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This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). Did Lyndon Johnson escalate the Vietnam War for personal profit? Julia Sweig's fourth book, "Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight" comes out March 16, 2021 from Random House. The steel pipe funneling the oil up from the Permian basin and other reservoirs of crude would sooner or later develop cracks, allowing groundwater to contaminate the crude. LBJ lived up to his obligations. 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. Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. But just as their most ambitious, controversial project is about to get underway, tragedy strikes. Over the next 25 years, the company cashed in on more than $10 billion in contracts with Iran. If theyve read any of the LBJ histories, they might remember that she used her inheritance to finance Lyndons first congressional campaign. Halliburton agreed to acquire Brown & Root for the bargain basement price of $36.7 million, far below the market value of the company. Lady Bird Johnson greets supporters during a westward trip while campaigning for her husband Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential bid, in 1964. 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. As Halliburton executives and managers dispensed and received millions in kickbacks, the company itself simply wrote the dispensations directly onto the invoices submitted by the subcontractors. In the late winter of 1937, the imperious Texas Congressman James P. Bucky Buchanan, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, suddenly died in office. Johnson vowed to learn the lessons of his defeat. Vietnam: What really happened between Eartha Kitt and Halliburton spent more than $73 million a year just to house its executives in Kuwaitthats $73 million a year billed to the Pentagon, plus a two percent profit tacked on for good measure. 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. 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. At a time when the National Press Club barred female reporters, the Womens National Press Club provided a home for the citys contingent. I have no financial interests in Halliburton of any kind, Cheney said flatly. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight at the best online prices at eBay! They owned a few congressmen, but an obedient senator was the key to a higher order of riches. Born in 1912 and 1921, respectively, Lady Bird and Nancy both belonged to a generation sandwiched between two feminist movements. When the oil boom hit Texas, the wildcatters and other drillers quickly began experiencing problems with their deep shafts. Of that She recalled his sleepless musings in her diary: I dont want to get in a war and I dont see any way out of it. Shes on her way to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to talk to a group of privileged conservationists about the need to bring access to nature to the inner city, when Lyndon has another health scare. 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. 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.. 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. In the fall of 2000, Halliburton won a $300 million contract to build a massive prison at Guatanamo Bay in Cuba. In a way then, its not surprising that Cheneys official biography, posted on the White Houses website, forsakes all mention of his career as the commander-in-chief of Halliburton. 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. There was another curious hitch to the Halliburton RIO deal. Johnsons tapes also capture affectionate moments between him and his wife, Lady Bird. But Cheney does have the quaint habit of taking this modesty too far. Welcome to the club, any number of women might have told him. 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 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. Ep. First ladies? But like his other advisers, she bowed to the inevitability of saying yes and fully entered into the campaign. When the price gouging by Altanmia began to draw the attention of Pentagon auditors, the US Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the contracts, came up with an elegant solution. 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. 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 auditors report accuses Halliburton of misleading the government inspectors at nearly every turn. They were soon one of the big players in the aluminum business, much of which they sold right back to the feds, making tens of millions in profits. 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. 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 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. Brown & Root: A Company with a History | History News When his own contract auditors objected, Strock sought to silence them by saying he had determined that the compelling emergency in Iraq dictated swift and unilateral action. This time his opponent was Coke Stevenson, rancher, bigot and anti-communist. Return the national parks to the tribes, how well remember the pandemic, a kidnapping gone wrong, and the women reinventing the Western. A similar investigation by the Department of Justice was launched in 2004 into Halliburtons operations in the second-leg of the axis of evil, Iran. 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. Of course, Cheney didnt wrest these deals from the feds alone. That her thing about flowers was really a cover for a pretty radical environmentalism. 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. We hear about the decade-long relationship between the two of them, one that dates back to the Kennedys arrival in Washington in the mid-50s, and hear fascinating observations these women make about each other. 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.. WebLyndon Johnson. 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. In 2003, he was asked about his financial ties to Halliburton. On a trip to two New England colleges to give speeches supporting their new environmental studies programs, Lady Bird is confronted by outspoken dissent from both students and faculty who walk out of her speeches, picket her presence and circulate letters denouncing the war in Vietnam. They were quite literally laundering money. The spot was sunny, safe and expensive. Lyndon Johnson belonged to a generation of men who regarded sex as a perk of power. As the first and second couples moved to ascend the Capitol steps, Emhoff stood to her left; changed his mind and dashed to her right; then sort of bobbled, hesitating, before settling at her left. 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. This contract was to prove immensely profitable over the next three war-plagued decades. 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