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

Stanford University’s International Student Center, The Ford Foundation and the American University of Beirut. Bechtel has also contributed millions to various programs around the world designed to turn out engineers and technicians, teaching them the skills necessary to operate Bechtel facilities. In addition, the Bechtel Foundation was the vehicle for the Bechtel Corporation’s philanthropic efforts, while the family-run Lakeside Foundation supported many of Steve and Laura’s Bay Area charity projects.

* Though he enjoyed the Carlyle and was considered a generous tipper, Bechtel was not happy about paying the annual rent, which in the early 1970s came to $17,000. At one point, when the hotel raised the rate to what Bechtel considered an extortionate level, he and Henry Ford II, another unhappy Carlyle guest and a fellow Ford Foundation director, seriously discussed buying the hotel. The idea passed; Bechtel’s unhappiness didn’t.

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money, for example, she waited to buy Christmas cards until the postholiday sales. She would then take cards with her on all her husband’s travels, passing her time while Steve was in meetings carefully inscribing each of the thousand in her luggage according to precise routine. To recipients on her “A” list-relatives, close friends, important company executives-went a card with a photo of the Bechtel clan and a long, expansive message, signed by Laura and Steve. The most special of all also received a gift: a bouquet of Bechtel-grown orchids arranged in an empty Lancer’s bottle. Meanwhile, those on the ” B” list-acquaintances, distant cousins, Bechtel lower-downs-had to settle for off-the-rackHallmarks.

The precision of Laura’s Christmas-card writing, like Steve’s battered Cadillac and their unostentatious apartment, were sy mbols of how a no-nonsense family ran a no-nonsense company. The same quality was evident in the way they had raised their offspring.

Children were important to Steve Bechtel, both in themselves and as a measure of the men who fathered them. “A good man,” he was fond of telling his executives, in tones suggesting an order, “gets married. A good man has children. “1

Steve’s own children, no less than his wife, set the corporate example. As adolescents, neither had attended private school, gone to cotillions, been treated to any thing the least bit extravagant. After graduation from high school, daughter Barbara had become a surgical nurse-Bechtel women weren’t doctors-married well (her husband was Paul Davies, Jr., an attorney with the prestigious San Francisco firm of Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro; his father was chairman of the FMC Corporation and a colleague of Steve’s at the Business Council, the ExportImport Bank and the Bohemian Grove) and settled down to a life of good works and raising children. She was, said her beaming father, “the salt of the earth.”

The same characterization could apply to Steve’s son. More, however, was expected of Steve junior than of Barbara. Bechtel men were meant to work. Moreover, this particular Bechtel man was born to succeed. How that succession would be accomplished, when and in what form was a subject which as the turn of the decade approached was increasingly on his father’s mind.

There had never been any doubt that one day, someday, Stephen D.

Bechtel, Jr., would take over the company Steve senior had built. Besides Bechtel blood, he had all the other requisite qualifications. As a child, he had traveled like his father before him, from jobsite to job-129

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tenant, World War II was over. The service offered him a choice: he could take up a career