did lady bird johnson profit from the vietnam war

Welcome to the club, any number of women might have told him. Tumulty calls theirs an epic love story, an observation confirmed by the eyewitness accounts of many. They got all of the contracts to build all of the bases, roads, and airports in Vietnam. The $10 million dam deal was the biggest Brown & Root contract to date. And that throughout it all, she was a journalist and historian in her own right, as her tapes clearly demonstrate. It was a political partnership and a powerful one at that. 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. Moreover, US government financing for Halliburton projects in the Third World soared soon after the Wizard of Wyoming took control of the company, ballooning from $100 million in the five years prior to Cheneys arrival to more than $1.5 billion during his time at the helm. 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 Thats because nearly all of Halliburtons work in Iraq was farmed out to subcontractors. And behind her rightful insistence on we lay a more painful bargain. 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) (Who else was going to take care of her? In 1992, Halliburton won a $3.9 million contract from the Pentagon in the waning days of the George H.W. He rewarded him with the plum position of vice president for governmental operations-in other words, Halliburtons top lobbyist. n Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents, Remembering Akbar, Iran, and Other Gnarly Things Like Revolution, The Real Reason Disney is Defying DeSantis, Australia: Outsourced to the US Military Establishment, To End the Gerrymander Wars, Get Algorithmic, How the War on Crypto Triggered a Banking Crisis, The Curious Species Politics of Dinotopia, May Day and the Murder of William McKay: 100 Years Past, How a Tribal Rights Lawyer Is Winning Back the Rights of Nature, We Must Not Dance to the Billionaires Beat, Bushs Mission Accomplished, 20 Years Later, Anxiety as Socialism: AI Moratorium Fantasies, Final Demand Remains Strong, But Inventories Drag Down First Quarter GDP Growth, Not the Last White Man In San Francisco: a Conversation with Artist Charles Albert, Its the Class War, Stupid: An Evening with Noam Chomsky, Demagogues Three: Charles Foster Kane, Willie Stark, and Tucker Carlson, Not Even a Win: The Malevolent and Misogynist Mifepristone Mess Moved to May, As American Life Expectancy Plunges, Political Bigwigs Stay Busy Not Noticing, Letters From Saudi Arabia: Toward the Hejaz, Shivas Bouncing Ball: the New Push for Uranium Mining, Here Come the Militarized Robots (But There Go Our Civil Liberties), Emergencies: Delusions of Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Innocence in Elite Groups, The Rise of China (and the Fall of the U.S.? 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. 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. Even here Halliburton benefited. But the most majestic profits, as always, were to be made during wartime and LBJ gave them a big one. 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. Once I listened to her often riveting, unique and surprising diary accounts -- accounts of some of the most iconic moments in our countrys history -- I began to see that all of the volumes of history and journalism written about the 1960s -- Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Great Society -- suffer from a pretty big gap without her voice, without an idea of her influence. Two years later, Halliburton won the 5-year renewal of this deal, valued at $180 million. Even congress was denied a peak at the reports findings until mid-March 2005. LBJ, serving out The remarkable thing is that Halliburtons looting of Iraq and the US treasury happened in broad daylight, right under the nose of the press, the Democrats and Michael Moore, who made Dick Cheneys former company the bete noir of his film 9/11. Nothing deterred the company from capitalizing on the war it helped orchestrate. He exacted revenge with a bombshell memoir revealing the extent to which the White House schedule was dictated by astrology. But those off-shore subsidiaries werent merely a way of hiding money from corporate auditors, the SEC and the IRS. The meeting was chaired by Lt. General Carl Strock, a ranking official at the US Army Corps of Engineers. 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. 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. Over the next few days, precincts across the vast state counted and recounted their votes. 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? 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. 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. 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.. 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. 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. More than $1.5 billion of Halliburtons $2.5 billion deal was funded by Iraqi oil sales overseen by the UN. Black was a New Dealer elevated to the high bench by FDR. Hunt and Sid Richardson. WebEartha Kitt confronts President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon. Of course, the acquisition of Brown & Root had another great advantage for Halliburton. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). The wife, your wife, is the most important asset youll have, he declared. As the polls closed in the Texas senate race of 1948, the margin was razor thin, with Coke Stevenson running slightly ahead of LBJ. LBJ got the NYA position, at the age of 29, through the intervention of Alvin Wirtz, the lead attorney for Brown & Root and a noted fixer. During the Vietnam War, Lady Bird woke to hear President Johnson talking to himself in the early-morning darkness. 2: Thank You, Mrs. Vice PresidentThere are moments in Lady Birds audio diaries that truly re-write the known history of LBJ's presidency. 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. But it was politically expedient since it allowed civilian officials in the Pentagon to steer billions into the coffers of favored contractors, such as Halliburton, Lockheed and DynCorp. Using money from Lady Birds inheritance and generous infusions of cash from Brown & Root, the Johnsons bought the station, made major upgrades in its operations and squeezed federal broadcast regulators into allowing it to expand its output and change its location to a more central place on the dial. Born in 1912 and 1921, respectively, Lady Bird and Nancy both belonged to a generation sandwiched between two feminist movements. 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. 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. WebLyndon Johnson. The top priority on that February morning was to decide which US company would receive the juicy contract to put out the expected oil field fires and to rebuild and manage Iraqs oil infrastructure, from the wellheads to the pipelines to the big oil terminals off the coast near Basra. Needless to say, this prospect didnt sit well with Halliburton and the consortium of British and American oil companies exploiting Irans petroleum wealth. He got a state judge in Texas to place an injunction against the ballots from Alice. But Cheney was no mere figurehead. 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. (You had to be wary of her, Ron said.) When Mossadegh moved forward with his plans, the oil companies appealed to President Eisenhower to intervene, who turned the matter over to his National Security Council. On August 19, 1953, the CIA launched its coup. She was quick to suspect that aides might be serving their own interests before hisand she wasnt always wrong. 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.. The auditors report accuses Halliburton of misleading the government inspectors at nearly every turn. His distaste for Uncle Sam was matched only by his ferocious hatred of Mexicans, blacks and labor unionists. Halliburton won another $6.3 million contract to service US troops stationed at the air base in Aviano, Italy, from which US jets launched bombing raids on Yugoslavia. With her familys money as a seed investment, she helped build an empire of Texas media and business holdings. 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. 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. Lynda was born on March 19, 1944 in Washington, D.C. Shes a presidents wife. Ep. First stop Somalia, where Halliburton set up shop providing fuel, food, laundry services and even morticians for US troops. 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. (A later analysis by Johnson biographer Robert Caro showed that 220 names had been added to the voters list after the polls had closed.). In Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, Julia Sweig argues that for all her mid-century Betty Crocker flip curls, Bird (as her husband called her) had a disarmingly modern partnership with the president. Ep. In 1919, Red Halliburton started the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company from his home in Wilson, Oklahoma, a hardscrabble town in the oil patch. 4: EntangledNetwork television comes calling for Lady Bird, as the president of ABC News convinces a reluctant first lady to host a documentary about her beautification work in DC. 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. 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. So let the man use his privilege to shield and protect the woman, an old role deployed for a modern purpose. Witness Cheneys disastrous decision to acquire Dresser Industries, another oil services and engineering company. And on her return to Washington, a sex scandal involving Lyndons closest aide presents an October surprise that could easily upend the election. Never say that Brown & Root wasnt grateful. Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. When someone finally leaked the audit to Waxmans office, the documents disclosed a thick wad of Halliburton billings that the Pentagon bookkeepers deemed illogical.. Sweigs writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, the National Interest and in Brazils Folha de So Paulo. Using a subsidiary corporation set up in Cheney time in the Cayman Islands, Halliburton had been doing business with the Mullahs of Iran since 1997, in flagrant violation of the US trade embargo. 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 had a maniacal drive for money and power. Lady Bird Johnson travelled to Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia in 1967. I always wanted someone to take care of me, someone I could take care of, she said, a yearning fulfilled when she met Ronnie, in 1949. Im so scared, she said. The pipeline won the approval of the US Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who would later land a spot on the Halliburton board. A later probe found that the company had bought the plywood for $14 per sheet. In the end, the Naval Air Station cost the Pentagon more than $125 million. He shed much of his New Dealer image and reemerged as a Southern populist, touting his votes against an anti-lynching bill, against Trumans bill to outlaw the poll tax, and for the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act. Like any number of female Kennedys, like Coretta Scott King, like the Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, and like others then (and since), Lady Bird suffered the humiliation of her husbands flagrant infidelity. In 1995, Halliburton hired Dick Cheney as its CEO. 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. Cheney pursued a company that no one else really wanted and to compound his blunder he paid an outrageous price for it. As the first and second couples moved to ascend the Capitol steps, Emhoff stood to her left; changed his mind and dashed to her right; then sort of bobbled, hesitating, before settling at her left. The Clinton years were very good to Halliburton right to the final days. 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. We just have to look. 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. It turns out that there wasnt much for these managers from Houston to manage. He also was able to increase his wealth through various business deals and investments. 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. That she understood early on that the Vietnam War might well destroy her husbands presidency. During Reagans second term, she saw the peril posed by the Iran-Contra scandal and hectored a stubbornly resistant Ronnie until, in a crucial speech to the American public, he admitted to the arms-for-hostages deal, and to his own mistake. 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. Lyndon Johnson belonged to a generation of men who regarded sex as a perk of power. Each haul would net between $40,000and $50,000 for the Johnson campaign. The bagman was none other than John Connolly, the future governor of Texas and Halliburton board member. LBJ lived up to his obligations. 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. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. 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. As our vision of high-level political partnership gets a reboot (the first-ever first lady whos not giving up her career, the first-ever second gentleman), it seems a good time to recall just how undefined the role of unelected spouse has been. 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. 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. Lady Bird Johnson (born December 22, 1912) is famous for being political wife. With time running out, LBJs lawyers Abe Fortas (whom LBJ ultimately rewarded by putting him on the Supreme Court) and Alvin Wirtz, who was also Brown & Roots lead corporate counsel, arranged a secret meeting with Black in his chambers at the Supreme Court. She came into office in the wake of the JFK assassination. WebAs of 2022, Lady Bird Johnsons net worth is under review. 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. Lady Bird Johnson remembers the President's pain over the war. Lady Bird decides to use the opportunity to launch a full PR blitz to take her message to America. Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. 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. 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. The Halliburton audits were also concealed from a team of investigators from the United Nations, which is probing profiteering from oil contracts in Iraq. One former Halliburton employee said that the company had inflated costs on 224 different projects in Kosovo. The fiercely Republican oil services company, which prospered under Eisenhower, now found many familiar doors in Washington shuttered under the Kennedy administration. The fraying of the social contract the Johnsons were so vital in knitting together 50 years ago. 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. First lady Lady Bird Johnson greets supporters while campaigning for her husband President Lyndon B. Johnson's bid for the Presidency in 1964. 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. Emhoffs little side step of uncertainty got raves. 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. Halliburton spent more than $73 million a year just to house its executives in Kuwaitthats $73 million a year billed to the Pentagon, plus a two percent profit tacked on for good measure. What had suddenly looked like a sure thing, now found Brown & Root on the unnerving verge of bankruptcy. LBJ did more than that. 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. Once again, Johnson faced a popular and reactionary governor for the Texas senate seat, vacated when Pappy ODaniel (grew bored of living in DC. For the first time, the Pentagon began to privatize construction and logistics operations during wartime in the war zone. If the current second gentleman, or a future first one, wants advice on how to do it, and how not to, he has plenty of history to consult. Lady Bird Johnson holds artwork while greeting a young girl during her tour of Appalachia in 1967. The Pentagon rejected 12 separate requests from Congressman Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who has spearheaded the ad hoc congressional inquiry into Halliburtons contract abuse, seeking to examine the internal audits of Halliburtons $2.5 billion contract for fuel supplies and other services to the US military and occupation government in Iraq. 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. Nearly 40 years ago, Halliburton faced almost identical charges over its work for the U.S. government in Vietnam -- allegations of overcharging, sweetheart contracts 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. LBJs first shot at the senate came in 1941, after Texas Senator Morris Sheppard keeled over from a brain hemorrhage. 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. Buchanan departed the living with some unfinished business of extreme importance to his political cronies. 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.. (There was also yellow, for iffy ones.) He won round one. He ran on an anti-union and anti-FDR platform that appealed to rural Texas voters. Halliburton continues to garner millions from its drilling technology, from Saudi Arabia to the Amazonian rainforest. 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. They were also designed to help Halliburton evade government prohibitions against US-based companies doing business with unsavory regimes. 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. 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. Johnson had it a little easier, as his symbiotic relationship with Brown & Root occurred before campaign finance laws required candidates to reveal the sources of their Bell set-up a design shop in Garden Park, NY where the first Bell Helicopter was built. In 1999, Cheney urged Lopez to leave the Pentagon and join Halliburton. Best Case Studios' Adam Pincus is executive producer and Anne Carkeet is a producer on the project. When he ran again in 1948, Johnson almost certainly lost the vote, but stole the election, abetted by Brown & Root, the companys lawyer Alvin Wirtz, and newspaper tycoon Charles Marsh. 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. First ladies? Ironically, Altanmia executives griped that they were forced to charge that hefty amount in order to cover the kickbacks and bribes they were forced to pay to Halliburton officials in order to secure the contract. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. 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. He helped me get out. Kennedy was the first president to approve the sale of As did she: Our presidency, Lady Bird called it. 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. 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. For Nancy Reagan, we meant a combative us-against-them partnership that betrayed a different kind of insecurity, Tumultys biography suggests. 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.

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