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) 📕

on a Pan Am flight to Tokyo grounded Bechtel in Alaska, he merely called the president of the airline and had another 747 diverted to pick him up), not other people’s schedules (informed on one occasion that San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto would not be able to attend an impromptu dinner party he was hosting for Charles Lindbergh because of a prior commitment, Bechtel “ordered” him to come; he did), not age-and certainly not the coming to power of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Bechtel hadn’t been pleased by the defeat of his friend Richard Nixon; but the pain was lessened when the new president appointed another old friend, C. Douglas Dillon, secretary of the Treasury, and, later, an even older and better one, John McCone, as director of the CIA. Such friendships-and there were others in the Kennedy administration, including General Clay, who was dispatched as the president’s special representative to Berlin-gave Bechtel assured entree to the new administration. Not that he particularly needed assistance; such was Bechtel’s personal clout that the president himself was inviting him to call.

Still, the presence of all those Democrats in Washington seemed to make Bechtel uneasy, and during the Kennedy y ears he spent more and more time in New York, where, in his suite at the Carlyle, he regularly gathered for dinner corporate cronies like Juan Trippe, Texaco chairman Augustus Long, Lucius Clay, FMC chairman Paul Davies and Morgan Bank chairman and former Defense secretary Thomas Gates.

These Carly le get-togethers followed an invariable script. After dinner in the Versailles Suite, Laura and the other wives would retire to another hotel room for liqueurs and coffee, leaving the men to their brandy and cigars and the business of the evening. At the start, Steve would alway s appoint a discussion chairman-usually Juan Trippe, because Trippe liked the role and was good at it. Then the guests would talk in turn about their political concerns and the trends and opportunities they saw developing that might have a bearing on their operations. Gus Long, for instance, usually offered a reading on oil 138

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prices, while Steve might tell the group of his latest visit to Saudi Arabia or of a recent tete-a-tete in Washington with John McCone.

Gates, who frequently visited Europe and still had high-level contacts in the Pentagon, often voiced concern that NATO was not up to deterring the Russians. Davies would follow up with an even more pessimistic assessment of the worsening situation in· Southeast Asia, where his company had major interests. As the talk wore into the night, plates became countries, napkins mountain ranges, salt and pepper shakers armies. Huddled over the dinner table, eyes gleaming like schoolboys, Steve Bechtel and his aging friends pushed them to and fro.

W hile his father was planning the future of the world and Bechtel’s role in it, Steve Bechtel, Jr., was not having an easy time. He was just as energetic as the elder Bechtel, routinely working sixteen-hour days six, even seven days a week, and traveling just as extensively, racking up, on average, 250,000 air miles per year. He did his homework, informing himself on the details of each and every Bechtel project; he went into the field, peppering his employees with pointed, wellthought-out questions; he demonstrated he was tough, “taking a man’s head off,” as one executive put it, if he failed to deliver a sufficiently ·

succinct presentation.* But unlike his