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) 📕

134

CHAPTER

1 2

TAKING COMMAND

I n taking

brave

over

note.

as

He Bechtel’s

would run president,

the

Steve

business, he Bechtel,

told his Jr., sounded

executives,

a

with

the same vigor and vision with which it had always been run. Nonetheless, there would be changes. He was a different man from his father, with a different background and different personality. From now on, Steve junior asserted, he would impose “my style of doing things.”

T hey were fine words; but if Steve Bechtel, Jr., expected his father to fade into the background, he soon found he was mistaken.

Freed from the administrative chores he so detested, Steve senior was, if anything, even more dominant than before-and as his pile of used air tickets attested, just as much in motion. He spent fully six months of the year on the road, popping up one day in London, the next in Toronto, a third in Beirut, Seoul, Sydney or Rome. In his wake, he left a lengthening string of deals: phosphorous, zirconium, iron and nickel mines in South Africa; copper mines, mills and smelters in Chile, Mauritania and Ireland; pipelines in Germany and Switzerland; nuclear plants in Spain and India; hydroelectric complexes in New Zealand and Newfoundland, and, in the Canadian 135

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

province of Quebec, a giant hydroelectric project that, when complete, would generate 5.25 million kilowatts of power and create a reservoir nearly half the size of Lake Ontario. So boundless was his energy that by the middle 1960s the Bechtel Corporation had operations in 22

countries on five continents, which together were bringing more than $3 billion per year.

To be sure, there were some miscues along the way. In Saudi Arabia, Bechtel had a temporary falling-out with its old partner Aramco over what Aramco considered cavalier treatment by Bechtel. “There was a period,” explained former Aramco chairman Frank Jungers, “when Bechtel took its Aramco dealings for granted, and we phased Bechtel out and replaced them with another construction company, the Fluor Corporation. From the late 1950s to the mid-l960s our relations with Bechtel were at low ebb. “1 And then there was the great Indian fertilizer fiasco.

The Indian misadventure had begun in April 1964, when Steve senior, in the company of several members of the Business Council, visited New Delhi on a State Department-sponsored tour to drum up business. 2 Included in the American delegation was Bechtel’s friend General Lucius Clay, whose presence cannot have been reassuring to the Indians. Seven months before, it had been largely his testimony to Congress which had doomed a provision of a foreign aid bill that would have underwritten India’s construction of a badly needed steel mill. Clay had opposed the grant on the ground that building things like steel mills should be done by private companies (such as, notably, Bechtel), not by governments. The Indians had been infuriated, and along with them, U.S. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, who charged that “for blatant ideological reasons [Clay] is going back to the policies of the Eisenhower Administration. “3 The ones left happy by the whole affair were the Russians, who, having no scruples about a government’s doing anything, had built the steel mill for the Indians.

In any event, there Clay was, sitting alongside Bechtel, as Steve, who was interested in building nuclear plants in India, tried to smooth things over by telling Indian officials that he would like