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

own. Moreover, she went on, two of her women coworkers, both Gentile, had been promoted despite the fact that neither was a college graduate. In the New York office where she worked, Cheren said, only 2 5 to 30 members of the 600-person staff were Jewish, and they were kept in low-level positions so “they were not visible when Arabs came into the office.”

Despite the stories told by employees like Cheren and Fischer, the documentation of Bechtel’s compliance with the boycott in Commerce Department records and Levi’s own enthusiasm for the case, a number of Justice Department officials were uneasy about prosecuting Bechtel, especially on antitrust grounds. W hatever Bechtel’s sins, the case was clearly political. Moreover, it involved alleged violations that had occurred overseas, an area where the Sherman Antitrust Act had never before been applied. “A lot of people in the department were skeptical,” recalled one Justice Department official. “We were breaking new ground here. And frankly, it didn’t seem so much a legal issue as a public-policy one. “11

Levi’s determination to prosecute also unsettled many members of the administration, including Gerald Ford, who hadn’t expected his attorney general to go so far. Nonetheless, Ford was reluctant to overrule Levi, whom he had installed at Justice to lift department morale, badly shaken by the Watergate scandals; moreover, the Jewish community was watching the case closely, and with a presidential election looming, Ford could hardly afford to alienate such an important voting block. “It was to Ford’s advantage politically for the administration to appear to be behind the antitrust action,” said a Washington lawyer involved in Bechtel’s defense. “The President was smart enough to realize that there was some excellent political mileage to be garnered from this suit. “12

Ford’s silence did not prevent others in the administration from speaking out, most notably Treasury Secretary William Simon. Having worked hard to recycle Arab petrodollars into the still-sagging U.S.

economy, Simon, who would later become a consultant to Bechtel and chairman of an investment firm controlled by Bechtel’s partner in Saudi Arabia, Suliman Olayan, publicly blasted Levi’s plans as a direct threat to the tens of billions the Arabs were expected to invest in the United States. More criticism came from Deputy Secretary of State Upon leaving his post as Treasury secretary in January 1977, Simon became a

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for Mideast Affairs Sidney Sofar as well as from Assistant Secretary of State Arthur Hartman. But by far the most formidable opponent of Levi’s plans was Henry Kissinger. The secretary of State held Bechtel and its president in high regard. With its Sumed pipeline deal, Bechtel had helped State open the door to improved relations with the Sadat government. Of Shultz, who would later ask the Secretary of State to join Bechtel’s Bohemian Grove lodge, Kissinger was unaccustomedly admiring, proclaiming him “the one man whom I would readily entrust with the future of my country.”

Beyond these considerations, Kissinger feared that Levi’s suit would jeopardize the Mideast peace offensive he had launched in November 1973. As a result of this offensive, the United States had been able to disengage Israel and Syria on the Golan Heights, bring Egypt out from under Soviet influence, lift the oil embargo and restore relations with Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil supplier. That Levi