Pentagon auditors concluded that La Nouvelle was overbilling for its laundry services alone by at least $1 million a month, with Halliburton enjoying its slice of the profits without even having had to break a sweat. Instead of being administered by Douglas Feiths office at the Pentagon (as were almost all of the other Iraq contracts), the Halliburton RIO contract was pawned off on the Corps of Engineers, a remote outpost of the Pentagon known, to the extent that it is known at all, for the management of locks and dams on American rivers. Then more ballots mysteriously materialized, and ODaniel claimed victory by 1,311 votes. As The Washington Posts White House correspondent during the Reagan years, Lou Cannon, notes in a biography of the president, for all her talent for turmoil, Nancy became a force for peace within the White House., Tumulty writes about the power that comes with intimacythe influence of the companion who is there in moments public and private, high and lowand some of the most arresting scenes in both books capture drama unfolding in pajamas, or not even. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. Letter from President Johnson to John Steinbeck The company that had prospered through the Great Depression thanks to federal dam projects was poised to make a killing from World War II, with most of the deal coming courtesy of the US Navy and its congressional overlord LBJ and the powerful congressman from Houston, Albert Thomas. Luci Johnsons wedding in Washington, DC becomes the setting of dramatic anti-war protests, and Lady Bird herself is the target of a bomb threat. Bob Gomel/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. The civil rights movement is confronting a violent backlash, especially in the South, and despite LBJs public stance, Lady Bird knows they have a small war on our hands in Vietnam. Of the many images that lingered after the January inauguration of President Joe Bidenthe twinkling hand gestures of the poet Amanda Gorman, the rakish eyebrow-waggling of the second daughter, Ella Emhoffone of the more subtly significant was the scene of Doug Emhoff trying to figure out which side of his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, to stand on. That she was a keen political strategist -- I think the one Lyndon Johnson trusted and confided in most. Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. And behind her rightful insistence on we lay a more painful bargain. Over the course of the Vietnam war, Halliburtons annual revenues nearly tripled and it emerged from the war as the worlds second largest construction firm, trailing only Bechtel. This article was published online on April 20, 2021. The Corpus Christi Naval Air Station was one of the first cost-plus contracts, a sweet deal where the government simply pays every bill the contractor submits. As Halliburton executives and managers dispensed and received millions in kickbacks, the company itself simply wrote the dispensations directly onto the invoices submitted by the subcontractors. Yet, instead of firing of Cheney for this calamitous mistake, the Halliburton board, now ornamented by the rotund figure of former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, awarded its chieftain a $1.5 million bonus for his decisive role in the doomed acquisition. License granted by Intellectual Properties Management, Atlanta, Georgia, as exclusive licensor of the King estate. From the October 1980 issue: Looking at Reagan, Nancys wary nature did have its upsides, which Tumulty emphasizes. The wife, your wife, is the most important asset youll have, he declared. Five days after the election, an amended return came in from Jim Wells County in the southern outback of Texas. His term expired in 1948, and Harry Truman had just announced his intention to reappoint him to the position, enraging the oil and gas industry. ), Erasure vs. Sumud: How the Nakba Came to Define the Collective Palestinian Identity, Violence as an Investment Policy, Human Rights Violations as a Business Model, Politicians and the Anzac Tradition: a Story of Manipulation and Mythology, Her Name Was Nora al-Awlaki: The Real Reason Donald Trump Should Rot in Hell, Relocating UN Headquarters out of the United States, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. Theres no more pungent symbol of the corrupt nature of the Bush administrations invasion and occupation of Iraq than Halliburton, the Houston, Texas-based oil services conglomerate, which has made billions from the war even in the face of charges of massive overbilling, shoddy work, official bribery and political influence-peddling. For the first time, the Pentagon began to privatize construction and logistics operations during wartime in the war zone. Did Lyndon Johnson escalate the Vietnam War for personal profit? Im so scared, she said. WebAs of 2022, Lady Bird Johnsons net worth is under review. Over the next five years, the contracts would fatten to more than $2 billion. And an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam begins to overshadow just about everything else. WebLyndon Johnson. If theyve read any of the LBJ histories, they might remember that she used her inheritance to finance Lyndons first congressional campaign. Anderson was a partner in the Houston law firm of Baker Botts, the family firm of James A. Baker, III, which had represented Halliburton for many years. In all a report prepared by the Democratic Policy Committee estimates that Halliburtons overcharges in Iraq alone exceed $1 billion. Waxman charged that the Pentagon withheld the damaging reports at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton. By 1968, the United States had 548,000 troops in Vietnam and had When the oil boom hit Texas, the wildcatters and other drillers quickly began experiencing problems with their deep shafts. In fact, the contract was secretly handed to Halliburton in May, but the Pentagon kept it underwraps for more than a month. We tend to date a modern shift to 1992, when Bill Clinton proposed a two-for-the-price-of-one presidency with Hillary. When LBJs fortunes rose on the Hill, so did Brown & Roots. She and Nancys feckless biological father had effectively separated before their daughter was born; in early girlhood, Nancy was lodged with an aunt and uncle while her mother sought gigs. Indeed, he bragged about his prowess at securing powerful and deep-pocketed backers, saying that his rise to the senate had been Brown & Root funded.. With good reason. Deaver did, tooas deputy chief of staff in the governors office, he had been tasked with what his colleagues called the Mommy Watch, charged with keeping her away from others. It was a medium size construction company in Texas. That marriage between the two LBJs? He won round one. And that although she took personal risks to campaign in the south for civil rights, she couldnt quite figure out what to make of Black protests in American cities or dissent against the war. Phan Rang, from which US bombers pounded North Vietnam and later Cambodia, gained a little notoriety in December 1967, when Bob Hope brought his Christmas show there featuring a sultry performance by Raquel Welch that nearly caused a riot on the base. Soon the Johnsons were rich. As if they were rerouting an river in the Smokeys, the quick-fix generals at the Corps of Engineers simply reconfigured the terms of the Halliburton contract, changing it from putting out oil well fires to hauling fuel for US military operations. As for Dillon Anderson, Ike soon elevated the Yale-trained lawyer from Texas to the position of National Security Adviser, where he served until 1957. In July, the Pentagon discreetly let slip that it had awarded Halliburton a fat new contract for yet more logistics work in Iraq. Ive got to call up 6,000 boys, make them leave their homes and their families. She doubted that others understood the depth of his pain.. It was an early lesson in the demented logic of Pentagon contracting: the bigger the cost-overruns, the juicier the profits. She shored up his self-doubt and rallied his spiritsand her own. Lady Bird Johnson: 1912 2007 As did she: Our presidency, Lady Bird called it. Meanwhile, in that same crucial year of 1919, the other half of Halliburton was also beginning to take shape as two friends from San Marcos, Texas, Herman Brown and Dan Root, formed a road paving company that would eventually become one of the worlds largest construction firms. Some staffers, like James Baker, understood her influence and made a point of getting along. He and Lady Bird fretted about money during the early years of their marriage. A similar investigation by the Department of Justice was launched in 2004 into Halliburtons operations in the second-leg of the axis of evil, Iran. Speaking of Halliburtons logistics work for the Pentagon in the Balkans, Cheney said, the first person to greet our soldiers as they arrive and the last one to wave good-bye is one our employees. Halliburton: the Alpha and Omega of Pentagon contractors. When the price gouging by Altanmia began to draw the attention of Pentagon auditors, the US Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the contracts, came up with an elegant solution. Far from being the path toward a leaner military, the General Accounting Office pegged the LOGCAP program as an adventure in high risk government spending.. The Johnson family grew accustomed to the patriarchs dedication to his country, and adapted to the ever-changing, politically-charged atmosphere of Washington. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and their connections to Again, the race was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court by the intervention of a single justice, Hugo Black. Fifty-two years later, Halliburton offered its corporate jets for use by George Bush and his campaign team during the 2000 campaign and subsequent tumultuous Florida recount. From his early days running the Texas branch of FDRs National Youth Administration, LBJ had set his eyes on landing a seat in the US senate. In Iraq, LOGCAP would be a recipe for rampant fraud over the basic of services. The centerpiece of this enterprise was the Marshall Ford Dam outside Austin and the company that had won the contract to build the dam was none other than Brown & Root. Stevenson was a wildly popular figure in Texas, but LBJ had an equalizer: a nearly bottomless reservoir of campaign money provided by Brown & Root and Wirtzs client list of oil barons, including H.L. Sweig posits that she coped with the insecurity by making herself increasingly indispensable. LBJ struggled with depressionLady Bird called it the Valley of the Black Pig, quoting Yeatsand more so as the Vietnam War took an immense psychological toll. Over the next 25 years, the company cashed in on more than $10 billion in contracts with Iran. Then thirty years after they were constructed, Halliburton was hired by the Pentagon to take control of the two terminals and get them into working condition in the earliest days of the US invasion. In the stunned aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, she sought out Jackie: I tried to express something of how we felt. As a result, Halliburton flourished. LBJ was pronounced the winner of the primary by 87 votes and then went on to crush his Republican opponent in November. With the help of his pals Sam Rayburn and Senator Robert Kerr, Johnson, a freshman senator, got himself appointed chairman of the committee overseeing the Federal Power Commission. They witnessed the mortal pressures on what Nancy called the flesh-and-blood person. Both kept close watch on sleep, diet, and mental and emotional statesa wifely role, you could say, but is it? In the run up to the 64 election, Lady Bird makes a Whistle Stop tour of the South her home turf to try to keep Southern Democrats from defecting over Civil Rights. LBJs first shot at the senate came in 1941, after Texas Senator Morris Sheppard keeled over from a brain hemorrhage. The Army didnt consider it necessary to reveal the terms of the deal, a Pentagon spokesman explained to Reuters. For Nancy Reagan, we meant a combative us-against-them partnership that betrayed a different kind of insecurity, Tumultys biography suggests. It cushioned the blow by awarding Halliburton a $405 million no bid deal to provide support for US troops in Bosnia. In 1990, Halliburton was picked by the Pentagon to put out 300 oil well fires in Kuwait, while its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, grabbed the big contract to reconstruct the ravaged buildings of Kuwait City. Lady Bird Johnson was a first lady -- but her audio diaries reveal so much more. Old hands at Halliburton remember Cheney as arrogant and inept, a clumsy autocrat. From May 2003 to March 2004, Halliburton sent the Corps of Engineers bills totalling more than $875 million for supplies of fuel to US operations in Iraq. Indeed, its fair to say that the only life-support for the company during those five years was the nearly inexhaustible tide of cash coming from Halliburtons Pentagon contracts. In a memo to Lyndon just five months into his presidency, Lady Bird predicts how the Vietnam war will derail his administration, and proposes a clear end-date for his Halliburtons solution, which he unveiled in the oil town of Burkburnett, Texas, was to seal the well-pipes in a sheath of concrete, protecting the pipes from corrosion and precious loads of crude from contamination. Most notably, Halliburtons US government contracts bulged from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion under Cheneys reign as CEO. In return, the Shah soon signed over control of Irans oil resources to a consortium of western oil companies, lead by Exxon, Mobil and Texaco. WebLyndon B. Johnson: Foreign Affairs. She doesnt really like dealing with women, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver noted, in an understatement. Thomas Jefferson Taylor II, merchant, philanthropist, and father of Lady Bird Johnson, was born on August 29, 1874, in Autauga County, Alabama, the son of Thomas Jefferson and Emma Louisa (Bates) Taylor. One night, sitting in her private office in the White House family quarters, and reflecting on one of those shallow, glowing books about her written at the time, Lady Bird sighed and recorded, Sometime, somewhere, I hope someone will write one with more depth about Lyndon and me., Ep. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). It seems that a certain Luis Salas, following the suggestion of a Brown & Root lawyer, began scouring the courthouse for a missing box of ballots. Although she never once called herself a feminist, in the doing, her values aligned squarely with the more outspoken feminists of the time. Its the contract that keeps on giving. The Brown & Root Company shared Halliburtons antipathy toward organized labor, but realized early on that there was a fortune to be made through outsourced government work. It is startling to realize that, for the 14 months from November 1963 to January 1965, Lady Bird Johnson effectively was the vice president. Both had lively, unconventional mothers who supported womens suffrageand yet both girls grew up during a time when second billing (or none) was a wifes lot, even in the most collaborative marital enterprises. Halliburton acquired Dresser for $7.7 billion, which proved to be at least 16 percent more than the companys actual value. Ep. Tumulty calls theirs an epic love story, an observation confirmed by the eyewitness accounts of many. But Nancy had no appetite for cozy calm in the White House. Brown & Root: A Company with a History | History News Emhoff joined a long line of female political spouses who have struggled, in a larger sense, to figure out where they should be and what they should do. As for LBJ, he later said that Wirtz was like a daddy to me. But a review by Pentagon auditors found that the bill was inflated by nearly 200 percent, since the company never served more than 2,500 soldiers on any single day. During World War II, Halliburton was called upon to help build the infrastructure for the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, launching a profitable relationship with the petro-kingdom that persists to this day. Suddenly, it was. And Lady Bird is even sending Lyndon Johnson notes, comments on speeches and other notes during the day written on office of the vice president stationery, which, of course, Lyndon Johnson was the vice president. WebLyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and their connections to Bell Helicopter? On February 26, 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, a meeting was convened in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon. The GAO disclosed that Halliburton could not account for the whereabouts of approximately $120 million worth of materials which had been shipped from Vietnam to the United States.. Apparently, Halliburton views these kickbacks and bribes as a kind of a priori cost of doing business across the globe. This thread is archived New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast 24K 675 comments He rewarded him with the plum position of vice president for governmental operations-in other words, Halliburtons top lobbyist. Running as a New Dealer and fueled by cash from Herman Brown, Johnson embarked on a fabulously corrupt campaign against the populist governor of Texas, W. Lee Pass the Biscuits, Pappy ODaniel, a flour magnate and the states most popular radio personality. When Halliburton bought Dresser, it also acquired the companys enormous asbestos liability, a burden which Cheney assured company stockholders would be resolved without material effect. Its the kind of casual lie covering a metastasizing problem that would become a Cheney signature as vice president. On a trip to two New England colleges to give speeches supporting their new environmental studies programs, Lady Bird is confronted by outspoken dissent from both students and faculty who walk out of her speeches, picket her presence and circulate letters denouncing the war in Vietnam. By the end of March 2005, more than 65 Halliburton employees had been killed in Iraq and more than 200 injuredthe most of any private contractor in the war zone. In The Triumph of Nancy Reagan, the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty likewise invokes a teammate without whom her spouse would never have been governor of California, much less president of the United States. The money was delivered in $100 bills stuffed into grocery bags. The Corpus Christi deal initiated Brown & Root into the risk-free fraternity of favored Pentagon contractors. La Nouvelle billed $108 for each 15-pound bag of laundry at this base, $80 a bag more than the very same company charged at another base. When someone finally leaked the audit to Waxmans office, the documents disclosed a thick wad of Halliburton billings that the Pentagon bookkeepers deemed illogical.. Im a foreign policy person. Soon after Eisenhowers election, Anderson, who had funneled more than $200,000 into the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign, was invited to join the administration as a consultant to the National Security Council. So little doubt, in fact, that a Halliburton executive had been invited to attend the secret conclave. The Making of Halliburton - CounterPunch.org One of the first politicians to use the newfangled machine, Johnson would descend upon his campaign venues with the Yellow Rose of Texas blaring from loudspeakers attached to the landing gear a prelude for the Wagner-screaming choppers in Apocalypse Now. After this grilling, Olds was rejected by the senate on a vote of 53-15 and left the government a broken man. Lady Bird Johnson travelled to Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia in 1967. He had a maniacal drive for money and power. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon used Iraqi oil proceeds to overpay Halliburton, says Waxman. He exacted revenge with a bombshell memoir revealing the extent to which the White House schedule was dictated by astrology. I have to admit -- if you had asked me 10 years ago if I could see myself spending more than five years writing about Lady Bird Johnson, and another five months producing a podcast about her, I would have thought I was the wrong woman for the job. On August 19, 1953, the CIA launched its coup. She recalled his sleepless musings in her diary: I dont want to get in a war and I dont see any way out of it. 1: Fourteen DaysIn her first-ever diary entry, recorded eight days after President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, Lady Bird presents a dramatic, cinematically detailed moment-by-moment account of those terrible hours in Dallas, and the days that follow. Indeed, a few months earlier Halliburton had already been paid $1.9 million to draft a plan for how to implement RIO. In the spring of 1949, only months after claiming his senate seat, LBJ, the former New Dealer, launched an assault on Leland Olds, the chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. Of that Bird Johnson He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.netor on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. Even here Halliburton benefited. First stop Somalia, where Halliburton set up shop providing fuel, food, laundry services and even morticians for US troops. In fact, at that precise moment Cheney enjoyed options on 43,300 shares of Halliburton stock and was pocketing $162,392 a year in deferred compensation from the company. But those off-shore subsidiaries werent merely a way of hiding money from corporate auditors, the SEC and the IRS. Lynda Bird was the first of two daughters born to Lyndon and Claudia Lady Bird Johnson. Halliburton charged the US Army $85.98 for each sheet of plywood it used in construction projects during Clintons war on Serbia and its aftermath. Her motivation was not to expand her own portfolio: She wanted only to promote her husbands well-being and success, ferociously tending him and his image. "Lady Bird" Johnson, the wife of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, the nation's 36th president, died Wednesday at the age of 94. They were also designed to help Halliburton evade government prohibitions against US-based companies doing business with unsavory regimes. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). When it came time to select a space for its corporate offices to oversee the new Iraq contracts, Halliburton decided not to bunker down inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. On September 29, 1948, Black came through. For one thing, those big terminals, the Mina al-Bakr and the Khor al-Amaya were inviting targets. The pipeline won the approval of the US Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who would later land a spot on the Halliburton board. Cheney, as is his natural inclination, continues to deny any involvement, direct or implicit, in the Pentagon deals that have sent billions in no bid contracts to his former company, at the very same time Halliburton continued to sweeten his bank accounts with more than $140,000 a year. Lyndon B. Johnson - Election and the Vietnam War | Britannica But like his other advisers, she bowed to the inevitability of saying yes and fully entered into the campaign. One former Halliburton employee said that the company had inflated costs on 224 different projects in Kosovo. Black was a New Dealer elevated to the high bench by FDR. Sure, beautifying highways mattered, but when she was in office, her real focus was on what we now call environmental justice, especially in American cities and on bringing democratic access to nature to people of color especially. Did Lyndon B. Johnson profit financially from the Vietnam War? In a scenario that would be reprised in the Iraq war, Halliburton soon won the contract to implement the LOGCAP plan that it had devised. License granted by CSK Legacy, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia, as exclusive licensor of Coretta Scott King's estate. When his own contract auditors objected, Strock sought to silence them by saying he had determined that the compelling emergency in Iraq dictated swift and unilateral action. Johnson vowed to learn the lessons of his defeat. The bagman was none other than John Connolly, the future governor of Texas and Halliburton board member. They got all of the contracts to build all of the bases, roads, and airports in Vietnam. Even congress was denied a peak at the reports findings until mid-March 2005. Three New Revelations About She listened, and she empathized with his agonized decisions. I needed to take a look at the topic of women and power and the questions that are asked and answered in telling stories, writing about and making history. LBJs ambush of Olds was scripted by none other than Brown & Roots lawyer, Alvin Wirtz. But after 15 years sitting around conference tables in Washington talking about global conflict, nuclear strategy or trade policy with mostly all-male colleagues, and, with some exceptions, mostly all-male bosses and role models, something started to bother me: It was the way the experiences of the people asking the questions by definition shapes those questions, and often the answers. Halliburton, which employed thousands of foreign-born subcontractors, even went so far as to operate segregated dining facilities and Americans Only bathrooms. Lady Bird Johnson (born December 22, 1912) is famous for being political wife. During World War II and Korea, Brown & Root made billions True to form, Johnson never tried to conceal the role his corporate sponsors played in securing the 1948 election. There were also numerous allegations of human rights violations by Halliburton workers, including mounting claims of racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the Balkans. Emhoffs little side step of uncertainty got raves.