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. He proposed at the end of their first date, then launched a full-court press until she yielded after 10 weeks. Ballot boxes were bought by both campaigns. When Cheney went to Halliburton he took along some of his old pals at the Pentagon with him, most notably Admiral Joe Lopez, a top Cheney aid during the Bush I regime. Vietnams legacy may loom over Lyndon B. Johnsons family, but not as much as it loomed over the hundreds of thousands of soldiers sent to that country with During World War II and Korea, Brown & Root made billions building bases and ships in the US. Two years later Saddam hired Halliburton once again. Bush administration to a develop a scheme for outsourcing to private corporations much of the logistics and construction work previously handled by the US Army Corps of Engineers. And she finds inspiration and an unlikely collaborator in San Francisco. For those flights, the Bush campaign reimbursed Halliburton only the cost of one first class ticket. First lady Lady Bird Johnson is at work seated at her desk in the White House in Washington, D.C., 1964. Archival materials from: LBJ Library; JFK Library; Miller Center; U.S. National Archives; Universal Newsreel; WFAA-TV Collection/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza; KLIF broadcast from November 22, 1963 courtesy of Cumulus Media; Andrew West audio report on June 5, 1968 courtesy of Westwood One; NBC5/KXAS Television News Collection; University of North Texas Special Collections; Jane Jacobs (Books and Authors Luncheon); WNYC, courtesy of NYC Municipal Archives. Most notably, Halliburtons US government contracts bulged from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion under Cheneys reign as CEO. This prison, which serves as the torture and interrogation center for Bushs wars, was originally designed to hold Haitians and, according to some sources, Cubans, in the event of the collapse of the Castro government. Of course, Cheney didnt wrest these deals from the feds alone. Under the initial contract, Halliburton established a plan for housing and feeding 20,000 troops in various hot spots around the globe. Dave Gribbin, one of Cheneys closest aides, left his position as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs for a slot as one of Halliburtons top lobbyists. For the first time, the Pentagon began to privatize construction and logistics operations during wartime in the war zone. They were also designed to help Halliburton evade government prohibitions against US-based companies doing business with unsavory regimes. Halliburton agreed to acquire Brown & Root for the bargain basement price of $36.7 million, far below the market value of the company. Eartha Kitt didnt want to attend the White House luncheon that wound up derailing her career: the 1968 Women Doers Luncheon, the First Lady Claudia (Lady Bird) In 1948 it was also this same DC-3 that made emergency flights to Austin and Dallas in search of cash from the accounts of Brown & Root. 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. And yet, after nearly two years in office, the Johnsons still find themselves in the shadow of the glamorous Kennedys, when a high profile event at the White House brings the Johnsons their first taste of public protest and bad press. Vietnam war But forswearing potentially polarizing talk of urban renewal and land stewardship, Lady Bird spoke of beautification, though she had mixed feelings about the word. They hated to spend nights apart, and famously (or infamously) called each other Mommie and Daddy. The congress granted to the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson for 1965 $700 million for the expected ramping up of a direct American military role. It would become the most expensive political campaign waged in Texas until George W. Bush, underwritten by the descendents of LBJs backers, defeated Anne Richards in the fierce 1994 gubernatorial campaign. WebLyndon B. Johnson: Foreign Affairs. In all a report prepared by the Democratic Policy Committee estimates that Halliburtons overcharges in Iraq alone exceed $1 billion. Did lady bird Johnson travel to Vietnam during the war? The deal was worth $2 billion. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). Halliburton, the signature corporation of the Bush-Cheney onslaught on Iraq, didnt start its corporate life on the government dole. Over the next few days, precincts across the vast state counted and recounted their votes. If I asked, say, a few hundred people anywhere over 25 or 30 years old, its a good bet theyd know a few things. The Army didnt consider it necessary to reveal the terms of the deal, a Pentagon spokesman explained to Reuters. In 1965, Halliburton formed a consortium with the Idaho-based firm Morrison-Knudsen to manage big construction projects for the Pentagon in Vietnam. For all their differences, what Lady Bird and Nancy sharedand Michelle Obama later struck the same notewas an abiding concern for the presidents well-being and very life. Like Lady Bird, Nancy served as a mood regulator: She knew how well Reagan could perform when confident and relaxed, and her presence improved his performance. Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight 9780812985849 | eBay LBJ, serving out Johnson also prevailed upon the Bell Helicopter Company, which would soon relocate to Texas, to loan him a chopper for his campaign. For Johnson, money was the route to political power. It was courtesy of LBJ, and his privileged position in the congress, that Brown & Root got into the Pentagon contracting business in a big way. WebEartha Kitt confronts President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon. In the end, Dressers workers paid the price. Never say that Brown & Root wasnt grateful. Halliburton would continue to work on a variety of projects in Iraq right up until the first Gulf War. But over the next five years, Brown Shipbuilding, a huge operation on the Houston Ship Channel, would build 355 ships for the Navy, specializing in sub chasers and escorts for destroyers. The result was not just a slow down in the delivery of fuel and military supplies, but a greatly enhanced risk to the lives of Halliburtons drivers, who were becoming easily identifiable targets for the growing insurgency in Iraq. 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 June 2004, the company eased out Jack Shanley, chairman of its Kellogg, Brown & Root subsidiary, for having received improper benefits from this very account. On Monday, May 16, 1966, John Steinbeck and his 19 year-old son, John, visited President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office of the White House. 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. 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. In a way, this meeting in the bowels of the Pentagon was all for show, a kind of mating ritual between the government and its favorite contractor. In an otherwise scripted and sober ceremony, the shuffle injected a spontaneous note as the second gentleman sought his placenot sure quite what that place was. Try $5 billion. But in exchange, Halliburton executives agreed to let Brown and his colleagues run the new Brown & Root subsidiary as a quasi-independent arm of Halliburton. It cushioned the blow by awarding Halliburton a $405 million no bid deal to provide support for US troops in Bosnia. In the immediate wake of the Dresser acquisition, Cheney fired 10,000 of the companys employees. My marginalia included NR v Helene von Damm (Reagans secretary in California, who rose to become a diplomat and considered Nancy a schemer), NR v Betty Ford, NR v Barbara Bush, NR v Raisa Gorbachev (an instant loathing), NR v Barbara Sinatra. Then again, she didnt really like dealing with many men: NR v Ed Meese, NR v William Clark, NR v James Watt, NR v Al Haig, NR v Pat Buchanan. At varying times, she clashed with Ronnies children from his first marriageMichael and Maureenand with theirs, Patti and Ron. When the oil boom hit Texas, the wildcatters and other drillers quickly began experiencing problems with their deep shafts. Some might remember she had a thing for wildflowers and planting them along highways. The plan came to be known as LOGCAP and Halliburton soon got an additional $5 million to flesh out the details. In fact, the contract was secretly handed to Halliburton in May, but the Pentagon kept it underwraps for more than a month. Each time they were bombed, Halliburton was called in to repair the damage. 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 time in office -- fully four years before he shocked the nation with his announcement in March of 1968 that he wouldn't run for reelection. In the ever-expanding universe of Pentagon contracting, cost is never the problem, public exposure is. With the outbreak of the prolonged Iran/Iraq, those oil terminals, Iraqs main source of getting its crude to global markets, were hit time and time again by Iranian saboteurs. Like many other US companies that choose to turn a blind eye to the regimes more sanginary manifestations, Halliburton had been working in Iraq since the early 1970s, even though the Ford and Carter administrations had both refused to recognize the socialist government. Shes on her way to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to talk to a group of privileged conservationists about the need to bring access to nature to the inner city, when Lyndon has another health scare. Lady Bird Johnson remembers the President's pain over the war. Thats real money, even by Pentagon standards. But the company had an ace in the hole in the shape of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the lumbering former schoolteacher who was vying to replace the departed Buchanan. Johnson bought them in San Antonio and southern Texas, while ODaniel, called the greatest campaigner in Texas history, purchased them throughout east Texas. And shes rightit was. Brown & Root decided there was no turning back. What had suddenly looked like a sure thing, now found Brown & Root on the unnerving verge of bankruptcy. I am not sure that the above answer is accurate but I can't prove it. In fact, the company patriarch, Erle P. Red Halliburton, despised the federal government. But thats only a rough opening bid for the true scale of the looting, in large part because the companys indefatigable stonewalling. WebLyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and their connections to Bell Helicopter? Halliburton failed to demonstrate its prices for Kuwait fuel were fair and reasonable', the auditors wrote in their report. Yet, even the most forgiving analysis of the Yale dropouts leadership of Halliburton must admit that the Cheney years were marked by a series of staggering false moves and financial missteps that nearly crippled the company. 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. The final fix may have been made by a cabal of Texas oil men and ranchers who wanted ODaniel out of Austin. A pungent example: A team of French investigators unearthed a robust Swiss bank account harboring $5 million, which reportedly derived from bribes involving Halliburton contracts in Nigeria. The GAO audit should have given the company a black eye and caused the government to reconsider the outscourcing of wartime logistics work, but the prophetic report was buried by the Pentagon and ignored by the press. Someday, a first gentleman will be called upon to match that care and dedication. Negroponte followed up his threat by recruiting the Parsons Corporation, Halliburtons archrival, to execute some of the remaining work in the south. Parsons had previously been awarded the $800 million contract to repair and manage the oil fields around Kirkuk in northern Iraq. She was quick to suspect that aides might be serving their own interests before hisand she wasnt always wrong. Julia Sweig's fourth book, "Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight" comes out March 16, 2021 from Random House. Erle changed the name of the company to Halliburton and raked in millions from his patent. A parallel probe was launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission into an admission by Halliburton that one of its managers slipped $2.4 million into the pockets of another Nigerian official in order to secure illegal tax-breaks for its business in the impoverished African nation. Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy : NPR Audio diaries reveal Lady Bird Johnson's unseen influence in Cheney didnt have much experience in the corporate world before becoming Halliburtons chieftain and his tenure there shows it. Lady Bird would later describe the day, according to Gomolak: Person after person plucked at my sleeve and said, I wouldnt be here today if it wasnt for him. He rewarded him with the plum position of vice president for governmental operations-in other words, Halliburtons top lobbyist. Soon Halliburton employees were a common sight across South Vietnam digging wells, building latrines, managing commissaries, excavating harbors and constructing barracks from Da Nang to Cam Rahn Bay. During the Vietnam War, Lady Bird woke to hear President Johnson talking to himself in the early-morning darkness. In Iraq, LOGCAP would be a recipe for rampant fraud over the basic of services. But there were two problems left by Buchanans ill-timed passing: the money for the dam hadnt yet been approved by congress and the land at the dam-site wasnt owned by the federal government. 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. Instead, Lt. General Strock steered the cost-plus contract into Halliburtons hands without the faintest whiff of competition. Because the offshore terminals were such easy targets for Iranian gunboats, in 1981 Saddam signed a $2.5 million contract with Halliburton to build a feeder pipeline from the terminals out into the Gulf where the crude oil could be safely sluiced into wary tankers. The purpose of this conclave was to devise a project that would come to be known as RIO or Restore Iraq Oil. They began construction on the dam before getting any federal funds and before the feds had actually acquired the land from the state of Texas. Nearly every other venture racked up huge levels of debt and legal liabilities. 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. Lyndon B. Johnson - Election and the Vietnam War | Britannica On Election Night 1980, Nancy was taking a bath, not expecting the race to be called before the polls closed in California. Lady Bird Johnson isnt exactly an obscure figure in the life of the nation. 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. In a way then, its not surprising that Cheneys official biography, posted on the White Houses website, forsakes all mention of his career as the commander-in-chief of Halliburton. 5: CaliforniaRiots, uprisings and protests rock the country in the summer of 1966, and despite their progress with civil rights legislation, the Johnsons cant seem to move fast enough. United States in the Vietnam War - Wikipedia 5: This Is What We Do (July 1967-December 1967) President Johnson escalates the war while promising the public that victory is in sight. 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. Another Cheney veteran worked along side Lopez to keep the government contracts flowing to Houston. Two years later, Halliburton won the 5-year renewal of this deal, valued at $180 million. As the war drew to a close, Brown & Root went from building ships to melting more than 20,000 surplus airplanes they bought on the cheap from the War Assets Administration. 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. In 1997, the renewal of the LOGCAP contract was finally put up for competitive bid and, lo and behold, DynCorp snatched the golden egg of Pentagon contracts away from Halliburton. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. But Johnsons Vietnam War forever changed the role of Pentagon contractors, and Halliburtons Brown & Root subsidiary lead the way. He also was able to increase his wealth through various business deals and investments. In 1940, the former road paving firm won a huge contract to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, a complex of runways, hangars, barracks and command centers sprawling across 2,000 acres of swamp and scrubland on the gulf coast of Texas. As far as the Pentagon was concerned all of this was written off to carping from the sidelines by busy-bodies and tightwads at the State Department. 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. The congressman, who controlled the federal purse, was in the midst of pushing through congress the Lower Colorado River Project, a scheme to build a network of dams across the Texas hill country that would bring water to the people and millions in federal funds to favored contractors. Call it the Oil-for-Contracts scandal. So she swam laps and hiked.) 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. Now that Ive spent more than five years learning her story and telling it for you here and in my book "Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight," I also see how the tendency to look at the infidelity piece of the Johnson marriage winds up demeaning her and stripping her of substance. In her East Wing policy shop, Lady Bird began to build a portfolio of environmental policies, working with Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. Right before our eyes. Both Johnsons knew they had to seize the momentum of the national tragedy and rapidly push through a progressive agenda, which soon became known as the Great Society. In the fall of 1979, the Iranian revolution led to the expulsion of Halliburton from the lucrative sinecure it had enjoyed under the Shahs dictatorship. Halliburtons big innovation was something called the Cement Jet Mixer. The wife, your wife, is the most important asset youll have, he declared. The initial price-tag was pegged at $23.5 million, with Brown & Root guaranteed a profit of $1.2 million. Over the next five years, the contracts would fatten to more than $2 billion. Several of the subcontracts in Iraq were doled out accompanied by the judicious application of cash bribes. She currently Johnson, however, flew back to Houston the night after his destruction of Olds on a private jet owned by Brown & Root. WebPresident Johnson and his advisers were and risk nuclear war in the interests of capitalist profit. First ladies? Shes a presidents wife. In this busy milieu, Lady Bird was, she said, so happy being the wife of the senator from Texas., Julia E. Sweig: The lost story of Lady Bird, So happy was sheand so aware of how her husband would chafe at a subordinate rolethat when John F. Kennedy drafted LBJ as his running mate in 1960, she made the case for not accepting. We hear Lady Birds growing sense that Bobby Kennedy will become LBJ's political rival, and RFKs bring-down-the-house performance at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1964. The former majority leaders power shrank while Lady Birds official ambit expanded to include public appearances, both on the campaign trail, where she stood in for a pregnant Jackie Kennedy, and as second lady. At the time of the takeover, Dresser was facing more than 66,000 claims for asbestos-related health problems from its subsidiary Harrison-Walker. Unlike many others in Congress during the 1940s, Johnson wasnt rich. Feeling the urgency, Lady Bird is looking for ways to make beautification have more impact for the people who need it most. The most peculiar billing found in this limited series of transactions was a $27.5 million charge for shipping cooking gas and heating fuel that the Pentagon auditors valued at $82,000. Buchanan departed the living with some unfinished business of extreme importance to his political cronies. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. The spot was sunny, safe and expensive. The city was well stocked with influential women. 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. In 1995, Halliburton hired Dick Cheney as its CEO. As for LBJ, he later said that Wirtz was like a daddy to me. Soon there were other summonses from the Middle East. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. Working together, LBJ and Thomas convinced the Navy to give Brown & Root a lucrative shipbuilding contract, even though, as investigative reporter Robert Bryce notes, up until that point the company had never built so much as a canoe.. That marriage between the two LBJs? Kitt's defence of America's young soldiers elicits tears from the First Lady and results in the CIA opening a dossier on her. She doesnt really like dealing with women, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver noted, in an understatement. Of course, the acquisition of Brown & Root had another great advantage for Halliburton. This time the Iraq government contracted with the Houston firm to build a long oil pipeline, that would skirt Iranian bombs, running from Basra to Yanbu on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. 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. He ran on an anti-union and anti-FDR platform that appealed to rural Texas voters. Apparently, Halliburton views these kickbacks and bribes as a kind of a priori cost of doing business across the globe. 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 time in office -- fully four years before he shocked the nation with his announcement in March of 1968 that he wouldn't run for reelection. It simply passed the bills on to the Pentagon and cashed its reimbursement checks, complete with the 4 percent government gratuity. By 1968, the United States had 548,000 troops in Vietnam and had 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. Over the course of the fall of 2002 and the early winter of 2003, Halliburton executives met on several occasions with Cheneys staff at the White House and at the Pentagon. This bizarre and secret waiver of standard Pentagon accounting practices was signed by the Corps top contracting officer, Gordon A. Sumner, on December 19, 2003stymieing the pending congressional and Pentagon investigations in contract fraud by the company. Of that Similarly, Halliburton kept the Pentagon investigators in the dark about the prices it paid for purchasing fuel from Turkey and Jordan. But shes met with open hostility, and worse. 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 1962, Herman Brown died and his brother, George, began searching for possible corporate suitors who might take over the company. Still, tandem toil was one thing; staking out too much terrain for herself was another. 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. He chanced upon the infamous Box 13 from the hamlet of Alice, Texas, which contained 220 votes, all for Johnson, which was enough to push LBJ into the lead by 87 votes. War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq - CounterPunch.org But despite all that public support, its clear theres trouble ahead. Lady Bird decides to use the opportunity to launch a full PR blitz to take her message to America.