by Sally Denton
“This place is surreal”: James Cox and Gary Strauss, “Iraq Work Puts Bechtel in Spotlight: Private Contractor Juggles Restoration with Controversy,” USA Today, June 19, 2003.
“Saddam’s ‘I’m-on-crack’ ”: Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011).
“Sinatra’s Vegas”: Ibid., 167.
“script” . . . “imagined Americans”: Ibid., 6.
“What did work out”: Walter Hickey, “The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad Cost a Staggering $750 Million,” Business Insider, March 20, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/750-million-united-states-embassy-iraq-baghdad-2013-3.
“The World’s Largest” . . . “We placed”: Van Buren, We Meant Well, 154.
“the world’s worst bar scene”: Ibid., 159.
“the biblical Eden”: Ibid., 110.
“hideous modernist bunker” . . . “scowls at the world” . . . “an insult”: Martin Kemp, “Diplomacy Has No Place in This Monstrous Bunker,” Guardian.com, May 23, 2007, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/may/23/diplomacyhasnoplaceinthis.
“War began last week”: Elizabeth Rosenberg, Anthony Allesandrini, and Adam Horowitz, “Iraq Reconstruction Tracker,” Middle East Report 33 (Summer 2003), www.merip.org/mer/mer227/iraq-reconstruction-tracker.
“We were the ones”: Van Buren, We Meant Well, 3.
“exceptionally maladroit” . . . “only well-connected”: Thomas A. Fogarty, “Companies Bid on Rebuilding Iraq—Halliburton, Bechtel Benefit from Experience and Political Ties,” USA Today, March 26, 2003.
“build anything” . . . “The bigger, the tougher”: Fortune, March 1951, quoted in Laton McCartney, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story—The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 55.
“wheeling and dealing”: Newsweek, December 29, 1975.
“an entity so powerful”: Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 297.
“Wild West capitalism”: Robert B. Laughlin, Powering the Future: How We Will (Eventually) Solve the Energy Crisis and Fuel the Civilization of Tomorrow (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 98.
Re: Bechtel’s ranking among private companies, see www.forbes.com/pictures/eggh45efje/4-bechtel-5.
“What appears to an outsider”: Mark Dowie, “The Bechtel File: How the Master Builders Protect Their Beachheads,” Mother Jones, September/October 1978, 33.
Re: petitioning to have family voter records sealed, see Lisa Davis, “It’s a Bechtel World: Think That a $680 Million Iraq Contract Is a Big Deal? You Don’t Know Bechtel,” SF Weekly, June 18, 2003.
“In fact, if they had their way”: Dowie, “Bechtel File,” 33.
“multiyear megaprojects” . . . “markets” . . . “signature projects” . . . “tens of thousands” . . . “a third of the world’s” . . . “many of the largest” . . . “global leader in design”: www.bechtel.com.
“to industrial standards”: Gary Gwilliam press release, interview with author.
“the U.S. Nuclear Security Enterprise”: www.bechtel.com.
Bechtel was in it for the money: Hugh Gusterson, “The Assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A Drama in Three Acts,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (November/December 2011).
“a playground for political patronage”: Upton.
“a deep-pocketed”: Ralph King and Charlie McCoy, “Bechtel’s Power Outage,” Business 2.0, March 2004.
“Bechtel espouses”: William Greider, “The Boys from Bechtel: Will Ronald Reagan Reverse U.S. Policy on Nuclear Proliferation?” Rolling Stone, September 2, 1982, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-boys-from-bechtel-19820902.
“There’s no reason for people to hear of us. We’re not selling to the public”: Riccio, quoted in Newsweek.
Bechtel achievement . . . “frequent discouragements” . . . “showed what men could do”: Robert L. Ingram, A Builder and His Family, 1898–1948: Being the Historical Account of the Contracting, Engineering & Construction Career of W. A. Bechtel and of How His Sons and Their Associates Have Carried Forward His Principles in Their Many Activities (San Francisco: privately printed, 1949), xii.
“The California settlement”: Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 24.
“Western builders will build”: Pacific Builder, quoted in Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 16.
“single most remarkable achievement”: Ibid.
PROLOGUE: THE SPY WITH A FAN CLUB
The Jonathan Pollard account is drawn from the many authors and journalists who covered the Pollard case, including Mark Shaw, Milton Viorst, and Jeff Stein. Outlets included Washingtonian, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Wall Street Journal.
The Spy with a Fan Club: Washingtonian, quoted in Mark Shaw, Miscarriage of Justice: The Jonathan Pollard Story (Saint Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2001), 153.
The journalism pool present at President Obama’s speech reported the references to Pollard. The New York Times reported that the Hebrew-speaking heckler was an Arab-Israeli activist calling for the liberation of Palestine. But Jennifer Bendery of the Huffington Post and other journalists stood by the pool report: www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/obama-heckled_n_2924127.html, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/03/who-is-jonathan-pollard-obama-heckled-over-spy-for-israel.
“the endless Pollard intrigues”: Black.
“Year of the Spy” . . . “last gasps”: Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“The Spy with a Fan Club”: Washingtonian, quoted in Shaw, Miscarriage of Justice, 153.
“Whoever has studied” . . . “ ‘Catch-22’ Plight”: Milton Viorst, “The ‘Catch-22’ Plight of Imprisoned Spy Jonathan Pollard: The U.S. Has Shown a Key Memo to Its Attorneys 25 Times but Denied It to the Defense as Irrelevant and Top Secret,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2003.
“bullying tactics” . . . “Even Pollard Deserves”: Gordon L. Crovitz, “Even Pollard Deserves Better Than Government Sandbagging,” Asian Wall Street Journal, September 27, 1991.
“Israel has been caught”: Jeff Stein, “Israel Flagged as Top Spy Threat to U.S. in New Snowden/NSA Document,” Newsweek, August 4, 2014.
PART ONE: WE WERE AMBASSADORS WITH BULLDOZERS, 1872–1972
The history of Bechtel’s first hundred years has been thoroughly chronicled, beginning first with the extensive, in-depth and revealing three-part, 1943 series in Fortune called “The Earth Movers.” The story of Six Companies, the construction of Hoover Dam, and the politics of water in the American West have all been the subject of numerous full-length and definitive works, including Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Michael Hiltzik’s Collossus, Judith Nies’s Unreal City, Peter Wiley’s and Robert Gottlieb’s Empires in the Sun, and Joseph E. Stevens’s Hoover Dam. Guy Rocca’s biography of Frank Crowe was particularly insightful, as was Dennis McBride’s history of Boulder City. Any interpretation of the Bechtel-McCone company’s participation in World War II maritime construction, as well as the early seminal pipeline construction projects in the Middle East, owes a primary debt to Laton McCartney’s groundbreaking company history, Friends in High Places. Again, the Bechtel-sponsored corporate histories by Robert L. Ingram were enormously helpful—especially Richard Finnie’s Bechtel in Arab Lands, as was John L. Simpson’s rare and hard-to-find autobiography of his life as a Bechtel family member operating in the clandestine postwar world of the Dulles brothers.
As for the origins of the OSS and CIA, works by authors Burton Hersh, Stephen Kinzer, and Anthony Cave Brown, among many others, were particularly helpful. The rise of John McCone from shipbuilder to Chairman of the AEC to Director of the CIA was charted in his nomination hearings before the US Congress, and, especially, in the investigative reporting of national syndicated columnists, Drew Pea
rson and Jack Anderson. The account of the death of Bechtel Senior Vice President George Colley in 1958 in Baghdad was reported by the Associated Press, as well as in US State Department cables.
A vast bibliography exists about McCone’s role as CIA Director in the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination and the investigation of the crime, including books and journalism by acclaimed writers and reporters Jefferson Morley, Jack Anderson, and Curt Gentry, and a treasure trove of declassified government documents obtained by Tom Blanton’s indefatigable researchers at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Many newspaper and magazine stories have been published over several decades about Bohemian Gove, as well as several sociological studies, including works by William G. Domhoff, Peter Martin Phillips, Joan Didion, and John van der Zee.
The CIA’s attempt to oust Chilean President Salvador Allende has been widely reported, contemporaneously by investigative columnist Jack Anderson and in Victor Marchetti’s and John Marks’s definitive book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, and later by Peter Kornbluh in The Pinochet File, among many published sources.
We Were Ambassadors with Bulldozers: Richard Finnie, Bechtel in Arab Lands: A Fifteenth-Year Review of Engineering and Construction Projects (San Francisco: Bechtel Corporation, 1958), 50.
“This extreme reliance”: Didion, Where I Was From, 24.
CHAPTER ONE: GO WEST!
“tall, beefy man”: Fortune 28, I.
“at a time when he saw”: Judith Nies, Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the American West (New York: Nation Books, 2014, advance uncorrected proof), 147.
“Either the music of the ladies’ band”: New York Times, August 28, 1933.
“Having mastered these, gather up your family”: www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/development-west/resources/horace-greeley-“go-west”-1871.
“I landed in Reno”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 3.
“He was learning”: Ibid., 4.
“a horse-drawn fresno-scraper”: Fortune 28, I.
“Many of the old-timers”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 21.
“Still largely undeveloped”: Davis, “It’s a Bechtel World.”
“whose trek to California”: Joseph E. Stevens, Hoover Dam: An American Adventure (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 35.
“Might as well ask him in”: Wattis, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 23.
“coming of age” . . . “I never expected”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 13.
“near misses, the bad judgment calls” . . . “It is difficult to connect”: Heather Zwicker, “ ‘To Build a Better World’: Bechtel, a Family Company,” in Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation, ed. Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 110.
“and still fancying himself”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 25.
“egomaniacal small-time”: Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking, 1986), 131.
“It sounds a little ambitious”: Fortune 28, I.
CHAPTER TWO: FOLLOW THE WATER
“the most fateful transformation”: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 172.
“The Colorado has always been best known”: Michael Hiltzik, Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 2010), 3.
“unequivocally announced”: Starr, Endangered Dreams, 294–95.
“Two were aging Mormons”: Fortune 28, I.
“Hocking everything but their shirts”: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 132.
“put in motion”: Nies, Unreal City, 149.
“wild to build this dam”: Fortune 28, I.
“When the last bills are paid” . . . “The U.S. is willing”: Fortune, quoted in Sally Denton, “Hoover’s Promise: The Dam That Remade the American West Celebrates Its 75th Anniversary,” Invention & Technology 25, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 14.
“In All the President’s Men”: Wiley and Gottlieb, xvi.
CHAPTER THREE: HOBO JUNGLE
“unleash a flood”: Denton, “Hoover’s Promise.”
“We were all scared stiff”: Stevens, Hoover Dam, 35.
“like a general”: Al M. Rocca, America’s Master Dam Builder: The Engineering Genius of Frank T. Crowe (Langham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 190.
“When one set of tracks”: Dennis McBride, In the Beginning: A History of Boulder City, Nevada (Boulder City: Hoover Dam Museum, 1992), 16.
“He knew it would take”: Rocca, America’s Master Dam Builder, 190.
rock bottom: Manchester, I:I.
“hobo jungle”: Rocca, America’s Master Dam Builder, 190.
“Instead of the young miners”: Nies, Unreal City, 149.
“This will be a job for machines”: Denton, “Hoover’s Promise.”
“The structure spanned ideology”: Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 11.
CHAPTER FOUR: THAT HELLHOLE
“bête noir”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 45.
“resembled a battlefield”: Hiltzik, Colossus, 216.
“pocketed an additional”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 39.
“Besides the hazards of the construction”: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 133.
“That siren—oh, it scared you”: Helen Holmes, quoted in Rocca, America’s Master Dam Builder, 196.
“exempt from the prying attentions” . . . “showed up in Las Vegas” . . . “quickly, quietly, and privately”: Hiltzik, Colossus, 218–19.
“We feel it’s a crime”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 39.
“They will have to work”: Wattis, quoted in Stevens, Hoover Dam, 72.
“In the town”: Ibid., 173.
“crisis-filled narrative”: T. H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874–1952 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 383.
“coaxed and manipulated”: Wiley and Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun, 20.
“a telegraphic bombardment”: Ickes, quoted in Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim, 384.
“Flooded gorges”: Denton and Morris, 96.
“This is a good time”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 36.
“an overdose of a medicine”: “W. A. Bechtel Dies in Moscow Hotel,” New York Times, August 29, 1933, 17.
“Fumbling with a syringe”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 45. For details of Warren Bechtel’s death and the count Zucatur, see McCartney, 45 ff., and 244, notes for chapter 4.
“Coming at the time it did”: Steve Bechtel interview, Stevens, Hoover Dam, 258.
CHAPTER FIVE: WARTIME SOCIALISTS
“Warren Bechtel was a very successful”: www.bechtel.com.
“aggressive, boisterous”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 46.
“They wanted me to lead”: Ibid., 49.
“on the job”: New York Times, March 16, 1989.
“burning up the French countryside”: www.bechtel.com.
“The incident” . . . “There was no explanation”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 47.
“went east to talk” . . . “As a newcomer”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 27.
“more sophisticated and worldly”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 49.
“The ancient Western dream”: Bernard De Voto, “The Anxious West,” Harper’s, December 1946.
“lusty, uninhibited”: Fortune 28, I.
“Steve’s vision was of energy”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 41.
“Steve and I shared a sense” . . . “Not just pipelines”: McCone, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 53.
“it was a success”: Fortune 28, II.
“jaunty fellow”: Fortune 28, I.
“hard-boiled” . . . “molten temper”: “Nominations of McCone, Korth, and Harlan.” U.S Senate. Hearing Before the Committee on Armed Services. 87th Cong., 2nd Sess. January 18, 1962.
“the perfec
t material” . . . “a real grind”: Warren Kozak, “The American Defender Stop: John McCone Helped Thwart a Cuban Missile,” Investor’s Business Daily, April 10, 2012.
“great foresight” . . . “Like others”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 45.
“seemed about ripe”: Fortune 28, II.
“the American Onassis”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 109.
“Japs”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 72.
“the mountains are nameless”: Service, quoted in Ingram, Builder and His Family, 72.
“just begun to fight!”: Ibid., 50.
“strengthening the nation’s sinews”: Ibid., 70.
“the war would have been lost”: Ibid., 55.
“built the ships”: Admiral Howard L. Vickery, paraphrased in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 70.
“I daresay”: Casey, quoted in David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, 1964), 193.
“cast up a worthwhile profit-and-loss”: Fortune 28, III.
CHAPTER SIX: PATRIOT CAPITALISTS
“We’re not worried”: Fortune 28, III.
“Nobody around here wanted to go foreign”: www.bechtel.com.
“quasi-industrialists”: Fortune 28, III.
“Size can work to your advantage”: Church, “Stephen Bechtel.”
“a series of shrewd”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 71.
“the birth of the modern Bechtel Corporation”: www.bechtel.com/BAC-Chapter-3.html.
“the company took off like a rocket”: Bridges, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 73.
“hardworking WASP”: Ibid., 73.
“They are not always the easiest”: Clayton Hirst, “The World’s at Bechtel’s Beck and Call,” Independent (London), April 20, 2003.
“determined the entire future course”: John L. Simpson, Random Notes: Recollections of My Early Life. Europe Without a Guidebook, 1915–1922 (Printed privately, 1969), ii.