Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo Laton Mccartney (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

Only a year had passed since George Shultz, the outsider and former academic, had joined Bechtel. Now he was but one step away from the pinnacle of company power. It had been a dizzying rise, and in Washington, another cabinet member was about to attempt to match it.

Shultz put his membership in The Grove to good and immediate use, inviting a number of former government colleagues to be his guests. One of the most notable occasions was during the 1979 encampment, when Shultz played host to former secretary of State Henry Kissinger, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, former Nixon chief of staff and NATO commander Alexander Haig and computer magnate David Packard, who would eventually become Ronald Reagan’s deputy secretary of Defense. After the encampment, Shultz flew the party to Steve junior’s Pebble Beach vacation house aboard one of Bechtel’s corporate jets. They remained there several days, talking and socializing in private.

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CAP’S PERIOD

OF ADJUSTMENT

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take up duties as the Bechtel Corporation’s general counsel. The new recruit was Caspar Weinberger, of late secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Around San Francisco and Washington, it was assumed that the California-born Weinberger had been lured back to his native state by his onetime colleague and boss, George Shultz. It was also assumed that once he was in place, Weinberger’s career at Bechtel would be just as glittering as that of his former cabinet colleague. Neither assumption was correct.

A number of Nixon appointees besides Weinberger and Shultz wound up working for Bechtel in one capacity or another. They ranged from CIA director Richard Helms (who became a Bechtel Corporation consultant); to White House political advisor Peter Flanigan (who would become a senior partner in the Bechtelowned New York investment house Dillon, Read); to the Atomic Energy Commission’s general manager Robert L. Hollingsworth (who became manager of manpower services at Bechtel); to Treasury secretary William Simon, who became still another Bechtel consultant.

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CAP’S PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT

The truth was that Weinberger had come to Bechtel not because of Shultz, but in spite of him. They were different men, with differentand often conflicting-styles, and at Bechtel, their progress would be dissimilar as well.

That Weinberger had joined Bechtel was, in fact, rather odd. There were, in the first place, his origins. W hile his mother had been Episcopalian, as was Cap himself, his father, Herman Weinberger, was the son of immigrant Bohemian Jews-not a plus at a company with extensive dealings with the Arabs and more than a little anti-Semitism in its own executive suite. Moreover, while Weinberger had begun his career as a corporate lawyer, it had been years since he had practiced law, a subject that never held much interest for him. Nor did he claim to know much about business, especially the business of construction and engineering. His expertise was as a manager, a cost-cutter, a political doer and fixer, and through the years it had served him well. Indeed, if anything, the former cabinet secretary, OMB director and Federal Trade Commission chairman was overqualified for the post of general counsel.

Yet Weinberger had been recruited for the Bechtel job by the company’s general counsel, Bill Slusser, who was planning to retire, and it appealed to him on a number of counts. With a $200,000-a-year-plus salary, he could afford a residence in one of San Francisco’s most affluent suburbs and later acquire a summer place on Maine’s tony Mount Desert Island. His wife, Jane, suffered from arthritis, a condition aggravated by the Washington climate, so the Weinbergers were eager to return to California. Finally, a move to Bechtel would put Cap on the same political fast track