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

and John Foster Dulles, who had asked McCone to be his deputy secretary of State. Washington itself, however, had lost much of its charm for McCone, largely because of the flak he had taken as under-secretary of the Air Force for awarding a contract to build Flying Boxcar transports to his former business partner Henry J. Kaiser. The seeming impropriety of the arrangement nettled a number of congress.: men, who were even more upset that McCone was paying Kaiser three times as much as it had formerly paid the Fairchild Corporation, another Air Force contractor, to build the identical plane. 16 Eyebrows had gone up also when it was revealed that the Kaiser-Fraser Corporation, the financially strapped Kaiser partnership that was building the planes, was partly owned by McCone’s good friend and former busines�

partner Steve Bechtel. McCone, Republican senator from W isconsin Alvin O’Konski charged, was “merely on leave of absence from his position as BechtelMcCone Corporation president. “17

Partly as a result of the Flying Boxcar episode, and partly, too, be-108

ATOMS FOR PEACE

cause he wanted to attend to business affairs in California, McCone had informed Eisenhower that he was not interested in serving during the general’s first term. In 19 54, however, Eisenhower briefly lured McCone back with an invitation to serve on a committee that was devising ways of restructuring the U.S. Foreign Service, which had been decimated by the McCarthyite purge. The following year, Eisenhower sent him to Rome as his personal representative for the observance of the birthday of Pope Pius XII. McCone, however, was reluctant to do more. His growing shipping business was on its way to making him the American Onassis. Indeed, when the call came in from White House chief of staff Sherman Adams summoning him to a meeting with the president in May 1958, McCone was about to launch a new $75 million 14-ship fleet.

Nonetheless, McCone did not turn the president down. Offered the AEC post over lunch at the White House, he asked for three days to think it over, then accepted.*

The agency John McCone took over had a budget of $2 billion per year, operated $7 billion worth of facilities, employed 105,000 persons and was counted as one of the most complex and diffuse organizations in the federal government. Despite all its resources, however, the AEC

had been slow in developing commercial nuclear power-a delay McCone attributed largely to lack of leadership. In the words of one of his aides: “He thinks the commission should lead where it has been following.”

McCone quickly took charge. One of his first-and for Bechtel, most important-moves involved AEC funding for the private nuclear industry. Under Strauss, the AEC had underwritten research and development, but nothing more. McCone recommended that federal subsidies be paid to utilities for the construction of prototype

During McCone’s confirmation hearings, several senators made much of the fact that during the 1956 presidential campaign, McCone, then a trustee and principal fund-raiser for Cal Tech, had attacked ten of its scientists who had written a letter supporting Adlai Stevenson’s proposal to suspend H-bomb tests. According to one wellplaced Cal Tech source, McCone had stormed into a trustees’ meeting “bright purple”

and asserted that the scientists’ letter was designed to “create fear in the minds of the uninformed that radioactive fallout from the H-bomb endangers life.” When the trustees refused to muzzle the scientists, McCone had resigned as chairman of Cal Tech’s fund-raising effort. Questioned about the incident during the confirmation