The NSC, with judicious prodding from Dillon Anderson, quickly sanctioned a CIA plan, devised by Kermit Roosevelt, to overthrow Mossadegh. The Army didnt consider it necessary to reveal the terms of the deal, a Pentagon spokesman explained to Reuters. And it made me think: How many other women are in plain sight, women in powerful positions and many more unseen women whose stories likewise make up the fabric of who we are and who we will become as a society. In 1973, Halliburton won a $120 million contract to build Iraqs two mammoth oil terminals in the Persian Gulf off the coast from Umm Qasr. Lady Bird Johnson greets supporters during a westward trip while campaigning for her husband Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential bid, in 1964. Young Claudia Alta Taylor, nicknamed Lady Bird by a nanny (or playmateexactly who isnt certain), was 5 when she lost her mother. The Corpus Christi deal initiated Brown & Root into the risk-free fraternity of favored Pentagon contractors. 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. Two years later Saddam hired Halliburton once again. Even congress was denied a peak at the reports findings until mid-March 2005. Once again, Johnson faced a popular and reactionary governor for the Texas senate seat, vacated when Pappy ODaniel (grew bored of living in DC. 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. 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. Johnson was a sneaky, back slapping, And listen. All of this got LBJ close, but quite not close enough, to assure him of an outright victory. (You had to be wary of her, Ron said.) As our vision of high-level political partnership gets a reboot (the first-ever first lady whos not giving up her career, the first-ever second gentleman), it seems a good time to recall just how undefined the role of unelected spouse has been.
Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and their connections to Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. Brown & Root, though, was riding higher than ever thanks to its old political fixer, LBJ, now Kennedys vice president. She was quick to suspect that aides might be serving their own interests before hisand she wasnt always wrong. Lady Bird decides to use the opportunity to launch a full PR blitz to take her message to America. Lady Bird Johnson (born December 22, 1912) is famous for being political wife. He later served as a key figure on the Bush-Cheney transition team. Johnson, however, flew back to Houston the night after his destruction of Olds on a private jet owned by Brown & Root. LBJ was pronounced the winner of the primary by 87 votes and then went on to crush his Republican opponent in November. 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. Altanmia charged Halliburton a hefty $2.65 per gallon, roughly the price charged at the pump in Washington, D.C. The civil rights movement is confronting a violent backlash, especially in the South, and despite LBJs public stance, Lady Bird knows they have a small war on our hands in Vietnam. The fraying of the social contract the Johnsons were so vital in knitting together 50 years ago. The company had essentially written its own job description, a scenario that would make that initial payment mushroom into the billions. Then more ballots mysteriously materialized, and ODaniel claimed victory by 1,311 votes. 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. The LOGCAP deal was sanctioned by none other than Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. 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. Kitt's defence of America's young soldiers elicits tears from the First Lady and results in the CIA opening a dossier on her. 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. No, and he even lost his job because of the Vietnam War. As LBJ said, Finally, I was a millionaire. The wife, your wife, is the most important asset youll have, he declared. Lyndon Johnson belonged to a generation of men who regarded sex as a perk of power. 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.. 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. More than $1.5 billion of Halliburtons $2.5 billion deal was funded by Iraqi oil sales overseen by the UN. 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. 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. But no.
The Candidate from Brown and Root - The Texas Observer A few months after La Nouvelle took over, the tab soared to $1.2 million a month. Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. In 1995, the State Department hit Cheneys Halliburton with a $3.8 million fine for violating the trade embargo with Libya. 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. 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. And then the company and the Pentagon sought to hide the evidence of these overchages from the international auditors.. The resulting media backlash, fueled by the White House PR machine, is swift and brutal, effectively derailing Kitts career for decades to come. 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. 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. 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. But forswearing potentially polarizing talk of urban renewal and land stewardship, Lady Bird spoke of beautification, though she had mixed feelings about the word. 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. 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. He also was able to increase his wealth through various business deals and investments. In the late winter of 1937, the imperious Texas Congressman James P. Bucky Buchanan, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, suddenly died in office. 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. 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.
TSHA | Taylor, Thomas Jefferson II Several of the subcontracts in Iraq were doled out accompanied by the judicious application of cash bribes. 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. How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands ambitionsand their own. On Election Night 1980, Nancy was taking a bath, not expecting the race to be called before the polls closed in California. Some staffers, like James Baker, understood her influence and made a point of getting along. 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. He also courted cash from every corporation and mogul he could find, promising to return their investment tenfold. 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. 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. His distaste for Uncle Sam was matched only by his ferocious hatred of Mexicans, blacks and labor unionists. 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 the Democratic primary, Stevenson steamrollered Johnson by more than 70,000 votes; yet in a crowded field, the governor didnt top 50 per cent, forcing a run-off election in the fall.
how did president johnson profit from the vietnam war 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. A later probe found that the company had bought the plywood for $14 per sheet. During World War II and Korea, Brown & Root made billions building bases and ships in the US. Instead, Lt. General Strock steered the cost-plus contract into Halliburtons hands without the faintest whiff of competition. But shes met with open hostility, and worse. 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. This article was published online on April 20, 2021. 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 and The Triumph of Nancy Reagan: Review The auditors report accuses Halliburton of misleading the government inspectors at nearly every turn. Its just so cute! exclaimed Jessica Jones, a viewer who entertainingly narrated the viral moment on TikTok. I have heard numerous times over the years Lady Bird Johnson's family were key stockholders in Bell
Opinion | L.B.J. and the Shadow of Vietnam - New York Times Once again, it didnt take LBJ long to pay back his political investors with interest. Ep. If I asked, say, a few hundred people anywhere over 25 or 30 years old, its a good bet theyd know a few things. 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. First lady Lady Bird Johnson is at work seated at her desk in the White House in Washington, D.C., 1964. They figured he could do them less damage in Washington. 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 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. So little doubt, in fact, that a Halliburton executive had been invited to attend the secret conclave. 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. 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.
Friend, ally, savior: Revealing LBJ's Jewish ties J. Call it the Oil-for-Contracts scandal. In 1943, Larry Bell who owned Bell Aerospace was convinced of a helicopter design after seeing a remote controlled model built and flown by Arthur Young. 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. This contract was to prove immensely profitable over the next three war-plagued decades.
The most surprising moments from LBJs secretly recorded calls Over the next 25 years, the company cashed in on more than $10 billion in contracts with Iran. ABC News will kick off Womens History Month with its new podcast "In Plain Sight," co-produced with Best Case Studios and hosted by author Julia Sweig. Some might remember she had a thing for wildflowers and planting them along highways. The first two episodes of the eight-part series will debut on Monday, March 1. Julia Sweig is co-executive producer, writer and host of the project.
Three New Revelations About 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. 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. 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. But Johnsons Vietnam War forever changed the role of Pentagon contractors, and Halliburtons Brown & Root subsidiary lead the way. 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. Unlike her conflict-averse husband, she played the ruthless enforcer, conducting feuds and engineering firings. It simply passed the bills on to the Pentagon and cashed its reimbursement checks, complete with the 4 percent government gratuity. At least he didnt see himself that way. The final fix may have been made by a cabal of Texas oil men and ranchers who wanted ODaniel out of Austin.
Why did Lyndon Johnson escalate the conflict It was a political partnership and a powerful one at that. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon used Iraqi oil proceeds to overpay Halliburton, says Waxman. 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. Someday, a first gentleman will be called upon to match that care and dedication. It was a medium size construction company in Texas. In some cases, the pipes would even explode. With the bulk of the Pentagon contracts cashed in and government investigators closing in on all fronts, Halliburton placed Kellogg, Brown & Root on the market, looking to squeeze one final payout from its golden goose. Theres no more pungent symbol of the corrupt nature of the Bush administrations invasion and occupation of Iraq than Halliburton, the Houston, Texas-based oil services conglomerate, which has made billions from the war even in the face of charges of massive overbilling, shoddy work, official bribery and political influence-peddling. 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 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. The company that had prospered through the Great Depression thanks to federal dam projects was poised to make a killing from World War II, with most of the deal coming courtesy of the US Navy and its congressional overlord LBJ and the powerful congressman from Houston, Albert Thomas. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). 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. Victoria Thompson and Eric Johnson are executive producers and Suzie Liu is a producer with ABC News. LBJs ambush of Olds was scripted by none other than Brown & Roots lawyer, Alvin Wirtz. It was an early lesson in the demented logic of Pentagon contracting: the bigger the cost-overruns, the juicier the profits. Bob Gomel/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. 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. Ep. LBJ, serving out JFKs term, did not have a VP. 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. License granted by CSK Legacy, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia, as exclusive licensor of Coretta Scott King's estate. In 1967, a GAO report on Halliburtons operations in Vietnam skewered the company for abandoning normal management controls and for wasting millions of dollars. Bell set-up a design shop in Garden Park, NY where the first Bell Helicopter was built. 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. Most notably, Halliburtons US government contracts bulged from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion under Cheneys reign as CEO. She shared his belief in American exceptionalism and defended his policies, digging in as protesters challenged the escalation of the war. Shes a presidents wife. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. Finally, he was able to use the war to further his political career and gain more control over the government. Not my thing. The 1948 election needed to be both bought and stolen. (Who else was going to take care of her? At this ex parte conclave, Wirtz impressed upon Black the importance of LBJs election to the senate, saying that many New Deal programs (he presunmably did not mention the gross topic of Pentagon contracts) hinged on the outcome. As The Washington Posts White House correspondent during the Reagan years, Lou Cannon, notes in a biography of the president, for all her talent for turmoil, Nancy became a force for peace within the White House., Tumulty writes about the power that comes with intimacythe influence of the companion who is there in moments public and private, high and lowand some of the most arresting scenes in both books capture drama unfolding in pajamas, or not even. From May 2003 to March 2004, Halliburton sent the Corps of Engineers bills totalling more than $875 million for supplies of fuel to US operations in Iraq. 6: BlindsidedBy the mid-60s, you can hear a growing distance between Lady Bird and the protest movement thats sweeping the country. 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 Brown & Root Company shared Halliburtons antipathy toward organized labor, but realized early on that there was a fortune to be made through outsourced government work. In 1962, Herman Brown died and his brother, George, began searching for possible corporate suitors who might take over the company. But even the Clinton administration showed mercy to the Republican firm. This prototype evolved to become the Bell Model 47---the first helicopter to receive FAA Certification. WebPresident Johnson and his advisers were and risk nuclear war in the interests of capitalist profit. But you didnt hear daily drumbeats about the outrageous rip-off on FoxNews. 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. She was replaced as first lady by Lyndon Johnson's wife, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy as president. If theyve read any of the LBJ histories, they might remember that she used her inheritance to finance Lyndons first congressional campaign.
Bird Johnson 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. As the war drew to a close, Brown & Root went from building ships to melting more than 20,000 surplus airplanes they bought on the cheap from the War Assets Administration. 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. They just arent. The tricky part was trying to find the right subcontractor. Plus American exclusion, Zoom justice, Andrew Yang, puberty TV, first ladies, giant closets, and more. Im so scared, she said. But the most majestic profits, as always, were to be made during wartime and LBJ gave them a big one. 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.. Cheney pursued a company that no one else really wanted and to compound his blunder he paid an outrageous price for it. The purpose of this conclave was to devise a project that would come to be known as RIO or Restore Iraq Oil. Why? 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. There was another curious hitch to the Halliburton RIO deal. It is estimated that 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. The centerpiece of this enterprise was the Marshall Ford Dam outside Austin and the company that had won the contract to build the dam was none other than Brown & Root. Of course, the deal had sublime benefits for the Clinton administration as well. She doesnt really like dealing with women, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver noted, in an understatement. Each time they were bombed, Halliburton was called in to repair the damage. Old hands at Halliburton remember Cheney as arrogant and inept, a clumsy autocrat. 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. Lady Bird Johnson isnt exactly an obscure figure in the life of the nation. 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. 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. The initial price-tag was pegged at $23.5 million, with Brown & Root guaranteed a profit of $1.2 million. The city was well stocked with influential women. And she finds inspiration and an unlikely collaborator in San Francisco. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. His term expired in 1948, and Harry Truman had just announced his intention to reappoint him to the position, enraging the oil and gas industry. 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. 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. 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. For Nancy Reagan, we meant a combative us-against-them partnership that betrayed a different kind of insecurity, Tumultys biography suggests. Recovering in the hospital, Lyndon is once again gripped by crippling anxiety and depression and this time it threatens his presidency. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson pose seated atop a fence at their ranch, Johnson City, Texas, 1963. So let the man use his privilege to shield and protect the woman, an old role deployed for a modern purpose. 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. 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. We just have to look.
Vietnam: What really happened between Eartha Kitt and