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. But Cheney does have the quaint habit of taking this modesty too far. The tricky part was trying to find the right subcontractor. She came into office in the wake of the JFK assassination. 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. 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. But within a year, the cost had soared to more than $45 million, with Brown & Root pocketing more than $2.4 million in profits. Feeling the urgency, Lady Bird is looking for ways to make beautification have more impact for the people who need it most. It was a political partnership and a powerful one at that. And to purchase an Austin radio station that she probably had a big hand in growing into a very successful media company. Johnson had it a little easier, as his symbiotic relationship with Brown & Root occurred before campaign finance laws required candidates to reveal the sources of their 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. On Election Night 1980, Nancy was taking a bath, not expecting the race to be called before the polls closed in California. 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. 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. When the oil boom hit Texas, the wildcatters and other drillers quickly began experiencing problems with their deep shafts. 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. 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. Halliburton, the signature corporation of the Bush-Cheney onslaught on Iraq, didnt start its corporate life on the government dole. 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. WebLyndon B. Johnson: Foreign Affairs. So let the man use his privilege to shield and protect the woman, an old role deployed for a modern purpose. Johnson bought them in San Antonio and southern Texas, while ODaniel, called the greatest campaigner in Texas history, purchased them throughout east Texas. They began construction on the dam before getting any federal funds and before the feds had actually acquired the land from the state of Texas. Julia Sweig is an award-winning author, scholar and entrepreneur. 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. Never say that Brown & Root wasnt grateful. For example, the auditors allege that Halliburton simply refused to hand over any information on its subcontractors in Kuwait. 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. So she swam laps and hiked.) The former majority leaders power shrank while Lady Birds official ambit expanded to include public appearances, both on the campaign trail, where she stood in for a pregnant Jackie Kennedy, and as second lady. At the time of the takeover, Dresser was facing more than 66,000 claims for asbestos-related health problems from its subsidiary Harrison-Walker. The deal was worth $2 billion. (There was also yellow, for iffy ones.) 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. 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. In the immediate wake of the Dresser acquisition, Cheney fired 10,000 of the companys employees. Of course, Cheney did deliver some morsels for the shareholders. The wife, your wife, is the most important asset youll have, he declared. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.netor on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. A later probe found that the company had bought the plywood for $14 per sheet. The money was delivered in $100 bills stuffed into grocery bags. 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. 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. Witness Cheneys disastrous decision to acquire Dresser Industries, another oil services and engineering company. Needless to say, this prospect didnt sit well with Halliburton and the consortium of British and American oil companies exploiting Irans petroleum wealth. Working together, LBJ and Thomas convinced the Navy to give Brown & Root a lucrative shipbuilding contract, even though, as investigative reporter Robert Bryce notes, up until that point the company had never built so much as a canoe.. And then there was NR v Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff she managed to oust after much mutual combat. The vice president demurred, as if the very name of the company was unfamiliar to him. In 1999, Cheney urged Lopez to leave the Pentagon and join Halliburton. Lynda was born on March 19, 1944 in Washington, D.C. A GAO investigation also revealed that Halliburton was billing the Pentagon for cleaning offices in US bases the Balkans four times a day. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? 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. The bagman was none other than John Connolly, the future governor of Texas and Halliburton board member. Johnson was a sneaky, back slapping, Ronnie affirmed her through flirtatious quips and love letters; her love language was acts of service, chief among them the act of protection. 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. From the October 1980 issue: Looking at Reagan, Nancys wary nature did have its upsides, which Tumulty emphasizes. 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. 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. Even the Pentagons own team of auditors, who nailed Halliburton red-handed for bilking the government for $108.4 million in overcharges for only one task order of its work in Iraq, found their report languishing in a kind of bureaucratic netherland for many months. LBJs ambush of Olds was scripted by none other than Brown & Roots lawyer, Alvin Wirtz. Particularly involved in the War on Poverty, Lady Bird braved the consequences of the entire mission: The first presidential wife to act as a true surrogate, she made a whistle-stop tour of the South during the 1964 contestnot just his advocate, but his protector. Ep. Ep. Halliburton would continue to work on a variety of projects in Iraq right up until the first Gulf War. 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. The pipeline won the approval of the US Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who would later land a spot on the Halliburton board. Julia Sweig is co-executive producer, writer and host of the project. 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. 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. 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. She was quick to suspect that aides might be serving their own interests before hisand she wasnt always wrong. Halliburton, which employed thousands of foreign-born subcontractors, even went so far as to operate segregated dining facilities and Americans Only bathrooms. And so it came to pass. The company had gone into debt by more than $1.5 million in order to purchase the equipment needed to build the dam. It was an early lesson in the demented logic of Pentagon contracting: the bigger the cost-overruns, the juicier the profits. Right before our eyes. 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. depended but should Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. 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. Johnson also prevailed upon the Bell Helicopter Company, which would soon relocate to Texas, to loan him a chopper for his campaign. It simply passed the bills on to the Pentagon and cashed its reimbursement checks, complete with the 4 percent government gratuity. During the Vietnam War, Lady Bird woke to hear President Johnson talking to himself in the early-morning darkness. Its just so cute! exclaimed Jessica Jones, a viewer who entertainingly narrated the viral moment on TikTok. For her part, Lady Bird discovered that marriage promised her broader horizons than the teaching job she had envisioned. Cheney pursued a company that no one else really wanted and to compound his blunder he paid an outrageous price for it. On September 29, 1948, Black came through. Did lady bird Johnson travel to Vietnam during the war? His distaste for Uncle Sam was matched only by his ferocious hatred of Mexicans, blacks and labor unionists. She and Nancys feckless biological father had effectively separated before their daughter was born; in early girlhood, Nancy was lodged with an aunt and uncle while her mother sought gigs. Anderson was a partner in the Houston law firm of Baker Botts, the family firm of James A. Baker, III, which had represented Halliburton for many years. 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. Johnsons tapes also capture affectionate moments between him and his wife, Lady Bird. It is startling to realize that, for the 14 months from November 1963 to January 1965, Lady Bird Johnson effectively was the vice president. But those off-shore subsidiaries werent merely a way of hiding money from corporate auditors, the SEC and the IRS. Victoria Thompson and Eric Johnson are executive producers and Suzie Liu is a producer with ABC News. 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. But like his other advisers, she bowed to the inevitability of saying yes and fully entered into the campaign. LBJ, serving out JFKs term, did not have a VP. For those flights, the Bush campaign reimbursed Halliburton only the cost of one first class ticket. Halliburton continues to garner millions from its drilling technology, from Saudi Arabia to the Amazonian rainforest. 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, Halliburton won the 5-year renewal of this deal, valued at $180 million. What had suddenly looked like a sure thing, now found Brown & Root on the unnerving verge of bankruptcy. She shared his belief in American exceptionalism and defended his policies, digging in as protesters challenged the escalation of the war. Jacqueline had a very full life. Hunt and Sid Richardson. That she understood early on that the Vietnam War might well destroy her husbands presidency. Nearly 40 years ago, Halliburton faced almost identical charges over its work for the U.S. government in Vietnam -- allegations of overcharging, sweetheart contracts For example, Halliburton sent the Pentagon a bill for $240 million in dining hall charges for feeding 4,700 troops each day. The 1948 election needed to be both bought and stolen. In her East Wing policy shop, Lady Bird began to build a portfolio of environmental policies, working with Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. But even the Clinton administration showed mercy to the Republican firm. 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. He proposed at the end of their first date, then launched a full-court press until she yielded after 10 weeks. 2: Thank You, Mrs. Vice PresidentThere are moments in Lady Birds audio diaries that truly re-write the known history of LBJ's presidency. A pungent example: A team of French investigators unearthed a robust Swiss bank account harboring $5 million, which reportedly derived from bribes involving Halliburton contracts in Nigeria. Nearly every other venture racked up huge levels of debt and legal liabilities. 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. On February 26, 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, a meeting was convened in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon. They owned a few congressmen, but an obedient senator was the key to a higher order of riches. 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. Mossadegh was arrested and thrown in to jail and Reza Pahlavi was re-installed on the Peacock Throne as the Shah of Iran. Astrology was a compulsion, and the attempted assassination of her husband traumatized her, understandably, leading to even more hypervigilance. License granted by Intellectual Properties Management, Atlanta, Georgia, as exclusive licensor of the King estate. They hated to spend nights apart, and famously (or infamously) called each other Mommie and Daddy. They were quite literally laundering money. 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. He got a state judge in Texas to place an injunction against the ballots from Alice. 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. He rewarded him with the plum position of vice president for governmental operations-in other words, Halliburtons top lobbyist. After this grilling, Olds was rejected by the senate on a vote of 53-15 and left the government a broken man. He destroyed the man in a set of hearings that would lay the groundwork for the show trials of the McCarthy era. Two years later Saddam hired Halliburton once again. First lady Lady Bird Johnson is at work seated at her desk in the White House in Washington, D.C., 1964. And she finds inspiration and an unlikely collaborator in San Francisco. A little more than a week after having arrived in DC, the freshly hatched congressman had engineered congressional approval for both the appropriation and the land purchase. By the end of March 2005, more than 65 Halliburton employees had been killed in Iraq and more than 200 injuredthe most of any private contractor in the war zone. He was soon in demand across the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma. 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. I said, Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be Vice President and now, dear God, its come to this.. 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. In the late winter of 1937, the imperious Texas Congressman James P. Bucky Buchanan, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, suddenly died in office. LBJ also enjoyed free access to a DC3, courtesy of Brown & Root, which would rush him across the vast Texan plains for as many as 10 appearances in a single day. 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. Only six months into the occupation of Iraq, Halliburtons fleets of trucks began to breakdown due to lack of spare parts and shoddy upkeep. For Johnson, money was the route to political power. 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. Some might remember she had a thing for wildflowers and planting them along highways. And there it sat. This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIRs forthcoming book, Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage, 2005). 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. 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. As the polls closed in the Texas senate race of 1948, the margin was razor thin, with Coke Stevenson running slightly ahead of LBJ. Halliburtons big innovation was something called the Cement Jet Mixer. With the outbreak of the prolonged Iran/Iraq, those oil terminals, Iraqs main source of getting its crude to global markets, were hit time and time again by Iranian saboteurs. President Johnson profited from the Vietnam War in many ways. 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. Then an unexpected thing happened. 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.
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