For example, the auditors allege that Halliburton simply refused to hand over any information on its subcontractors in Kuwait. The result was not just a slow down in the delivery of fuel and military supplies, but a greatly enhanced risk to the lives of Halliburtons drivers, who were becoming easily identifiable targets for the growing insurgency in Iraq. 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. This time his opponent was Coke Stevenson, rancher, bigot and anti-communist. Each time they were bombed, Halliburton was called in to repair the damage. In 1965, Halliburton formed a consortium with the Idaho-based firm Morrison-Knudsen to manage big construction projects for the Pentagon in Vietnam. But shes met with open hostility, and worse. Victoria Thompson and Eric Johnson are executive producers and Suzie Liu is a producer with ABC News. 6: BlindsidedBy the mid-60s, you can hear a growing distance between Lady Bird and the protest movement thats sweeping the country. 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. 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. 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. 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. Nearly 40 years ago, Halliburton faced almost identical charges over its work for the U.S. government in Vietnam -- allegations of overcharging, sweetheart contracts Though its not a heart attack, hell still need surgery. Her motivation was not to expand her own portfolio: She wanted only to promote her husbands well-being and success, ferociously tending him and his image. 2: Thank You, Mrs. Vice PresidentThere are moments in Lady Birds audio diaries that truly re-write the known history of LBJ's presidency. 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. 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. The Browns were furious at Oldss rulings and pleaded with Johnson to defeat his renomination. In fact, the contract was secretly handed to Halliburton in May, but the Pentagon kept it underwraps for more than a month. There was another curious hitch to the Halliburton RIO deal. 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 The wife, your wife, is the most important asset youll have, he declared. Johnson also prevailed upon the Bell Helicopter Company, which would soon relocate to Texas, to loan him a chopper for his campaign. His distaste for Uncle Sam was matched only by his ferocious hatred of Mexicans, blacks and labor unionists. 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. He helped me get out. Kennedy was the first president to approve the sale of But Johnsons Vietnam War forever changed the role of Pentagon contractors, and Halliburtons Brown & Root subsidiary lead the way. For Nancy Reagan, we meant a combative us-against-them partnership that betrayed a different kind of insecurity, Tumultys biography suggests. Birds a true believer in progressive causes -- civil rights, environmentalism -- but shes also the product of her own generation and background. 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.. In the late winter of 1937, the imperious Texas Congressman James P. Bucky Buchanan, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, suddenly died in office. Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via. In a way, this meeting in the bowels of the Pentagon was all for show, a kind of mating ritual between the government and its favorite contractor. The episode tracks the 14 days from the murder of the president to when the Johnsons move into the White House, days filled with tragic ceremony and heartfelt moments of solidarity between Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird. Nancys mother, Edie Davis, was a stage actor whose glamorous social life included Spencer Tracy and Mary Martin. WebJacqueline did not remain first lady. License granted by CSK Legacy, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia, as exclusive licensor of Coretta Scott King's estate. At the time of the takeover, Dresser was facing more than 66,000 claims for asbestos-related health problems from its subsidiary Harrison-Walker. He and Lady Bird fretted about money during the early years of their marriage. The company had gone into debt by more than $1.5 million in order to purchase the equipment needed to build the dam. And shes rightit was. And that although she took personal risks to campaign in the south for civil rights, she couldnt quite figure out what to make of Black protests in American cities or dissent against the war. Halliburton would continue to work on a variety of projects in Iraq right up until the first Gulf War. The congressman, who controlled the federal purse, was in the midst of pushing through congress the Lower Colorado River Project, a scheme to build a network of dams across the Texas hill country that would bring water to the people and millions in federal funds to favored contractors. 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. Ballot boxes were bought by both campaigns. As for LBJ, he later said that Wirtz was like a daddy to me. 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. Im sort of an archive geek, so when I heard that Lady Bird had recorded her own White House tapes, the idea of getting to know her and her story didnt sound so far-fetched. Worldly and colorful, even late in life, Edie was not above using a word like cocksucker (in this case, to describe Barry Goldwater). But those off-shore subsidiaries werent merely a way of hiding money from corporate auditors, the SEC and the IRS. Kitt's defence of America's young soldiers elicits tears from the First Lady and results in the CIA opening a dossier on her. He proposed at the end of their first date, then launched a full-court press until she yielded after 10 weeks. When it came time to select a space for its corporate offices to oversee the new Iraq contracts, Halliburton decided not to bunker down inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. 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. Feeling the urgency, Lady Bird is looking for ways to make beautification have more impact for the people who need it most. In 1999, Cheney urged Lopez to leave the Pentagon and join Halliburton. Then in 1995, at the same time Cheney was taking over the reins at Halliburton, the Pentagon handed the company a $550 million contract to provide logistical support for US and NATOs IFOR forces in Bosnia, Croatia and Hungry. Speaking of Halliburtons logistics work for the Pentagon in the Balkans, Cheney said, the first person to greet our soldiers as they arrive and the last one to wave good-bye is one our employees. Halliburton: the Alpha and Omega of Pentagon contractors. And that throughout it all, she was a journalist and historian in her own right, as her tapes clearly demonstrate. Of course, the acquisition of Brown & Root had another great advantage for Halliburton. The unusually frank assessment accused Halliburton of undocumented cost overruns totaling tens of millions of dollars and generally poor performance.. 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. 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. 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. A strong believer in her husbands political talents, Lady Bird used her own inheritance to fund his early campaigns, and overcame her aversion to public speaking to become one Over the next few days, precincts across the vast state counted and recounted their votes. It cushioned the blow by awarding Halliburton a $405 million no bid deal to provide support for US troops in Bosnia. It simply passed the bills on to the Pentagon and cashed its reimbursement checks, complete with the 4 percent government gratuity. He was able to increase his power and influence both domestically and internationally. 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. Similarly, Halliburton kept the Pentagon investigators in the dark about the prices it paid for purchasing fuel from Turkey and Jordan. 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. He destroyed the man in a set of hearings that would lay the groundwork for the show trials of the McCarthy era. Stevenson rushed to the courts for relief. And to purchase an Austin radio station that she probably had a big hand in growing into a very successful media company. They knew that their fortunes rode on the backs of their political benefactors and they did their best to keep them happy. Ep. 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. He ran on an anti-union and anti-FDR platform that appealed to rural Texas voters. 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. Lynda Bird was the first of two daughters born to Lyndon and Claudia Lady Bird Johnson. 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. I am not sure that the above answer is accurate but I can't prove it. Halliburton later discreetly disclosed that it may have paid upwards of $180 million in bribes. Brown sluiced cash into LBJs campaign and he sailed to victory in a special election on May 13, 1937. 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. 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. LBJ, serving out 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. 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. For all their differences, what Lady Bird and Nancy sharedand Michelle Obama later struck the same notewas an abiding concern for the presidents well-being and very life. 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. 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. 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.. But it was politically expedient since it allowed civilian officials in the Pentagon to steer billions into the coffers of favored contractors, such as Halliburton, Lockheed and DynCorp. Most notably, Halliburtons US government contracts bulged from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion under Cheneys reign as CEO. Some staffers, like James Baker, understood her influence and made a point of getting along. The city was well stocked with influential women. In this busy milieu, Lady Bird was, she said, so happy being the wife of the senator from Texas., Julia E. Sweig: The lost story of Lady Bird, So happy was sheand so aware of how her husband would chafe at a subordinate rolethat when John F. Kennedy drafted LBJ as his running mate in 1960, she made the case for not accepting. Not to worry. She currently 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. The higher the costs, the bigger the profits. 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. In 2003, he was asked about his financial ties to Halliburton. 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. All of this got LBJ close, but quite not close enough, to assure him of an outright victory. From this position, he launched into an onslaught on Olds, smearing the former supporter of Herbert Hoover as a communist who travels with those who proposed the Marxian answer. LBJ, who only a few years earlier had used his political muscle to secure the vast public hydropower projects on the Little Colorado with the goal of providing cheap power to the citizens of the Hill Country, now accused Olds of plotting a course toward confiscation and public ownership. This coincided with the assassination of Diem (with American collusion) and subsequent chaos in the South Vietnamese government, administration and army. Several of the subcontracts in Iraq were doled out accompanied by the judicious application of cash bribes. Lady Birdthe youngest child and only daughter of a wealthy East Texas businessmantook refuge, Sweig writes, in a rich inner life that taught her how to take emotional sustenance from nature and books. An excellent student, she earned a history degree in 1933 from the University of Texas at Austin, in an era when only a small percentage of women graduated from college; she then spent a year completing a journalism degree. For Johnson, money was the route to political power. 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. Its the contract that keeps on giving. The bagman was none other than John Connolly, the future governor of Texas and Halliburton board member. Astrology was a compulsion, and the attempted assassination of her husband traumatized her, understandably, leading to even more hypervigilance. What is the birth It is startling to realize that, for the 14 months from November 1963 to January 1965, Lady Bird Johnson effectively was the vice president. WebPresident Johnson and his advisers were and risk nuclear war in the interests of capitalist profit. 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. We just have to look. 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. Thats real money, even by Pentagon standards. Only six months into the occupation of Iraq, Halliburtons fleets of trucks began to breakdown due to lack of spare parts and shoddy upkeep. The pipeline won the approval of the US Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who would later land a spot on the Halliburton board. The Army didnt consider it necessary to reveal the terms of the deal, a Pentagon spokesman explained to Reuters. Yet, none of these firms were invited to submit a bid or a plan of action. 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.. At least he didnt see himself that way. Then an unexpected thing happened. The apex political fixer Thomas Tommy the Cork Corcoran later observed that LBJs whole world was built on that dam.
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