A Real American Story
Stephen D. Bechtel Jr., who took over his family’s global engineering and construction company, elevating its already formidable reputation and transforming what had been a hidebound, top-down hierarchy into a modern, if secretive, corporation, died on Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 95.
– New York Times obituary, March 15, 2021
The smiling face of Steven Bechtel Jr. recently appeared in a full-page photo in the Sunday New York Times. “Thank you, Steve,” read the caption. “For eight decades you inspired us with your character and your achievements.” Sponsored by “thousands of past and present Bechtel colleagues,” the testimonial described him as a business leader, engineer, builder, and philanthropist. The obituary gave only a few hints about the company that built roads and refineries in Saudi Arabia (under a subsidiary called Bechtel-Bin Laden); nuclear plants in countries around the world; power stations in China; was a prime contractor for President Bush’s war in Kuwait and Iraq; and joined Halliburton as prime contractor for President George W. Bush’s second Iraq war. Bechtel was said to have its own foreign policy. As a private company, it issued no annual reports or regular earnings or stockholder’s meetings. Steve Bechtel Jr. was a grandson of the founder, owned 20 percent of the company shares with personal worth estimated at $3 billion.
Roberta’s Sheepherding Camp
Roberta Blackgoat’s sheepherding camp is gone now, but it was located on the Navajo reservation some eighteen miles south of the Kayenta Coal Mine in the area around Big Mountain, at 7,000 feet the highest point on Black Mesa. She was a sheepherder, a weaver of Navajo rugs, and a canny strategist about the Anglo world. Her camp had no electricity and she had to drive 18 miles to pump water from a deep-water well because her well had gone dry. The cluster of buildings included a three-room house, a round earth-covered hogan with an inviting plume of cedar smoke coming out of the center, a sheep corral made of split cedar rails, a hen house, and two outhouses in the distance.
It was 1991 when I went to see her along with her daughter, a Dartmouth graduate who lived in Massachusetts. I had a hard time imagining how she could operate in the same world as Stephen Bechtel. Yet Roberta Blackgoat, age seventy-four, had traveled to the United Nations with a delegation of Hopi and Navajo Indians to charge the American government of human rights abuses and cultural genocide by destroying the lands and culture of the traditional Navajo. While there, I learned about the coal strip-mining: toxic water and polluted water holes that killed her sheep, coal dust in the air causing skyrocketing asthma rates, land stripped of all natural vegetation that could never be reclaimed in the high desert, mountainous slag heaps of earth that had once been valleys of pinon and juniper, and thousands of ancient archaeological Anasazi sites destroyed by the drag lines. I had seen an Anasazi cliff house in the amphitheater of a canyon on the way to her camp. Peabody Coal was owned by a private holding company made up of five of the largest engineering and construction companies in America. Bechtel was one of them. By then I knew more about Bechtel because it was tearing up the streets throughout Boston.
Phoenix, 1982
I had encountered the Bechtel Corporation for the first time in 1982 at an Indian art celebration in a Phoenix art gallery. There, a flashy gathering of Arizona’s politically-connected wealthy were gathered for a movie star celebration of American Indian art. I always remembered it because when I was introduced to Senator Barry Goldwater as a former congressional staffer and reporter from the Atlantic, he left my extended hand in mid-air, silently turned on his heel, and hustled back into the gallery. There is something here that Goldwater doesn’t want me to see, I thought.
Inside the gallery, a photographer friend pointed out the top executives from some of America’s largest engineering, construction, and mining companies, including Bechtel. She added, “I bet this is the first time they’ve been out in public together. They don’t like publicity.” She explained that they were the owners of the Peabody Holding Company and were mining the coal on the Indian reservations to supply the cheap electricity and water infrastructure — that they were also building — key to the Sunbelt Boom.
At the same time, many believed they were also destroying some of America’s oldest sustainable Native American cultures so that people in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles could water their desert golf courses, light their neon cities, and cool the hundred-degree temperatures of their six-month summers. Understandably, the Indians were having trouble getting to the microphone.
The Grand Plan — largely coordinated by Bechtel — for the urban Southwest involved building five new power plants, a new water distribution plan for Arizona, and the infrastructure for new towns and cities throughout the three-state area of Arizona, Nevada, and California. Cheap coal made it possible.
Washington D.C.
Though his father remained chairman and chief executive until 1965 (he died in 1989), the younger Mr. Bechtel plotted his own course, retaining the company’s longstanding aversion to publicity (though that was somewhat modified in later years). “There’s no reason for people to hear of us,” he once told Newsweek magazine. “We’re not selling the public.” He went on to preside over a notable switch to majority ownership by managers who were not family members.
Even while I was in Phoenix in December of 1982 (I have a signed poster by Hopi artist Dan Namingha that reminds me of the date) trying to comprehend the implications of the Southwest’s Grand Plan, Ronald Reagan, America’s new president, had announced his cabinet: George Shultz, the first outside CEO in Bechtel’s history, was named secretary of state; Caspar Weinberger, Bechtel’s legal counsel, became secretary of defense; Ken Davis, Bechtel’s Nuclear Division head, became assistant secretary in the department of energy. Other Bechtel executives took high posts at the Office of Surface Mining and Enforcement, and at the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the interior department.
New Technologies in Remote Areas
Under Mr. Bechtel, sales swelled 11-fold at the Bechtel Group, the company founded by his grandfather that built scores of power plants, transit systems, and other infrastructure projects on six continents, often pioneering new technologies in remote areas.
One of the “new technologies” was the coal slurry pipeline, in which pulverized coal is ground into small pieces, mixed with water, and sluiced along a pipeline to its destination. Think of a giant garbage disposal in operation. The slurry pipeline was promoted as making coal as easily transportable as oil, and mining engineers came from all over the world to see the slurry pipeline in operation and the generating station that ran from “dewatered coal.”
One of the “remote areas” was the Navajo and Hopi reservation in northern Arizona where a huge coal deposit had been discovered with more than a billion tons of low-sulfur coal close to the surface. The Hopi and the Navajo, however, were resistant to having their lands torn up and their scarce drinking water pumped to transport coal, although the Hopi agreed to sell 4,000 acre feet of water to run the slurry pipeline.
Bechtel was familiar with the Navajo reservation on Black Mesa because of building nuclear power plants. Much of the uranium came from the Navajo reservation. Many Navajo miners had died from cancers they contracted while digging uranium ore. They were not supplied with protective clothing or even told about the radioactive properties of the ore they were mining. The presence of the old uranium mines made the Navajo skeptical of any promises about the benefits of strip-mining — good jobs, good wages, economic growth, royalties from the coal. They’d heard that before.
In reality, the decision would be made in Washington. Here is where Barry Goldwater came in, still in his first term as a Republican senator from Arizona.
Republican Politics
Heavily reliant on government contracts, the Bechtel Group has been a large contributor to political campaigns, mainly Republican, and over the years employed many former high-ranking intelligence and defense officials. President George H.W. Bush awarded Mr. Bechtel the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1991.
Barry Goldwater, as a first-term Republican senator, introduced the first of a series of congressional bills that redefined reservation boundaries between the Hopi and the Navajo. For the next ten years he introduced successive bills that moved the project along, enlarging the Hopi part of the reservation and shrinking the Navajo. The end result was that a parcel of land larger than Rhode Island was transferred from the Navajo, who lived on it, to the Hopi, who did not. “Why are we replacing human beings with livestock?” asked South Dakota Senator James Abourezk at one of the Senate hearings after learning that 13,000 Navajo would have to be removed from land now claimed by the Hopi whose only plan was to graze livestock. Where would the Navajo go? This remained vague.
The FBI, the Hopi police, and federal marshals executed the unstoppable removal law. They installed barbed wire fencing to define the new reservation boundaries and organized early morning livestock raids at Navajo sheepherding camps to whisk away the familys’ sheep and livestock.
Although the Boston Globe and the New York Times ran many articles about the irresolvable land dispute between two fractious Indian tribes in the west, they rarely mentioned the driving issue of coal. Nor did they mention the newly constructed power plants that ran from the coal, or the cost of the removal of the Navajo (13,000 people) from the new Hopi lands (32 Hopi people were removed). After the undersecretary from the interior department testified that the number of people to be removed amounted to no more than 800 families, he soon became a Peabody Coal vice president of government relations.
Bechtel Comes to Boston
The company later came under scrutiny for its management of Boston’s “Big Dig” infrastructure megaproject beginning in the early 1990s, involving the building of highways, tunnels, and bridges. Bechtel and its partner in overseeing the project, Parsons Brinckerhoff, agreed in 2008 to pay $407 million to settle litigation over leaky tunnels and a fatal ceiling collapse.
Bechtel came to Boston in the 1990s. (They first came to Massachusetts in 1968 to build the Pilgrim Nuclear power plant in Plymouth.) In Boston, Bechtel found its name in the news. The scope and the costs of the Boston project had remained slippery. Originally conceived to remove the city’s overhead highway, its replacement was elusive. The Central Artery Project started at $3 billion, jumped to $6 billion, then $8 billion. By the time the plans were approved for two new tunnels, one to the airport, another 2 ½ miles through the center of the city, a new bridge over the Charles River, and two new spaghetti interchanges to connect with highways, the project had a price tag of $16 billion. “With enough money we can build anything,” one Bechtel engineer was quoted as saying. The total cost, including interest, was $21 billion. Transportation planners said it was outdated the moment it opened.
By the 1990s Boston-area college students had joined other activists around the country that had taken up the cause of Black Mesa. It was also a moment when environmentalism and global warming caught public attention. When I came out of the Park Street Subway station, I was amazed to see demonstrators holding a banner that read “Black Mesa Resistance. Support the Navajo of Big Mountain.” It was at that moment that Bechtel and the other partners in Peabody Holding decided it was time to sell Peabody Coal. Roberta Blackgoat sent me the clippings from two London newspapers that described her encounter with the buyer, Lord James Hanson of Hanson’s Ltd. By then I understood that Roberta Blackgoat knew far more about how the world really worked than I did. Like Steve Bechtel Jr., James Hanson had inherited a company from his father and turned it into an engineering and construction behemoth.
I was not able to publish the story of Black Mesa until many years later when it was a history book rather than an account of current events. When I had queried the Atlantic editor who had given me the credential to the Phoenix event, he said, “You know, Atlantic readers aren’t really interested in Indians.”
An editor at the New Yorker read and liked my drafts, but didn’t assign it. After I had included a few more anecdotes about Bechtel to frame the scope of the Indians’ corporate and government opposition, he said, “It’s a real American story.”
Judith Nies is the award winning author of four nonfiction books including Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West (Nation Books, 2014). She has published essays and book reviews in Orion, American Voice, Women’s Review of Books, and Solstice Literary Magazine. Her current book in progress is called The Long Forgetting: America’s Origin Stories Retold, about how the codfish aristocracy of early Massachusetts became the Boston Brahmins.