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A recent Bohemian roster shows that Riley Bechtel and his father are joined in membership by Riley's brother Gary, brother-in-law Alan Dachs (head of the family investment firm the Fremont Group), Shultz, and a few other Bechtel insiders. Of course, Bohemian Grove is long famous for the rest of its membership, which has included virtually every Republican president (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush remain members), numerous secretaries of state (Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Colin Powell are listed on a recent roster in the same camp with Riley and Stephen Bechtel), and innumerable political leaders.
In his 1994 doctoral dissertation, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, Peter Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, noted more than 175 directors of major corporations on the membership roll of the Bohemian Club.
For decades, Bechtel has been closely aligned with Stanford University. Stephen Bechtel Jr. graduated from the university's MBA program, as did Riley, who also has a law degree from Stanford. A major donor, Bechtel has a conspicuous presence on campus with the Bechtel International Center and Bechtel Conference Center. Shultz, meanwhile, is a distinguished fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank with close ties to the Bush administration that also is the recipient of Bechtel family funding.
The social connections even extend to golf; Riley and Stephen are members of the Augusta National golf club in Georgia, home to the storied Masters tournament and recent subject of protest because of its refusal to admit women as members. Again, the membership roster here is filled with directors of major corporations and big political donors. Closer to home, Riley Bechtel is a regular at Pebble Beach and plays in the PGA's celebrity Pro-Am tournament there.
In addition to its revolving door leading to and from government and its social club connections, Bechtel gains influence over the governments that give it projects through the perfectly ordinary and legal process known as campaign contributions. Once again, however, Bechtel plays the political funding game at a higher level than even many multinational giants.
In one way, Bechtel's campaign funding is quite run-of-the-mill. Although many who criticize the company from the left stress its Republican connections, Bechtel's political contributions tend to relate more to its business interests than ideology. Between 1999 and 2002, Bechtel gave $1.3 million in individual, PAC, and soft money contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C. Bechtel has spread its contributions among both Republicans and Democrats, leaning slightly more to the Republicans. In 2002, for instance, 52 percent of Bechtel's soft money contributions went to Republicans. But in 1998, when Democrats controlled the White House, some 67 percent of Bechtel's contributions went to their party. The family's personal giving, however, is consistently Republican.
Bechtel contributed $685,125 to California politics during the past decade, $65,000 of which was directly related to the BART system, in which Bechtel is a contractor. Another $60,000 went toward defeating a proposition that would have required that state construction projects use Caltrans engineers exclusively, significantly cutting work to private contractors such as Bechtel.
And, if Republicanism taints Bechtel's money, that same tainted money has landed heavily in the coffers of San Francisco Democrats. During the past three years, Bechtel (the corporation and family members) has given $95,000 to Mayor Willie Brown, a longtime power in the California Democratic Party, and to Brown-supported candidates -- Sophie Maxwell, Mabel Teng, and Mark Leno to name a few -- and political action committees. Congressional Democrats have fared well, too: U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer has received $26,000 in contributions from Bechtel during the past decade, while U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi received $22,000 and Sen. Dianne Feinstein took $16,000.
The firm gave more than $20,000 to Hetch Hetchy ballot issues between 2000 and 2002, when the company was a contractor there.
Even Bechtel's charitable gifts, through the Bechtel Foundation, seem related to business, often going to the universities with engineering schools that accept and then graduate Bechtel employees. The foundation has also given $3 million to charities in countries where the company has projects.
Riley Bechtel's grandfather, Stephen D. Bechtel, once famously said that his company was as much about making money as it was constructing things. Because Bechtel is a private company, the firm's books are out of public view, but the Bechtel fortune is an industry -- and a power -- unto itself.
In 1986, Bechtel spun off its Bechtel Investments subsidiary into a separate corporation called the Fremont Group, headed by Alan Dachs, Riley Bechtel's brother-in-law. Board members include Riley Bechtel, Stephen Bechtel Jr., Shultz, Dachs, Cordell Hull (a retired Bechtel executive and board member distantly related to Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of state of the same name), and Harold J. Haynes, a Bechtel board member and former chairman of Standard Oil Company of California.
A decade later, the firm began investing money for clients other than Bechtel; as The New Yorker magazine reported earlier this year, Osama bin Laden's estranged family, with whom Bechtel has had construction business in Saudi Arabia, was among those clients. Fremont, according to its Web site, currently has $11 billion in assets. Its real estate arm, Fremont Properties, owns some 4 million square feet of commercial real estate, including the 23-story Bechtel Building, five other office buildings in San Francisco, and IBM's Internet division headquarters in Somers, N.Y.
During the past several years, Bechtel has expanded its role into that of shareholder in several projects. Through its Bechtel Enterprises, the firm finances construction and other jobs in exchange for an ownership stake. The result, often, is Bechtel's effective privatization of public infrastructure, something that has garnered the firm a great deal of criticism.
