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. The company Bechtel built is not universally loved. One partner in the wartime shipyards was John McCone, then a steel executive who later became cia director. He came early in a long line of men who alternately filled high offices 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 with Israel. Bechtel signed a consent decree promising not to join any Arab boycott of Israel.

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.

Stephen Bechtel

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