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

had been created to handle the Bechtel family portfolio, Shultz was investing his employ ers’ personal funds as well. Much of their assets went for real estate and oil deals, but the most significant purchase, made in April 1981 for $18

million and a commitment to pump tens of millions of dollars more into the business, was of Dillon, Read & Company, the “white shoes”

Wall Street investment house long presided over by Kennedy administration Treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon. “We observe that people who have reached out from the stream of their experience,” Shultz told a reporter, explaining his investment strategy, “have not done well.” He added, “We can afford as a private company to make investments we can be patient with. “2

Besides diversifying and investing, Shultz was also helping the company by drawing on the contacts he had made while in government.

Perhaps the most important of them was John Turner, a politically well-connected Toronto lawyer, who would become Canada’s prime minister in 1984. Shultz had met Turner in the early 1970s, when the latter was serving in the short-lived Conservative Canadian government as finance minister. A friendship had developed, and when Shultz went to Bechtel, he invited Turner to become a director of Bechtel’s Canadian subsidiary, Bechtel Canada, Ltd. In that capacity, Turner was instrumental in cementing a number of critical deals, including 220

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lining up $350 million in Canadian government financing for Bechtel’s Algerian oil and gas customer, Sonatrach. 3

By 1982, Shultz had made himself all but indispensable to Bechtel’s operations. Though now and again he would slip off to Washington or a foreign capital to advise on economic policy, he seemed content at Bechtel, which kept him on the road as often as he would have been as secretary of State. He was a company man, and he seemed to relish the role-nearly as much as Steve junior relished having him play it. It might have continued that way -the affable, clubbable George Shultz a permanent fixture of the Bechtel executive suite-but for the peculiar personality of Alexander Haig.

Since becoming Ronald Reagan’s secretary of State, the former general and Nixon chief of staff had been engaged in turf and policy battles with virtually every important member of the administration, from the vicepresident to the national security advisor to the secretaries of Defense, Treasury and Agriculture. He had blustered; he had bullied; he had threatened, more than once, to resign; and Reagan’s patience was wearing thin. It snapped, finally, in June 1982, when Haig blasted the White House for issuing a statement calling on Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin not to attack Beirut and to resume talks on west bank autonomy as soon as possible. Summoning Haig into the Oval Office early in the afternoon of June 2 5, Reagan reached into his desk, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to Haig. It was a statement accepting his resignation.

Within the hour, Reagan was on the phone to George Shultz, then in London on a business trip, offering the Bechtel president Haig’s job.

Shultz asked for half an hour to think it over, then accepted.

Richard Nixon, who was among the first to hear the news, congratulated Reagan on selecting Shultz. “I happen to be one of the few who know both Shultz and Haig, perhaps better than anyone else,” the

The incident that spelled Haig’s downfall as secretary of State-his public anger at the W hite House’s criticism of Israeli moves on Beirut-came as the climax of a long-simmering war between Haig and Caspar Weinberger over U. S. policy vis-a-vis the Middle East. As it happened, Shultz also played a role in Haig’s