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. First ladies? Not to worry. Halliburton agreed to acquire Brown & Root for the bargain basement price of $36.7 million, far below the market value of the company. 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. Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. In southern Iraq, much of Halliburtons logistics work ended up in the hands of a Kuwaiti firm called La Nouvelle, which handled meals, sanitation facilities and laundry. Another Cheney veteran worked along side Lopez to keep the government contracts flowing to Houston. Lady Bird feels increasing under siege, even as she vows not to retreat into a bubble in the White House. 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. The Browns were furious at Oldss rulings and pleaded with Johnson to defeat his renomination. 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. Ballot boxes were bought by both campaigns. But one might also diagnose a codependent partnership between two people who felt abandoned in childhoodReagans father was an alcoholicand formed a profoundly anxious attachment. 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. 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.. 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. This article appears in the May 2021 print edition with the headline The Power of the First Lady., You Wont Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will, America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses. She wrapped a towel around herself and got Ronnie out of the shower; dripping, they both stood watching TV as the news sank in that he had won in a landslide. LBJ also enjoyed free access to a DC3, courtesy of Brown & Root, which would rush him across the vast Texan plains for as many as 10 appearances in a single day. With good reason. Its the contract that keeps on giving. There was little doubt about who was going to land the deal. 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. License granted by CSK Legacy, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia, as exclusive licensor of Coretta Scott King's estate. Tumulty credits her with appreciating the full potential of his powers of persuasion, and pushing him to negotiate with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. In the ever-expanding universe of Pentagon contracting, cost is never the problem, public exposure is. When the oil boom hit Texas, the wildcatters and other drillers quickly began experiencing problems with their deep shafts. Instead, Lt. General Strock steered the cost-plus contract into Halliburtons hands without the faintest whiff of competition. Thats real money, even by Pentagon standards. Sweig posits that she coped with the insecurity by making herself increasingly indispensable. LBJ struggled with depressionLady Bird called it the Valley of the Black Pig, quoting Yeatsand more so as the Vietnam War took an immense psychological toll. Lyndon Johnson, an up-and-coming congressional staffer, instantly sized her up as the sort of smart, capable partner who would push him and expand his prospects. The woman who becomes president will bear the usual burdens of the office, plus an added weight: In public life, men are not the lightning rod women are. 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. In the end, Dressers workers paid the price. 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. In fact, the contract was secretly handed to Halliburton in May, but the Pentagon kept it underwraps for more than a month. In the summer of that year, George Brown worked out a strange deal with Halliburton, which was looking to diversify its operations. (There was also yellow, for iffy ones.) 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. Cheney also approved a legally dubious scheme to set up dozens of offshore shell corporations designed to exploit Enron-style accounting hijinks in order to make Halliburtons bottom line seem more robust than it really was. 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. For Johnson, money was the route to political power. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson pose seated atop a fence at their ranch, Johnson City, Texas, 1963. Of course, this decision had been set in motion much earlier and by figures far loftier in the power hierarchy of the Bush administration than lowly Lt. General Strock from the bureaucratic outback of the Corps of Engineers. 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. WebJacqueline did not remain first lady. Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. Even congress was denied a peak at the reports findings until mid-March 2005. Far from being the path toward a leaner military, the General Accounting Office pegged the LOGCAP program as an adventure in high risk government spending.. There was another curious hitch to the Halliburton RIO deal. The pipeline won the approval of the US Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who would later land a spot on the Halliburton board. During World War II and Korea, Brown & Root made billions And an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam begins to overshadow just about everything else. 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. For the first time, the Pentagon began to privatize construction and logistics operations during wartime in the war zone. Johnsons tapes also capture affectionate moments between him and his wife, Lady Bird. 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. Victoria Thompson and Eric Johnson are executive producers and Suzie Liu is a producer with ABC News. Halliburton was also back in Iran. Lyndon B. Johnson - Election and the Vietnam War | Britannica 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. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon used Iraqi oil proceeds to overpay Halliburton, says Waxman. Johnson WebLyndon Johnson. Im a foreign policy person. Vietnam war 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. Lady Bird Johnson Net Worth 2022: Money, Salary, Bio 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. Brown & Root harbored similar ambitions for their man. During World War II and Korea, Brown & Root made billions building bases and ships in the US. First lady Lady Bird Johnson is at work seated at her desk in the White House in Washington, D.C., 1964. So little doubt, in fact, that a Halliburton executive had been invited to attend the secret conclave. 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. He exacted revenge with a bombshell memoir revealing the extent to which the White House schedule was dictated by astrology. Thanks to her tapes, Lady Bird brings alive aspects of American politics that are highly relevant today: Race, political polarization, inequality and how Americans use their power abroad, often at our own peril. 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. Olds, a former muckraking reporter, was appointed by FDR to head the commission, which set power rates and regulated natural gas prices. 6: BlindsidedBy the mid-60s, you can hear a growing distance between Lady Bird and the protest movement thats sweeping the country. 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. Thats because nearly all of Halliburtons work in Iraq was farmed out to subcontractors. Plus American exclusion, Zoom justice, Andrew Yang, puberty TV, first ladies, giant closets, and more. If I asked, say, a few hundred people anywhere over 25 or 30 years old, its a good bet theyd know a few things. If theyve read any of the LBJ histories, they might remember that she used her inheritance to finance Lyndons first congressional campaign. 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. After he ascended to the Senate in 1948, she became a force in the Senate Wives Club, a group of spouses who exercised a sort of soft power in postwar Washingtons political life. While Defense Secretary, Cheney defended this kind of military outsourcing as an efficient way to control spiraling costs. Brown & Root, though, was riding higher than ever thanks to its old political fixer, LBJ, now Kennedys vice president. Johnson also prevailed upon the Bell Helicopter Company, which would soon relocate to Texas, to loan him a chopper for his campaign. She was quick to suspect that aides might be serving their own interests before hisand she wasnt always wrong. The contract was another of the notorious cost-plus deals, where Halliburton simply faxed over receipts to the Pentagon and got fully reimbursed, along with a guaranteed 1 percent profit and performance bonuses that went as high as 8 percent of the total costs. 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. 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. 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. So too was Brown & Roots. ABC News will kick off Womens History Month with its new podcast "In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson," co-produced with Best Case Studios and hosted by author Julia Sweig. 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. In Iraq, LOGCAP would be a recipe for rampant fraud over the basic of services. Astrology was a compulsion, and the attempted assassination of her husband traumatized her, understandably, leading to even more hypervigilance. They were quite literally laundering money. 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 1919, Red Halliburton started the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company from his home in Wilson, Oklahoma, a hardscrabble town in the oil patch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). Vietnam: What really happened between Eartha Kitt and Two years later, Halliburton won the 5-year renewal of this deal, valued at $180 million. LBJs first shot at the senate came in 1941, after Texas Senator Morris Sheppard keeled over from a brain hemorrhage. She doesnt really like dealing with women, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver noted, in an understatement. And behind her rightful insistence on we lay a more painful bargain. She also used her inheritance to finance Lyndons successful bid for a House seat in 1937 and, in the years following, helped cultivate what she termed our political machine. During World War II, when LBJ was on active duty in the Pacific, she ran his congressional office. Similarly, Halliburton kept the Pentagon investigators in the dark about the prices it paid for purchasing fuel from Turkey and Jordan. "California";Written and Performed by Angel Olsen;Courtesy of Angel Olsen, Ribbon Music and Domino Publishing Company of America Inc. "Cross Bones Style;Written by Chan Marshall;Performed by Cat Power;Courtesy of Matador Records, Mattitude Music, LLC and Doorman Music, "Look Out Mama;Written by Alynda Segarra;Performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff;Courtesy of Born to Win Records and BMG, 24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events. On Election Night 1980, Nancy was taking a bath, not expecting the race to be called before the polls closed in California. During World War II, Halliburton was called upon to help build the infrastructure for the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, launching a profitable relationship with the petro-kingdom that persists to this day. 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. I had a career when I got married and very gladly gave it up, she later explained, referring to her own brief foray into acting. In fact, the company patriarch, Erle P. Red Halliburton, despised the federal government. But no. Still, tandem toil was one thing; staking out too much terrain for herself was another. Lady Bird Johnson was a first lady -- but her audio diaries reveal so much more. They also followed a familiar contour: the contracts were awarded without competitive bidding and on a cost-plus basis with a guaranteed profit built-in. 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. The fraying of the social contract the Johnsons were so vital in knitting together 50 years ago. But Nancy had no appetite for cozy calm in the White House. The deal was worth $2 billion. There were several other companies that could have done the job that was given to Halliburton. And listen. Some might remember she had a thing for wildflowers and planting them along highways. 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 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. And to purchase an Austin radio station that she probably had a big hand in growing into a very successful media company. With a key difference: For wives, the choices have almost always elicited harrumphing from some quarter or anotheras the ruckus over Dr. Jill Bidens use of her well-earned honorific served to remind us. Hunt and Sid Richardson. And then there was NR v Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff she managed to oust after much mutual combat. But the most majestic profits, as always, were to be made during wartime and LBJ gave them a big one. 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. He also was able to increase his wealth through various business deals and investments. 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. The NSC, with judicious prodding from Dillon Anderson, quickly sanctioned a CIA plan, devised by Kermit Roosevelt, to overthrow Mossadegh. Bob Gomel/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. Two years later Saddam hired Halliburton once again. Wrong. (A later analysis by Johnson biographer Robert Caro showed that 220 names had been added to the voters list after the polls had closed.). But within a year, the cost had soared to more than $45 million, with Brown & Root pocketing more than $2.4 million in profits. But despite all that public support, its clear theres trouble ahead. As did she: Our presidency, Lady Bird called it. Halliburton failed to demonstrate its prices for Kuwait fuel were fair and reasonable', the auditors wrote in their report. Altanmia charged Halliburton a hefty $2.65 per gallon, roughly the price charged at the pump in Washington, D.C. Lady Bird Johnson (born December 22, 1912) is famous for being political wife. 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. Best Case Studios' Adam Pincus is executive producer and Anne Carkeet is a producer on the project. Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. The plan came to be known as LOGCAP and Halliburton soon got an additional $5 million to flesh out the details. On September 29, 1948, Black came through. As the polls closed in the Texas senate race of 1948, the margin was razor thin, with Coke Stevenson running slightly ahead of LBJ. Try $5 billion. Claudia Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) was an American first lady (1963-69) and the wife of Lyndon Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. Of that Did lady bird Johnson have Vietnam business interest? Ep. 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. From the October 1980 issue: Looking at Reagan, Nancys wary nature did have its upsides, which Tumulty emphasizes. When LBJs fortunes rose on the Hill, so did Brown & Roots. April 16, 1965, Lady Bird Johnson poses for Okamoto at her ranch. Witness Cheneys disastrous decision to acquire Dresser Industries, another oil services and engineering company. Cheney swiftly announced two goals for the company: make it the top Pentagon contractor and greatly expand its contractual relationships with foreign governments. Nancys mother, Edie Davis, was a stage actor whose glamorous social life included Spencer Tracy and Mary Martin. 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.
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