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

Instead, Bechtel’s $200 million a year in revenues was the result of shrewd calculation and careful balancing. To protect his company from the boom-and-bust cycles that regularly ravaged the rest of the U.S. construction industry, Steve Bechtel had set a goal of dividing the company’s workload 50/50 between international and domestic projects. When one area or the other went soft-and rarely did both do so at once-he leaned on the other. He buffered himself further by diversifying, adding to Bechtel’s established petroleum, mining and construction work new areas like shipping and building of chemical and industrial plants. What luck there was in all this planning was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Such a time was 1952, when a subsidiary of U.S. Steel decided to extract half a billion tons of high-grade iron ore from the Orinoco region in Venezuela. The one American construction company that had extensive Venezuelan experience, as well as expertise in mining, was Bechtel, which was awarded the contract to coordinate construction and administration of the job, one of the largest the steel company ever sponsored outside the United States.

Bechtel’s good fortune, however, was more than simple happenstance. Twenty years earlier, when Steve was purchasing steel at Boulder, he had given considerable business to a John McCone salesman named Alden Roach. Later, the same Alden Roach had become chairman of Consolidated Steel and had set up the meeting with Admiral V ickery that led to the BechtelMcCone shipbuilding work.

Later still, Roach headed a subsidiary of U.S. Steel which at Roach’s suggestion contracted with Bechtel to do the mining work in Venezuela. In the world of Steve Bechtel, an effect invariably had a cause.

This was especially true in the Middle East, where Bechtel’s operations were rapidly expanding beyond Saudi Arabia. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bechtel crews moved into Yemen, Kuwait, 95

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

tary conclusions were written by McCone, became a major rationale for increasing the Defense budget.

Impressed with McCone’s handiwork, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, the most hard-line member of the Truman cabinet, asked him to draw up the budget for the newly formed Department of the Air Force. McCone threw himself into the task with the same relentless dedication he had shown at Calship. “I’ve never worked for anyone who demanded as much as this guy or wanted as much,” one Air Force colonel who labored under McCone told Bechtel executive Jerry Komes. “He wakes us up at six in the morning, and at midnight we’re still working for the son of a bitch.”4 And woe be to those who didn’t produce. When that happened, McCone would take out his gold pocket watch and begin twirling it, the rotations becoming more and more rapid as his displeasure grew, until the motion became a blur.

“That’s when the explosion came,” a former colleague said. “You wanted to run for cover. “5

Nonetheless, the McCone method got results. As his stature in the Defense Department grew, he became close to California Senator William Knowland, a leading proponent of beefing up the Air Force, as well as to the former supreme commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom McCone first met when Eisenhower returned to Washington to take up duties as Army chief of staff.