did lady bird johnson profit 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. WebLyndon B. Johnson: Foreign Affairs. Before La Nouvelle picked up the subcontract to do the laundry at a US military base near Basra, the monthly cleaning bill had averaged around $62,000. Unlike many others in Congress during the 1940s, Johnson wasnt rich. Even here Halliburton benefited. A company limousine met him at the airport and whisked away to the Brown & Root suite at the Lamar Hotel, where a victory party was in full swing featuring whiskey, women and the richest oil men in Texas men who were primed to get a lot richer. The company had essentially written its own job description, a scenario that would make that initial payment mushroom into the billions. Bell set-up a design shop in Garden Park, NY where the first Bell Helicopter was built. At the time of the merger, Brown & Root had just been handed one of its biggest federal contracts, the multi-billion dollar deal to build NASAs Manned Space Center outside Houston-a complex that would later be renamed the Johnson Space Center. But within a year, the cost had soared to more than $45 million, with Brown & Root pocketing more than $2.4 million in profits. In 1967, a GAO report on Halliburtons operations in Vietnam skewered the company for abandoning normal management controls and for wasting millions of dollars. 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. Shes a first lady -- with never a hair out of place on her petite frame. Halliburton agreed to acquire Brown & Root for the bargain basement price of $36.7 million, far below the market value of the company. Halliburtons big innovation was something called the Cement Jet Mixer. An Army Corps of Engineers email, uncovered by Time Magazine, disclosed that the initial decision to have Halliburton draft the RIO plan had been coordinated with the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. But shes met with open hostility, and worse. LBJ, serving out There was little doubt about who was going to land the deal. Needless to say, this prospect didnt sit well with Halliburton and the consortium of British and American oil companies exploiting Irans petroleum wealth. 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. There were also numerous allegations of human rights violations by Halliburton workers, including mounting claims of racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the Balkans. And on her return to Washington, a sex scandal involving Lyndons closest aide presents an October surprise that could easily upend the election. She came into office in the wake of the JFK assassination. 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. In fact, the contract was secretly handed to Halliburton in May, but the Pentagon kept it underwraps for more than a month. When someone finally leaked the audit to Waxmans office, the documents disclosed a thick wad of Halliburton billings that the Pentagon bookkeepers deemed illogical.. 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. For this task order alone, the Pentagon auditors estimated that Halliburton overbilled the government by at least $108.4 million. 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. 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. He also courted cash from every corporation and mogul he could find, promising to return their investment tenfold. 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. Nearly 40 years ago, Halliburton faced almost identical charges over its work for the U.S. government in Vietnam -- allegations of overcharging, sweetheart contracts The damning investigation by the Defense Contract Audit Agency was completed in early October of 2004 and shipped up the line to Pentagons dark triumverate, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. 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. The brief meeting took place a few weeks after John, Jr. had completed basic training in the Army and a few weeks before his departure for Vietnam. Julia Sweig is co-executive producer, writer and host of the project. 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. The company made a cool $500 million from the deal. The big prize in the 1950s was Iran, where Halliburton enjoyed tens of millions in contracts which were suddenly placed in jeopardy with election of Mohammed Mossadegh, who had campaigned on a pledge to nationalize Irans enormous oil reserves. During World War II and Korea, Brown & Root made billions building bases and ships in the US. And it made me think: How many other women are in plain sight, women in powerful positions and many more unseen women whose stories likewise make up the fabric of who we are and who we will become as a society. Let me take the tough ones, she said, shouldering what was arguably the hardest, most thankless, and personally riskiest task of the campaign, Sweig writes, given the hate and outrage among many white southerners after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In 1999, Cheney urged Lopez to leave the Pentagon and join Halliburton. 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. In the ever-expanding universe of Pentagon contracting, cost is never the problem, public exposure is. The companys Kosovo operations were rife with fraud. Lady Bird Johnson remembers the President's pain over the war. Its the contract that keeps on giving. WebPresident Johnson and his advisers were and risk nuclear war in the interests of capitalist profit. They got all of the contracts to build all of the bases, roads, and airports in Vietnam. Born in 1912 and 1921, respectively, Lady Bird and Nancy both belonged to a generation sandwiched between two feminist movements. From this position, he launched into an onslaught on Olds, smearing the former supporter of Herbert Hoover as a communist who travels with those who proposed the Marxian answer. LBJ, who only a few years earlier had used his political muscle to secure the vast public hydropower projects on the Little Colorado with the goal of providing cheap power to the citizens of the Hill Country, now accused Olds of plotting a course toward confiscation and public ownership. 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.. The meeting was chaired by Lt. General Carl Strock, a ranking official at the US Army Corps of Engineers. But no. The final fix may have been made by a cabal of Texas oil men and ranchers who wanted ODaniel out of Austin. 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. It informed Halliburton that the company no longer had to submit a public record of the fuel purchases. In some cases, the pipes would even explode. He ran on an anti-union and anti-FDR platform that appealed to rural Texas voters. 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. DETAILS BELOW. For Johnson, money was the route to political power. Im sort of an archive geek, so when I heard that Lady Bird had recorded her own White House tapes, the idea of getting to know her and her story didnt sound so far-fetched. But you didnt hear daily drumbeats about the outrageous rip-off on FoxNews. 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. How fat? The bagman was none other than John Connolly, the future governor of Texas and Halliburton board member. So little doubt, in fact, that a Halliburton executive had been invited to attend the secret conclave. Lady Birdthe youngest child and only daughter of a wealthy East Texas businessmantook refuge, Sweig writes, in a rich inner life that taught her how to take emotional sustenance from nature and books. An excellent student, she earned a history degree in 1933 from the University of Texas at Austin, in an era when only a small percentage of women graduated from college; she then spent a year completing a journalism degree. In 1943, the year Lady Bird Johnson purchased KTBC, the Federal Communications Commission, which reviewed all broadcast-license transfers, was close 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. Plus American exclusion, Zoom justice, Andrew Yang, puberty TV, first ladies, giant closets, and more. And then the company and the Pentagon sought to hide the evidence of these overchages from the international auditors.. 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. As the partnership between LBJ and Brown & Root propelled both the company and the politician to new heights of power and wealth, Halliburton was taking a different track: capitalizing on the globalization of the oil industry. It was a medium size construction company in Texas. 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.. Shes from Texas. Ballot boxes were bought by both campaigns. In an email documenting a meeting between Altanmia executives and officials at the US embassy in Kuwait City an Altanmia manager is quoted as saying that anyone visiting their [i.e., Halliburtons] seaside villas at the Kuwaiti Hilton who offers provide services will be asked for a bribe.. Two years later, Halliburton would land the contract to build the other big torture center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. And that throughout it all, she was a journalist and historian in her own right, as her tapes clearly demonstrate. Suddenly, it was. Finally, he was able to use the war to further his political career and gain more control over the government. Each haul would net between $40,000and $50,000 for the Johnson campaign. LBJs first shot at the senate came in 1941, after Texas Senator Morris Sheppard keeled over from a brain hemorrhage. In 1965, Halliburton formed a consortium with the Idaho-based firm Morrison-Knudsen to manage big construction projects for the Pentagon in Vietnam. In the immediate wake of the Dresser acquisition, Cheney fired 10,000 of the companys employees. His distaste for Uncle Sam was matched only by his ferocious hatred of Mexicans, blacks and labor unionists. In the stunned aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, she sought out Jackie: I tried to express something of how we felt. These scams didnt lead to an indictment of Halliburton executives, but the SEC did ding the company with a $7.5 million fine for its deviant accounting practicesa slap on the wrist, to be sure, but a black eye for the moral hypocrite Dick Cheney. In the spring of 2005, the Bush administration over-ruled its own auditors and awarded Halliburton a $9.4 million bonus for its work in Afghanistan and Kuwait, operations which the Pentagon described as excellent.. We tend to date a modern shift to 1992, when Bill Clinton proposed a two-for-the-price-of-one presidency with Hillary. Astrology was a compulsion, and the attempted assassination of her husband traumatized her, understandably, leading to even more hypervigilance. At an October 2002 meeting, Michael Mobbs, an assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, parlayed with Cheneys chief of staff Lewis Scooter Libby to personally deliver the jubilant news that Halliburton had gotten the RIO planning contract. Cheney didnt have much experience in the corporate world before becoming Halliburtons chieftain and his tenure there shows it. The Pentagons civilian leadership mothballed the explosive report for more than five months, until after the election, the inauguration, the State of the Union Address and the Defense Department budget request had all safely transpired. Young Claudia Alta Taylor, nicknamed Lady Bird by a nanny (or playmateexactly who isnt certain), was 5 when she lost her mother. The auditors report accuses Halliburton of misleading the government inspectors at nearly every turn. Despite a lot of baiting from the US military and the most bellicose voices of in Bush administration, Saddam didnt ignite the Basra oil fields. 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. It simply passed the bills on to the Pentagon and cashed its reimbursement checks, complete with the 4 percent government gratuity. But the unpaid behind-the-scenes partner has been with us a long time, and the deal has never been straightforwardly feminist, as two new biographies of first ladies reveal. LBJ, serving out JFKs term, did not have a VP. Halliburton, the signature corporation of the Bush-Cheney onslaught on Iraq, didnt start its corporate life on the government dole. 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. They hated to spend nights apart, and famously (or infamously) called each other Mommie and Daddy. 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. Of course, Cheney didnt wrest these deals from the feds alone. While millions were splurged on opulent accommodations for its executives, bribes and kickbacks and scandalously inflated laundry bills, Halliburton skimped on the maintenance of its vehicles, which were transporting fuel and supplies on the dangerous desert roads from Kuwait to the US bases in Iraq. For Johnson, the decision to continue the Vietnam commitment followed the path of his predecessors. He was committed to maintaining an independent South Vietnam and to achieving success in Southeast Asia. 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. 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. 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. Brown & Root decided there was no turning back. Im so scared, she said. The situation had gotten so dire that the US Embassy in Baghdad, then under the command of John Negroponte, issued what is known as a Cure Notice, a stark warning to Halliburton executives that if the companys performance didnt improve the $1.2 billion contract would be terminated. 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 resulting media backlash, fueled by the White House PR machine, is swift and brutal, effectively derailing Kitts career for decades to come. The unusually frank assessment accused Halliburton of undocumented cost overruns totaling tens of millions of dollars and generally poor performance.. Then, in the mid-1940s, opportunity came calling when KTBC, Austins first radio station, went on the market. 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. 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. He was soon in demand across the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma. The State Department report pointed out that Iraqi oil production at the beginning of 2005 was lower than it had been during the previous fall. Even the Pentagons own team of auditors, who nailed Halliburton red-handed for bilking the government for $108.4 million in overcharges for only one task order of its work in Iraq, found their report languishing in a kind of bureaucratic netherland for many months. Amid this turmoil, Lady Birds ideas about her own work are changing -- what started as planting flowers in underserved DC neighborhoods is growing into an agenda that brings environmentalism and social justice together in Americas cities. In 1943, Larry Bell who owned Bell Aerospace was convinced of a helicopter design after seeing a remote controlled model built and flown by Arthur Young. She currently A Department of Justice investigation charged that Halliburton bribed the Nigerian officials in order to win a billion-dollar construction contract. 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. Although she never once called herself a feminist, in the doing, her values aligned squarely with the more outspoken feminists of the time. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight at the best online prices at eBay! Almost immediately, Cheney began poking his fingers into the Halliburton corporate machine, with, it must be said, less than glamorous results. Wrong. For one thing, those big terminals, the Mina al-Bakr and the Khor al-Amaya were inviting targets. Jacqueline had a very full life. In late 1940s, Halliburton began doing business in Bahrain, followed by an equally lucrative contract with the royal family of Kuwait to manage that kingdoms oil fields. No, and he even lost his job because of the Vietnam War. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. 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. Several of the subcontracts in Iraq were doled out accompanied by the judicious application of cash bribes. 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. They just arent. Tumulty calls theirs an epic love story, an observation confirmed by the eyewitness accounts of many. But before the year had ended that contract, covering everything from road construction, vehicle maintenance and power generation to food services, latrines and mail delivery, had generated nearly a billion dollars in revenues for Halliburton. Of course, the acquisition of Brown & Root had another great advantage for Halliburton. 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. Johnson was a sneaky, back slapping, Lynda was born on March 19, 1944 in Washington, D.C. And she finds inspiration and an unlikely collaborator in San Francisco. 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. Johnson also prevailed upon the Bell Helicopter Company, which would soon relocate to Texas, to loan him a chopper for his campaign. 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. Lady Bird Johnson was a first lady -- but her audio diaries reveal so much more. He exacted revenge with a bombshell memoir revealing the extent to which the White House schedule was dictated by astrology. The plan came to be known as LOGCAP and Halliburton soon got an additional $5 million to flesh out the details. Johnson, however, flew back to Houston the night after his destruction of Olds on a private jet owned by Brown & Root. Lady Bird Johnson greets supporters during a westward trip while campaigning for her husband Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential bid, in 1964. True to form, Johnson never tried to conceal the role his corporate sponsors played in securing the 1948 election. 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. 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. ), 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. Halliburton continues to garner millions from its drilling technology, from Saudi Arabia to the Amazonian rainforest. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.netor on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 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. On February 26, 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, a meeting was convened in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). The major initiative in the Lyndon Johnson presidency was the Vietnam War. This neat trick was followed by a huge cost-plus contract to build the US military base on Guam in the south Pacific, a deal that started out with a price tag of $25 million but soon ballooned to more than $250 million. So too was Brown & Roots. I cringe every time we step out of a car. The irony, as Tumulty points out, is that in allowing the presidents schedule to be determined by an unseen stranger who would know his movements, she left him more exposed, not less. 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. I have no financial interests in Halliburton of any kind, Cheney said flatly. Unlike her conflict-averse husband, she played the ruthless enforcer, conducting feuds and engineering firings. If theyve read any of the LBJ histories, they might remember that she used her inheritance to finance Lyndons first congressional campaign. Then in 1995, at the same time Cheney was taking over the reins at Halliburton, the Pentagon handed the company a $550 million contract to provide logistical support for US and NATOs IFOR forces in Bosnia, Croatia and Hungry. That her thing about flowers was really a cover for a pretty radical environmentalism. Lyndon Johnson belonged to a generation of men who regarded sex as a perk of power. 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. A later probe found that the company had bought the plywood for $14 per sheet. 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. Lynda Bird was the first of two daughters born to Lyndon and Claudia Lady Bird Johnson. Ill never forgive Lyndons boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project, she said. 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. How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands ambitionsand their own. At this ex parte conclave, Wirtz impressed upon Black the importance of LBJs election to the senate, saying that many New Deal programs (he presunmably did not mention the gross topic of Pentagon contracts) hinged on the outcome. Lady Bird Johnson (born December 22, 1912) is famous for being political wife. Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. Halliburton quickly moved to replace those revenues with an equally rich stream from Irans neighbor and blood enemy, the Baathist republic of Iraq, now under the grip of Saddam Hussein.
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