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) 📕

hired for the evening passed sweet potatoes, giblet gravy and cranberry stuffing and for dessert, ice cream snowmen frozen so hard that one once slipped from a serving spoon and shattered one of Laura’s prized Dresden plates.

After dinner, as the men loosened their belts a notch or two and the women joked about having to start a diet in the morning, the stuffed revelers would get up slowly from the table and drift into the living room to admire the tree a final time or exchange a word with a cousin they’d missed talking to earlier in the day. Exactly at 10:00, Steve, a habitually early-to-bed man, would rise and announce, “Well, boys and girls, it’s ten o’clock. Time to go home.” There would be embraces and “thank-you’s” and “goodbyes,” and another Christmastime at the Bechtels’ would come to an end.

So, with little deviation, it went every year-except for 1960. For Steve Bechtel, his only son and the Bechtel Corporation, that Christmas was a special one indeed.

It was twenty-seven years now since Steve Bechtel had taken over the family business-more than two and a half decades of sweat, toil and unprecedented growth. The company had become a corporate colossus, with projects stretching around the world, and revenues topping $1

billion every year. Steve Bechtel, whose energy and enterprise had made it possible, was proud of his labors-and at the age of 61, increasingly worn out by them as well.

He had never been a man with much time or use for rest. When he golfed or hiked, it was in the company of business associates or clients, 127

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

the customers who made his company grow. His one nonbusiness hobby-stamp collecting-was no more than a minor diversion, and though his collection was valued in the millions, he entrusted its ongoing upkeep to one of his employees. Despite his vast fortune-in 1958, Fortune estimated his net worth at $250 million, making him one of the richest men in the United States-he lived simply. The Lakeside apartment, for instance, though spacious and comfortable, and adorned with knickknacks from his travels (including, over the fireplace in the den, a silver sword presented to him by King ibn Saud), was no more luxurious than that which might belong to a middleranking insurance executive. Except for his charities, he was, in all, a confirmed penny-pincher, who hated to shop and regarded consumerism generally as wasteful indulgence. The one time he allowed himself some luxury was while on the road. If only for the sake of conducting meetings conveniently, he and Laura, his constant traveling companion, stayed in the best hotels in every city, including New York, where he maintained a permanently rented suite on the thirty-third floor of the Carlyle, and in Vienna, where the Bechtels favored the luxuriously grand Imperial,** at home in San Francisco, there were no frills . To go to and from the office and the airport, Steve had himself ferried in an aging Cadillac sedan.

Save for a collection of fine jewels, which spent most of their time in the company safe, his wife, Laura, was equally frugal. Partly to save

The Bechtel family’s numerous and generous charitable contributions are with few exceptions tied in one way or another to business. Among the recipients of Bechtel’s beneficence are Oakland’s Merrit Hospital (which the family refers to as “Bechtel Hospital”); the University of California at Berkeley (where Steve senior, who failed to graduate, contributed most of the money that built the Stephen D. Bechtel School of Engineering);