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.

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