Saturday, April 9, 2016

The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World, by Sally Denton,Simon & Schuster, RRP$30, 448 pages
For decades, the relationship between Bechtel and the US government has stirred intrigue. Bechtel — a behemoth among closely held companies — has been the world’s builder, benefiting from vast government contracts for engineering and infrastructure work in difficult places while it nurtured relationships with power brokers in Washington.

In The Profiteers, journalist Sally Denton seeks to unravel the history of Bechtel, from its raw beginnings in the American West to its advance into the Middle East. Her story is one of “how a dynastic line of rulers from the same American family conducts its business” and how its system of networking now pervades US capitalism.

She faced significant obstacles. US agencies that could have released documents to her about Bechtel dealings — such as the Department of Energy, which since 2000 has privatised much of its management with Bechtel as its top private contractor at the nation’s nuclear laboratories — refused to do so. Bechtel itself apparently answered her questions by referring to its online press kit. The papers of Caspar Weinberger, a former defence secretary under Ronald Reagan and one-time general counsel and director of Bechtel, are housed at the US Library of Congress — a repository often open to researchers — but they too were kept from Denton. Weinberger’s son controls access and denied her request, she writes.

So the author has compiled what she calls a biography of an empire without fully understanding the gritty nature of its deals and decision-making. For anyone unfamiliar with Bechtel’s far-flung enterprises, though, this is still an eye-opening journey about how money, and opportunity, sloshes between like-minded friends.

Her short chapters pulling together family relationships, university ties and business partners from the last century are useful. Anecdotes of Bohemian Grove, the secretive retreat that became an all-male “summer camp” for US corporate, political and military elites to toast marshmallows, skinny-dip in the river north of San Francisco and dress in drag for skits, elucidate the chummy nature of big business. The long-running animus between Republican heavyweights George Shultz and Weinberger, whose careers shuttled between Bechtel and government, is told with effect and makes plain the ideology and ambitions that stoked Bechtel’s stunning growth. As of 2014, its reported revenue was $37bn, with projects and employees in 37 countries.


The corporation’s embrace of Saudi Arabia as a lucrative client and its decades-long and contorted experience in Iraq also makes sense of some aspects of US foreign policy — as well as its intelligence-gathering operations. The life and times of John McCone, a former Bechtel executive who later served as CIA director in the US administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, is chronicled deftly here. It is worth noting: McCone was and is critical of Bechtel’s dominance today. He devised the idea of “cost-plus contracts” for the toughest jobs sought by government. Contractors are guaranteed a profit in such deals.


But Denton’s account suffers from relying too much on what is known. The reader learns far more than necessary (for a story about Bechtel) about convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. The battles of trial lawyer J Gary Gwilliam against Bechtel are not artfully woven into this volume. For readers in the US — where the Boston Globe investigated Bechtel’s shortcomings in the so-called Big Dig, a mega-highway project plagued by escalating costs, and James Glanz of the New York Times reported on Iraq reconstruction following the 2003 US-led invasion — Denton’s effort may feel derivative.


Denton frequently refers to the reporting of US journalists of past eras — fair enough, but who are they and why are they reputable? — to support her thesis. (As someone who reported for the Washington Post in 1980s and 1990s, I recognised many of the names and dispatches; still, I had to flick continually to the back of the book to connect the dots of her footnotes.)


Denton had big ambitions. Hers is a wrangle with a difficult and important story about corporate influence on democracy and capitalism. She might have done better by focusing on Bechtel’s deals since 2000, though she clearly wanted to tell a history to span the ages. Instead, The Profiteers stands as a challenge to journalists: try again.


The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World, by Sally Denton,Simon & Schuster, RRP$30, 448 pages

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