The Profiteers

December 7, 2015
Greed, corruption, hypocrisy, and skullduggery shadow Bechtel, a mammoth construction company, in this dour corporate history. Journalist Denton (The Money and the Power) follows the contractor from its early days erecting the Hoover Dam through its current global omnipresence, building airports, pipelines, nuclear plants, and even a whole city in Saudi Arabia. She focuses on the company’s unsavory entanglements with the U.S. government and foreign potentates: for example, she ties a Reagan administration tilt toward Arab countries and against Israel to Secretary of State George Schultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, both ex-Bechtel executives. She suggests that they wanted to further the company’s interests in building Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein a sinister chemical plant and other projects. (A lengthy digression paints the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard as a noble victim of a Bechtel-related vendetta by Weinberger.) Denton’s claims about the company’s control over U.S. policy—“Bechtel’s political influence in Washington would set the stage for privatizing foreign policy”—are never fully backed up with evidence; more convincing are her revelations about the mundane corruption of Bechtel’s coziness with government officials, which wins the company lucrative no-bid contracts. Denton’s rambling narrative gets overwrought about Bechtel’s tentacular villainy, but enough of her charges stick to raise troubling questions about the company’s relationships with the powerful.

December 1, 2015

Journalist Denton (The Money and the Power) is no stranger to digging into controversial topics; her new offering delves into the U.S. military-industrial complex, particularly the Bechtel Corporation, the family who founded it in 1898, their major engineering and construction works, and their close ties to the government. Several Bechtel executives segued into high-level government positions and vice versa, though Bechtel's only interest in politics occurs when an issue affects their company directly, as they have billions of dollars of government contracts from countries throughout the world. As Denton points out, "observers consider Bechtel either a brilliant triumph or an iconic symbol of grotesque capitalism," and she makes a persuasive argument for the latter. The author's journalistic writing style is fast paced, hard-hitting, and engaging. If one criticism must be made, it is that scattered throughout is information about the Jonathan Pollard espionage case, in which Pollard passed classified information to Israel about neighboring Middle Eastern countries. Several Bechtel executives-turned-Washington heavy-hitters were part of the reason Pollard's sentence was so harsh; however, Denton's inclusion of these details--while interesting--felt like an ongoing aside rather than a well-integrated part of the narrative. VERDICT This book will interest readers who enjoy contemporary U.S. history, Middle Eastern history, political science, and public works spending.--Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
Investigative journalist Denton (The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right, 2012, etc.) offers an ambitious "empire biography" of the Bechtel family and the secretive, privately held construction company-turned-diversified international conglomerate that has been "inextricably enmeshed" in U.S. foreign policy for seven decades. In this incredible-seeming but deeply researched book, the author traces the phenomenal rise of the California-based corporation that became famous for building the Hoover Dam and went on to handle billion-dollar projects from the Channel Tunnel to the Big Dig; to construct airports, power plants, and entire cities; to cart away the wreckage of the World Trade Center and rebuild Iraq; to privatize America's nuclear weapons business (assuming control of Los Alamos, etc.); and, in the end, to complete 25,000 projects in 160 countries. Now the world's largest contractor, with offices in 50 nations, Bechtel, from 1999 to 2013, received $40 billion in contracts from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. "Despite its fiercely antiregulatory, antigovernment stance," writes Denton, "the Bechtel family owes its entire fortune to the U.S. government." She describes the dizzying revolving door between Bechtel's headquarters and the federal government: Bechtel executives that include John McCone, George P. Shultz, and Casper Weinberger have passed through, forging links with the CIA and other government agencies and leading to favorable contracts and subsidies. Whether in war-torn Europe, the Middle East, or elsewhere, it has always been "difficult to determine if Bechtel was doing favors for the US government, or if it was the other way around." Parts of this mammoth story have been told before, but Denton has shaped it into a taut, page-turning narrative detailing the company's machinations under five generations of family leadership. She concludes that the firm is "either a brilliant triumph or an iconic symbol of grotesque capitalism." Filled with stories of cronyism and influence peddling, Denton's riveting and revealing book will undoubtedly displease the so-called "boys from Bechtel," who refused to talk to Denton, referring her to the company website.

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January 1, 2016
The Bechtel company, still family-controlled generations after founder Warren Bechtel made the firm famous with its construction of the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam, has attracted criticism during its history. How much becomes clear in Denton's survey of Bechtel's globe-girdling operations. Like Laton McCartney in Friends in High Places (1988), Denton focuses on the executives who carry out Bechtel's business model, which is government contracting. To Denton, these men constitute a nefarious nexus of influence within the U.S. government's national security apparatus. After serving in high posts, they bring to Bechtel their connections and lobbying knowledge. Are the contracts that ensue evidence of corrupt crony capitalism or of Bechtel as the best outfit to perform a job? Denton dutifully reports Bechtel's denials of influence-peddling but plainly doesn't believe them. Instead, she maps coincidences between the government tenure of a Bechtel executive, such as George Schultz, and projects his former agency later awarded to Bechtel. However readers view the company, Denton's extensively researched work informs readers about the firm's maintenance as a privately held concern during its growth into a huge, multinational enterprise.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)