The money was delivered in $100 bills stuffed into grocery bags. (A later analysis by Johnson biographer Robert Caro showed that 220 names had been added to the voters list after the polls had closed.). 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. Halliburton charged the US Army $85.98 for each sheet of plywood it used in construction projects during Clintons war on Serbia and its aftermath. For example, the auditors allege that Halliburton simply refused to hand over any information on its subcontractors in Kuwait. 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. Three New Revelations About 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. There was little doubt about who was going to land the deal. 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. It informed Halliburton that the company no longer had to submit a public record of the fuel purchases. For this task order alone, the Pentagon auditors estimated that Halliburton overbilled the government by at least $108.4 million. In the end, the Naval Air Station cost the Pentagon more than $125 million. 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. Then in 1999 Halliburton struck gold once again in the Balkans when Clinton went to war against Serbia over Kosovo. The first two episodes of the eight-part series will debut on Monday, March 1. 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. For Johnson, the decision to continue the Vietnam commitment followed the path of his predecessors. He was committed to maintaining an independent South Vietnam and to achieving success in Southeast Asia. Why did Lyndon Johnson escalate the conflict She listened, and she empathized with his agonized decisions. Unlike her conflict-averse husband, she played the ruthless enforcer, conducting feuds and engineering firings. Over the next five years, the contracts would fatten to more than $2 billion. 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. 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. The justice issued an order overturning the state judges injunction and also put the brakes on a parallel investigation into vote fraud in Jim Wells County. Though its not a heart attack, hell still need surgery. He destroyed the man in a set of hearings that would lay the groundwork for the show trials of the McCarthy era. 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. And so it came to pass. 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. It is estimated that 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. 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. It is startling to realize that, for the 14 months from November 1963 to January 1965, Lady Bird Johnson effectively was the vice president. The company had gone into debt by more than $1.5 million in order to purchase the equipment needed to build the dam. A few months after La Nouvelle took over, the tab soared to $1.2 million a month. Welcome to the club, any number of women might have told him. 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. But the most majestic profits, as always, were to be made during wartime and LBJ gave them a big one. This article was published online on April 20, 2021. 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. We tend to date a modern shift to 1992, when Bill Clinton proposed a two-for-the-price-of-one presidency with Hillary. Bush administration to a develop a scheme for outsourcing to private corporations much of the logistics and construction work previously handled by the US Army Corps of Engineers. On August 19, 1953, the CIA launched its coup. 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. The major initiative in the Lyndon Johnson presidency was the Vietnam War. They owned a few congressmen, but an obedient senator was the key to a higher order of riches. They were quite literally laundering money. LBJ had the good fortune to land on the congressional committee overseeing the operations of the US Navy as it prepared for World War II. 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. He and Lady Bird fretted about money during the early years of their marriage. This single invoice amounted to an overcharge of more than 335 times the value of the liquified natural gas delivered by Halliburtons subcontractors. No, and he even lost his job because of the Vietnam War. How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands ambitionsand their own. A later probe found that the company had bought the plywood for $14 per sheet. Halliburtons big innovation was something called the Cement Jet Mixer. Okay, the Pentagon learned a billion-dollar lesson the hard way, right? It was an early lesson in the demented logic of Pentagon contracting: the bigger the cost-overruns, the juicier the profits. He later served as a key figure on the Bush-Cheney transition team. Nancys mother, Edie Davis, was a stage actor whose glamorous social life included Spencer Tracy and Mary Martin. But I went ahead and talked about wildflowers so as not to scare anybody, because I knew if the people came to love wildflowers theyd have to eventually care about the land that grew em., From the July 1973 issue: The last days of the president. So let the man use his privilege to shield and protect the woman, an old role deployed for a modern purpose. It was a medium size construction company in Texas. On Olds advice, Truman had vetoed a bill that would have deregulated the natural gas industry. By outsourcing most of the logistics work in Kosovo, the Pentagon was able to reduce its deployment by around 8,000 troops, helping Clinton and Albright to sell an unpopular war at home. In the ever-expanding universe of Pentagon contracting, cost is never the problem, public exposure is. Only six months into the occupation of Iraq, Halliburtons fleets of trucks began to breakdown due to lack of spare parts and shoddy upkeep. But just as their most ambitious, controversial project is about to get underway, tragedy strikes. On Monday, May 16, 1966, John Steinbeck and his 19 year-old son, John, visited President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office of the White House. He moved to Texas in the mid-1890s and opened a store in Karnack, Harrison County. Never say that Brown & Root wasnt grateful. 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. 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. There was another curious hitch to the Halliburton RIO deal. Nearly every other venture racked up huge levels of debt and legal liabilities. 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. Vietnams legacy may loom over Lyndon B. Johnsons family, but not as much as it loomed over the hundreds of thousands of soldiers sent to that country with 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. At a time when the National Press Club barred female reporters, the Womens National Press Club provided a home for the citys contingent. 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. Amid this turmoil, Lady Birds ideas about her own work are changing -- what started as planting flowers in underserved DC neighborhoods is growing into an agenda that brings environmentalism and social justice together in Americas cities. In fact, the company patriarch, Erle P. Red Halliburton, despised the federal government. Johnson Far from being the path toward a leaner military, the General Accounting Office pegged the LOGCAP program as an adventure in high risk government spending.. Still, tandem toil was one thing; staking out too much terrain for herself was another. Plus American exclusion, Zoom justice, Andrew Yang, puberty TV, first ladies, giant closets, and more. Apparently, Halliburton views these kickbacks and bribes as a kind of a priori cost of doing business across the globe. In 1919, Red Halliburton started the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company from his home in Wilson, Oklahoma, a hardscrabble town in the oil patch. 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. War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq - CounterPunch.org 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. Over the next few days, precincts across the vast state counted and recounted their votes. There were several other companies that could have done the job that was given to Halliburton.