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Ep. 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. The first two episodes of the eight-part series will debut on Monday, March 1. The Johnson family grew accustomed to the patriarchs dedication to his country, and adapted to the ever-changing, politically-charged atmosphere of Washington. For this task order alone, the Pentagon auditors estimated that Halliburton overbilled the government by at least $108.4 million. Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy : NPR Almost immediately, Cheney began poking his fingers into the Halliburton corporate machine, with, it must be said, less than glamorous results. In the summer of that year, George Brown worked out a strange deal with Halliburton, which was looking to diversify its operations. Halliburton never uttered the meekest protest about the grossly inflated fuel prices. It simply passed the bills on to the Pentagon and cashed its reimbursement checks, complete with the 4 percent government gratuity. There were also numerous allegations of human rights violations by Halliburton workers, including mounting claims of racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the Balkans. Though its not a heart attack, hell still need surgery. 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. 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. Then an unexpected thing happened. He ran on an anti-union and anti-FDR platform that appealed to rural Texas voters. 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. Hunt and Sid Richardson. 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. It informed Halliburton that the company no longer had to submit a public record of the fuel purchases. Okay, the Pentagon learned a billion-dollar lesson the hard way, right? Emhoffs little side step of uncertainty got raves. WebLyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and their connections to Bell Helicopter? And behind her rightful insistence on we lay a more painful bargain. 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. It seems that a certain Luis Salas, following the suggestion of a Brown & Root lawyer, began scouring the courthouse for a missing box of ballots. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and their connections to It was an early lesson in the demented logic of Pentagon contracting: the bigger the cost-overruns, the juicier the profits. Over the next 25 years, the company cashed in on more than $10 billion in contracts with Iran. Return the national parks to the tribes, how well remember the pandemic, a kidnapping gone wrong, and the women reinventing the Western. But despite all that public support, its clear theres trouble ahead. We hear Lady Birds growing sense that Bobby Kennedy will become LBJ's political rival, and RFKs bring-down-the-house performance at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1964. 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. 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.. 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. 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. Not necessarily the company that would do the best job, but the one that would charge the most for the work, since Halliburtons built-in profits came as a fixed percentage of the costs. In the fall of 1979, the Iranian revolution led to the expulsion of Halliburton from the lucrative sinecure it had enjoyed under the Shahs dictatorship. 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 Johnsons Vietnam War forever changed the role of Pentagon contractors, and Halliburtons Brown & Root subsidiary lead the way. While the US oil companies were later given the boot by the Saudi royal family, Halliburton continued to prosper, constructing pipelines, refineries and oil terminals. Halliburton acquired Dresser for $7.7 billion, which proved to be at least 16 percent more than the companys actual value. Lyndon Johnson belonged to a generation of men who regarded sex as a perk of power. Unlike her conflict-averse husband, she played the ruthless enforcer, conducting feuds and engineering firings. 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. They hated to spend nights apart, and famously (or infamously) called each other Mommie and Daddy. In the end, the Naval Air Station cost the Pentagon more than $125 million. She shored up his self-doubt and rallied his spiritsand her own. 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. 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. He also courted cash from every corporation and mogul he could find, promising to return their investment tenfold. He got a state judge in Texas to place an injunction against the ballots from Alice. In July, the Pentagon discreetly let slip that it had awarded Halliburton a fat new contract for yet more logistics work in Iraq. There was an even uglier problem with the Dresser deal that somehow escaped Cheneys notice. And shes rightit was. Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via. 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. 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.. 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 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. At the time of the takeover, Dresser was facing more than 66,000 claims for asbestos-related health problems from its subsidiary Harrison-Walker. 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. WebPresident Johnson and his advisers were and risk nuclear war in the interests of capitalist profit. Did lady bird Johnson have Vietnam business interest? 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. Brown & Root, though, was riding higher than ever thanks to its old political fixer, LBJ, now Kennedys vice president. There was another curious hitch to the Halliburton RIO deal. Im so scared, she said. 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. A strong believer in her husbands political talents, Lady Bird used her own inheritance to fund his early campaigns, and overcame her aversion to public speaking to become one 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. I said, Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be Vice President and now, dear God, its come to this.. Young Claudia Alta Taylor, nicknamed Lady Bird by a nanny (or playmateexactly who isnt certain), was 5 when she lost her mother. 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. We just have to look. 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. There was little doubt about who was going to land the deal. That she was a keen political strategist -- I think the one Lyndon Johnson trusted and confided in most. 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. Johnson Lady Bird Johnson travelled to Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia in 1967. The auditors examined only a single task order in Halliburtons scandal-plagued contract with the Army Corps of Engineers, yet their report lambasted nearly every aspect of the deal, from the no-bid award to the cost-plus nature of the contract to the almost total lack of supervision of the work orders and the subcontractors. During the Vietnam War, Lady Bird woke to hear President Johnson talking to himself in the early-morning darkness. 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. It was a model for things to come. Halliburtons big innovation was something called the Cement Jet Mixer. 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. In 1995, the State Department hit Cheneys Halliburton with a $3.8 million fine for violating the trade embargo with Libya. As a brawny member of the Naval Affair Committee, the ambitious congressman, a key southern supporter of FDRs New Deal and therefore confident of the backing of the White House for almost any pet project, steered as many big contracts to his political financiers as possible. 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. When the oil boom hit Texas, the wildcatters and other drillers quickly began experiencing problems with their deep shafts. 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. 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. 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. 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. Under the initial contract, Halliburton established a plan for housing and feeding 20,000 troops in various hot spots around the globe. how did president johnson profit from the vietnam war 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. Halliburton got a $200 million cost/plus contract to work in Kosovo. 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. Lady Bird Johnson soared as quiet, determined First Lady Jacqueline had a very full life. 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. Julia Sweig is co-executive producer, writer and host of the project. So too was Brown & Roots. diaries reveal Lady Bird Johnson The adventurous and well-read Minnie Taylor died after a fall while pregnant. While Defense Secretary, Cheney defended this kind of military outsourcing as an efficient way to control spiraling costs. Yet, instead of firing of Cheney for this calamitous mistake, the Halliburton board, now ornamented by the rotund figure of former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, awarded its chieftain a $1.5 million bonus for his decisive role in the doomed acquisition. 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. 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. 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. In the first six months of the war, Pentagon auditors estimated that Halliburton had overcharged the US Treasury by at least $61 million for its fuel deliveries. 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. 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. On February 26, 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, a meeting was convened in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon. 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. Like Lady Bird, Nancy served as a mood regulator: She knew how well Reagan could perform when confident and relaxed, and her presence improved his performance. I have heard numerous times over the years Lady Bird Johnson's family were key stockholders in Bell Two years later Saddam hired Halliburton once again. 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. When someone finally leaked the audit to Waxmans office, the documents disclosed a thick wad of Halliburton billings that the Pentagon bookkeepers deemed illogical.. Most notably, Halliburtons US government contracts bulged from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion under Cheneys reign as CEO. The company had essentially written its own job description, a scenario that would make that initial payment mushroom into the billions. It cushioned the blow by awarding Halliburton a $405 million no bid deal to provide support for US troops in Bosnia. (Who else was going to take care of her? 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. 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. Opinion | L.B.J. and the Shadow of Vietnam - New York Times WebEartha Kitt confronts President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. Indeed, a few months earlier Halliburton had already been paid $1.9 million to draft a plan for how to implement RIO. 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. depended but should Ep. Johnsons tapes also capture affectionate moments between him and his wife, Lady Bird. Brown & Root also understood that government contracts are a lot easier to get if you have a politician on retainer. In The Triumph of Nancy Reagan, the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty likewise invokes a teammate without whom her spouse would never have been governor of California, much less president of the United States. 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. Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. 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. These claims eventually totaled something on the order of $5.5 billion, an amount that threatened to bankrupt Halliburton. In late 1963 the North Vietnamese greatly increased supplies of weapons and equipment to the Vietcong and infiltrated regular army units into the South. Some might remember she had a thing for wildflowers and planting them along highways. There were several other companies that could have done the job that was given to Halliburton. The city was well stocked with influential women. In 1992, Halliburton won a $3.9 million contract from the Pentagon in the waning days of the George H.W. It was courtesy of LBJ, and his privileged position in the congress, that Brown & Root got into the Pentagon contracting business in a big way. Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson pose seated atop a fence at their ranch, Johnson City, Texas, 1963. 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. 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. Nearly 40 years ago, Halliburton faced almost identical charges over its work for the U.S. government in Vietnam -- allegations of overcharging, sweetheart contracts 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. But those off-shore subsidiaries werent merely a way of hiding money from corporate auditors, the SEC and the IRS. With the help of his pals Sam Rayburn and Senator Robert Kerr, Johnson, a freshman senator, got himself appointed chairman of the committee overseeing the Federal Power Commission. 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. Ronnie affirmed her through flirtatious quips and love letters; her love language was acts of service, chief among them the act of protection. License granted by Intellectual Properties Management, Atlanta, Georgia, as exclusive licensor of the King estate. For the first time, the Pentagon began to privatize construction and logistics operations during wartime in the war zone. Johnson, however, flew back to Houston the night after his destruction of Olds on a private jet owned by Brown & Root. Thomas Jefferson Taylor II, merchant, philanthropist, and father of Lady Bird Johnson, was born on August 29, 1874, in Autauga County, Alabama, the son of Thomas Jefferson and Emma Louisa (Bates) Taylor. In the fall of 2000, Halliburton won a $300 million contract to build a massive prison at Guatanamo Bay in Cuba. In all a report prepared by the Democratic Policy Committee estimates that Halliburtons overcharges in Iraq alone exceed $1 billion. 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. In her East Wing policy shop, Lady Bird began to build a portfolio of environmental policies, working with Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. Ill never forgive Lyndons boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project, she said. 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. Several of the subcontracts in Iraq were doled out accompanied by the judicious application of cash bribes. This prototype evolved to become the Bell Model 47---the first helicopter to receive FAA Certification. Lady Bird Johnson was a first lady -- but her audio diaries reveal so much more. Over the next few days, precincts across the vast state counted and recounted their votes. 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. The pipeline won the approval of the US Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who would later land a spot on the Halliburton board. From this position, he launched into an onslaught on Olds, smearing the former supporter of Herbert Hoover as a communist who travels with those who proposed the Marxian answer. LBJ, who only a few years earlier had used his political muscle to secure the vast public hydropower projects on the Little Colorado with the goal of providing cheap power to the citizens of the Hill Country, now accused Olds of plotting a course toward confiscation and public ownership. Like many other US companies that choose to turn a blind eye to the regimes more sanginary manifestations, Halliburton had been working in Iraq since the early 1970s, even though the Ford and Carter administrations had both refused to recognize the socialist government. 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. WebAnswer (1 of 10): Lyndon Baines Johnson was arguably the most corrupt President in the history of this country.