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

Walker confidently smiled. “On the last day of the session, someone in the Senate is going to get up and object to the bill. He’s going to get up and talk and talk and talk and the bill’s just not going to get through. Not this year.”22

It took a moment or two for the full impact of Walker’s statement to register. Finally, Graubard realized that Walker had already arranged some sort of deal. The bill would fail, whatever the ADL did, but if only for public relations purposes, Bechtel was offering the organization a chance to get on board. Graubard was impressed-and chilled.

A few moments later, he brought the meeting to an end.

There turned out to be good reason for Walker’s confidence: the fix was indeed in. As a result of what Walker later called “plain old vanilla lobbying,”23 Walker had recruited Texas Senator John Tower to the Bechtel cause. His role, however, was not evident until September 28, when the bill, of which one version had been passed by the House, another by the Senate, came to the Senate floor, in the form of a motion to name a conference committee. Without such a committee to resolve differences between the Senate and House versions, the bill could not become law. Under ordinary circumstances, however, the naming of a committee was routine. Not, however, this time. Tower rose to object, citing obscure parliamentary points of procedure. Supporters of the Ribicoff amendment, like Illinois Democrat Adlai Stevenson Ill, were furious. “T he will of the Congress,” Stevenson declared, “is being frustrated by a parliamentary ploy aimed at keeping this legislation from being brought to a final vote in the Senate. T hat effort is being supported by the Administration. “24 Stevenson was right, but with Congress anxious to adjourn, there was nothing he could do.

Tower’s point was sustained, and, with that, the bill-and the threat to Bechtel’s interests in the Middle East-died.

“What Charls Walker said would happen, happened, exactly as he said it would,” Sy Graubard noted later. “He was worth every dollar Bechtel paid him. “25

196

CHAPTER

l 8

NUCLEAR ECLIPSE

I n beating

provided back

a

the

graphic controversy over

demonstration of the

its Arab Boy

political cott, Bechtel

muscle and

had

legislative clout. The company was a power in Washington, one whose influence reached to the very highest levels of government. But there were some issues on which connections, however gilded and glittering, were not enough. One such issue was nuclear power.

The nuclear industry, and Bechtel with it, had prospered greatly during the late 1960s and 1970s, thanks in no small measure to Richard Nixon, who made the expansion of nuclear power a centerpiece of his plans to combat the Arab oil cartel. Responding to a presidential call to build a thousand nuclear power plants by the year 2000, U.S.

utilities in 1973 had ordered a record thirty-one nuclear plants, of which Bechtel, by now the largest builder of nuclear power stations in the world, was scheduled to build more than half. For Bechtel, the orders were only the beginning of the good news-or of the billions that were expected to flow in.

In 1969, the company, working in concert with Union Carbide, had persuaded Nixon to reverse two decades plus of U.S. policy by allowing 197

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

commercial concerns to produce and sell enriched nuclear