Given everything, there was ample reason for Steve Bechtel, Jr., to make the long annual drive from San Francisco, and the reason had never been better this year. This year especially Steve Bechtel needed to be among friends, because this year the Bechtel Group was in trouble.
It was not a difficulty that showed up on a balance sheet-at least, not yet. Rather, it was something more elusive, an unease, a sense of the ground moving underfoot. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the world in which Bechtel had done business so long and so profitably was changing. Nuclear power, an industry Bechtel had helped pioneer, and from which it had derived millions in revenues, was on the wane, driven back by skyrocketing plant-construction costs and environmental fears. Oil too was taking a pounding, and with it, the refineries and pipelines that had been a traditional mainstay of Bechtel’s business. At the same time, European, Japanese and Korean builders were becoming increasingly competitive, and as a result, the foreign customers who’d come automatically to Bechtel and other big American construction firms for roads and airports, factories and bridges, dams and mines were turning more and more to non-U.S. contractors.
At home Bechtel was experiencing difficulties as well, not only with the environmentalists who had been the bete noire of its existence, but with its so-called “sweetheart” customers, the big industrial and energy concerns whose projects had for decades filled the giant construction and engineering firm’s coffers. Confronted with a recession, declining oil prices and stiffer competition from abroad, Bechtel’s major U.S.
customers had begun cutting back on their expansion and developmental efforts, and those megaprojects which remained were getting harder to come by. It was, in short, the beginning of a lean time, one that for the foreseeable future, at least, promised only to get leaner.
16
THE GROVE
There had been other such times for Bechtel, and with the help of its friends, the company had always survived them-sometimes narrowly, sometimes questionably, but, in the end, always successfully.
The current times, however, were different. The stakes were greater, the potential loss more devastating. And there was one thing more: Bechtel was no longer an unknown. Its privacy had been shattered.
The veils had begun to fall away two years before when the company ‘s general counsel, Caspar W Weinberger, had been named Ronald Reagan’s secretary of Defense. Weinberger’s appointment had prompted questions about Bechtel and its methods of doing business, and as more Bechtel executives joined the administration, the questions had intensified. How was it, people were asking, that a private company could enjoy such close links to the government that was supposed to regulate it? How was it, too, that Bechtel did the bidding of the CIA on the one hand and the likes of Colonel Qaddafi on the other? Just what was the Bechtel Group? How and why had it become so powerful?
Now more strongly than ever, those questions were being raised again. Three weeks before, in a move that had staggered Steve Bechtel, Ronald Reagan had tapped the Bechtel Group’s president, George Shultz, to be his new secretary of State. Already, Steve
