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

55

CHAPTER

5

THE WAR YEARS

I n the

pelled, crowded Washington

double-breasted suits restaurant,

lunched

industrialists

on 75-cent

in wide-lasirloins, sipped

sour mash and talked defense contracts with politicians and military brass. It was the summer of 1940, and much of Europe had already fallen to the Germans. In England, the British were mourning their dead and nursing their wounded from Dunkirk, even as they prepared for the soon-to-come Nazi blitz. At Number lO Downing Street, the new prime minister, W inston Churchill, was hurling defiance at Adolf Hitler and begging his friend Franklin Roosevelt for help. “Give us the tools,” he implored, “and we will finish the fight.” America, they agreed, would be in the war soon: it was merely a matter of time.

At a corner table, five men lingered over their coffee long after the rest of the restaurant was deserted. Their host was the redheaded president of Consolidated Steel, Alden C. Roach. He had come to Washington to make a sales call on one of his lunch guests, Admiral Howard L. Vickery, number two man at the U.S. Maritime Commission and the person responsible for all naval ship construction and design.

Vickery, however, had more important matters on his mind. Recently, his office had received a telegram from the British Purchasing Commission (BPC) urgently requesting that the Maritime Commission 56

THE WAR YEARS

arrange the building of 60 tankers to replace the ships the British had lost to German torpedoes. But as Vickery was well aware, U.S. shipy ards on the Atlantic coast were already producing beyond capacity. If the British were to have their ships-and England needed them, if the war was to continue-a Pacific shipbuilder had to be found. Dropping his voice even lower, the admiral asked Roach if he knew anyone on the West Coast who could fill the bill.

“Give me a little time,” Roach replied, “I might be able to help. “1

Though he did not say so to Vickery, Roach already had his candidates in mind; and as luck would have it, they were staying at the same hotel. They knew next to nothing about building ships; but when an opportunity presented itself, Steve Bechtel and John McCone were always ready to learn.

W ithin twenty-four hours Roach had set up a meeting between the admiral and his two friends. He warned them in advance that Vickery was not going to be an easy person to deal with. An Annapolis graduate who had shown such promise as a naval architect that the Navy had sent him on to MIT, Vickery had a reputation for driving contractors hard. Let one of them fall behind schedule, and he would soon be on the receiving end of a bluntly worded telegram-one of “Vickery ‘s needles”-warning him to get with it, or else.

But Vickery was also a good judge of talent. In selecting contractors, he looked for what he termed “management brains” as much as experience. He had never heard of BechtelMcCone or Six Companies, but as he listened over lunch while Steve and McCone described their background, he couldn’t help being impressed. W ith the Hoover Dam, and the numerous other projects Bechtel and McCone had undertaken since, they were clearly in the front ranks of American builders. Moreover, Vickery discovered, one of Bechtel’s Six Companies associates, Felix Kahn, had run one of the nation’s biggest shipyards during World War I. Lately, Bechtel and McCone themselves had become interested in shipbuilding, sensing, as Steve put it, that it “seemed about ripe to become a big-volume business.” Indeed, so much interested had they become that they had already approached Six Companies with a jointventure proposal, and bought a part interest in