American library books » Other » 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) 📕

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that committee had no trouble getting his views to the President. “1

It was Steve senior, though, who got the choicest plum: appointment to the advisory committee of the U.S. ExportImport Bank, a job that during the Nixon years added billions to Bechtel’s bottom line.

The creditor blame-for this development rested with the bank’s Nixon-appointed president, an ebullient, pudgy 59-year-old former car salesman named Henry Kearns.

That Henry Kearns would play so central a role in Bechtel’s financial fortunes-not to mention those of the countries in which it operated

-was, to put it mildly, an improbable happenstance: nearly as improbable as Henry Kearns himself.

He had been born in Utah, where he studied engineering for a time at the state university before dropping out to move to Southern California. There, armed with a business degree obtained through a correspondence course, he tried his hand at various odd occupations (none of them related to banking or international finance) before discovering his true talent, selling-selling, in fact, almost anything, from real estate to gasoline to, best of all, cars, which he did with conspicuous success for the Loesh and Osborne Motor Company of Pasadena.

Kearns’s career attainment might have ended there, but for the fact that in addition to being a supersalesman, he was also a fervent antiCommunist, a trait he had in common with an ambitious young California politician named Richard Nixon. The two became friends, and when Nixon ran as Dwight Eisenhower’s vicepresident in 1952, Kearns served as chairman of the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign in Southern California. Following the election, and a stint spent as vicechairman of the Republican National Finance Committee, Kearns, at nel insisted on duplicating Bechtel efforts and generated unnecessary red tape. The dispute culminated in May 1975 when Alyeska fired Bechtel from the project. Steve junior was reportedly enraged and embittered and rarely spoke of the project again.

What should have been the crown jewel in his career as a builder proved to be severely flawed.

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A FRIEND IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Nixon’s recommendation, was appointed by Eisenhower as assistant secretary for international affairs at the Commerce Department.

During his years at Commerce, Kearns traveled frequently, especially to Asia, where he developed a network of contracts with many of the region’s leading businessmen. In 1961, following Nixon’s defeat at the hands of John Kennedy, Kearns moved to Tokyo, and there became a consultant to Mitsui, the giant Japanese trading company. Operating out of an office in Mitsui’s corporate headquarters, Kearns set up a number of businesses in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, where, in the company of a Pasadena lawyer named Maurice Stans-later to be Nixon’s secretary of Commerce and chairman of his reelection committee-he made what would turn out to be a fateful investment in a Bangkok pulp and paper mill, Siam Kraft.

While Kearns saw to his business interests, he also maintained his relations with Nixon. In 1967, when the former vicepresident came to Japan, hunting clients for his New York law firm, Kearns served as his guide and door-opener, introducing Nixon to the principals at Mitsui (which wound up hiring Nixon’s firm to handle much of the company’s American legal work), putting him together with such notables as former prime minister Kishi Nobosuke and arranging for him to be entertained in the capital’s Ginza district.

Kearns’s efforts were rewarded two years later, when now President Nixon named him head of the ExportImport Bank.

The appointment did not go down well with everyone-“What we need here,” said one State Department official after meeting him, “is fewer snake-oil salesmen”-and Kearns himself was highly defensive about his limited background and even more limited qualifications. It was not true, he insisted, that he had sold used cars; he had sold only new cars. But whatever others

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