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

Another important friendship made during this period was with Allen Dulles, later to be McCone’s predecessor as director of Central Intelligence.

The occasion that initially brought them together was a dinner party at the Dulles town house in New York, called to celebrate the expected victory of Thomas E. Dewey as president. Taking a brief respite from his Washington duties, McCone had been staying as the houseguest of Grete and John Simpson, Steve Bechtel’s chief confidant. When the Dulleses asked the Simpsons to dinner, Uncle John brought McCone along. During the party, McCone and Dulles chatted amiably, interrupting their conversation now and again to listen to the latest election bulletins. With each announcement, it became clearer that the biggest upset in American political history was in the making. On a deflated note, the party broke up, but not before John McCone had made an important friend. 6

With Truman’s reelection, McCone returned to California to resume his business career. He saw Bechtel frequently, and the two men often golfed together, sometimes in the company of McCone’s friends from Washington, including Eisenhower. “We Republicans are fond of 98

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golf,” McCone explained to Life magazine/ “because by and large, we’re a sociable lot.”

McCone’s socializing was interrupted in June 1950 by another summons to Washington. With war in Korea looming, his Air Policy Commission colleague Thomas Finletter, now secretary of the Air Force, wanted him by his side.

Though McCone’s title was deputy secretary, it quickly became apparent that he was the department’s real boss. McCone’s first order of business: Get aircraft production moving on a crash basis; get the Sabre jets needed to combat the Russian-built MiGs out of the plants and into the skies over Korea.

In his new role, McCone also revamped the entire Air Force, approving the development of a new generation of jet fighters and bombers and providing the principal inspiration for the creation of the Stategic Air Command, whose nuclear-laden bombers remained constantly ready to strike the Russian homeland.

McCone could draw satisfaction from the fact that one of his key recommendations in “Survival in the Air Age”-the buildup of U.S.

nuclear-weapons stockpiles-had been put into effect by Truman. As part of the effort, the president authorized the tripling of capacity at the principal weapons plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the building of ancillary gaseous-diffusion plants at Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky. McCone was heartened by Truman’s move. So was Steve Bechtel, whose company was chief contractor on the work.

McCone, meanwhile, kept drawing closer to Eisenhower, now NATO commander and being touted by both parties as a presidential candidate. Eisenhower himself, however, was being coy about his candidacy, and indeed, had y et to declare his party affiliation. Then, in early January 1951, Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican senator from Massachusetts, told the press that he had learned that Eisenhower would soon announce his candidacy as a Republican. McCone, who was in Paris, vacationing with his wife, hurried to Eisenhower’s headquarters outside the French capital. 8

Escorted in through a back door and away from a mob of reporters waiting out front, he found Eisenhower and three senior U.S. generals convened around a large conference table littered with coffee cups.

They looked as if they had been up all night.

“Cabot Lodge made this statement and we’ve got to answer it,” Eisenhower told McCone. “We’re drafting an answer and I’d like y ou to help with it. “9

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Ike said he was ready to declare his candidacy; the trouble, McCone quickly discovered, was that he had still not made up his mind whether he