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

federal judge Clement Hay nsworth. Claiming that Haynsworth was “antilabor,” Meany had helped lead the successful Senate fight against his confirmation.

Those episodes, however, were minor compared with the explosion that occurred late in the summer of 1969 over Shultz and Nixon’s attempt to correct racial discrimination in the U.S. construction industry, where out of 1. 3 million workers, only 106,000 were black.

Under pressure from the NAACP, which had filed suit against the administration, charging that it had failed to enforce the provisions of the Equal Opportunity Act, Shultz had persuaded Nixon to require builders with federal contracts to take. affirmative action in hiring minorities. If they refused, the builders lost their contracts.

The “Philadelphia Plan,” as it was dubbed, after its first application to a federally financed hospital project in that city, came under immediate fire. The NAACP branded it “tokenism,” while the construction industry, then in a severe slump and already heavily burdened by a number of costly wage settlements, claimed that the administration’s hiring target-a 26 percent minority work force by 1972-would be impossible to meet. The most withering assault, though, came from Meany. Recalled Nixon in his memoirs: “George Meany hit the roof, charging the Administration was making the unions a ‘whipping boy’

and trying to score ‘brownie points’ with civil rights groups. “1

Under attack from all sides, Shultz was battle-scarred and weary. “I was tired of hearing problems,” he later recounted. “So I finally said,

‘Why doesn’t someone be constructive and tell me what can be done about the problems?’ “2

Someone finally did: Steve Bechtel, Jr.

The Bechtel family had been keeping a watchful and appreciative ey e on Shultz since 1967, when Steve senior had heard the then dean of the University of Chicago’s business school address the board of directors of the Morgan Bank. Bechtel had come away impressed.

Though Shultz was an academic, with an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a doctorate from MIT, he was no dreamy socialist 166

SECRE TARY SHULTZ

leaning professor. He was, in fact, deeply conservative, and entirely friendly with business. Bechtel was also heartened by the fact that Shultz, a very “clubbable” sort, also had a suitably businesslike passion for martinis and golf. Steve junior took a liking to Shultz as well, especially after he learned that the secretary of labor had been a Marine Corps combat colonel in World War H.

W hat impressed the Bechtels most, though, was Shultz’s policies.

Like Nixon and themselves, Shultz was a believer in the inviolability of U.S. trade, which, he held, “should not be turned on and off again like a light switch to induce changes in the domestic and foreign policies” of other governments. He was also a supporter of Bechtel’s ongoing business dealings with the Soviet Union-and, indeed, with virtually any nation where the company thought it could make a profit.

Taken together, these considerations were good reason for the Bechtel Corporation to lend the struggling secretary a hand.

In May 1974, Steve junior arranged a meeting with Shultz and flew to Washington, bringing with him an executive who would be the key to solving Shultz’ problems. That was Bechtel’s vicechairman and labor chief, John O’Connell.

A bluff, backslapping Irishman, O’Connell, who, in addition to his labor responsibilities, appointed himself Bechtel’s unofficial ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was nothing if not gregarious-too much so for some tastes. Referring to O’Connell’s penchant for treating the Saudis to boisterous, lavish American-style entertaining, often at the expense of Saudi sensibilities, one senior Bechtel official shuddered, “I can’t think of anyone