did lady bird johnson profit from the vietnam war

Johnson vowed to learn the lessons of his defeat. 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. The major initiative in the Lyndon Johnson presidency was the Vietnam War. Though its not a heart attack, hell still need surgery. Gathered around that table just down the hall from the office Douglas Feith were ranking officials from the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the Pentagon. The company made a cool $500 million from the deal. Why did Lyndon Johnson escalate the conflict 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. 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. Lady Bird Johnson remembers the President's pain over the war. Before La Nouvelle picked up the subcontract to do the laundry at a US military base near Basra, the monthly cleaning bill had averaged around $62,000. 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. He also courted cash from every corporation and mogul he could find, promising to return their investment tenfold. In late 1940s, Halliburton began doing business in Bahrain, followed by an equally lucrative contract with the royal family of Kuwait to manage that kingdoms oil fields. But like his other advisers, she bowed to the inevitability of saying yes and fully entered into the campaign. The cost overruns in Vietnam quickly swelled and soon caught the attention of auditors with the General Accounting Office. Right before our eyes. Its just so cute! exclaimed Jessica Jones, a viewer who entertainingly narrated the viral moment on TikTok. Indeed, a few months earlier Halliburton had already been paid $1.9 million to draft a plan for how to implement RIO. (Who else was going to take care of her? It turns out that there wasnt much for these managers from Houston to manage. And on her return to Washington, a sex scandal involving Lyndons closest aide presents an October surprise that could easily upend the election. Thats because nearly all of Halliburtons work in Iraq was farmed out to subcontractors. The apex political fixer Thomas Tommy the Cork Corcoran later observed that LBJs whole world was built on that dam. 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. Two years later Saddam hired Halliburton once again. 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. Needless to say, this prospect didnt sit well with Halliburton and the consortium of British and American oil companies exploiting Irans petroleum wealth. For example, Halliburton sent the Pentagon a bill for $240 million in dining hall charges for feeding 4,700 troops each day. Halliburtons big innovation was something called the Cement Jet Mixer. 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. 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. With time running out, LBJs lawyers Abe Fortas (whom LBJ ultimately rewarded by putting him on the Supreme Court) and Alvin Wirtz, who was also Brown & Roots lead corporate counsel, arranged a secret meeting with Black in his chambers at the Supreme Court. First lady Lady Bird Johnson is at work seated at her desk in the White House in Washington, D.C., 1964. 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. These claims eventually totaled something on the order of $5.5 billion, an amount that threatened to bankrupt Halliburton. In the spring of 1949, only months after claiming his senate seat, LBJ, the former New Dealer, launched an assault on Leland Olds, the chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Phan Rang, from which US bombers pounded North Vietnam and later Cambodia, gained a little notoriety in December 1967, when Bob Hope brought his Christmas show there featuring a sultry performance by Raquel Welch that nearly caused a riot on the base. Lynda Bird was the first of two daughters born to Lyndon and Claudia Lady Bird Johnson. In fact, the company patriarch, Erle P. Red Halliburton, despised the federal government. Unlike many others in Congress during the 1940s, Johnson wasnt rich. 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. But shes met with open hostility, and worse. A parallel probe was launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission into an admission by Halliburton that one of its managers slipped $2.4 million into the pockets of another Nigerian official in order to secure illegal tax-breaks for its business in the impoverished African nation. 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. In some cases, the pipes would even explode. Altanmia charged Halliburton a hefty $2.65 per gallon, roughly the price charged at the pump in Washington, D.C. LBJ, serving out JFKs term, did not have a VP. On August 19, 1953, the CIA launched its coup. 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. And there it sat. 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. This thread is archived New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast 24K 675 comments In an otherwise scripted and sober ceremony, the shuffle injected a spontaneous note as the second gentleman sought his placenot sure quite what that place was. He got a state judge in Texas to place an injunction against the ballots from Alice. The Army didnt consider it necessary to reveal the terms of the deal, a Pentagon spokesman explained to Reuters. She listened, and she empathized with his agonized decisions. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. 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! For example, the auditors allege that Halliburton simply refused to hand over any information on its subcontractors in Kuwait. 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.. In all a report prepared by the Democratic Policy Committee estimates that Halliburtons overcharges in Iraq alone exceed $1 billion. Both Johnsons knew they had to seize the momentum of the national tragedy and rapidly push through a progressive agenda, which soon became known as the Great Society. 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. More than $1.5 billion of Halliburtons $2.5 billion deal was funded by Iraqi oil sales overseen by the UN. 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. Then in 1999 Halliburton struck gold once again in the Balkans when Clinton went to war against Serbia over Kosovo. Johnson was a sneaky, back slapping, 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) Brown & Root: A Company with a History | History News Brown & Root, though, was riding higher than ever thanks to its old political fixer, LBJ, now Kennedys vice president. She shared his belief in American exceptionalism and defended his policies, digging in as protesters challenged the escalation of the war. Several of the subcontracts in Iraq were doled out accompanied by the judicious application of cash bribes. 1: Fourteen DaysIn her first-ever diary entry, recorded eight days after President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, Lady Bird presents a dramatic, cinematically detailed moment-by-moment account of those terrible hours in Dallas, and the days that follow. Soon there were other summonses from the Middle East. 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. They just arent. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. 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. 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. 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. (A later analysis by Johnson biographer Robert Caro showed that 220 names had been added to the voters list after the polls had closed.). For Johnson, money was the route to political power. 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. At the time of the takeover, Dresser was facing more than 66,000 claims for asbestos-related health problems from its subsidiary Harrison-Walker. It cushioned the blow by awarding Halliburton a $405 million no bid deal to provide support for US troops in Bosnia. Ronnie affirmed her through flirtatious quips and love letters; her love language was acts of service, chief among them the act of protection. 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. Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via. He ran on an anti-union and anti-FDR platform that appealed to rural Texas voters. Nearly 40 years ago, Halliburton faced almost identical charges over its work for the U.S. government in Vietnam -- allegations of overcharging, sweetheart contracts 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. 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. "He had no stomach for it," she told me, "no heart for it; it wasn't the war he wanted. 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. Birds a true believer in progressive causes -- civil rights, environmentalism -- but shes also the product of her own generation and background. 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. Ep. Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy : NPR Lyndon B. Johnson - Election and the Vietnam War | Britannica Best Case Studios' Adam Pincus is executive producer and Anne Carkeet is a producer on the project. Halliburton continues to garner millions from its drilling technology, from Saudi Arabia to the Amazonian rainforest. Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. Soon after Eisenhowers election, Anderson, who had funneled more than $200,000 into the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign, was invited to join the administration as a consultant to the National Security Council. As it happened, Halliburton had a man on the inside to press its case in the person of Dillon Anderson. 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. Halliburton, the signature corporation of the Bush-Cheney onslaught on Iraq, didnt start its corporate life on the government dole. For those flights, the Bush campaign reimbursed Halliburton only the cost of one first class ticket. The Defense Contract Audit Agency report comes on top of previous investigations tagging Halliburton, and its Kellogg, Brown and Root subsidiary, for more than $442 million in unsupported billings for its work in Iraq, including charges for meals that were never served, $45 cases of pop, unnecessary heavy equipment, tailoring fees and $152,000 for movie screenings. Suddenly, it was. Did Lyndon Johnson escalate the Vietnam War for personal profit? After this grilling, Olds was rejected by the senate on a vote of 53-15 and left the government a broken man. He exacted revenge with a bombshell memoir revealing the extent to which the White House schedule was dictated by astrology. 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 Cheney was no mere figurehead. 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.. "California";Written and Performed by Angel Olsen;Courtesy of Angel Olsen, Ribbon Music and Domino Publishing Company of America Inc. "Cross Bones Style;Written by Chan Marshall;Performed by Cat Power;Courtesy of Matador Records, Mattitude Music, LLC and Doorman Music, "Look Out Mama;Written by Alynda Segarra;Performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff;Courtesy of Born to Win Records and BMG, 24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events. Even here Halliburton benefited. 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. Lynda was born on March 19, 1944 in Washington, D.C. 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. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He later served as a key figure on the Bush-Cheney transition team. Again, the race was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court by the intervention of a single justice, Hugo Black. In 1995, Halliburton hired Dick Cheney as its CEO. Pentagon auditors concluded that La Nouvelle was overbilling for its laundry services alone by at least $1 million a month, with Halliburton enjoying its slice of the profits without even having had to break a sweat. Johnson Friend, ally, savior: Revealing LBJ's Jewish ties J.
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