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

Despite Raphael Dorman’s determination to finance the Yakutsk project from other sources, the deal was shelved after Dorman died suddenly in early May 1974 and Richard Nixon, the prime architect of U.S.-U.S.S.R detente resigned from the presidency that summer.

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The companies say this is a splendid deal because they don’t have to assume any risk; they don’t have to put out much capitaL That is all done by the federal government, our government, which comes in well along in the process when a lot of vested interests are already behind the proposal … Now is this really a wise way to formulate a national economic policy?

The Eximbank’s policies were also drawing fire from European suppliers, who were finding it hard to get contracts, not to speak of making a profit, given the edge the bank’s low-interest loans gave companies like Bechtel. As one West German official put it: “Our most tenacious competition isn’t [U.S. industry], but the ExportImport Bank.”

The controversy over the Eximbank was still mounting, when, on October 8, 1973, Kearns suddenly resigned.

The reason for his departure became apparent a few weeks later, when the GAO revealed that during Keams’s administration, the bank had made a number of loans to Siam Kraft, the Bangkok, Thailandbased paper company in which Keams, his executive vicepresident, Donald T. Bostwick, and Nixon reelection official and former Commerce secretary Maurice Stans all owned substantial blocks of stock.

The GAO further disclosed that during the same period the bank had also made thirty-seven separate loans to Mitsui, the huge Japanese trading firm with which Keams and Nixon had done business in the late 1960s. But what really raised eyebrows at the GAO and subsequently in Congress was the revelation that while Keams was running the Eximbank, Mitsui had purchased his stock in Siam Kraft at nearly ten times its market value, a transaction that netted Keams $500,000.

“This is the worst conflict of interest in the seventeen years I have been in the Senate,” said Wisconsin’s William Proxmire, who during Keams’s confirmation hearings had pressed him to sell his Siam Kraft holdings. Ultimately, the Justice Department came to a similar conclusion and launched an investigation to determine whether Keams and Bostwick had violated any criminal statutes.

The investigation of Kearns and Bostwick took place only after Senator Proxmire brought pressure on U.S. Attorney General William Saxbe. He in turn referred the case to Assistant Attorney General (and later governor of Pennsylvania) Richard L.

Thornburgh, who eventually concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” to charge either man with a criminal offense. Proxmire, not mollified, blasted the decision in a letter to the attorney general. Wrote Proxmire: “Kearns obviously feathered his own nest at a time when he was President of the Bank and openly solicited the pur-163

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Meany made no secret of his distaste for Nixon, and since the inauguration he had seemed to go out of his way to seek confrontation. At the onset of the 1969 recession, for instance, Meany first criticized Nixon for doing nothing, then, when Nixon finally did do something -namely, initiate a ninety -day wage-price freeze-blasted the president’s solution as being “patently discriminatory against labor.” Later the same y ear, Meany clashed with Nixon again, this time over the Supreme Court nomination of South Carolina