BECHTEL, STEPHEN DAVISON

Stephen D. Bechtel (1900–89), a man who directed some of the twentieth century's greatest construction feats, possessed extraordinary imagination and organizational abilities. Beginning with his work on the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, he thrived on surmounting nearly impossible challenges. In naming him one of its 100 most influential persons of the twentieth century, Time magazine said, "Only a man who thought on the grandest scale could build the world's biggest engineering projects. . . . Thinking big was Steve Bechtel's forte."

Young Bechtel spent school vacations working with his father and brothers on rugged railroad construction projects throughout the West. During World War I Bechtel served in France with the Twentieth Engineers, American Expeditionary Force. After the war he attended the University of California at Berkeley but left before graduation to join his father in the construction business.

Bechtel's father founded the W. A. Bechtel Company in California in 1925 and appointed his son its vice president. The company built many of the roads, tunnels, bridges, pipelines, and dams that fueled West Coast economic growth in the twentieth century. In 1931 the elder Bechtel organized six companies in a successful bid to build one of the largest construction projects in history, the Hoover Dam. When his father died suddenly in 1933, Bechtel became president of the family company and chief executive of the dam project.

The Hoover Dam, which eventually transformed the economy of much of the West, was completed in a remarkably short five years, at a cost of $54 million. The scale of the project was immense. The dam, which rises 70 feet in the air, required 4.4 million cubic yards of concrete to build. 5,000 workers at a time toiled on the project, excavating 3.7 million cubic yards of rock.

Bechtel followed the success of the Hoover Dam project with the 8.2-mile San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. In 1936 he joined with steel executive John A. McCone (1909–1991), who later became director of the CIA, to form Bechtel-McCone Corporation, a firm concentrating on designing and building petroleum refineries and chemical plants. During World War II, Bechtel's companies and joint ventures turned their efforts to supporting U.S. defense efforts. The shipyards his companies organized built 560 vessels between 1941 and 1945. Bechtel's companies also guided the work of aircraft modification plants and constructed naval bases and other key defense facilities.

In 1946, following the war, Bechtel consolidated his various companies into the Bechtel Corporation and began to build many of the world's oil pipelines, including the 1,600-mile Alaska pipeline and, beginning in 1947, the Trans-Arabian (1,068 miles) pipeline that opened up Mideast oil reserves to the world.

Bechtel was widely recognized as a man of unusual vision. In his last years he was actively engaged in building a new city, Jubail, on the site of a former fishing village in Saudi Arabia. He pioneered the concept of "turnkey" projects—projects that remained entirely under his company's supervision and responsibility until they were completed. Coordinating the work of several contractors with Bechtel as project manager was another of his initiatives that took root and helped his company to flourish.

Bechtel resigned as president and CEO of Bechtel Corporation in 1960. He remained active in the company's affairs until his death in 1989 (at age 88), first as chairman of the board and later as senior director. He had built the company from revenues of less than $20 million when he took it over in 1936 to $463 million when he retired in 1960. By 1997 the company was posting annual revenues of $11.3 billion. Since 1898 four generations of the Bechtel family have guided the family-owned business through 19,000 projects which included transit systems in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, the Boston expressway project, and the Hong Kong airport.

BECHTEL, STEPHEN DAVISON

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