckled, and with help from the AFL, Bechtel began rehiring-refusing, however, to take back workers it deemed to be troublemakers. From there on, work proceeded smoothly.

W ith Joppa’s completion, Bechtel’s reputation soared even higher at the AEC and among the utilities. But there was one link in the nuclear chain still missing: an affiliation with either General Electric or Westinghouse, the nation’s principal reactor manufacturers. In October 1953, Steve forged it during a relaxing weekend in the company of America’s business elite.

The Homestead is the unlikely name of an elegant, antebellum hotel nestled high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Here, twice a year, the 160 or so members of the Business Council gather to discuss the concerns of corporate America, shucking their somber pinstriped suits for brightly hued sport jackets and golf trousers. Invariably, they are joined by top-ranking government officials, who are whisked into the nearby Hot Springs airport aboard Air Force jets, or as was the case with President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, ferried by helicopter to the manicured Homestead lawns.

The council was established in 193 3 to serve as a meeting point between the private sector and government. Over the years, dozens of its members have served in presidential cabinets, while the council itself has advised a succession of presidents, both Republican and Democratic, on everything from taxes to inflation. “Its power to influence the nation’s economy-and the decision-making of its elected officials-is little short of awesome,” noted a business journal. 13

Here, as in the Bohemian Grove, Steve Bechtel was in his element.

Since being elected a council member in 1950, he had developed a cordial personal-and oftentimes financially beneficial-relationship with many of his comembers. Through the council, for instance, Bechtel met Pan American Airways founder and chairman Juan Trippe, for whom he later built the worldwide chain of Inter-Continental Hotels. It was also at the council that Bechtel came to be friendly with IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and his son, Tom junior; 106

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later, Bechtel would build a number of major facilities for both men, and his son, Steve junior, would serve on the IBM board. United States Steel Chairman Roger Blough was still another friend made at the council; it was Blough’s company that had given Bechtel the Orinoco ore project. In terms of furthering Bechtel’s nuclear development, though, the key council member was Ralph H. Cordiner, chairman and chief executive officer of General Electric.

Cordiner and Bechtel had known each other slightly before serving together on the council. GE had managed the plutonium-processing reactors at Hanford, and