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

as he later put it, whether Schroder’s South American clients would remain loyal to the Allies. Simpson passed along the results of his private intelligence-gathering to two men who were regular lunch partners in Washington: Dean Acheson, later to become Harry Truman’s secretary of State, and William “Wild Bill ” Donovan, founder of the OSS.

During World War II, when Allen Dulles was organizing OSS networks from Switzerland, Simpson took time off from the bank to become chief financial advisor for the U.S. Army in Europe. After the Allied landings in Italy in 1943 and subsequent Italian surrender, Simpson, working with another Schroder executive attached to the OSS, in effect controlled the country’s treasury. After completing that task in 1944, he returned to San Francisco for what he imagined would be a brief rest at the home of his niece and her husband, Steve Bechtel.

Bechtel, however, had an offer for him: a consultancy position with BechtelMcCone.

”I’m not an engineer,” Simpson protested.

“We have plenty of engineers,” Steve replied. “But you’ve had broad experience, and the very fact that you’re different makes it interesting.”5

Simpson accepted and brought to Bechtel’s various enterprises a financial expertise they had been sorely lacking. But his real worth was as a door-opener, a skill he demonstrated at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in April1945.

Assembled at the conference were many of Simpson’s friends from Washington and New York, and he made a point of introducing most of them to Steve Bechtel, who showed them around his shipyards. One who got the tour was Thomas Finletter, later to succeed James Forrestal as Harry Truman’s secretary .of Defense. Another was a State Department aide named Adlai Stevenson, who evidently was impressed.

“Dear John,” he wrote afterward:

I have been meaning ever since I got back from San Francisco to report to you how much I enjoyed meeting Steve Bechtel. … He is a most stimulating and interesting citizen and I was awed by all that he has done with which I was unfamiliar during the war period. 6

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

In 1946 Simpson decided, at Steve’s urging, to go to work for the Bechtel Corporation as its chief financial officer and eminence grise.

He and Steve had adjoining offices in the headquarters Steve set up at 15 3 Sansome Street, and they were close personally as well as professionally. Seldom, if ever, did Steve undertake a major move without checking it first with “Uncle John.”

Despite Simpson’s influence, there was never any doubt who was in charge at 15 3 Sansome. At the monthly meeting of the board of directors, recalled Jerome W Komes, a key Bechtel executive who had joined Steve after working for John McCone at Calship, “Steve would say, ‘This is what I think’ and the rest of us would nod: ‘That’s a hell of an idea, Steve.‘7 He was the dominant, vital force in the outfit, with great imagination and salesmanship.”

He also had very definite ideas how he wanted that outfit to function. After the war, Bechtel had seen a number of his fellow contractors go broke, and others, like Henry Kaiser, who went barreling into the manufacturing of aluminum and automobiles (Kaiser-Frazer), lose tens of millions. Steve was not about to repeat their mistakes. His would qe a service company, one that would travel light and keep overhead to a minimum. There would be no factories, no assembly lines, no big capital outlay s, and despite his excellent lines of credit at Bank of America and other major West Coast financial institutions, no major debt. His father had borrowed and lived to regret