Bechtel Corporation is one of the largest closely held companies in this country.
It reported more than $37 billion of revenue in 2014, and it employs 55,000 people around the world.
For more than a century, Bechtel has worked on a number of major projects and even played a major role in building Hoover Dam.
Since the completion of the dam, Bechtel has grown into one of the largest contractors in the world.
So, how did the company become so successful? One might argue it was due to business ingenuity.
In “The Profiteers,” investigative journalist Sally Denton tells a darker story. She puts Bechtel at the center of a nefarious cartel enabled by the collusion of U.S. government officials.
And she joins us now to talk about Bechtel and her career.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, you describe your book as not a business biography but an empire biography. Why?
It was going to be a profile of a five-generation business family in California and the United States. The second-largest privately held company in America and the largest construction company in the world.
I initially thought it would be about this western American family. As I proceeded in doing the research, which took about four years, I realized it was less about the Bechtel people themselves… and more about how business is done in the world. How American multinationals operate throughout the world and their relationship to foreign policy.
It was really more of an empire from the traditional sense of empire, this larger-than-life, mega-project-building construction firm.
How did Warren Bechtel and his two sons grow an upstart business into a global construction, energy, and technology company?
It was really Warren Bechtel. He was one of the consortium called the Six Companies that got the contract to build Hoover Dam in 1931. It was at the time the largest public-private partnership ever in the history of the United States and it was to dam the Colorado River with the iconic concrete arch that we all know in Southern Nevada.
There is this mythology about Hoover Dam, it was Boulder Dam at the time, but there is this mythology that has grown up around that as being an FDR-New Deal project to put Americans to work during the Depression but in fact it was a Hebert Hoover idea spawned and manifested in order to provide water and electricity to Southern California and the Imperial Valley.
Is it your contention the consortium was nefarious in some way?
No, it’s not that the consortium was nefarious. It was a massive undertaking and really was technologically genius. I grew in Boulder City, which is why the company was always of such interest to me. In fact, I grew up in the house built by one of the executives of Bechtel.
Obviously, there was a lot of controversy around the construction of the dam because of the brutal working conditions. The number of people who died, the labor conditions, the houses in Boulder City. It was a company town built for the workers at the height of the Depression. There were thousands and thousands of people that came to Nevada for the purpose of working on the dam and it was largely a white force. Asians, African Americans, and Jews were not hired.
The brutal conditions in the summer. In some of the tunnels, it would rise to 130, 140 degrees and they didn’t have water. They were dying of heat stroke and carbon monoxide. They were doing blasting inside tunnels with gas-fired engines.
How did Hoover Dam change Bechtel’s fortunes?
It had really been a road construction company and relatively small until that point. This was a massive project with massive profits. It was done in short order. It was one of the first ‘cost-plus’ type of arrangements that Bechtel would actually perfect in future generations.
The Six Companies was paid with a guaranteed profit built into it. So they ultimately became uber rich from this, the individuals and the individuals in the companies. Warren Bechtel didn’t live to see the dam completed. As family lore goes, he was invited by Stalin to the Soviet Union to inspect their dams and subways… not to inspect but to advise the construction. He died mysteriously while there. They had trouble getting his body back.
It left the Bechtel sons, there were three sons, in kind of a struggle for who was going to take the helm. It ended up in the hands of Stephen Bechtel, the middle son. This is when the company really takes off in a new direction away from just construction and into more industrialization that goes actually throughout the world for the next generations.
They built the Nevada Test Site?
I’m not sure what their involvement was in the beginning of the Nevada Test Site. They did build the first nuclear reactor in the United States. They were also involved in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. They go way back to the very beginning of nuclear energy in America.
What was the most surprising thing you learned about how multinational corporations work?
This book really grew out of an article I did for Science and Technology magazine at the 75 th anniversary of Hoover Dam. They had asked me to write the story because I grew up in Boulder City. And it was going to be nice little anniversary story.
Once I left Boulder City in 1970, I never thought of Bechtel again. Except for the years that I lived in Washington, D.C., I saw that they had a presence with the subway system there and I would see their name… I just knew nothing about them and frankly wasn’t that curious about them. But in writing this story, at the same time that the new big bridge was being built, I became intrigued with the fact that they had gone on for four more generation and to build on every continent in the world and to really diversify into oil refineries, natural gas, transportation, airports.
How did your BMI-Kluge fellowship shape your approach to writing this book?
This is such an amazing fellowship. In fact, I had access, the only other body that had the same kind of access that I had was the Supreme Court. Not even Congress or the White House had it. I had an office right next to the most beautiful building and the most beautiful room in America probably with a direct computer connection to the entire library circulation. I could request any book. And the Library of Congress essentially has any book ever published anywhere.
What do you think of Bechtel?
I try not to make the judgment almost. My job as a journalist or historian is to shed light on a situation and let the reader determine. T.J. Stiles, the imminent historian reviews my book for the New York
Times this Sunday, and… he really kind of gets to the crux of this book and says ‘this is a conversation that really needs to be had in America about the relationship between government and private industry’ and I agree. That is not a subject I can tackle in any way thoroughly. This is something all Americans need to do.
When I started out this book, I saw Bechtel as the corporate arm of the U.S. government but by the end of the book, I saw the government as the public policy arm of Bechtel.
Did Bechtel help you?
It was a challenge to do this book because of the private nature of it. There is no oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission. There were no stockholder reports. You had to take them at face value. So I found everything I needed, from the Bechtel point of view, was [on their website].
How as being a native Nevadan influenced you as a person and as a writer?
I think it’s very key to everything that I do. I’m a fourth generation Nevadan. I started journalism at the Boulder City News.
Editor's Note: In June of 2017, Denton was awarded the prestigious IRE Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors Association for her work on The Profiteers. This interview originally aired in March 2016.