Because of those friends, anonymous Steve Bechtel was a presence at The Grove, a man whose very appearance generated awed and admiring whispers. Set on a hillside, Mandalay, the lodge to which he belonged, was the most esteemed of The Grove’s 127 separate encampments. Its membership and guest list included Steve; his father, Stephen D. Bechtel, Sr.; Henry Kissinger; former Bechtel Group president and secretary of state designate George P. Shultz (who this year
Knowledgeable family sources estimate that in 1982, Stephen D. Bechtel, Sr.’s, for tune amounted to $1 billion and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr.’s, wealth totaled between $600 million and $700 million.
14
THE GROVE
was bringing West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as his personal guest); former IBM chairman and U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Thomas J. Watson; former CIA director John A. McCone; Attorney General William French Smith; industrialist Edgar F. Kaiser, Jr.; former Nixon political aide Peter M. Flanigan; Pan American World Airways’ onetime boss Najeeb Halaby; Wells Fargo Bank chairman Richard P. Cooley; former General Electric chairman Philip D.
Reed; Southern California Edison chairman J. K. “Jack” Horton; Utah International Chairman Edmund W Littlefield; Dillon Read’s former boss Nicholas F. Brady, who was serving as an interim senator from New Jersey and, like Peter Flanigan, was Steve junior’s guest; tire and rubber heir Leonard K. Firestone and, not least, Gerald R. Ford, the former president of the United States.
In addition, this year’s encampment would feature such notables as former secretary of State Alexander Haig; FBI Director William Webster; computer magnate (and former deputy Defense secretary) David Packard; Chief of Naval Operations Thomas Hayward; Eastern Airlines president Frank Borman; Federal Reserve Bank chairman Paul Volcker; World Bank president Alden W Clausen; Union Oil chairman Fred L.
Hartley; Atlantic Richfield chairman Robert 0. Anderson; publishing czar W illiam Randolph Hearst, Jr.; Southern Pacific Railroad president Alan C. Furth; show-business personalities Charlton Heston, Art Linkletter and Dennis Day; and including, among various other pooh-bahs, the presidents of Dean Witter Reynolds, the Bank of America and United Airlines.
Among such men, Steve Bechtel, Jr., could unwind, for he was a friend and business associate of nearly all of them. John McCone, for instance, had been his father’s business partner, while Edgar Kaiser’s father, the legendary Henry J. Kaiser, had teamed with Bechtel to build Boulder Dam. W hen Nick Brady’s interim term as U.S. senator was complete, he would be returning to the chairmanship of Dillon, Read, the Wall Street brokerage house in which Bechtel had a controlling interest. Peter Flanigan, another Dillon, Read senior executive, had, while serving in the Nixon W hite House, helped clear the way for Bechtel to construct a $3 billion coal-slurry pipeline. Philip D. Reed’s former company, General Electric, had joined with Bechtel to build many of the world’s nuclear plants. Southern Pacific Railroad, where Alan Furth was president, had given Bechtel some of its earliest business, while Pan Am under its patriarch Juan Trippe had tapped the company to build the bulk of its Inter-Continental Hotels. In Canada, 15
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
Bechtel had laid pipelines for Atlantic Richfield and Union Oil; in the United States, it had built many power plants for Pacific Gas & Electric and Jack Horton’s Southern California Edison. IBM
had given the Bechtel Group work as well, and Stephen Bechtel, Jr., was a member of its board. Gerald Ford had also lent
