On Monday, May 16, 1966, John Steinbeck and his 19 year-old son, John, visited President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office of the White House. Lady Bird Johnson holds artwork while greeting a young girl during her tour of Appalachia in 1967. And Lady Bird is even sending Lyndon Johnson notes, comments on speeches and other notes during the day written on office of the vice president stationery, which, of course, Lyndon Johnson was the vice president. 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. One former Halliburton employee said that the company had inflated costs on 224 different projects in Kosovo. Tumulty makes the case that over the course of Ronalds political career, Nancy grew to understand her power. Wielding their clout, the two first ladies could hardly be a greater study in contrastseven as they shared a priority: vigilantly protecting their spouse above all, but also their own access and influence. Shes from Texas. 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. The meeting was chaired by Lt. General Carl Strock, a ranking official at the US Army Corps of Engineers. It informed Halliburton that the company no longer had to submit a public record of the fuel purchases. 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. But Nancy had no appetite for cozy calm in the White House. 1968: Vietnam stance was Ali's fight of a lifetime 1968 pageant proved black is beautiful A year of chaos and change Reports about the incident made it seem that Kitt, The LOGCAP deal was sanctioned by none other than Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. 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. And on her return to Washington, a sex scandal involving Lyndons closest aide presents an October surprise that could easily upend the election. Of the many images that lingered after the January inauguration of President Joe Bidenthe twinkling hand gestures of the poet Amanda Gorman, the rakish eyebrow-waggling of the second daughter, Ella Emhoffone of the more subtly significant was the scene of Doug Emhoff trying to figure out which side of his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, to stand on. Johnson, however, flew back to Houston the night after his destruction of Olds on a private jet owned by Brown & Root. 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. In fact, the company patriarch, Erle P. Red Halliburton, despised the federal government. But despite all that public support, its clear theres trouble ahead. and in my book "Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,", Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. 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. In 1948 it was also this same DC-3 that made emergency flights to Austin and Dallas in search of cash from the accounts of Brown & Root. And listen. Birds a true believer in progressive causes -- civil rights, environmentalism -- but shes also the product of her own generation and background. Fluor-Daniel, Parsons and GSM Services were all were just as qualified for the task. 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.. 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. The biggest project by far was its $220 million contract to build the mammoth Air Force Base at Phan Rang, which Halliburton constructed on top of some the most beautiful Cham temple complexes in Vietnam. She was replaced as first lady by Lyndon Johnson's wife, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy as president. 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. The company made a cool $500 million from the deal. They got all of the contracts to build all of the bases, roads, and airports in Vietnam. They were also designed to help Halliburton evade government prohibitions against US-based companies doing business with unsavory regimes. 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. The deal was worth $2 billion. But Cheney does have the quaint habit of taking this modesty too far. Young Claudia Alta Taylor, nicknamed Lady Bird by a nanny (or playmateexactly who isnt certain), was 5 when she lost her mother. Vietnam war (There was also yellow, for iffy ones.) 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. 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. The apex political fixer Thomas Tommy the Cork Corcoran later observed that LBJs whole world was built on that dam. In February 2005, the State Department finally weighed in with a damning report on Halliburtons work to rehabilitate the oil fields in southern Iraq. It was a medium size construction company in Texas. Never say that Brown & Root wasnt grateful. As the polls closed in the Texas senate race of 1948, the margin was razor thin, with Coke Stevenson running slightly ahead of LBJ. Lady Bird Johnson: 1912 2007 In May 1967, she testified before Congress, along with Washington D.C. youth group Rebels With a Cause, on behalf of President Lyndon B. Johnson's juvenile delinquency bill. Lady Bird Johnson subsequently invited Kitt to her Women Doers' Luncheon on Jan. 18, 1968, for a discussion of what women could do to help eradicate crime on the streets. 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. That she understood early on that the Vietnam War might well destroy her husbands presidency. Halliburtons solution, which he unveiled in the oil town of Burkburnett, Texas, was to seal the well-pipes in a sheath of concrete, protecting the pipes from corrosion and precious loads of crude from contamination. Ronnie affirmed her through flirtatious quips and love letters; her love language was acts of service, chief among them the act of protection. 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. 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. 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 Over the next 25 years, the company cashed in on more than $10 billion in contracts with Iran. In the stunned aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, she sought out Jackie: I tried to express something of how we felt. In July, the Pentagon discreetly let slip that it had awarded Halliburton a fat new contract for yet more logistics work in Iraq. Meanwhile, in that same crucial year of 1919, the other half of Halliburton was also beginning to take shape as two friends from San Marcos, Texas, Herman Brown and Dan Root, formed a road paving company that would eventually become one of the worlds largest construction firms. 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) 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. 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. She came into office in the wake of the JFK assassination. 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. Ill never forgive Lyndons boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project, she said. There were also numerous allegations of human rights violations by Halliburton workers, including mounting claims of racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the Balkans. First lady Lady Bird Johnson is at work seated at her desk in the White House in Washington, D.C., 1964. 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. I have no financial interests in Halliburton of any kind, Cheney said flatly. The Marshall Ford Dam deal launched LBJs career a can-do politician without parallel in American politics and it set Brown & Root on course to become one of the federal governments favorite contractors. Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. Similarly, Halliburton kept the Pentagon investigators in the dark about the prices it paid for purchasing fuel from Turkey and Jordan. The adventurous and well-read Minnie Taylor died after a fall while pregnant. 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. Bird Johnson Im so scared, she said. When the oil boom hit Texas, the wildcatters and other drillers quickly began experiencing problems with their deep shafts. And to purchase an Austin radio station that she probably had a big hand in growing into a very successful media company. Indeed, a few months earlier Halliburton had already been paid $1.9 million to draft a plan for how to implement RIO. 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. 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.. 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. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. After this grilling, Olds was rejected by the senate on a vote of 53-15 and left the government a broken man. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon used Iraqi oil proceeds to overpay Halliburton, says Waxman. Halliburton would continue to work on a variety of projects in Iraq right up until the first Gulf War. 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. She worked hard to be a fully engaged participant in Lyndon B. Johnsons career, and while his biographers have rarely emphasized her centrality, Johnson himself certainly did. In the spring of that year, young LBJ met several times with Herman Brown, vowing to make congressional approval of the dam project his top priority. 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. 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. 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. Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy : NPR The justice issued an order overturning the state judges injunction and also put the brakes on a parallel investigation into vote fraud in Jim Wells County. Of course, Cheney didnt wrest these deals from the feds alone. In addition to Brown & Root, the Brown family also owned the Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation, then the nations biggest natural gas pipeline company. Three New Revelations About But just as their most ambitious, controversial project is about to get underway, tragedy strikes. 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. Johnson was a sneaky, back slapping, 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.. 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. 6: BlindsidedBy the mid-60s, you can hear a growing distance between Lady Bird and the protest movement thats sweeping the country. 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. Johnsons tapes also capture affectionate moments between him and his wife, Lady Bird. 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. But the most majestic profits, as always, were to be made during wartime and LBJ gave them a big one. 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. Lynda was born on March 19, 1944 in Washington, D.C. The final fix may have been made by a cabal of Texas oil men and ranchers who wanted ODaniel out of Austin. If theyve read any of the LBJ histories, they might remember that she used her inheritance to finance Lyndons first congressional campaign. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). 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. 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. Ep. Not my thing. This episode includes one of the most consequential. Halliburton agreed to acquire Brown & Root for the bargain basement price of $36.7 million, far below the market value of the company. 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. Not to worry. But what I am certain no one knows is that she was arguably the most influential member of the Johnson administration. 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. They just arent. Waxman charged that the Pentagon withheld the damaging reports at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton. Then more ballots mysteriously materialized, and ODaniel claimed victory by 1,311 votes. Lady Bird was a major stock holder of Brown &Root which was bought out by and became Haliburton in which Lady Bird held major interest to this day in. Lady Bird Johnson greets supporters during a westward trip while campaigning for her husband Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential bid, in 1964. He was able to increase his power and influence both domestically and internationally. Tumulty calls theirs an epic love story, an observation confirmed by the eyewitness accounts of many. There were several other companies that could have done the job that was given to Halliburton. Its just so cute! exclaimed Jessica Jones, a viewer who entertainingly narrated the viral moment on TikTok. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.netor on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. But then dissent comes to lunch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when singer, actor and activist Eartha Kitt participates in one of Lady Birds Doers Luncheons, and delivers a fierce critique of the war and its effect on young Black men. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In 1995, the State Department hit Cheneys Halliburton with a $3.8 million fine for violating the trade embargo with Libya. The initial price-tag was pegged at $23.5 million, with Brown & Root guaranteed a profit of $1.2 million. Im a foreign policy person. 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. Cheney, as is his natural inclination, continues to deny any involvement, direct or implicit, in the Pentagon deals that have sent billions in no bid contracts to his former company, at the very same time Halliburton continued to sweeten his bank accounts with more than $140,000 a year. Once again, it didnt take LBJ long to pay back his political investors with interest. Soon there were other summonses from the Middle East. Lady Bird Johnson travelled to Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia in 1967. 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. What is the birth I needed to take a look at the topic of women and power and the questions that are asked and answered in telling stories, writing about and making history. More than $1.5 billion of Halliburtons $2.5 billion deal was funded by Iraqi oil sales overseen by the UN. 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. 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. In 1943, the year Lady Bird Johnson purchased KTBC, the Federal Communications Commission, which reviewed all broadcast-license transfers, was close So let the man use his privilege to shield and protect the woman, an old role deployed for a modern purpose. A few months after La Nouvelle took over, the tab soared to $1.2 million a month. Letter from President Johnson to John Steinbeck Only six months into the occupation of Iraq, Halliburtons fleets of trucks began to breakdown due to lack of spare parts and shoddy upkeep. He later served as a key figure on the Bush-Cheney transition team. 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. Wrong. In reality, of course, the privatization of military logistics operations was neither cost-conscious nor particularly efficient. He won round one. When LBJs fortunes rose on the Hill, so did Brown & Roots. As a result, Halliburton flourished. 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. So she swam laps and hiked.) But Cheney was no mere figurehead. I have heard numerous times over the years Lady Bird Johnson's family were key stockholders in Bell Altanmia charged Halliburton a hefty $2.65 per gallon, roughly the price charged at the pump in Washington, D.C. In the late winter of 1937, the imperious Texas Congressman James P. Bucky Buchanan, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, suddenly died in office. 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. 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. Witness Cheneys disastrous decision to acquire Dresser Industries, another oil services and engineering company. 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.? Drawn from over 123 hours of the former first ladys mostly unheard daily audio diaries, the podcast presents a surprising and original portrait of Claudia Alta Lady Bird Johnson, told in her own words. diaries reveal Lady Bird Johnson Did Lyndon B. Johnson profit financially from the Vietnam War? She was quick to suspect that aides might be serving their own interests before hisand she wasnt always wrong. And she finds inspiration and an unlikely collaborator in San Francisco. The unusually frank assessment accused Halliburton of undocumented cost overruns totaling tens of millions of dollars and generally poor performance.. 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. Bob Gomel/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. The first two episodes of the eight-part series will debut on Monday, March 1. Welcome to the club, any number of women might have told him. The purpose of this conclave was to devise a project that would come to be known as RIO or Restore Iraq Oil. For her part, Lady Bird discovered that marriage promised her broader horizons than the teaching job she had envisioned. This time his opponent was Coke Stevenson, rancher, bigot and anti-communist. That her thing about flowers was really a cover for a pretty radical environmentalism. This article was published online on April 20, 2021. Even congress was denied a peak at the reports findings until mid-March 2005. The tricky part was trying to find the right subcontractor. 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 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. WebPresident Johnson and his advisers were and risk nuclear war in the interests of capitalist profit. The wife, your wife, is the most important asset youll have, he declared. First lady Lady Bird Johnson greets supporters while campaigning for her husband President Lyndon B. Johnson's bid for the Presidency in 1964. 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. At a time when the National Press Club barred female reporters, the Womens National Press Club provided a home for the citys contingent. For this task order alone, the Pentagon auditors estimated that Halliburton overbilled the government by at least $108.4 million. 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. The $10 million dam deal was the biggest Brown & Root contract to date. Halliburton failed to demonstrate its prices for Kuwait fuel were fair and reasonable', the auditors wrote in their report. Lady Bird Johnson soared as quiet, determined First Lady He and Lady Bird fretted about money during the early years of their marriage. Over the next five years, the contracts would fatten to more than $2 billion. 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. The Making of Halliburton - CounterPunch.org The companys Kosovo operations were rife with fraud. She listened, and she empathized with his agonized decisions. Erle changed the name of the company to Halliburton and raked in millions from his patent.