Stephen Bechtel

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

In the early days of World War II, German U-boats were sending Allied merchant ships to the bottom twice as fast as shipyards could build them. The U.S. Maritime Commission, desperately seeking an outfit to build 60 cargo ships for its allies, sent word to the Bechtel construction company that it would be welcome to bid on half the job. Stephen Bechtel, head of the family firm, had no experience in shipbuilding. But he insisted on getting the order for all 60. "Size can work to your advantage if you think big," he said. "You just recognize it and move the decimal point over."

Thinking big was Steve Bechtel's forte. He learned to appreciate scale as the primary manager in the building of Hoover Dam in the early '30s, then the largest public works project in U.S. history. The wartime shipyards Bechtel organized would build 560 vessels--up to 20 ships a month--between 1941 and 1945, an astounding output even in an era of production miracles.

Bechtel was, and remained throughout his nearly 70-year career, a visionary whose imagination was fired by grandiose projects--the more seemingly impossible the better. His motto, endlessly repeated, was "We'll build anything for anybody, no matter what the location, type or size." He and his company built pipelines and power plants in the forbidding reaches of the Canadian Rockies, across the Arabian desert and through South American jungles, as well as in daunting places like downtown Boston, where the Central Artery project unfolds today. His portfolio even includes an entire city (Jubail, Saudi Arabia). Bechtel built in 140 countries and on six continents. It has been said, hyperbolically perhaps, that Bechtel engineers changed the physical contours of the planet more than any other humans.

Bechtel grew up on rugged construction sites where his father Warren, who started the company, punched rail lines and highways through the California wilderness. To the end of his long life--he died in 1989, six months short of his 89th birthday--Steve Bechtel enjoyed prowling around job sites, but he neither looked nor sounded like a construction boss. In his prime, in the 1950s, he was trim, well tailored and relatively soft voiced, with the ingratiating manner of a salesman.

He was always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project finally realized this decade.

Bechtel got on the map in a place that was almost off it: Black Canyon, Nev. With the Depression raging in 1931, Bechtel's father helped organize a consortium called Six Companies to tackle the massive engineering job that became known as Hoover Dam. The consortium bid $49 million and made a profit.

In the course of five years workers excavated 3.7 million cu. yds. of rock and poured 4.4 million cu. yds. of concrete; the main arch of the dam towers 70 stories high. Steve was first in charge of 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 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 long.

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, still under construction, houses a steel mill and factories that make chemicals, plastics and fertilizer. The town is now home to 70,000 and growing.

The 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 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.

George J. Church, a contributor to TIME, has written more than 125 cover stories