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 be put to some use. In 1973 he presented a plan to King Faisal, an old acquaintance: use the gas to power factories in a new city that Bechtel would build on the site of a tiny fishing village at Jubail. The city is still under construction, but it already houses a steel mill and factories that make chemicals, plastics and fertilizer. The town is now home to 70,000 people out of a planned eventual population of 370,000.

Bechtel got on the map in a place that was almost off it — Black Canyon, Nev. With Depression raging in 1931, Bechtel helped organize a consortium called Six Companies to tackle what was then the biggest civil engineering construction job in U.S. history: the Hoover Dam. Workers had to excavate 3.7 million cubic yards of rock and pour 4.4 million cubic yards of cement; the main arch of the dam towers 70 stories high. Steve was first in charge of all transportation, engineering and administration. When his father died suddenly in 1933, he became chief executive of the whole project, which transformed the economy of much of the West, as well as transforming the company.

After Hoover, Bechtel was convinced he and his outfit had no limits, and 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 operated shipyards that turned out more than 550 cargo carriers and oil tankers. At the same time he built a top-secret 1,600-mile pipeline through the Canadian wilderness to Alaska, under primitive conditions. The hectic pace left him so fatigued that in 1946 he briefly retired. But he could never be happy on the shelf.

< < Previous  1 | 2 | 3   Next > >