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. Did Lyndon Johnson escalate the Vietnam War for personal profit? 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. 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 city was well stocked with influential women. 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. With her familys money as a seed investment, she helped build an empire of Texas media and business holdings. 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. And listen. 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. Lady Bird decides to use the opportunity to launch a full PR blitz to take her message to America. Lady Bird Johnson soared as quiet, determined First Lady 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. Again, the race was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court by the intervention of a single justice, Hugo Black. In Iraq, LOGCAP would be a recipe for rampant fraud over the basic of services. 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. 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. LBJs first shot at the senate came in 1941, after Texas Senator Morris Sheppard keeled over from a brain hemorrhage. 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 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. 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. And then the company and the Pentagon sought to hide the evidence of these overchages from the international auditors.. We just have to look. She is a senior research fellow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin and the creator, host and executive producer of the podcast In Plain Sight. Her fourth book, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight comes out March 16, 2021 from Random House. Its just so cute! exclaimed Jessica Jones, a viewer who entertainingly narrated the viral moment on TikTok. 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. 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. 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. Wrong. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and their connections to Why? April 16, 1965, Lady Bird Johnson poses for Okamoto at her ranch. Johnson Two years later, Halliburton would land the contract to build the other big torture center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. 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. But Cheney was no mere figurehead. 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. Brown & Root also understood that government contracts are a lot easier to get if you have a politician on retainer. With 97 per cent of the votes counted, Johnson led the race and seemed assured of victory. 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. Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight 9780812985849 | eBay Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. The NSC, with judicious prodding from Dillon Anderson, quickly sanctioned a CIA plan, devised by Kermit Roosevelt, to overthrow Mossadegh. They knew that their fortunes rode on the backs of their political benefactors and they did their best to keep them happy. Each haul would net between $40,000and $50,000 for the Johnson campaign. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon used Iraqi oil proceeds to overpay Halliburton, says Waxman. WebAnswer (1 of 10): Lyndon Baines Johnson was arguably the most corrupt President in the history of this country. 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. Instead, Lt. General Strock steered the cost-plus contract into Halliburtons hands without the faintest whiff of competition. Jacqueline had a very full life. A few months after La Nouvelle took over, the tab soared to $1.2 million a month. It is estimated that It was a medium size construction company in Texas. For one thing, those big terminals, the Mina al-Bakr and the Khor al-Amaya were inviting targets. Much of the fuel those Halliburton drivers were carrying into Iraq came courtesy of a company called Altanmia, a Kuwait firm with cozy ties to the countrys royal family. 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. 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. I have heard numerous times over the years Lady Bird Johnson's family were key stockholders in Bell Born in 1912 and 1921, respectively, Lady Bird and Nancy both belonged to a generation sandwiched between two feminist movements. The final fix may have been made by a cabal of Texas oil men and ranchers who wanted ODaniel out of Austin. Plus American exclusion, Zoom justice, Andrew Yang, puberty TV, first ladies, giant closets, and more. Indeed, a few weeks before Saddam sent his tanks into Kuwait, the Iraqi government had paid Halliburton $57 million for its work on the Mina Al-Bakr terminal and a seismographic project to help the Iraqi Oil Exploration Company enhance its exploration technology. The resulting media backlash, fueled by the White House PR machine, is swift and brutal, effectively derailing Kitts career for decades to come. In 1967, a GAO report on Halliburtons operations in Vietnam skewered the company for abandoning normal management controls and for wasting millions of dollars. 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. Brown & Root decided there was no turning back. They got all of the contracts to build all of the bases, roads, and airports in Vietnam. She currently 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. But this rate was nearly three times the 97 cents per gallon that the Iraqi Oil State Marketing Organization was paying to buy oil from Jordan and Turkey. Olds, a former muckraking reporter, was appointed by FDR to head the commission, which set power rates and regulated natural gas prices. Bell set-up a design shop in Garden Park, NY where the first Bell Helicopter was built. She was replaced as first lady by Lyndon Johnson's wife, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy as president. The tricky part was trying to find the right subcontractor. 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? It informed Halliburton that the company no longer had to submit a public record of the fuel purchases. 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. Not to worry. 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. And on her return to Washington, a sex scandal involving Lyndons closest aide presents an October surprise that could easily upend the election. In reality, of course, the privatization of military logistics operations was neither cost-conscious nor particularly efficient. Welcome to the club, any number of women might have told him. But just as their most ambitious, controversial project is about to get underway, tragedy strikes. In 1995, Halliburton hired Dick Cheney as its CEO. 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.. 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. The purpose of this conclave was to devise a project that would come to be known as RIO or Restore Iraq Oil. Over the next five years, the contracts would fatten to more than $2 billion. 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. WebLyndon Johnson. Lady Bird' Johnson Laid to Rest We tend to date a modern shift to 1992, when Bill Clinton proposed a two-for-the-price-of-one presidency with Hillary. While Defense Secretary, Cheney defended this kind of military outsourcing as an efficient way to control spiraling costs. Call it the Oil-for-Contracts scandal. The apex political fixer Thomas Tommy the Cork Corcoran later observed that LBJs whole world was built on that dam. Almost immediately, Cheney began poking his fingers into the Halliburton corporate machine, with, it must be said, less than glamorous results. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. And that throughout it all, she was a journalist and historian in her own right, as her tapes clearly demonstrate. Kitt's defence of America's young soldiers elicits tears from the First Lady and results in the CIA opening a dossier on her. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. When she called his campaign office early on, one operator said, The bitch is on the phone again. In the margins of my copy, I began tracking all the people she set herself against. Shes from Texas. The plan came to be known as LOGCAP and Halliburton soon got an additional $5 million to flesh out the details. 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. But forswearing potentially polarizing talk of urban renewal and land stewardship, Lady Bird spoke of beautification, though she had mixed feelings about the word. For those flights, the Bush campaign reimbursed Halliburton only the cost of one first class ticket. It was a political partnership and a powerful one at that. Two years later, Halliburton won the 5-year renewal of this deal, valued at $180 million. But thats only a rough opening bid for the true scale of the looting, in large part because the companys indefatigable stonewalling. As LBJ said, Finally, I was a millionaire. 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. But Nancy had no appetite for cozy calm in the White House. 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. The Halliburton audits were also concealed from a team of investigators from the United Nations, which is probing profiteering from oil contracts in Iraq. For all her devotion (including, or especially, when he developed Alzheimers disease), Nancy emerges in the biography as a disruptive force, to put it mildly, in the political life they shared, particularly on staffing matters. President Johnson profited from the Vietnam War in many ways. But like his other advisers, she bowed to the inevitability of saying yes and fully entered into the campaign. I am not sure that the above answer is accurate but I can't prove it. Evidence of the systematic accounting fraud at Halliburton during the Cheney years has now been marshaled into a class action suit by Halliburton shareholders that may even yet doom the company. 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. 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. 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. But Cheney does have the quaint habit of taking this modesty too far. She came into office in the wake of the JFK assassination. During the Vietnam War, Lady Bird woke to hear President Johnson talking to himself in the early-morning darkness. Did lady bird Johnson travel to Vietnam during the war? 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. The adventurous and well-read Minnie Taylor died after a fall while pregnant. 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. For this task order alone, the Pentagon auditors estimated that Halliburton overbilled the government by at least $108.4 million. 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. Lady Bird Johnson Net Worth 2022: Money, Salary, Bio So little doubt, in fact, that a Halliburton executive had been invited to attend the secret conclave. 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. Right before our eyes. But the most majestic profits, as always, were to be made during wartime and LBJ gave them a big one. 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. He was soon in demand across the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma. 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. 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. 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.. Never say that Brown & Root wasnt grateful. Even congress was denied a peak at the reports findings until mid-March 2005. In all a report prepared by the Democratic Policy Committee estimates that Halliburtons overcharges in Iraq alone exceed $1 billion. and in my book "Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,", Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. Soon the Johnsons were rich. LBJ, serving out JFKs term, did not have a VP. The most surprising moments from LBJs secretly recorded calls He moved to Texas in the mid-1890s and opened a store in Karnack, Harrison County. For her part, Lady Bird discovered that marriage promised her broader horizons than the teaching job she had envisioned. 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. In 1995, the State Department hit Cheneys Halliburton with a $3.8 million fine for violating the trade embargo with Libya. Johnson It cushioned the blow by awarding Halliburton a $405 million no bid deal to provide support for US troops in Bosnia. The higher the costs, the bigger the profits. Thats because nearly all of Halliburtons work in Iraq was farmed out to subcontractors. In 2003, he was asked about his financial ties to Halliburton. 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. Ill never forgive Lyndons boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project, she said. 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. 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. 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. In addition to Brown & Root, the Brown family also owned the Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation, then the nations biggest natural gas pipeline company. Did lady bird Johnson have Vietnam business interest? By outsourcing most of the logistics work in Kosovo, the Pentagon was able to reduce its deployment by around 8,000 troops, helping Clinton and Albright to sell an unpopular war at home. So she swam laps and hiked.) (A later analysis by Johnson biographer Robert Caro showed that 220 names had been added to the voters list after the polls had closed.). Often these bills exceeded the true costs of the projects by 300 or even 400 percentwith Halliburton snagging a built-in profit from the bribe-bloated contracts. 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. In fact, the contract was secretly handed to Halliburton in May, but the Pentagon kept it underwraps for more than a month. He destroyed the man in a set of hearings that would lay the groundwork for the show trials of the McCarthy era. Vietnam war When someone finally leaked the audit to Waxmans office, the documents disclosed a thick wad of Halliburton billings that the Pentagon bookkeepers deemed illogical.. 3: RenewalFresh from landslide victory in the 1964 election, Lyndon and Lady Bird shuttle back and forth between Washington, DC and Texas as they make plans for their first full term in office. 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. 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 little more than a week after having arrived in DC, the freshly hatched congressman had engineered congressional approval for both the appropriation and the land purchase. 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. 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. 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. Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. 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. 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. Im a foreign policy person. Some staffers, like James Baker, understood her influence and made a point of getting along. All of this got LBJ close, but quite not close enough, to assure him of an outright victory. Halliburton was also back in Iran. The initial price-tag was pegged at $23.5 million, with Brown & Root guaranteed a profit of $1.2 million. She shored up his self-doubt and rallied his spiritsand her own. Buchanan departed the living with some unfinished business of extreme importance to his political cronies. 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. As a result, Halliburton flourished. 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. 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. Try $5 billion. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). 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. 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. 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. 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. WebEartha Kitt confronts President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon. Regan, it emerged, had been obliged to devise a color-coded calendar signaling good days (green) and bad ones (red) for trips and meetingsbased on consultations Nancy conducted with a San Francisco stargazer. 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.

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