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) 📕

He was, said the president, firmly committed to imposing a ban on all nuclear-arms testing. The ban was bitterly opposed by McCone, who was keen on firing a nuclear missile in the general direction of Cuba, and the idea lay dormant until the Kennedy administration. Eisenhower, though, was able to have his way with one McCone-sponsored project: providing private companies like Bechtel with small nuclear explosives to help them extract oil from deep underground and to blast tunnels through mountains. McCone was positively rabid about the notion. Think, he asked, of the things a Bechtel or a Socal could do with a few atomic bombs in its toolbox! Eisenhower killed the plan with a one word response: “No. “19

Nonetheless, thanks to McCone, Bechtel and General Electric were moving right along, and by the fall of 1959, the Dresden I nuclear plant was complete. At the dedication ceremonies, Cordiner threw the switch, while flashbulbs popped and McCone, Bechtel and the representatives of the nation’s largest utilities beamed. McCone hailed the facility as “the largest, most efficient, most advanced nuclear plant in the world.” Bechtel predicted it would do more to “establish nuclear power than any other project in the world.”

It seemed to matter little that after only a month of operation, Dresden I suffered the first of numerous shutdowns and accidents, and that it proved far more expensive to operate than conventionally powered plants. Nor did it matter overly that the Bechtel Corporation had yet to Ill

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

make a profit on any of its nuclear operations. A toehold in the new age had been established, and in the years to come, billions upon billions would flow in.

John McCone had helped his friend Steve Bechtel in other ways as well. He had, for one thing, done much to make him a frequent and familiar face in Washington, including at the White House. Sensing a direct, low-key bluffness not unlike his own, Eisenhower seemed quite taken with Bechtel. They golfed together at Burning Tree, swapped stories, exchanged affectionate notes. “I know you did a lot of work in the recently concluded political campaign and that, in addition, you helped materially on the financial end,” Eisenhower wrote Bechtel after his 1956 reelection. “This note is merely to express my lasting appreciation of the personal compliment implicit in your action. “20

More substantively, Eisenhower also sought out Bechtel’s counsel and appointed him to a number of prestigious government posts. In 1954, for example, he named him to the National Highway Committee. Chaired by Berlin blockade hero General Lucius Clay, a figure who would join with Bechtel in a number of business ventures in coming years, the committee presented to Congress a blueprint for the creation of the Interstate Highway system. In 1957, Eisenhower appointed Bechtel as one of a number of business executives (among them Bechtel’s own John L. Simpson) to work with Under-Secretary of State Douglas Dillon in drafting a report that would determine policy for distribution of foreign aid and development loans-many to countries which would use them to employ Bechtel. “This is wonderful,”

exclaimed Eisenhower, when he reviewed the group’s findings. “I can read it myself. “21 Later, the president wrote Bechtel: “I am