FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACESThe Bechtel Story:The Most...

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

The Bechtel Story:

The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World

by Laton McCartney (Ballantine Books: $8.95) The Bechtel Group, a San Francisco-based engineering and construction firm, can be credited with building major pipelines for Standard Oil and Continental Gas in the 1920s, the Hoover Dam in Boulder, Colo., in the 1930s and possibly half the nuclear power plants in the world.

In “Friends in High Places,” a remarkable work of investigative reporting, Laton McCartney lays bare the inner machinations that made Bechtel such a paradigm of power: its politic interactions with the White House and the CIA.

The group’s close relations with the White House have been in the limelight under the previous administrations, particularly in the figures of George Shultz (Bechtel’s president since 1975) and Caspar Weinberger (formerly Bechtel’s general counsel), who under Reagan’s auspices became, respectively, secretary of state and secretary of defense.

Among numerous other transactions that reflect the strong “friendship” between the Bechtel organization and the CIA, the Tapline is perhaps representative. In the late 1940s, Bechtel was in the process of building Tapline, intended to bring oil from Saudi Arabia to market, just as the state of Israel officially came into existence. The Syrian government, furious at U.S. support for Israel, prohibited Bechtel from extending the pipeline across its borders. Bechtel stood to lose millions. “But in 1949, the civilian Syrian government was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup and replaced by a military dictatorship, friendlier to U.S. interests,” which granted Bechtel permission to resume construction.

Perhaps this implicit understanding between the two organizations explains why the U.S. Air Force awarded Bechtel the job of “building the highly sensitive NATO weapons storage and security system” despite the fact that its bid for the job was $21 million higher than the next highest bid.

ELEVEN KINDS OF

LONELINESS

Short Stories

by Richard Yates (Vintage Contemporaries: $8.95) An orphan boy--a city tough, newly transferred to a suburban grade school, weaves lies into the events of a fictional family weekend and is betrayed by his own words: “I sore that pitcha,” he tells the class. “ ‘Doctor Jack-o’-lantern and Mr. Hide.’ ”

A wife visits her husband in the tubercular ward of a hospital only to have him spend most of her visiting hour reading the Popular Science magazine she brought him.

An Army sergeant, a “splendid soldier . . . with that air of unlimited self-assurance that is the first requisite to good leadership,” simply packs his barracks bags and clears out when he’s transferred--without shaking the hands of the members of his platoon.

Richard Yates’ finely wrought stories, masterful in their brevity, represent 11 variations on the theme of solitude--characters closed up within themselves and yet eloquent in their silence.

MOTHERS OF INVENTION

From the Bra to the Bomb:

Forgotten Women & Their

Unforgettable Ideas

by Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek; foreword by Julie Newmar (Quill/William Morrow: $8.95) It wasn’t Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin in 1793, “or any other year. Eli Whitney built a device conceived, perfected, and marketed by Mrs. Catherine Littlefield Greene, a Georgia belle.”

So write Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek in this entertaining and informative compendium of seamstresses, engineers, secretaries, naturalists, schoolteachers, chemists, housewives and doctors--all inventors and all women.

By 1856, the authors write, “Mary Montagu had introduced smallpox inoculation; Nicole Cliquot had invented pink champagne . . . and Madame Lefebre synthesized the first nitrate fertilizer.”

By 1957, “Eleanor Raymond and Maria Telkes had perfected solar heating; . . . Mary Engle Pennington developed the refrigerator; . . . Gladys Hobby produced the first usable penicillin, . . . and Hattie Alexander had cured meningitis.”

Still, when the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame in Washington announced 52 inductees in 1984, not one was a woman, not even Marie Curie, who discovered radium.

“Mothers of Invention” corrects any such omissions and includes “inventions from the ridiculous to the sublime.” Actress Julie Newmar, known to many as “Catwoman” from the television series “Batman,” is herself an inventor: She holds the patent on the “Pantyhose With Shaping Band for Cheeky Derriere Relief.”

HOLLYWOOD DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

by Robert Parrish (Little, Brown: $9.95) As he writes in his first memoir, “Growing Up in Hollywood,” Robert Parrish got his start in the film industry as a corner newsboy who tortures “the little tramp” by shooting peas at him through a pea shooter in “City Lights.”

The book under review is full of entertaining vignettes about the actors and actresses with whom the award-winning film editor and director worked. He relates how Rita Hayworth simply tore the envelopes in half that arrived in the mail and threw them into the sea. He confesses his own faux pas when meeting Ernest Hemingway during Hemingway’s first visit to Spain since the Spanish civil war.

When Parrish and John Wayne appeared together on a Chicago talk show, Wayne told the host that Parrish’s book would tell him more about John Ford and Hollywood than Wayne himself could. Parrish thanked him afterward and asked, “Did you get a chance to read it?”

“Good to see ya again, Bob,” was Wayne’s response.