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) 📕

Now, though, the situation was about to change radically. Richard Nixon had been elected president, and for the Bechtel Corporation and its proprietors, he would prove to be a very good friend indeed.

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The ties between Bechtel and the new president were part the result of friendship (Steve senior had known Nixon since his days as a California congressman), in part a consequence of geography (both had a native-born chauvinism about California and the West), but mostly a matter of mutual interest. Like the Bechtels, Nixon was pragmatic, internationalist and, as events would amply demonstrate, not above doing an occasional shady deal. He was also very much interested in boosting American exports, improving relations with the Soviets and developing new sources of energy-all goals that dovetailed neatly with Bechtel’s business interests.

Just how helpful Nixon could be to those interests was demonstrated six weeks after the inauguration, when the president’s mentor and former law partner Attorney General John Mitchell announced that the Justice Department was dropping its eight-year-long prosecution of El Paso Natural Gas on antitrust charges. The decision was significant on several counts, not least of them the fact that in defending itself against the charges, El Paso had paid a total of $770,000 to Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander, the New York law firm where both Mitchell and Nixon had lately been senior partners. For Bechtel, which, like El Paso, had been a major contributor to the Nixon campaign, the decision was welcome as well. In one stroke, the administration had cleared the way for the company to contract with El Paso for a number of major projects, most notable among them a $235 million naturalgas facility in Algeria.

The El Paso decision, however, was only a foretaste of favors to come. During the Nixon presidency major government projects, from the Alaska pipeline to the Washington Metro to a raft of nuclear

When in February 1974, Bechtel won the contract from the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company to serve as the prime management contractor for the $8 billion, 789-mile-long Alaska pipeline, the project was heralded by Bechtel as one of the most important in its history. However, Bechtel soon became involved in a bitter battle with Alyeska, which became increasingly critical of Bechtel’s performance in Alaska. It claimed that Bechtel was overstaffing with senior-level people to increase its fees on the cost-plus contract and overbilling Alyeska for many of its 1,800 pipeline employees.

Under Bechtel, Alyeska claimed, the pipeline project was plagued with low productivity, featherbedding, on-site thievery and glaring supply problems. In addition Bechtel was accused of ordering its qualitycontrol staff deliberately to falsify X-rays of thousands of pipeline welds in order to expedite construction. Bechtel, in tum, claimed that Alyeska had dragged its feet in awarding the prime management contract and was so slow in paying its bills that Bechtel’s relations with its subcontractors were jeopardized and performance suffered as a result. Bechtel managers in Alaska said Alyeska person-153

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

power plants, fairly rained on the Bechtel corporation, which saw its gross annual revenues go from $750 million in 1968 to nearly $2 billion in 197 4 -an increase of more than 150 percent.

With the contracts came appointment of both Bechtels to an array of prestigious posts, including, in the case of Steve junior, membership on the Treasury Department’s LaborManagement Advisory Committee. “Bechtel is one of the elite group around here,” a White House aide told a reporter after Steve junior’s designation. “Anyone on