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) 📕

Cordiner, like Steve, was a frequent participant in various energy conferences. But it was at the council meetings at Homestead that their friendship really firmed. During the long weekends, the two men would often slip off to a quiet corner and discuss their plans and ideas for nuclear energy until late into the night.

GE, Steve was well aware, had dropped to second position in the reactor industry, following Hyman Rickover’s decision to award reactor development for his nuclear submarines to the company’s archrival, Westinghouse. He also knew that Cordiner was eager to regain the lead-as eager as Bechtel was himself to gain GE’s support� W ith its reactor-building capacity, its long history as one of the country’s leading consumer electric companies and its considerable clout on Wall Street and in Washington, politically conservative General Electric could be to Bechtel’s nuclear ambitions what Socal had been to its pipeline and refinery business.

During a break in the Homestead weekend, Steve drew Cordiner aside and told him that his company had decided to earmark 10 percent of its pretax earnings for nuclear development and training. Cordiner was impressed; he had had no idea Bechtel was so committed to nuclear power. Bechtel was in the nuclear game to stay, Steve added, going on to describe the work it had done already in developing EBR-1. Again, Cordiner was impressed; the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor, such as the one at EBR-1, was a design GE favored, rather than the water-cooled models Westinghouse was building for Rickover.

Finally, Bechtel came to the point. Why not, he proposed, get beyond all the testing and endless discussion over which type of reactor was best for generating commercial power, and simply built a nuclear plant-not just another prototype, but an actual, full-scale, moneymaking plant that ran on atomic energy. 14 Cordiner’s eyes lit up. The proposal was bold, but Bechtel was talking sense.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

By the end of the weekend, Bechtel and Cordiner had concluded a handshake agreement to go to the National Power Group and ask which of its members was ready to stop talking and start building.

When Commonwealth Edison of Chicago volunteered to build a plant at Dresden, Illinois, not far from its corporate headquarters, General Electric and Bechtel were in business.

As Cordiner and Bechtel were optimistically readying their plans, their friend AEC chairman Lewis Strauss was not having an easy time of it. Since taking office, he had been drawing increasing fire from the Democratic-majority Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Members of the committee, most notably its chairman, New Mexico Senator Clinton P. Anderson, had repeatedly charged that the AEC’s long-range nuclear power program was fuzzy and inadequate. So intense had the grilling been during committee sessions that Strauss was no longer on speaking terms with most of the members. During one hearing, he burst out: “This room is decorated with my blood!”15

By November 1957, Strauss had had enough and told Eisenhower he would not seek reappointment to another four-year term. The man he recommended to replace him was John McCone.

Since the fateful meeting in Paris, McCone had remained close to Eisenhower and had provided a steady stream of advice during the 1952 campaign. McCone had also struck up a warming friendship with Eisenhower’s vicepresident, Richard Nixon, whom he had known since Nixon emerged as an ardently antiCommunist California congressman,