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Summary
Summary
From the bestselling coauthor of The Money and the Power (which the Los Angeles Times called "one of the most important nonfiction books published in a half century")--the inside story of the Bechtel family and the empire they've controlled since the construction of the Hoover Dam.
The tale of the Bechtel family dynasty is a classic American business story. It begins with Warren A. "Dad" Bechtel, who led a consortium that constructed the Hoover Dam. From that auspicious start, the family and its eponymous company would go on to "build the world," from the construction of airports in Hong Kong and Doha, to pipelines and tunnels in Alaska and Europe, to mining and energy operations around the globe.
Today Bechtel is one of the largest privately held corporations in the world, enriched and empowered by a long history of government contracts and the privatization of public works, made possible by an unprecedented revolving door between its San Francisco headquarters and Washington. Bechtel executives John McCone, Caspar Weinberger, and George P. Shultz segued from leadership at the company to positions as Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, respectively.
Like all stories of empire building, the rise of Bechtel presents a complex and riveting narrative. In The Profiteers , Sally Denton, whom The New York Times called "a wonderful writer," exposes Bechtel's secret world and one of the biggest business and political stories of our time.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Greed, corruption, hypocrisy, and skullduggery shadow Bechtel, a mammoth construction company, in this dour corporate history. Journalist Denton (The Money and the Power) follows the contractor from its early days erecting the Hoover Dam through its current global omnipresence, building airports, pipelines, nuclear plants, and even a whole city in Saudi Arabia. She focuses on the company's unsavory entanglements with the U.S. government and foreign potentates: for example, she ties a Reagan administration tilt toward Arab countries and against Israel to Secretary of State George Schultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, both ex-Bechtel executives. She suggests that they wanted to further the company's interests in building Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein a sinister chemical plant and other projects. (A lengthy digression paints the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard as a noble victim of a Bechtel-related vendetta by Weinberger.) Denton's claims about the company's control over U.S. policy-"Bechtel's political influence in Washington would set the stage for privatizing foreign policy"-are never fully backed up with evidence; more convincing are her revelations about the mundane corruption of Bechtel's coziness with government officials, which wins the company lucrative no-bid contracts. Denton's rambling narrative gets overwrought about Bechtel's tentacular villainy, but enough of her charges stick to raise troubling questions about the company's relationships with the powerful. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The Bechtel company, still family-controlled generations after founder Warren Bechtel made the firm famous with its construction of the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam, has attracted criticism during its history. How much becomes clear in Denton's survey of Bechtel's globe-girdling operations. Like Laton McCartney in Friends in High Places (1988), Denton focuses on the executives who carry out Bechtel's business model, which is government contracting. To Denton, these men constitute a nefarious nexus of influence within the U.S. government's national security apparatus. After serving in high posts, they bring to Bechtel their connections and lobbying knowledge. Are the contracts that ensue evidence of corrupt crony capitalism or of Bechtel as the best outfit to perform a job? Denton dutifully reports Bechtel's denials of influence-peddling but plainly doesn't believe them. Instead, she maps coincidences between the government tenure of a Bechtel executive, such as George Schultz, and projects his former agency later awarded to Bechtel. However readers view the company, Denton's extensively researched work informs readers about the firm's maintenance as a privately held concern during its growth into a huge, multinational enterprise.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN JAMES MADISON discussed the relationship between corporations and government, he sounded as if he were knocking on doors for Bernie Sanders. "The stockjobbers," he wrote, "will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant." But stop right there. You might recognize Madison's worry about corporations being government's "tyrant," but "its tool"? In Madison's day, legislatures chartered corporations through special acts, one by one, to channel private money into public projects. Alexander Hamilton, the corporation's champion, saw it as a vessel for public policy, the consequences of which Madison feared as much as public corruption. I thought of this history as I read Sally Denton's new book, "The Profiteers," a history of the Bechtel Corporation, one of the world's largest construction companies. She targets Bechtel's decades of extraordinary influence in Washington, detailing how the company has thrived on and perhaps even set the terms of the relationship. But her account left me thinking: Hasn't the federal government benefited as well? Denton rolls ahead with all the energy of the company's founder, Warren Bechtel. Born in 1872, he worked his way from a farm in Illinois to a construction firm in California, "a natural engineer," as one boss said. In 1906, he "was ready to strike out on his own," Denton writes. He built railroads, pipelines, highways and finally the Hoover Dam. "The Profiteers" shows how the dam set a pattern. Warren Bechtel made alliances with other businesses and federal officials, and obtained the contract for his consortium in 1931, through the influence of a former government insider in his employ. Denton, the author of several books of American history and investigative reporting, uses the term "revolving door" more than once to describe Bechtel's personnel exchanges with Washington. She concedes that the Hoover Dam may have been "a marvel of design, engineering, architecture and construction," but she highlights how "the safety violations and labor unrest that characterized Hoover Dam's construction site would become synonymous with Bechtel" over time. Warren Bechtel's mysterious death in Moscow in 1933, from an apparent insulin overdose, ignites a theme of political maneuvering and international intrigue. The corporation went global after World War II, seeking contracts in the Soviet Union, Indonesia, Qaddafi's Libya. It developed an expertise in energy, erecting refineries, nuclear power plants, even an entire city in Saudi Arabia. It adhered to the Arab boycott of Israel. It cooperated with the C.I.A. But who or what is Bechtel? How do we separate the corporate person from the corporation's people? What of Bechtel's society of managers, technicians and workers, its internal turf wars, its procedural habits? Denton says little about Bechtel's internal culture; despite her extensive research, she writes, she confronted a privately held company with a "longstanding tradition of privacy and secrecy," and her freedom of information requests for Bechtel contracts with the Department of Energy "were denied in their entirety." She focuses on the top, populated by Warren Bechtel's descendants. They have maintained a consistent, and boring, sensibility. "The Bechtelians were a colorless, sober bunch," she writes. Fortunately for the reader, more vivid characters appear. John Alex McCone, for example, joined Bechtel in 1937. Stern to the point of threatening ("When he smiles, look out," a C.I.A. official once said), he helped invent the "cost-plus" contract, in which the government guarantees a profit. McCone pushed an anti-Communist, pro-nuclear agenda under Harry Truman; Eisenhower named him chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957, and Kennedy appointed him director of the C.I.A. in 1961. McCone used his posts to help the company, a long-running pattern. Steve Bechtel Jr., Warren's grandson, wove ties to Richard Nixon that proved lucrative after Nixon won the White House in 1968. Denton carries Bechtel's story into the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, but her argument reaches a climax with George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger. Both of them left their posts in the Nixon administration for Bechtel, and then returned to government to serve under Reagan. Reagan's administration went far to help Bechtel, Denton writes, promoting the company's plans for a pipeline and a chemical plant in Iraq, already listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. It's troubling stuff - yet this is also where the dam begins to crack. Innuendo filters in. Shultz was not so much planning but "plotting," and Weinberger was not firm in his convictions but "fanatical." She darkly describes meetings at the Bohemian Grove, a two-week, all-male summer retreat on California's Russian River, popular with the wealthy establishment. (Disclosure: I was invited to speak there last summer.) But the atmospherics carry a whiff of conspiracy theory. Powerful men talk all the time. They have private jets - phones, too. Why colluding among redwoods and amateur theatricals is particularly sinister remains unclear to me. Nor does she need the story of the confessed spy Jonathan Pollard, which she crams in like a tuxedo in a hiker's backpack. She devotes a prologue, the penultimate chapter and many pages of narrative to Pollard's espionage for the Israeli government, his arrest and his incarceration. His discovery of Bechtel's plan to build a petrochemicals complex in Iraq "clinched" his decision to spy, she asserts - though Saddam Hussein already operated several chemical-weapons factories. She attributes Pollard's unexpectedly long imprisonment to a memo from Weinberger, suggesting that he wanted to silence Pollard about Bechtel, Weinberger's former employer, even though Weinberger had been "sidelined" at Bechtel before he left. One needn't apologize for Bechtel's courtship of Saddam Hussein to decide it's thin evidence for concluding that Pollard's primary motivation was to expose Bechtel, or that Bechtel engineered his prosecution and sentencing. The problem with a circumstantial case for conspiracy is that one must eliminate simpler explanations, and there are plenty. Pollard's story sits awkwardly atop the whole, more lint than a woven thread in the fabric. That aside, Denton strikes at the very conundrum that worried Madison - the relationship between corporate power and government in a political democracy. Corporations are useful; they concentrate capital, undertake publicly beneficial works and create wealth. They also concentrate power, in service of private gain. They deserve healthy skepticism, not deference, and intelligent oversight. They have come far from their early days as relics of mercantilism, but large companies embody interests that Washington cannot ignore. Private enterprise is a critical part of our national power and still plays a role in public policy. Here is where I wish the author had placed more stress. Cronyism and wealth have helped Bechtel a great deal, but they cannot fully explain its long ties to Washington. Apple's $233.7 billion in revenue in 2015 dwarfs Bechtel's $37.2 billion, yet it is currently battling the government. Among private companies in 2015, Albertsons, the supermarket chain, was larger, though from what I can tell, hardly more influential. But Bechtel, unlike those companies, has played a central role in American foreign policy over the last century, particularly with regard to energy, and it knows how to keep state secrets. We should not leap to the conclusion that Bechtel has been only a tyrant rather than a tool. Considerations other than Bechtel's fortunes have shaped America's changing policies in the Middle East. But this is a long conversation, one that goes well beyond the scope of "The Profiteers." Denton begins it with a bang, itemizing amoral investments, environmental damage, exploitation of labor and chummy relationships with policy makers. Whether she persuades on all points or not, she shows that it's a conversation we must have. T.J. STILES received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt." His newest book is "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America," a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Kirkus Review
Investigative journalist Denton (The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right, 2012, etc.) offers an ambitious "empire biography" of the Bechtel family and the secretive, privately held construction company-turned-diversified international conglomerate that has been "inextricably enmeshed" in U.S. foreign policy for seven decades. In this incredible-seeming but deeply researched book, the author traces the phenomenal rise of the California-based corporation that became famous for building the Hoover Dam and went on to handle billion-dollar projects from the Channel Tunnel to the Big Dig; to construct airports, power plants, and entire cities; to cart away the wreckage of the World Trade Center and rebuild Iraq; to privatize America's nuclear weapons business (assuming control of Los Alamos, etc.); and, in the end, to complete 25,000 projects in 160 countries. Now the world's largest contractor, with offices in 50 nations, Bechtel, from 1999 to 2013, received $40 billion in contracts from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. "Despite its fiercely antiregulatory, antigovernment stance," writes Denton, "the Bechtel family owes its entire fortune to the U.S. government." She describes the dizzying revolving door between Bechtel's headquarters and the federal government: Bechtel executives that include John McCone, George P. Shultz, and Casper Weinberger have passed through, forging links with the CIA and other government agencies and leading to favorable contracts and subsidies. Whether in war-torn Europe, the Middle East, or elsewhere, it has always been "difficult to determine if Bechtel was doing favors for the US government, or if it was the other way around." Parts of this mammoth story have been told before, but Denton has shaped it into a taut, page-turning narrative detailing the company's machinations under five generations of family leadership. She concludes that the firm is "either a brilliant triumph or an iconic symbol of grotesque capitalism." Filled with stories of cronyism and influence peddling, Denton's riveting and revealing book will undoubtedly displease the so-called "boys from Bechtel," who refused to talk to Denton, referring her to the company website. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Journalist Denton (The Money and the Power) is no stranger to digging into controversial topics; her new offering delves into the U.S. military-industrial complex, particularly the Bechtel Corporation, the family who founded it in 1898, their major engineering and construction works, and their close ties to the government. Several Bechtel executives segued into high-level government positions and vice versa, though Bechtel's only interest in politics occurs when an issue affects their company directly, as they have billions of dollars of government contracts from countries throughout the world. As Denton points out, "observers consider Bechtel either a brilliant triumph or an iconic symbol of grotesque capitalism," and she makes a persuasive argument for the latter. The author's journalistic writing style is fast paced, hard-hitting, and engaging. If one criticism must be made, it is that scattered throughout is information about the Jonathan Pollard espionage case, in which Pollard passed classified information to Israel about neighboring Middle Eastern countries. Several Bechtel executives-turned-Washington heavy-hitters were part of the reason Pollard's sentence was so harsh; however, Denton's inclusion of these details-while interesting-felt like an ongoing aside rather than a well-integrated part of the narrative. VERDICT This book will interest readers who enjoy contemporary U.S. history, Middle Eastern history, political science, and public works spending.-Crystal Goldman, Univ. of -California, San Diego Lib. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Profiteers CHAPTER ONE Go West! A " tall, beefy man with a bull-like roar," Warren Augustine Bechtel, whose legacy would be one of the greatest engineering achievements in American history, came into the world on September 12, 1872. The fifth in a family of eight children, he was raised on a hardscrabble farm near Freeport, Illinois. His parents--Elizabeth Bentz and John Moyer Bechtel--were descendants of pioneer Pennsylvania German families. When he was twelve, his parents moved to Peabody, Kansas, where they eked out a living " at a time when he saw many men missing an arm or a leg from service in the Civil War," as one account described the setting. It was a backbreaking childhood that he fantasized about escaping from an early age. Because he was tasked with farm chores since he was a toddler, Warren's schooling was confined to the winter months when the crops lay beneath frozen ground. Like many of his contemporaries, he hated farming as only a farmer's son can, but he disliked the classroom with equal fervor. Still, his father, who was also a grocery store proprietor, insisted that he finish high school. In 1887 the first railroad came through the area, and during the summers, Warren hired himself out to the construction crews to learn grading and machinery. He also worked for neighboring ranchers, branding cattle and driving herds. But his passion was the slide trombone, which he practiced while roaming the land. He dreamed of playing the instrument professionally. Upon graduation at the age of nineteen, he hit the road with an ensemble of performers who called themselves the Ladies Band. He hoped music would spare him a future in farming. " Either the music of the ladies' band was very bad or the Western audiences were lacking in appreciation," the New York Times would later describe the venture. "The troupe came to grief in Lewiston, Ill., and the young slide-trombonist was stranded." Disheartened, he returned home to the unwelcome plow to raise corn for livestock feed. He remained there until 1897, when he became infatuated with a slender brunette named Clara Alice West. She was visiting relatives in nearby Peabody. After a fleeting courtship that alarmed her affluent Indiana parents, the two married, and Warren ventured into the cattle business. He embarked on his scheme to fatten Arizona draught steers as they awaited slaughter in the Kansas stockyards. But the bottom dropped out of both the corn and cattle markets to record lows at the end of the nineteenth century, leaving the newlyweds bankrupt. With their infant firstborn son, Warren Jr., their personal possessions, a slip grader, and two mules, they struck out for Indian Territory, where the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway Company was putting new lines westward from Chickasha in what is now Oklahoma. Earning $2.75 per day--a good living for a man with his own mule team--Warren found the work plentiful, as rail companies were expanding westward with boomtown gusto. His nascent construction company consisted mostly of muscle and ambition. As the railways forged west, so too did the little Bechtel family, with Warren grading track beds in Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wyoming. Though a rugged and itinerant existence, the couple was optimistic, and welcomed the birth of their second son, Stephen Davison, while visiting Clara's parents in Aurora, Indiana. When he was offered a job as gang foreman with the Southern Pacific Railroad in Reno, Nevada, during the winter of 1902-03, Warren was grateful for the opportunity. Eager for a more secure financial position, he had set his sights on the West Coast and the post-Gold Rush promise that existed in California. Warren embraced newspaperman Horace Greeley's famous 1871 career advice to a young correspondent: " Having mastered these, gather up your family and Go West!" " I landed in Reno with a wife and two babies, a slide trombone, and a ten-dollar bill," Warren later recalled. The railroad supervisor who had promised him the job had gone bust. Twenty-seven years old, Warren lived with his wife and small sons in a converted railroad boxcar. Discouraged, he hitched a ride on a buckboard to Wadsworth, Nevada--a remote railroad site on the banks of the Truckee River known for its wild mustang herd and native Paiute population. He found a job there as an estimator for the Southern Pacific, earning $59 a month. " He was learning all the time, but he seemed to me a natural engineer," his supervisor later recalled. An engineer who worked with him during those early days described him as " a horse-drawn fresno-scraper type of contractor"--meaning an old-fashioned laborer who had come up the hard way on the railroad construction gangs. A series of jobs ensued from which Warren acquired technical experience in lieu of a formal education. From Wadsworth, he moved to Lovelock, Nevada, where he became a gravel pit superintendent at a quarry. He, his wife, and two young sons were a familiar sight at the primitive migrant job sites. He soon acquired the nickname "Dad," as his ubiquitous brood called him. He bounced around various posts, gaining a reputation for efficiency and, especially, for mastering the newfangled modern transportation and construction equipment--most conspicuously the giant excavating machine called the steam shovel. " Many of the old-timers were reluctant to have anything to do with the big, belching mechanized monsters," according to one account, "but Bechtel put them to immediate--and profitable--use." That specialty brought him to the attention of an inspector for a construction firm, based in Oakland, California, that had a contract to build the Richmond Belt Railroad and to extend the Santa Fe line into Oakland. In 1904 Dad moved his family to Oakland, where a third son, Kenneth, was born. The city, named for the massive oak forest that dominated the landscape, was surrounded by redwoods, farmland, and rural settlements. Even then a sad relative to booming, raucous San Francisco, located six miles west across the San Francisco Bay, the city's future as Northern California's busiest seaport was not yet apparent. Still, its sunny and mild Mediterranean climate lured an increasing number of immigrants from throughout the country, and its population (eighty-two thousand upon the Bechtels' arrival) would double in just six years. A few blocks away from their Linden Street home, tracks of the interurban electric line to San Francisco were being laid. Dad had the contract to fill the swamp at the head of Lake Merritt for Oakland's Lakeshore Park. By 1906, Dad was ready to strike out on his own. At thirty-four years old, he obtained his first subcontract with the Western Pacific Railroad, building a line between Pleasanton and Sunol. This independent undertaking marked the birth of the modern Bechtel company. Dad began assembling the team of colleagues that would help him make construction history. For an extortionate fee, he rented the impressive Model 20 Marion steam shovel that had been memorably developed for the Panama Canal construction. When he purchased the imposing machine, thanks to a loan from his well-to-do father-in-law, his company was officially launched. His steam shovel was in great demand, and he undertook ever-larger railroad projects while expanding into building roads, tunnels, bridges, and dams. In large white block script, he stenciled "W. A. BECHTEL CO." onto the red cab door. It would be another sixteen years before he would formally incorporate his business. Home now to a family of five, their residential boxcar was called WaaTeeKaa for the combination of their three toddlers' baby names: "Waa-Waa" for Warren, "Tee-Tee" for Steve, and "Kaa-Kaa" for Kenneth. " Still largely undeveloped, California was booming . . . and, with the recent addition of the steam engine, railroads couldn't lay track fast enough to link the new west to the rest of the country," a newspaper described the moment. A man of unlimited ambition, Dad expanded his vision to the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, where he came into contact with the imposing and pugnacious sheep-ranching Wattis brothers of Ogden, Utah. W. H. and E. O. Wattis were the founders and chief executives of the Utah Construction Company--one of the great railroad construction firms of the West--who were devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The sons of a forty-niner "whose trek to California ended six hundred miles short in . . . northern Utah . . . they were reared in the dynamic, enterprising environment of Brigham Young's Mormon commonwealth," wrote historian Joseph E. Stevens. They were notoriously reluctant to work with non-Mormon "gentiles." But they admired Dad's abilities and resourcefulness and, as W.H. reportedly put it to his brother: " Might as well ask him in as to have him bitin' our feet." The Wattis brothers wielded extraordinary political power in Utah. David Eccles, patriarch of the single largest Mormon fortune, leading tither to the church, and the father of Marriner Eccles, who would later become chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, supplied most of their capital. (The Eccleses' formidable Utah Corporation was an international conglomerate of mining, shipping, and construction involved in the production of iron, coal, and uranium ore on three continents.) The Wattises gave Bechtel his most lucrative jobs to date: three large contracts for railroad lines in Northern California and central Utah. His work with the Northwestern Pacific Railroad required more sophisticated construction techniques, and he became the first contractor in the country to replace the horse- and mule-drawn freight teams with chain-driven, gasoline-powered dump trucks. At a yard in San Leandro, he retrofitted 1912 model Packards and Alcos with dump bodies. Referred to later as the " coming of age" period for the Bechtel organization, the completion of the last 106-mile stretch of the Northwestern Pacific line signaled the beginning of the company's rise. "I never expected to have that much money in a lifetime," the unlettered son of a small-town grocer confided to a friend upon receiving his nearly $500,000 payment. Now flush, he turned his attention to family--which included daughter Alice Elizabeth, born in 1912--purchasing a spacious Victorian home and furnishing it lavishly with rare Oriental rugs that had been exhibited at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. He chose the Estudillo Avenue house in nearby San Leandro, where the children would have "more room to grow." Evocative of his farm upbringing, the house was surrounded by acres of tomatoes and elaborate flower gardens. A tennis court on the grounds affirmed the family's fresh wealth. But just as the official history of the company smooths over the " near misses, the bad judgment calls, and the numerous failures" of Dad's early climb--as an academic critique of the corporate culture of Bechtel portrayed his dismal performance in the cattle, farming, and grading enterprises, not to mention the nomadic lifestyle to which he subjected his young family--so too are his subsequent fiascos whitewashed. "It is difficult to connect the sober-headed, hard-working straight-shooter depicted in the official history with the man whose main ambition on leaving home, for instance, was to play the slide trombone with a largely female dance band," wrote Canadian postcolonialist professor Heather Zwicker. Despite the revisionist and mythologizing company narrative of Warren A. Bechtel's entrepreneurial individualism--the American exceptionalism that would be much ballyhooed by later generations of Bechtels--in the years following the Northwestern Pacific windfall, Dad made a string of bad calls. Smug with his newfound success, " and still fancying himself the wheeler-dealer of his youth," according to Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story--The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World, by Laton McCartney, he sank tens of thousands of dollars into an unsuccessful Oregon gold mine, followed by several hundred thousand more invested in a folding toothbrush company that tanked. The salvation of his fortune and future would lie not in the up-from-the-bootstraps chronicle that would become family legend, but with the US government. With government patronage, Bechtel was able to build a network of tracks and highways throughout the land at the very moment that railroad expansion and the automobile industry were exploding. Sales of Henry Ford's iconic black Model Ts had passed the five hundred thousand mark by 1918--giving the Ford Motor Company a veritable monopoly, as a Ford was driven by more than half the car owners in America. Dad was not alone in recognizing that all of these cars needed roads to travel on, but he was among a handful of California builders positioned to capitalize on the new construction market. The Federal Aid Road Act had been approved in 1916 to meet the overwhelming demand, resulting in the creation of the US Bureau of Public Roads. Bechtel lobbied for a role, and in 1919 received the first federal highway contract in California. He first built the Klamath River Highway near the Oregon border; the scenic byway, considered an engineering marvel at the time, jutted through volcanic rock and granite. The following year, he built another highway for the federal government in Los Angeles County that ran through the rugged San Gabriel Canyon; this one required a bluff to be blasted down with the rarely used powerful explosive, picric powder. Next was the Generals Highway in Sequoia National Park, named after the largest, most famous giant sequoia trees--General Sherman and General Grant--and famous for its steep, often-impassable switchbacks. Then came the job of making additions and improvements to the highway system in Yosemite National Park, followed by contracts in New Mexico and Arizona to double track the Santa Fe Railroad from Gallup to Chambers. Dad, fleshy and always well groomed, gained a reputation for keeping his jobs orderly and his equipment in top condition. He espoused a "cleanliness is next to godliness" motto. He wore a trademark felt fedora and gold watch fob, and his dapper style set him apart from the workers on his many sites. Known for his hearty appetite, he hired the finest cooks and bakers he could find to accompany him to his worksites. Since his California labor force was composed mostly of what he called "eye-talians," his cooks became expert at cooking spaghetti, for which Dad acquired a penchant. A stickler for verbal agreements and handshake deals with his associates--"When you can't trust a man's word, you can't trust his signature," he would declare--he also insisted on fifty-fifty partnerships. "Dad had no patience with 51-49 arrangements," a former partner once said. "He used to say 'No man with a sense of self-respect wants to be controlled on that kind of percentage.' " Although the business of road and railroad construction was steady and profitable, Bechtel began turning his attention to oil--the coming boom that accompanied the automobile. Predicting a surge in the development of the West's oil and gas resources to meet the energy needs of a growing industrial economy, Bechtel envisioned a network of refineries and pipelines snaking throughout the country. The vision turned out to be prescient, heralding the establishment of an alliance between the Bechtel corporation and the largest oil and gas companies in the nation and, ultimately, in the world. Situated as he was in the heart of a flourishing American West, Dad garnered more contracts than he could manage, and in 1921 he partnered with a fellow Bay Area entrepreneur named Henry J. Kaiser. An " egomaniacal small-time construction tycoon," Kaiser joined Bechtel in building major arteries that wound along the entire West Coast. The company took off in 1929 with the firm's first gas line for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). Building more than a thousand miles of pipeline for Standard Oil and Continental Gas, he amassed a fortune of more than $30 million by the end of the 1920s, making his company one of the largest construction firms in America. At fifty-eight years of age, Dad was once again self-satisfied with his role as a newly minted western mogul. He gloried in the national and international influence he and his western partners exercised. He might have been content to enjoy the luxuries of his life, and the sweep of his enterprise, if not goaded into a construction challenge being called the "Eighth Wonder of the World." When the Herbert Hoover administration announced in 1929 that it would accept bids to dam the Colorado River, Dad was leery. " It sounds a little ambitious," he remarked drily to his protégé, Kaiser, about building the world's tallest dam in a forbidding desert gorge. But when Kaiser compared the gargantuan project with the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China, promising that the Bechtel name would be etched on a bronze plaque at the dam's crest in perpetuity, Dad was sold. That year he was the first western builder to become national president of the Associated General Contractors of America--a booster organization and powerful lobbying group--and he planned to brandish his political clout in both the state capital in Sacramento and in Washington's inner circles. His petitioning would pay off. Meanwhile, Kaiser's company followed the same path as Bechtel, by raking in government contracts for roads, dams, public works, and later the Kaiser shipyards. Excerpted from The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World by Sally Denton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Preface: Mission Accomplished | p. 1 |
Prologue: 'The Spy with a Fan Club | p. 13 |
Part 1 We Were Ambassadors with Bulldozers 1872-1972 | |
1 Go West! | p. 19 |
2 Follow the Water | p. 28 |
3 Hobo Jungle | p. 34 |
4 That Hellhole | p. 38 |
5 Wartime Socialists | p. 45 |
6 Patriot Capitalists | p. 53 |
7 The Largest American Colony | p. 59 |
8 Going Nuclear | p. 66 |
9 McConey Island | p. 74 |
10 Weaving Spiders | p. 83 |
11 Covert Corporate Collaboration | p. 91 |
12 The Energy-Industrial Complex | p. 100 |
Part 2 The Bechtel Cabinet 1973-1988 | |
13 Bechtel's Superstar | p. 109 |
14 Cap the Knife | p. 116 |
15 The Arab Boycott | p. 124 |
16 The Pacific Republic | p. 130 |
17 The Bechtel Babies | p. 137 |
18 The Reaganauts | p. 145 |
19 A World Awash in Plutonium | p. 153 |
20 It Would Be a Terrible Mess | p. 160 |
21 Ultimate Insiders | p. 167 |
22 A Witch's Brew | p. 174 |
23 The Territory of Lies | p. 180 |
24 A Tangled Scheme | p. 187 |
Part 3 Dividing the Spoils 1989-2008 | |
25 A Deal with the Devil | p. 197 |
26 The Giant Land of Bechtel | p. 204 |
27 Some Found the Company Arrogant | p. 211 |
28 Global Reach with a Local Touch | p. 217 |
29 A License to Make Money | p. 225 |
30 More Powerful Than the US Army | p. 232 |
31 The Hydra-Headed American Giant | p. 238 |
32 Profiting from Destruction | p. 245 |
Part 4 From Muleskinner to Sovereign State 2009-2015 | |
33 A Convenient Spy | p. 251 |
34 Privatize the Apocalypse | p. 256 |
35 Nukes for Profit | p. 262 |
36 The Buddhist and the Bomb | p. 267 |
37 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse | p. 274 |
38 The Captain Ahab of Nuclear Weapons | p. 280 |
39 A Trial Lawyer Goes to Battle | p. 285 |
40 The Exxon of Space | p. 291 |
41 A Nasty Piece of Work | p. 298 |
42 The Kingdom of Bechtelistan | p. 304 |
Acknowledgments | p. 313 |
Notes | p. 317 |
Bibliography | p. 369 |
Index | p. 409 |