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

father, who had taken over a relatively small company without the family patriarch watching over him, Steve junior was in nominal command of a giant corporation, with tens of thousands of employees, many of whom still looked to Steve senior for leadership.

Comparisons were inevitable, and at least at first, the slightly built (5

feet 10 inches, 15 5 pounds), reclusive “Junior,” as his enemies derisively called him, was found wanting. Some Bechtel employees thought him cold and arrogant; others found him charmless and plodding; still others faulted him for failing ever to follow his father’s practice of inquiring after Bechtel employees, their lives, wives and children, many of whom Steve senior knew by name. He was also, said his critics, utterly lacking in humor. Once, when one of the company’s brightest wits, a sophisticated businessman who had traveled the world over, handling Bechtel’s most delicate problems, was preparing to make a presentation for Steve and other senior executives, he jocularly cautioned that what they were about to hear “might be too deep for the At home, Steve could be equally stern. He laid down a strict rule that none of his

five children could cry in his presence and if they disobeyed him would punish them by sending them to their rooms.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

engineers in the room.” All those present-engineers to a man-exploded in laughter. All, that is, except Steve junior, who stormed out in a huff.

The basic problem was that Steve junior was Steve junior-not his father. Said one sympathetic Bechtel observer: “He was in a terribly difficult position, taking over from the largest builder in the world, and it had to leave scars. Around the company, he was regarded as the not-so-smart, not-so-great, not-so-dynamic son of Steve senior. He could run a tight ship, be an excellent businessman and a good builder, but he didn’t have his father’s flair. “6

As his father had with the Broadway Tunnel, Steve junior also ran into trouble, though the difficulties he encountered lay not with a particular project but with corrupt politicians.

The situation involved a 90-mile pipeline Bechtel was building for Texaco in 1964. Part of the line was to run from the Delaware River through Woodbridge, New Jersey, a suburban hamlet that had recently been honored by Look magazine as an “All American City.” W hen the pipeline managers sought a building permit from Woodbridge mayor Walter Zirpolo, though, the response was anything but All-American; to grant the permit, Zirpolo wanted a bribe of $60,000.

Not wishing to become involved in what was, after all, a felony, but still eager to build the pipeline, the managers kicked the problem to Bechtel vicepresident and pipeline manager Harry Waste, a son, as it happened, of Steve junior’s key executive Bill Waste. Young Waste found himself in something of a bind, for Bechtel was still in the process of negotiating the pipeline process with Woodbridge officials. If he turned down the request, the deal might be blown, which would not stand him in a good stead in San Francisco. If he acceded, and was caught, he faced a jail term. He resolved the dilemma in time-honored corporate fashion, by telling the pipeline managers he needed a few weeks to arrange the payoff, then passing along the dirty work to a subordinate named W illiam L. Fallow. Shortly thereafter, Bechtel’s contract with the pipeline company went through, renegotiated upward by $1 million.

Fallow, meanwhile, was arranging the details of the bribe. W ith the complicity of Harry Waste and several other senior Bechtel executives, including the company treasurer, he drew a check on the company’s account at the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New