Word: bechtel
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...should have given more than just a mention to engineer Stephen Bechtel's monumental achievement in creating the entire municipality of Jubail, Saudi Arabia. It cannot have been easy to construct on the edge of the desert out of thin air. KHURRAM AHMED TAJI Islamabad, Pakistan...
After Hoover, Bechtel was convinced he and his outfit had no limits, and he set out to prove it. While the dam was still going up, he began building the 8.2-mile San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. During World War II, Bechtel, in addition to its shipyards, built bases and ran plants that modified bombers and rebuilt jeeps. At the same time Steve built a top-secret 1,600-mile pipeline through the Canadian wilderness to Alaska, under primitive conditions. The pace left him so fatigued that in 1946 he briefly retired. But he would not be on the shelf...
Returning to active management, Bechtel spent six months every year roaming the world, hobnobbing with kings, presidents and foreign business magnates, fishing for projects. Around 1947 he landed a whopper: construction of what was then the world's longest oil pipeline (1,068 miles), across Saudi Arabia. That was an early step in the building of a powerful economy as well as a fruitful relationship with Saudi kings. According to legend, on one trip to the kingdom Bechtel noticed the flames of natural gas being burned off at wellheads as he flew over. Surely, he thought, the wasted energy could...
...company Bechtel built is not universally loved. One partner in the wartime shipyards was John McCone, a steel executive who later became CIA director. He came early in a long line of men who filled high offices alternately in Bechtel and the Federal Government (most notable: George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger). That led to charges of undue influence--by whom on whom was never quite clear. The company's penchant for secrecy didn't help its reputation either. In 1976 the Justice Department charged that Bechtel had gone too far to please Arab clients by blacklisting potential subcontractors who dealt...
None of that has prevented the company, now headed by Riley Bechtel, a grandson of Steve's, from flourishing mightily. When Steve Sr. took over, Bechtel had revenues of less than $20 million; a quarter-century later, when he officially retired, sales were $463 million. The company, still family controlled, had 1997 revenues of $11.3 billion; its projects range from a transit system in Athens to a semiconductor plant in China. These and others are fruits of Steve Bechtel's forward thinking--decades before the term global economy became a cliche...