CORPORATIONS: Power for Korea

On a trip to Korea for the American-Korean Foundation last winter, California Builder Stephen Bechtel paid a courtesy call on Coordinator C. Tyler Wood of the Foreign Operations Administration. As Wood well knew, Bechtel was there to see how Korea’s orphanages and hospitals were making out. But Ty Wood had another project that he considered just as important. For months, he had been unsuccessfully trying to persuade President Syngman Rhee to approve FOA plans for three coal-burning power plants for Korea. Would Bechtel please try his hand? Bechtel agreed to see what he could do.

For two hours he talked with Rhee, answered hundreds of questions about building and operating power plants. Rhee wanted hydroelectric plants, since “water power is free.” Bechtel told him that South Korea’s small lakes and streams were not suitable for such plants, and that thermoelectric plants could be built more cheaply and faster, burn Korea’s own coal. As Bechtel left, Rhee put his arm around him and said: “All right, if you will come over and build thermoelectric plants, I will approve them.” For fear that Rhee would change his mind, Ty Wood promptly declared it an emergency project, and persuaded Bechtel to take the job.

Crackers & Canals. At the thatched village of Tangan Ri, near Seoul, last week, as onlooking Koreans cried “Mansell” (ten thousand years), the first shovelful of earth was turned to launch Bechtel’s big project. In two years Bechtel will build three thermoelectric plants in Korea, thus almost double the nation’s power capacity to 200,000 kw. Cost: $34 million, the largest FOA contract yet issued in Korea.

The deal was typical of the way 54-year-old Steve Bechtel operates. Though he rose from the shovel, he is no horny-handed son of toil. Always immaculately tailored, Steve Bechtel is as much at home over the negotiating table or in one of his many clubs as he is on a construction site. Says one acquaintance: “Steve has housebroken the construction business.”

A University of California graduate, Steve Bechtel started working summers in his father’s construction firm. In 1931 the firm teamed up with other construction outfits to form the famed Six Companies that built Hoover Dam. After his father died in 1933, Steve Bechtel started branching out into a new construction field. He began laying pipelines, soon spotted the profits to be had from building power plants and oil refineries to keep pace with mushrooming demand. All a company had to do was tell Bechtel what it wanted and he would design and build it.

Chemicals & Cans. During World War II Bechtel built Navy bases in the Pacific and helped to form the famed California Shipbuilding Corp. and Marinship Corp., which turned out more than 460 freighters and some go tankers, often at a speed of one a day. At war’s end Steve Bechtel got back into his favorite line, now heads one of the world’s six biggest construction firms. Of Bechtel’s eleven major projects now under construction, four are oil refineries and six are power houses. The eleventh: the 2,240-mile trans-Canadian pipeline being built (with associates) for Texas’ Clint Murchison & Co. (TIME, May 24). With Wimpey & Co., Ltd., a big British construction firm, Bechtel is building a huge refinery for Anglo-Iranian at Aden (capacity: 100,000 bbls. a day), plus a city to house 15,000 workers.* Biggest current U.S. job: the 975,000-kw. steam electric plant to supply the AEC at Joppa, Ill., a construction project that Bechtel took over from Ebasco after labor troubles put it far behind schedule last year.

“Don’t Be a Sucker.” When the Bechtel company goes into a new area of the world, it briefs its workers carefully on how to keep on good terms with local help. On the Korean job, for example, employees were given a pamphlet advising: “Don’t discuss politics or religion with Korean workers”; “Reprimand in private”; “Don’t be a sucker in tipping.” One on-the-job rule for Bechtel’s foremen: “Teach them how to use our tools, but let them use their own whenever they’ll do the job.”

Korea is already getting a taste of Bechtel efficiency. Vice President Clifford E. Pehl, who is in charge of the power project, is distressed at the number of desks he has seen in existing Korean power plants. “If you’re at a desk,” says he, “you’re not producing power.” Bechtel has decided how many desks should be in each of the new plants: two.

* Other recent Bechtel projects, alone or with associates: the 1,000-mile trans-Arabian pipeline (“Tapline”) from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean (TIME, Nov. 20, 1950), Canada’s 700-mile Trans-Mountain Oil Pipeline across the Rockies, development of U.S. Steel’s giant Cerro Bolivar iron-ore deposit in Venezuela.