McCartney, Laton. Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. 273 pages.

It's trite to observe that some of the world's most powerful people and corporations are rarely in the newspapers. An example of the former is John McCone (1902-1991), who made $44 million during World War II on an investment of $100,000. Then he was Deputy to the Secretary of Defense (1948), Under Secretary of the Air Force (1950-1951), Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (1958-1961), and CIA director (1961-1965). McCone was involved in the 1973 coup in Chile as a director of ITT, and his other corporate connections are too numerous to mention. He didn't give interviews.

From 1937-1945 McCone was the president of Bechtel-McCone, which became the privately-held Bechtel Corporation when he was bought out after the war. Bechtel thrived on its government and intelligence connections, along with its huge energy-engineering contracts in the Middle East. After Steve Bechtel was appointed to the advisory board of the Export-Import Bank in 1969, generous Exim loans were available for Bechtel projects in the Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, USSR, and nuclear power plants in Brazil and elsewhere. When Ronald Reagan needed help at the White House, all he had to do was to place a call to Bechtel and ask to have George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger transferred to his administration.
ISBN 0-671-47415-4

This book was recently listed at UsedBookCentral.com

Search the NameBase site: While the best way to search for names is to use NameBase, most can also be found here by using only first and last name, separated by a single space, with no quotation marks.
Nerve Gas in Vietnam

Name index for McCartney,L. Friends in High Places. 1988

try a NameBase search          home page          register