THE
HALLIBURTON
AGENDA
The Politics of Oil and Money
By Dan Briody
PART I
The Politics of Oil and Money
By Dan Briody
PART I
The Early Years
1
Erle P. Halliburton and
the
Million-Dollar Boast
Before there was a $13 billion company, before the World
Wars and the Texas oil boom, before there were pet presidents and vice presidents, campaign contributions and government contracts, union busting and sanction dodging,
there was simply a man, fiercely struggling to escape poverty,
doggedly pursuing his piece of America’s manifest destiny. At
the time of his birth, September 22, 1892, in a small farming
town on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee, the name Erle
Palmer Halliburton stirred no national emotion. It held no political intrigue. It had no impact on government or business. It
was only the name of one of five sons of Edwin Gray Halliburton, an anonymous jack-of-all-trades, who would not live to see
Erle’s thirteenth birthday. Halliburton, as a name, meant virtually nothing to anyone outside of Henning, Tennessee. But
Erle Halliburton was determined to change all of that.
As a young boy, Erle Halliburton showed a natural inclination toward mechanics, often dismantling and reassembling devices for pure recreation. While boys his age in Henning were playing with toy trucks in sand boxes, Erle was tinkering with gears and repairing simple machines. His curiosity drove him to understand how things worked. He was an excellent student, completing both elementary and high school courses over an eight-year span by age fourteen. Yet, even then, Erle Halliburton was uninterested in the idle trappings of youth. In what would become one of his trademark characteristics, he was intensely focused on higher aims.
After his father passed away in 1904, the Halliburton family was left with little money and even less opportunity. Two years later, hopelessly impoverished at age fourteen, Erle decided it was time he left home and pursued his fortunes elsewhere. Diminutive in stature at just 5 foot 5 inches, the future of the Halliburton clan was resting on Erle’s narrow shoulders, the new man of the house. But he brimmed with confidence, promising his family he would not return to Henning until he had pocketed a million dollars, a claim that no one could have taken seriously at the time. Underestimating Erle Halliburton would be a mistake that many of his contemporaries would repeat over the years, for as author and Texas historian J. Evetts Haley put it, Halliburton was “fired by the stern disciplines of hunger and want.”
Alone, directionless, and penniless, Halliburton embarked on a worldwide journey that would take him from Brooklyn to Manila, working dozens of jobs as varied as driving a locomotive to selling automatic stokers. At age eighteen, he joined the U.S. Navy and received the first formal training of his young life, serving two tours and working engineering and hydraulics before leaving the service in 1915. The work suited Halliburton’s mechanical mind, and he ultimately ended up in Los Angeles, running a pressure irrigation project for the Dominguez Irrigation Company, pulling down $100 a month. It was there that Erle met and married his wife Vida Taber, and settled in— for the moment. It was a far cry from the $1 million he had vowed to earn, but for a dirt-poor kid from Henning, Tennessee, it was good work and a good life.
At about this time, life in America was changing dramatically. While Halliburton had found himself a quiet, decent living in the easy climes of California, the real action was taking place all around him, as oil fever gripped the nation. In the late 1860s, after Edwin L. Drake first struck oil in the hills overlooking Oil Creek in Titusville, Pennsylvania, localized oil booms had sprung up like wildfires, first in Ohio in the 1880s, then in California, and finally in Texas, when a strange-looking hill called Spindletop in Beaumont spewed 75,000 barrels of Texas crude into the sky on January 10, 1901.
It is not surprising that Halliburton did not immediately recognize the impact of oil on the average American, and indeed, the worldwide economic landscape. Oil was originally produced for illumination, to replace the expensive and increasingly scarce whale oil that powered most lamps in the home. With Thomas Edison’s new invention, the heat-resistant incandescent light bulb, it seemed for a time that the oil boom was destined to be nothing but a short-lived frenzy, a mineral-based Internet boom, as the price of oil fluctuated wildly and the number of light bulbs in use soared from just 250,000 in 1885 to 18 million in 1902. Kerosene, the by-product of refined oil that was to be the future of illumination, was quickly relegated to a rural niche necessity, severely limiting its market potential and throwing the future of the oil industry into doubt.
But the predicted demise of oil was so short-lived that it was practically unnoticeable. At the same time as the specter of electric light loomed over the kerosene industry, a market with almost the same amount of potential as electric illumination was springing to life: the internal combustion engine. The “horseless carriage” had slowly begun to insinuate itself onto the muddy, bumpy American roads by 1905. At first, the noisy, smelly contraptions were not taken seriously, often met with derisive shouts of “Get a horse!” from disgusted onlookers.
Up to this point, gasoline had been a largely useless, and sometimes cumbersome, by-product of the oil-refining process on the way to making quality kerosene. Refiners were lucky to unload it for two cents a gallon as fuel for stoves. With the explosion of the automobile onto the scene, however, gasoline, the ugly stepchild of oil refining, was revitalized. Automobile registrations in the United States ballooned from 8,000 in 1900 to 902,000 in 1912. The oil industry was back, and the automobile was its impetus. It was a rapid turn of events that would forever change the life of young Erle Halliburton.
After nine years of wanderlust and job-hopping, Erle Halliburton found the oil industry. In 1918, he took a job as a driver in the Perkins Oil Well Cementing Company in California. Though oil well drilling was still a nascent industry, it had already seen several waves of change since the first successful well was drilled at Oil Creek. The first wells, like that of Colonel Drake, had steam-powered cable-tool rigs, crude machines that repeatedly pounded through rock and dirt with a massive chisel on the end of what looked like a giant see-saw. These early rigs literally punched holes in the ground. It was effective for the rocky terrain in rural Pennsylvania, but in the softer sands and clay of the Southwest, the cable-tool method of drilling was futile because the unstable earth around the hole caved in and filled the hole as quickly as it was made. This resulted in a great deal of extra work since drillers or roughnecks needed to constantly remove the cuttings from the drill hole, severely slowing down the process.
By the 1920s, cable-tool drill rigs were approaching obsolescence as rotary drilling emerged as its successor. Rotary drilling uses a drill bit with teeth attached to a long, hollow pipe that turns and grinds, lifting the earth up as its weight pushes the drill bit further and further down. As the bit bores ever deeper, roughnecks add lengths of pipe to the drill, extending its reach. The biggest advantage to rotary drilling was that highly pressurized fluid, called drilling mud, could be pushed down the hollow piping and out of the drill bit, forcing the cuttings back up to the surface, while cooling and lubricating the bit.
The early days of oil drilling were riddled with problems, stemming from the fact that few in the industry had a good understanding of how oil reservoirs worked, where they were to be found, and how to best mine the oil. Wildcatters peppered the landscape of every oil discovery, randomly drilling every inch of the earth in a desperate attempt to strike it rich. Entire oil fields were pumped dry in weeks, leaving much of the valuable crude still locked in the pores of the earth. Often, careless drilling allowed water and underground gases to seep into wells and contaminate the oil, rendering it useless. It was a time of wild speculation, trial and error, and many dashed dreams.
It was in this frenzied environment that Erle Halliburton now found himself, working for Almond A. Perkins and his oil well cementing company. At the time, oil well cementing was unheard of, and the oil industry regarded the practice with skepticism. The process consists of forcing a cement “slurry” down the hollow pipe of a rotary drill, forcing the cement back up through the walls of the hole, and sealing out the water and other unwanted contaminants from the well. It also served to stabilize the drill itself.
After laboring as a truck driver for Perkins, Erle was soon promoted to cementer and learned the craft of oil well cementing firsthand. It’s hard to imagine a less romantic job, but the work excited Halliburton and his enthusiasm for the oil business fired his imagination. He began to relentlessly offer suggestions to his new boss on ways to improve the company, but Perkins was not a man open to suggestion, and Halliburton, just one year later, found himself between jobs once again. As it turned out, this break was exactly what Halliburton needed, as he himself would go on to say, “The two best things that ever happened to me were being hired, then fired, by the Perkins Oil Well Cementing Company.”
Down on his luck, but bitten by the oil bug, Halliburton and his wife Vida picked up and moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, a place that had already been thoroughly gripped by oil fever. Two nearby oil fields were in full swing, and Halliburton, armed with his new knowledge of oil well cementing, aimed to capitalize in full. He began working the Burkburnett oil fields, selling drillers on what he called the “Halliburton process.” Halliburton was a tireless salesman, constantly figuring and refiguring ways to build his young business up. Nevertheless, business went “a-begging.” Drillers were a salty, greedy, distrustful bunch, and to them it looked as if this nervous little man from Tennessee was trying to sell them nothing more than snake oil. Besides, the wildcatters who had struck oil were already rich and didn’t need any help, and the ones that hadn’t struck oil were as poor as Halliburton himself. Boomtowns attracted every kind of would-be entrepreneur and scam artist, and to the drillers and rig owners, it was impossible to tell into which category Halliburton fit. There were even clairvoyants who claimed they could sniff out oil, for the right price. His was one voice of a thousand trying to sell everything from oil barrels to drill bits.
Even in the face of this adversity, Halliburton would not back down. His stubbornness and ambition intact, he again moved his wife and two kids to another boomtown, Wilson, Oklahoma. The town was already overrun with wildcatters and roughnecks, so the Halliburton family set up shop in a oneroom house on the side of the road, built in two days by Erle himself, where they lived and worked. The conditions were atrocious and the rent for the land astronomical. No electricity, water, or gas. Just a telephone and a makeshift office, which Vida ran. She dutifully answered business calls and kept the books, all while raising their kids. Oil towns in those days were no place to raise a family. Whiskey-fueled fights broke out nightly, some ending in death, and many of the workers ended up in jail over weekends. The Halliburton's seemed to have hit rock bottom. Still, Erle was undeterred. “At any other time and place, his self-confidence, radiating in fluent, cocky self assurance from his tiny frame, might have been insufferable. But in this feverish rush for fortune, time was of the essence, and nothing counted but success,” says the historian Haley.
Erle bought a wagon and pump, convinced some friends to invest $1,000, and called his new project the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Business was not forthcoming. It was a hectic time, as prospectors “drilled, drained, and abandoned site after site.” Halliburton was chasing down business all over the region, driving endless days and nights through mud-drenched roads, to little or no avail. Money had gotten so tight, that Vida would later recall their bank account was “low, seriously low. . . . The lamp shone on my ring and I sat there admiring it when the thought came to me, ‘Here is the money we need.’ ” Erle reluctantly agreed to pawn Vida’s wedding ring as a last attempt at saving the business.
With the money from the ring, Halliburton bought materials to enhance the oil well cementing process, despite the almost total lack of interest in the process from the drillers. His belief in the process, fostered during his year stint with Perkins, was unshakeable. He designed a measuring line that could gauge the depth of the cement in the well, adding more precision to cementing. He patented the measuring line, which would eventually become a standard device in the oil well cementing business. But still, the family struggled to make ends meet, selling off its furniture to pay its workers on one occasion. Halliburton needed something to happen, and he needed it soon. They had very little left to sell. As far as he had come since leaving Henning, Tennessee, he was rapidly approaching utter poverty. The Halliburton's were, once again, broke. The company had a balance of only $50.27, a mere $999,949.73 short of the $1 million Erle was still aiming for.
Halliburton’s unyielding faith in his business and process paid off in January 1920. As was common in those days, an oil well was spewing oil into the air, wasting thousands of dollars worth of crude. The well, in Hewitt Field, outside of Wilson, Oklahoma, belonged to William G. Skelly, president of the Skelly Oil Company, and he was losing money by the barrelful. Erle Halliburton called Skelly and offered to subdue the well using the Halliburton process of oil well cementing. Skelly, not in a position to argue, gave the cocky little man the go-ahead, and shortly thereafter, the well was under control and Skelly was regulating the flow of oil with precision. It had worked. Oil well cementing really worked. And word began to spread throughout the drilling communities in Oklahoma and into Texas that a fiery Tennessean had a new method to control their wells. The Halliburton's had their first big break, and poverty would never again show its sallow face in their house.
It was an exciting time for Erle, Vida, and their children. Orders began to come in from the dozens of oil fields dotting the landscape. Halliburton kept busy driving from town to town, field to field, throughout the Southwest. Vida handled the financial side of the business while Erle racked up miles on the family truck. It was not uncommon for Erle to drive for days to reach a potential customer, sometimes putting 700 miles behind him before bedding down for the night. Outfitted in his corduroy cap and leather jacket, Erle was as much a roughneck as he was an entrepreneur, lending him the credibility he needed when cutting deals with his peers. He did business over a scotch-whiskey, and he was more at home in the mud and grime of the drilling floor than he was in the office crunching numbers and doling out payroll to his crews.
The work itself was brutal but relatively simple. Each job consisted of first getting a cement truck to the well site, no easy task with the deplorable state of Texas roads in the 1920s. Often, entire days were lost wrenching a truck out of waist high mud. Once at the site, the roughnecks mixed bags of cement with water and rushed to funnel the slurry into the well hole before it hardened. Halliburton, always working on ways to refine the process, would eventually patent the Jet Mixer or Halliburton Cement Mixer, which allowed workers to pour large amounts of concrete mix into a tub that automatically added the water. What seems like an obvious invention today, was nothing short of a revolution in oil well cementing at the time. Halliburton and his New Method Oil Well Cementing Company quickly gained a reputation for innovation and diligence throughout the industry.
While Halliburton devised a number of ingenious enhancements to the cementing process, one fundamental problem with his business remained: Erle Halliburton had not invented oil well cementing. In fact, his old boss Almond Perkins had patented the process long before Halliburton brought the idea to the Southwest. When Perkins got wind of Halliburton’s New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, he filed suit for patent infringement. Halliburton did not deny that he had infringed on Perkins’ patent. Rather, he was quoted as often telling his own patent attorney, “Don’t ever tell me I cannot do something because it will infringe somebody’s patent. I started in business infringing.” The dispute was settled when Erle gave Perkins rights to his Jet Mixer process in California, while Perkins conceded the oil well cementing process to New Method in the Southwest. This would not be the last time that Halliburton tangled with patent attorneys.
Though Halliburton had gained a reputation for a hard nosed, blue-collar work ethic, he was equally effective at negotiating deals. In the year 1920 alone, his crews cemented 500 wells. Halliburton was astute at following the money, moving the company and his family once again to new oil fields in Duncan, Oklahoma, in 1921. There he continued to grow the company from just three cementing trucks in 1920 to twenty in 1923. Even so, business was still shaky and inconsistent, and payment often relied on the success of a given well. Erle himself was earning only $260 a month, less than some of his employees were making. Halliburton knew that he would have to provide some stability and steady cash flow to his business. He had proven the value of oil well cementing, now he needed a more solid commitment from the industry. In 1924, Halliburton engineered a deal that would secure the future of his company and prove that his business acumen was grossly underrated.
The solution came when Halliburton convinced his seven largest customers, the biggest oil producers in the area, to invest in his business. He issued 3,500 shares of stock at $100 a share, and renamed the company the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company, or Howco. Magnolia, Texas Company, Gulf, Humble, Pure, and Atlantic were in for 200 shares apiece, while Sun bought 100 shares. The Halliburton family owned 1,700 shares, and the Republic National Bank of Dallas held the rest in trust.
By inviting his customers in as investors, Erle Halliburton increased his salary from $260 a month to $15,000 a year. He also took $130,000 in exchange for the use of his patents and used that money to further build the business. Howco now employed 57 people and had achieved the stability and cash flow the company so desperately needed. Suddenly, Erle’s million dollar boast was starting to look more attainable.
With his investors secured, and his position as president of Howco settled, Halliburton set about the business of building a truly professional corporation. For a company that employed mostly roustabouts and roughnecks, this was no easy task. But Halliburton’s hands-on approach and gritty reputation earned the respect of his employees. While his personal fortune grew, Halliburton never lost touch with his down-and out roots, and his work ethic and diligence remained intact. Howco was a successful company, and its books, now kept by professional accountants, were evidence of that.
A year after the company was incorporated in 1924, it paid a dividend of $30 per share. By 1927, the dividend had increased to $100 per share. With 1,700 shares of their own, the Halliburton’s were becoming a wealthy family. They continued to expand the business and bring in other family members. Erle’s brothers Paul and George founded the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company, Ltd., of Canada. They even began to win international business in 1926 when Howco exported cementing trucks to a British petroleum company.
In an effort to diversify, Halliburton bought a fleet of passenger planes and opened the Southwest Air Fast Express airline, known as SAFEway, which ferried people around the Texas panhandle. The airline would introduce Erle to the role of politics in American business. At the onset of the Great Depression, the airline fell on hard times, and Erle made a final attempt to save it by competing for a contract with the U.S. Postal Service to fly mail in the area. It was an entirely new kind of business for Halliburton, and not surprisingly, his bid was not accepted. In a fit of rage, Halliburton took his fight to Capitol Hill, flying to Washington to plead for the deal. At this point in his professional life, Halliburton was not familiar with the subtleties of government contracting, and his weeks of protest in Washington proved fruitless. Further, the experience engendered a lifelong distrust of politicians, whom he referred to as “those people in Washington.” As we now know, this was not an attitude that his company would maintain.
Another lesson Halliburton learned the hard way was the importance of patent protection. In stark contrast to his early disregard for other people’s patents, Halliburton fiercely protected his own patent rights, often filing suit in multiple states throughout the country. His legal battles met with mixed results, but Halliburton was fearless in pursuit of patent justice.
There were myriad cases of small, local companies infringing on Howco patents, like a band of blacksmiths in Guthrie, Oklahoma, who were using Howco’s Jet Mixer process without permission. Cases like that were cleared up quickly, and usually found in Howco’s favor. But in 1926, Howco tangled with the most powerful corporation in the world at the time—none other than John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The claim was that Standard Oil was using the oil well cementing process patented by Perkins but licensed by Howco in Louisiana. Halliburton was undaunted by Standard’s sheer mass and endless parade of expert attorneys and settled the case by requiring Standard to pay $75 for every well drilled below 200 feet deep.
As the drilling field became more and more advanced, innovation and patent protection grew in importance to Halliburton’s business. Oil field services was a rapidly maturing area, and the pressure on Howco to stay ahead of the curve mounted daily. In an effort to do so, Erle bought the rights to something called the Simmons Drill Stem Tester, a device used to collect samples of rock and fluid at a drill site for analysis. Halliburton met the inventor, John Simmons, and over a drink paid him $15,000 on the spot for the device. Unfortunately, for Halliburton, Simmons was not the only person working on that type of device, and he soon found himself involved in yet another patent dispute.
Because there were multiple applications for similar devices being filed at the U.S. Patent Office, the regulators set up an Interference Proceeding, which Howco won. One of the men who had contested Howco’s ownership of the patent in Texas skirted the ruling, however, by setting his brother up in California, using the same process. Halliburton was enraged, writing angry letters to oil companies throughout California who were using the process. He sued both the company that was selling the tester and the oil companies that were using it. The plan backfired, and Halliburton inadvertently galvanized the oil companies, many of whom were his customers and investors, against Howco. The California court found in favor of the defendants. In court, Halliburton lived up to his fiery reputation, banging the bench with his fists and prompting the judge to rebuke him repeatedly.
Halliburton would not let go, though. He took the battle all the way to the State Supreme Court, which ultimately found Howco’s patent to be invalid. Upon the rendering of the decision, Halliburton commented that “If the courts will not sustain my patents, I am not going to respect anybody else’s.” He fought hard, worked hard, and lived hard, and though life for Erle Halliburton had certainly improved since his days in Tennessee, you wouldn’t know it from looking at the stern, leathery face of a man always determined to do more.
By the end of the 1920s and the onset of the Great Depression, Howco was by all measures a successful company. The work remained arduous, back-breaking labor that required constant vigilance and endless hours of driving. But Erle Halliburton had made good on his promise of making $1 million, and he continued to pour every ounce of his considerable energy into the business. Despite his remarkable success, he would never rest easy.
It is hard to imagine a state in more flux and disarray than Texas at the turn of the twentieth century. Overrun by wildcatters, torn apart by political scandal, and laced with numerous pockets of abject poverty, the state was going through a severe and wrenching identity crisis. From 1870 to 1900, the population of the region had increased from 818,579 to 3,048,710. Speculators and the disenfranchised from the East in search of cheap land made up the bulk of the newcomers, and the state was ill equipped to handle the influx. There was very little infrastructure of any kind. Entire regions were without electricity or running water. The state government was virtually penniless. Compounding the problem was the fact that Texas had some of the worst roads in the country.
The importance of good roads to a state experiencing the type of growth that Texas was seeing cannot be overstated. While an extensive highway system is something that Americans take for granted today, at the turn of the last century, bad roads could cripple industry, restrict passenger travel, and delay mail delivery for weeks. This wasn’t about a few potholes on the interstate. This was about primitive trails of cleared brush, dusty in the dry months and quagmires in the rainy season.
Up to this point, most roads in Texas were old Indian trails that had been widened and matted down from repeated use. Some of the paths had improved considerably when the cattle trade sent seas of longhorns thundering across the landscape, pounding down the dirt and trampling down grass and brush. But still, by the early 1900s, some roads were no better than openings of “endless and everlasting mud.”
The situation was intolerable for a state with the dawning potential of Texas, hindering the state’s economic growth as it became bogged down in an endless cycle of poverty. Due to the poor roads, growth industries spurned most areas of the state, resulting in more poverty and an inability to fund new roads. There were few bridges, and travelers were often up to their waists in rushing water while crossing rivers that meandered so much they blocked a direct path three or more times a trip. The existing roads did not intersect, making it impossible to navigate the terrain without leaving the road. General Roy Stone, head of the U.S. Office of Road Inquiry, publicly berated the state for the lack of progress it had made in building better roads in 1895, singling out Texas as having the worst roads in America.
Yet, it was on these roads that Erle Halliburton slogged back and forth across the state in search of new business for Howco, and it was on these roads that Herman and George Brown, two kids from Belton, Texas, would grow rich beyond their dreams.
Central Texas in the early 1900s was a tough area to live in for more reasons than the bad roads. Tired of the harsh winters of Ohio, in 1879 Rhinehart “Riney” Brown moved to Belton, a budding commercial center in Bell County, and what he found there was not entirely to his liking. The majority of the residents were independent out of necessity, unable to move freely about the state due to the horrid conditions of the roads. They were farmers and cattle herders mostly, and there was little community in the area. Theft, vagrancy, and even murder were not uncommon in Belton, and Riney Brown was appalled by what he saw upon arriving: “More deceitful people in Texas than anywhere I’ve been—every man for himself, and everybody trying to steal from or cheat his neighbor.”
This was the Belton of Herman and George R. Brown, two sons of Riney born in 1892 and 1898, respectively. Riney ran a dry goods store in town, and his initial instincts about Texans proved tragically accurate when one of his business partners in The Brown Hardware Company stole money and merchandise and left town for the sunny climes of South America. These hard-learned lessons were passed on to Riney’s sons who worked hard from a very young age, selling newspapers and doing odd jobs around town. Riney also taught his sons the importance of saving money. Instead of buying fireworks for the family, Riney explained his homespun thinking to his boys: “They were just as pretty to look at when the other fellow was shooting them and cost us nothing.”
When Herman was twelve, the family moved to Temple, Texas, a town more centrally located on the local rail line. At Temple High School, Herman earned a reputation for his intensity and work ethic. He drove a grocery truck, worked at the family store, and did chores around the house. He went on to the University of Texas at Austin, but quickly discovered that academics were not his strong suit, and instead took a job at the Bell County Engineering Department. Various accounts of Herman Brown describe him as serious, contentious, and fantastically hardworking. With his young career in construction at the County Engineering Department now beginning, Herman put those traits to work, and the results were nothing short of phenomenal.
Pulling down $2 a day checking building materials for the county was decent work for a kid from Belton, but the money 22 The Road to Riches was inconsistent because rain would regularly wash out days of work at a time. In a theme that would repeat itself throughout his life, the simple county job was not enough for the ambitious Herman Brown, and he took his talents elsewhere. Herman took a foreman’s job with Carl Swinford, a local road contractor who was struggling to keep his business afloat. The position paid $75 a month, but Brown didn’t get to see much of that money. In fact, he rarely got paid. Swinford eventually ran the business into the ground, offering up his mules and road scraper in exchange for Herman’s back pay. Herman was finally in business for himself, albeit with a team of tired, old mules and some outdated equipment. “I had not been paid any salary for approximately two years, so I was given part of his worn-out mule outfit from which to collect my back pay, as if, and when I had paid off the mortgage . . . I struggled on, not only paying it off, but managing to buy additional teams on credit.”
George R. Brown, six years his brother’s junior, had an entirely different disposition than his older brother. Whereas Herman Brown was intense, brooding, and at times distant, George Brown was affable and engaged. He was a born salesman: charming, handsome, and well liked. He sold rabbits to his neighbors, he sold the Saturday Evening Post around town, and, most importantly, he sold himself. In high school, he was involved in activities as far ranging as the glee club, debate team, and business clubs. He was utterly aware of his allure and not the least bit modest.
After high school, George enrolled at Houston’s Rice Institute, which later became Rice University and the object of much of the Browns’ philanthropy. Life in Houston was far different than Belton or Temple. By 1916, when George arrived, the city was already being transformed by the oil boom into one of the fastest growing municipalities in the country. He thrived on the energy of the big city. But he cut short his education at Rice to join the U.S. Marines during the First World War, though he never saw any combat action. After the war, he enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines, intending to become an engineer. Having grown up in Central Texas, where floods and bad roads routinely disrupted life, George Brown recognized early on the growing need for public works projects, most of which required the skills of trained engineers. He enjoyed tremendous success in Colorado, graduating in 1922, with an inscription in his yearbook that read, “gains his power through his ability to make friends.” It was a simple but powerful phrase that would foretell the roots of the Brown brothers’ remarkable success.
With his new degree in hand, George headed to Butte, Montana, to work in the mines of the Anaconda Copper Company. It was dangerous and difficult work, exploring cavernous underground mines for veins of copper. One night, while exploring 2,200 feet underground, the walls of the mine caved in around George and left him bleeding from the head and with a fractured skull and cracked ribs. He spent the night alone, pressing his head against a rock to stem the bleeding, unable to move, waiting for help on a twelve-inch wide beam overlooking a bottomless chasm. “I pressed the vein in my head against a rock, with that side of my head down, and when I became unconscious, that shut off the bleeding.” He was rescued 12 hours later, returning home to Texas to convalesce. That was enough for Herman who offered George a job with his nascent road-building business for $100 a month. And that was the end of George Brown’s mining career.
By this time, Herman Brown had built up a decent business in road building. Much like Erle Halliburton and his wife, Herman and his wife, Margaret Root, a schoolteacher from Georgetown, Texas, started out living hand-to-mouth, honeymooning in a tent near one of Herman’s work sites. Herman spent endless hours performing heavy labor, moving dirt from one place to another, grading and paving roads with his beatup mules. He drove more than 75,000 miles in one year bidding on work and hustling for contracts. Along with his mules, Herman commanded small crews of reckless day laborers, working them hard all week and bailing them out of jail every Monday. The growing demand for roads in Texas, bolstered by the onslaught of cheap automobiles in 1917, provided enough work for a small-time contractor like Herman Brown to feed his family.
The only problem was that Herman Brown never wanted to be a small-time contractor. Like Halliburton, he was always on the prowl for bigger jobs, never content to scrape out a living. He had already imagined his future well beyond the dusty roads of Texas, and it was big. He needed to grow the business, and fast, but he confronted a major obstacle: His creditors were growing anxious and threatening to pull their funding in the middle of Herman’s largest job to date. That money was to be the source of his expansion. Facing an abrupt end to the fairy tale he’d yet to complete, he tapped a new, more familiar, source of capital: Margaret’s brother, Dan Root.
The owner of an enormous ranch near Granger, Texas, Dan Root used his good credit to lend Herman $20,000 to grow the fledgling business. After paying off his creditors, Brown thanked Root by naming the company Brown & Root. Dan Root had little interest in the road-building industry and was virtually uninvolved in the day-to-day activities of his brother in-law’s company. He died in 1929, but the name survives to this day.
In sharp contrast to Dan Root, Herman Brown was intimately involved in the workings of his company. The same inexorable force that drove Erle Halliburton’s oil well cementing business was driving the road-building business—the automobile. By 1925, there were 975,000 automobiles registered in the state of Texas, and the enormity of the road-building job was daunting. Most of the work consisted of clearing, grading, and sanding roads, unlike paving that would later become the standard. Herman Brown lived with his crews in sprawling tent cities along the side of the roads they were building. He mixed well with the motley crews, even giving his men money to shoot craps. One night, he was arrested and fined along with the rest of his crew for gambling, but was back at work the next day. Like Halliburton, Brown gained the respect of his crews through his grit and hard work. He was considered one of them as he later acknowledged, “I grew up in the days when the relationship between myself and my employees was a personal one. If he had a grievance, he could come to me with it. There was no disinterested third party between us.” Herman Brown was, and would continue to be, the heart and soul of Brown & Root. Though his brother George would play an increasingly important role in the development of new business ventures, it was Herman’s ambition and determination that fueled the company.
Road contracting was a business that required more than just hard labor. A tremendous amount of business acumen, political finesse, and relationship building was necessary as well—this was particularly true in 1920s’ Texas. At the time, government funding of road projects was nothing short of a political crapshoot. Power struggles between the state and county governments were routine, and the issue of Texas roads was repeatedly used to obtain political power, and to abuse it. By 1925, the politics of Texas roads had evolved into full-blown scandal—the Wild West of government contracting. Like it would do eighty years later when it hired Dick Cheney, Brown & Root needed to identify the political power base in its highly competitive business and curry favor with the key players. Relationships were everything.
As the rush to build new roads for the influx of people and automobiles reached a fevered pitch, allegations of waste, mismanagement, and favoritism began to surface against the newly formed Texas Highway Department, the statewide oversight commission for all new roads in Texas. In one case, a highway commissioner, who also happened to be in insurance and real estate, granted numerous contracts to Jim Smith of Smith Brothers Contractors. As it turns out, the commissioner also sold Smith a life insurance policy and collected $11,500 in real estate commissions. In another case, the American Road Company, which had close friends on the Texas Highway Commission, was issued several contracts without participating in the mandatory competitive bidding process. The company was eventually found guilty of corruption and excessive profits, fined $600,368, and banned from doing business in Texas.
The Texas road scandals went on for years, involving payoffs and kickbacks to everyone from governors to ex-governors and their wives. It was a thoroughly corrupt, highly political, and extremely profitable business. And Herman and George Brown now found themselves smack in the middle of it. In terms of business ethics, it probably could not have been a worse time and place to be learning the ropes in a new business. But for those with a willingness and ability to play the game, there was a lot of money to be made. The Brown brothers learned this lesson quickly. The groundwork was being laid for a pattern of influence peddling that would characterize Texas business and politics to this day.
In the early going, Brown & Root contented itself to take the scraps that the larger road companies left behind. With the sums of money that were required to gain contracts from highway commissioners, it was all Brown & Root could do. They had no great fortune and very little political clout. Paying off politicians was a little over their head. But gradually, they gained experience in how to influence the decisions of policymakers. At first, it was just taking out a commissioner for a nice dinner. Then they learned how to submit a low-bid then ratchet up costs over time. Finally, they became adept at the more sophisticated lobbying of public officials. Herman Brown was not some naïve kid who just happened to become involved in industrial and political intrigue, he was keenly aware of what it took to be successful and grow the business. He reveled in this environment of power, influence, and money and from the very beginning had no qualms about maneuvering within this world. One anecdote that confirms Herman’s comfort level at an early age involves how his company obtained its very first job. After he had acquired the broken-down mules, Herman walked into the county commissioner’s office and walked out with a contract. Not exactly a standard competitive bidding process, but that was how business in Texas got done, and Herman Brown knew it.
No one knows exactly what took place in that fateful meeting between Herman Brown and the county commissioner, but whatever it was, it went far beyond the open and competitive bidding process that was supposed to be taking place. To Herman Brown, it was strictly business, and in the corrupt world of Texas road politics, probably not that great a sin. But Herman Brown had taken his first steps out onto the slippery slope of inappropriate influence. To him, it probably felt good and right. He knew he could do the job, it was just a matter of getting his foot in the door. Very little has changed since those days, and Brown & Root (now called Kellogg Brown & Root), and its parent company Halliburton, still understand the lessons Herman Brown learned eighty years ago: politics is business, and business is politics.
The Brown brothers realized the nature of the business they had chosen and embraced it completely. While they may have started out with little idea of how to wield political influence, the Texas road business of the 1920s taught them everything they would ever need to know. It was never an issue of right and wrong with the Browns. As Brown brothers’ biographers Joseph Pratt and Christopher Castaneda point out, “They had to become more adept at playing the game of political influence. This was a natural part of doing business in the world of public works contracts. They accepted this reality.” Though our understanding of business ethics is far more advanced today, the methods of gaining contracts changed little for Brown & Root over the years. Indeed, with the work being done in Iraq today, the company is grappling with the very same issues they did in Texas in the 1920s, but the level of scrutiny and acceptability of their business practices has changed.
The burgeoning needs for roads eventually drew Brown & Root toward Houston, where George had first gone to college, and where road paving was now the hot new trend. To date, Brown & Root had done mostly grading jobs in which dirt was leveled and compacted, then covered with small rocks to make a smoother ride on what was essentially still a dirt road. As one long time Brown & Root road crew employee, Bill Trott, says, “It was real simple work, you get the water off and the rocks on.” Paving was a more complicated and more lucrative procedure that involved either asphalt or concrete. The company was also slowly getting more intricate work, building a few small bridges as part of its longer road-paving jobs. Every day the company became a little more sophisticated, a little more entrenched, and a little more profitable.
As payment for many of the jobs, the Browns took promissory notes that matured over a five-year period. By the late 1920s, the Browns were doing quite well building roads, and in addition to the cash they had made, were sitting on a mountain of promissory notes. The notes were secured by municipal real estate, and as the stock market crash of 1929 approached, the Browns were urged by their financial consultants to liquidate the immature notes. Demonstrating his legendary stubbornness and frugality, Herman continued to accept the notes and refused to cash them in before they had reached maturity. In July 1929, Dan Root passed away and Brown & Root officially incorporated. Upon incorporation, their financial advisor again pleaded with them to cash in the notes. “You’re broke and you don’t know it. All you’ve got is paper. Credit’s running wild; it’s out of hand. I tell you again, sell your paper and sell it quick.” Finally, George Brown took the advice and went to Chicago to cash in the notes. The company took a 10 percent hit on the notes, but saved its future—the stock market crashed only a few months later. If not for cashing those notes, Brown & Root would have been just another company that withered and died during the longest and darkest economic winter America has ever known. Instead, the money from the notes sustained the company through the Great Depression, barely, and delivered to them the project that would elevate Brown & Root to the next level.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the road-building business came to a virtual halt. By this time, Brown & Root had close to 600 employees on staff, fleets of trucks and equipment, and a number of road-paving contracts that were suddenly worth nothing. Up to this point, the company had prided itself on keeping its employees working, all year long, rain or shine. But the Depression was something different entirely, and drastic measures had to be taken if the company itself was to survive, let alone keep its employees busy. The Depression would be the sternest test of Herman Brown’s tenacity, and would bring his young company to the brink of dissolution.
For the first few years of the Depression, Brown & Root relied on the money they had made in cashing their promissory notes. Herman and George Brown learned some important lessons during that time; lessons that would serve them well for decades to come and serve as a basis for those that would come to decry the company in 2003.
The first was that the hardest part of their business was obtaining contracts, and they would need to employ any means at their disposal to do this. The second lesson, and perhaps most important to their long-term success, was that in order to adapt and survive, Brown & Root had to be willing to do any kind of work that was available in any kind of economic climate, no matter how demeaning or diverse. They had to scramble for every job; a reality that Herman Brown, who for once saw little use for his pride and stubbornness, readily accepted. By 1932, the situation had become dire. Brown & Root, as a last resort, took on work hauling garbage from the city of Houston. To make the business more profitable, Herman had his men separate the organic waste they collected, feed it to pigs, and then sell the pigs on the side. Times were indeed desperate, and even the garbage-hauling business was hotly contested. Brown & Root soon found itself involved in its first controversy involving municipal contracts—the first of many. As the company would learn, with any public works contract—whether supporting the military, rebuilding the oil infrastructure in Iraq, or even hauling garbage—a higher code of ethics is required. Public money comes with public scrutiny, an unavoidable and warranted fact of the government contracting business. Damage control, like that in which the company is currently engaged in Iraq, is a cost of doing business.
The subsidiary that did the garbage work for Brown & Root was the Houston Public Service Corporation, and it won a three-year contract worth $1,254,000 to collect and dispose of Houston’s trash. But at the eleventh hour, another contractor submitted a bid for $750,000. Brown & Root was given the opportunity to rebid, and lowered its bid to $792,000, and won the contract. The Houston press was outraged, and claimed that corruption and favoritism were at play. Yet, the contract stood. “The way things were handled in awarding the garbage contract, nobody else had a chance except Brown & Root,” wrote Nat Terence, editor of the Houstonian. Herman Brown was putting all that he learned during the 1920s Texas road building business to work during the Depression, but he was no longer the eager outsider trying to break into the corrupt establishment. He was on the other side now.
Garbage hauling was not the only odd job that Brown & Root would stoop to during these lean years. The company did everything from repurposing World War I surplus equipment to forming the Texas Railway Equipment Company. They also had a brief foray into the transportation business, hauling construction materials by mule over, ironically, unpaved roads to remote construction sites. Though varied and unglamorous, the businesses that Brown & Root adopted during the Depression had two things in common: they all involved unskilled labor and they all, collectively, kept Brown & Root out of bankruptcy.
Herman Brown, the undisputed leader of Brown & Root, had already known hardship in his life growing up in rural Texas. The Depression simply further educated him on the business needs for diversification, frugality, and above all, adaptability. Now forty years old, he more than ever yearned for the big score. He wanted so badly to make his mark on the world with significant projects that having to haul garbage and scrap metal was a bitter pill. He never gave up, though, and continued to look for the one contract that would make the difference. However, despite all of his hard work, scrambling for meager contracts and accepting any and all work that was thrown his way, Herman Brown was slowly going broke. The Depression was steadily sucking the cash out of the company coffers, eating up the money they had so reluctantly secured when George liquidated Brown & Root’s paving notes. Herman Brown needed a big score, and he needed it quickly. And he would do almost anything to get it.
Every state in the union, at one time, has had their own version of Alvin J. Wirtz. Seldom are the names and faces that
appear over and over in the newspapers, the public figures
and politicians that take the brunt of the praise and criticism
for government decisions, the driving forces behind those decisions. It is often the case that men operating outside of the
spotlight of public office are the ones that really make things
happen. We could argue that a certain level of anonymity is, in
fact, prerequisite for getting things done. Elected officials are
to some extent hamstrung by their constituency, limited by
media scrutiny, and at times paralyzed by their thirst for reelection; loathing to make the tough decisions for fear of
alienating voters. Alvin J. Wirtz recognized this unfortunate
reality of American Democracy early on, leaving his post as a
Texas state senator in 1930, and beginning his long career as a
behind-the-scenes politician and businessman.
For the average acquaintance, it was very difficult to understand the full extent of Wirtz’s power in 1930s’ Texas. That was because he went to great lengths to conceal it. Gregarious and sociable, Alvin Wirtz drew people to him, invariably gaining their trust. There was a lot to like about Wirtz. A big man who favored good cigars and mint juleps, he was always relaxed, charming, warm, and generous. He was a wonderful storyteller. He had a quiet, unassuming manner and never needed to raise his voice to command the full attention of a room. He was able to listen silently to a heated and emotional debate on virtually any topic and offer a soft-spoken, measured summary of the topic with stunning clarity. “He was very deliberate in everything he did, even to walking or talking, but it gave people confidence in him because he was slow in reaching any decision,” recalled George Brown of his close friend. People actively solicited his opinions and often abided by his judgment. It was this silent, entrancing power that enabled Alvin Wirtz to be a mover of men. In almost any group or organization there is that one individual who operates completely behind the scenes, wielding great power and ultimately pulling every string. Alvin Wirtz was that person in Texas in the 1930s.
Former Senator Wirtz moved effortlessly through the Texas power scene, playing the role of a simple country boy. Lyndon Johnson called him “my dearest friend, my most trusted counselor,” adding, “from him . . . I gained a glimpse of what greatness there is in the human race.” Lady Bird Johnson dubbed him, “The Captain of My Ship, Any Day.” Acquaintances referred to him simply as “The Senator,” even decades after his stint in the Texas Senate was over. But Wirtz’s inviting, warm, and humble exterior thickly veiled both his seething ambition and a “mind as quick as chain lightning.” He thought three steps ahead of everyone else in the room and was always working an angle. He was an indirect operator, aligning political forces against each other, deftly maneuvering men like chess pieces, and working the system to his own benefit. Many of the men who did Alvin Wirtz’s bidding were never aware they were being manipulated, including Lyndon Johnson. “A. J. Wirtz, I believe, as you say, had as much influence on Lyndon Johnson’s concept of what he should do as a public servant and what his obligations were as any man he came in contact with in his early political life,” said George Brown. In many ways, Alvin Wirtz was what Herman Brown would eventually become: a man who subtly but powerfully pulled the strings of government, without the knowledge or consent of the people that government represented.
Ultimately, it was power that Wirtz wanted, and in his position as partner in the law firm of Powell, Wirtz, Rauhut & Gideon, he was in a better role to attain that power than at any time during his eight years in public office. He worked alone in his dimly lit library and hatched plans, sometimes exceedingly complex plans, to further his goals. He burned and shredded documents and memos, instructing the recipients to do the same. During the Depression, most men found it difficult to find work at all, let alone work that would vault them into power and financial fortune. Alvin Wirtz operated outside the constraints of crumbling economies, however, and during the most trying time in America’s history, built his fortune beyond reasonable expectations. And he did it, in part, through Brown & Root.
By 1936, Herman Brown’s company was fighting for its life, after nearly two decades of scraping and scrapping for road contracts. Prior to the Depression when times were good, Brown & Root had made it clear that the company was ready and able to take on the more complex tasks in road building, like paving and even constructing small bridges. Getting this work, however, required more than willingness to do the job, as Herman Brown discovered when he saw the larger construction jobs continually being given to larger firms with better connections and more experience. With Texas’ public funds circling the drain during the Depression, it was clear that the pittance of roadwork being done was not nearly enough for the company to survive. Brown & Root was slowly sinking, drawing from its limited funds to make payroll, hopelessly casting about for a job that would save the ship. But the company had a powerful ally on its side: its counsel Alvin Wirtz.
Wirtz had already determined that the only available path to personal riches lay in the massive public works’ projects being doled out by the federal government under President Roosevelt’s New Deal program. These public works projects gave way to a new era of federally funded construction in an effort to put people to work and spur the national economy. It created a number of instant business success stories, like Bechtel, which built the historic Hoover Dam (then known as the Boulder Dam) between 1930 and 1936. Many of the companies that capitalized on government spending during this time became the largest and most powerful heavy construction firms in the world. The New Deal spawned some of the largest government contracting companies on earth, and Brown & Root would be no exception.
Wirtz had already worked on behalf of a large Chicago-based construction company to secure government funding and procure land for the building of several dams along the Guadalupe River, and he was now angling for another, much larger dam, along the Lower Colorado. The dam was to provide hydroelectric power to the Texas Hill Country, which was at the time largely in the dark. As the chief architect of the deal, which involved some tricky legal maneuvering to obtain the land where the dam was to be built, Wirtz anticipated having a powerful say in how the jobs were distributed, as well as how and where the electricity was distributed. Half way through the project, the company he represented, Insull of Chicago, went belly up, and further financing for the project was not forthcoming.
To remedy the situation, Wirtz pulled off an extraordinary magic act. First, he convinced the Texas Legislature that the purpose of the Hamilton Dam was not electricity production, but rather flood control. The Texas Hill Country was regularly ravaged by flooding of the Colorado. From the start of the century through 1936, the flooding had caused $80 million in damages, flooded the capital of Austin, killed hundreds of people, and left the valley in peril every rainy season. A series of attempts to build flood-control dams along the river had been met with every conceivable form of obstacle, from a dearth of financing to entire construction projects in progress being washed away by the unrelenting flood waters. Persuading the legislature of the need for flood control was the easy part.
Wirtz’s gifts were in full display during the second phase of his plan when he manipulated the legislature into forming a new public authority, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA). Designed to take advantage of the $3.3 billion Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, LCRA was ready to receive money that was allocated by the federal Public Works Administration, an organization set up as part of the New Deal. The LCRA was created despite suspicions on the part of the Texas legislature that the new dams were not intended for flood control at all and therefore qualified for public funding, as Wirtz had maintained, but for the generation of hydroelectric power. Wirtz, with his calm reassurance and trademark charm, allayed the fears of the legislature, and the LCRA was formed in 1935. Wirtz was nothing if not convincing; for him to persuade a handful of local politicians, many of whom he had worked with in the past, was hardly a challenge.
Wirtz was appointed chief counsel of the new public authority and immediately set off for Washington, DC, to secure Public Works Administration (PWA) funding for his dam. It was during these trips to the capitol that Wirtz met and befriended Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg’s ambitious young secretary, Lyndon Johnson, a relationship that would have a lasting impact on both Wirtz and, eventually, Brown & Root.
Convincing the PWA to authorize funding of the Hamilton Dam was the third step of Wirtz’s plan. At first, the PWA was tight-fisted with its massive relief fund and failed to see the urgent necessity of the dam. Wirtz skirted this roadblock by engineering a redistricting of Texas—a technique that Wirtz employed regularly and that Texas politicians use even today—such that the dam now fell under the district of Texas Congressman James P. Buchanan, who also happened to be the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. In a not-so subtle nod to the influential congressman, a classic Wirtz maneuver, he renamed the dam; it was now to be called the James P. Buchanan Dam. Buchanan, who was tight with Roosevelt, had little problem securing funding for the dam. The story goes that in the summer of 1936, he met with the president, told him he had recently had a birthday, and the president asked him what he wanted. Buchanan replied, “My dam.” The president responded, “Well, then, I guess we’d better give it to you, Buck.”
There was one problem: The Buchanan Dam, abandoned and half-completed by this time, was not designed for flood control, and everyone knew it. Wirtz had hoodwinked the entire Texas Legislature and half of Congress into approving a flood-control dam that was clearly meant for hydroelectric power. It simply would not be an effective measure against floodwaters. For Wirtz, this was less a problem than an opportunity. The solution would be to build another dam, downstream from the Buchanan, but bigger—much bigger. This dam, the Marshall Ford Dam, would ultimately cost $10 million to build, and the company in charge was none other than Alvin Wirtz’s suffering client, Brown & Root.
The closest Brown & Root had ever come to constructing a dam was the few bridges they had built before the Depression. But that hardly qualified them for a job of this magnitude and complexity. Realistically, Brown & Root had no business even submitting a bid for the Marshall Ford Dam. However, Herman Brown believed strongly that given enough men and money, his company could do any task. He reviled so-called “skilled laborers” and rejected union workers at every turn. His philosophy was to get the contract at all costs and worry about how to fulfill it later, a business practice that characterizes the company to this day. Securing contracts has become one of the company’s greatest skills.
Brown & Root competed against two other bidders, both infinitely more experienced, for the Marshall Ford Dam contract. So Herman Brown decided he’d better partner with at least one company that knew what it was doing, both to help educate Brown & Root on dam building and share in the risk. “Joint ventures in the early days not only spread the risk for us, it also permitted us to acquire a lot of know-how we didn’t have much of,” explained George Brown. “When we’d take on a big one, we wanted some company up in that dark alley with us.” McKenzie Construction Company went in on the bid with Brown & Root, and the joint venture underbid the nearest competitor, Utah Construction, by a margin of $127,000. In December of 1936, the LCRA and its chief counsel Alvin Wirtz, awarded the construction contract for the Marshall Ford Dam to Brown & Root McKenzie, also represented by Wirtz.
Brown & Root’s lack of experience did not faze the company’s ultra-confident leaders in the least. George Brown would later rationalize, “We originally were road builders. To be road builders, you have to know about concrete and asphalt. You have to learn something about bridges. Once you learn these things, it’s only a step, if you’re not afraid, to pour concrete for a dam. And if you get into the dam business, you’ll pick up a lot of information about power plants. . . . Each component of a new job involves things you’ve done before.” It didn’t matter that Brown & Root had no idea how to build a dam; they were hungry for work, for the big score. This was the job they had been waiting for, the job that would vault them to a whole new level. And besides, they had Alvin Wirtz there to smooth out all the wrinkles for them. The Browns knew something then that most government contractors understand now: 90 percent of the work in government contracting is getting the job. Once you have the contract in hand, prices can be systematically ratcheted up, and the government’s costs for switching contractors midstream exceeds the cost increases being handed down by the current contractor. It’s that dependency on the contractor that allowed Brown & Root to grow its contracts once they were obtained, everywhere from Austin to Iraq.
The wrinkles would be considerable. Though the money ultimately came from the same place as the Buchanan Dam, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the Marshall Ford Dam was not to be funded by the PWA. Instead, the $10 million dam was being funded by a grant from the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. As such, each project had to be approved by congressional committee. In this case, the relevant committee was the Rivers and Harbors Committee. But the Marshall Ford Dam had not been approved by that or any other committee yet. Because of Roosevelt’s informal awarding of the Buchanan Dam to James Buchanan, the appropriations for the Marshall Ford Dam (that had been tied to the Buchanan Dam), money that had already begun to flow to Brown & Root, had not been formally approved. In fact, there had been no hearings whatsoever on the project. Roosevelt had granted the go ahead on a project that required Congress’ approval while Congress was not even in session. It appeared that the dam was a nonstarter.
The Comptroller General’s office caught the mistake and refused payment on the first of two planned installments of the appropriation, $5 million. Enraged, Buchanan set about convincing the Comptroller General that the authorization of the dam was imminent and would be obtained first thing during the 1937 session of Congress. Against his better judgment, the comptroller relented and approved the $5 million installment. The comptroller was unambiguous though: The second half of the payment would not be made if congressional approval was not obtained.
Brown & Root, meanwhile, had already begun working on the dam. Because they had no prior experience in dam building, the Brown brothers were forced to outlay significant capital just to acquire the proper equipment. Railroads had to be built to the remote location, tent cities erected, and major construction equipment procured. The biggest expenditure was a massive cableway over the gorge of the dam site. The cable carried large buckets of concrete over the dam site and poured the cement down into block forms. The total cost of the planning and preparation of the site was $1,500,000— money that Brown & Root would never see again. Money they had to borrow in the first place. Now the whole project was in jeopardy because of Buchanan’s backroom deal.
The situation had the Brown’s very much on edge. “The appropriations were for one year at a time—piecemeal,” said George Brown. “And they were illegal. Wirtz was telling us all along that the money was wrong, and that if someone in Congress raised a question they would stop it.” The way Brown & Root had budgeted the job left them with only a $1 million profit on the first half of the work. That meant that if the second payment never came, they would be out $500,000, deficit enough to break them forever. This project was the biggest gamble the company had ever, or would ever, take. The fate of Brown & Root was resting solely on the shoulders of one politician and his ability to clear the way for congressional approval.
•••
After Herman and George Brown decided that they had no other option but to risk it, things quickly turned from bad to worse. It turned out that the land on which the Marshall Ford Dam was to be built was not owned by the federal government after all. It was owned by the state of Texas. The Bureau of Reclamation’s charter strictly forbade the agency from building anything on land owned by anyone other than the federal government. Not only had the bureau allocated money for a dam that was not authorized, but it had allocated money for a dam that it was, in fact, forbidden to build.
In most states, this would not have been an issue. Upon admittance to the union, most of the western states had given up land rights of their riverbeds to the federal government. Not Texas. The state had guarded its public lands and kept them under state control. Its proud heritage as an independent Republic had dictated that stipulation. Of the 17 western states the Bureau presided over, only Texas had this arrangement.
Of course, Texas could just sign away its rights to the land, and the problem would go way. But when the LCRA was created, part of its charter strictly forbade the state from ever selling its public land, for example, the land that was the proposed site of the Marshall Ford Dam, to anyone, especially the federal government. The idea was to prevent the union from ever “federalizing” its public utilities, like the Tennessee Valley Authority. It worked. And now Brown & Root was stuck in the mother of all legal impasses. As Robert A. Caro puts it, “Under federal law, then, the Bureau of Reclamation was required to own the land on which its dams were built; under state law, it could not own the land on which this dam was being built.”
George Brown later related Brown & Root’s predicament in his own words. “We had put a million and a half dollars in that dam, and then we found out it wasn’t legal. We found out the appropriation wasn’t legal, but we had already built the cableway. That cost several hundred thousand dollars, which we owed the banks. And we had had to set up a quarry for the stone and build a conveyor belt from the quarry to the dam site. And we had had to buy all sorts of equipment—big, heavy equipment. Heavy cranes. We had put in a million and a half dollars. And the appropriation wasn’t legal!”
Alvin Wirtz knew the law and he planned and devised a way around the whole mess. Buchanan would have to persuade Congress to pass a law so specific that it would approve the building of this particular dam on Texas land. If that were to happen, the original issue of land ownership and the laws that governed both Texas and federal land procurement would be so thoroughly obscured, the dam would have no problem getting approved. In other words, Buchanan’s law would muddy the waters enough that the comptroller general would appropriate the funds. The plan had a chance, a real chance. In fact, with Buchanan’s power in Congress, and the esoteric nature of the laws involved, few congressmen were likely to put up a fight. Understanding Wirtz’s plan, Buchanan told the Browns not to worry, he would handle it in March 1937 when Congress reconvened.
Though the company was teetering on the brink of ruin, Brown & Root had faith in Buchanan. He was a powerful force in Washington, and besides, most congressmen couldn’t be bothered with such a complicated and seemingly insignificant issue, even if it did violate the law. But Buchanan never got that chance. In February 1937, one month before he was to rectify the situation, Buchanan died of a heart attack. The Marshall Ford Dam was the first project in which Brown & Root was doing business directly with the federal government, and thus far, it was a complete disaster.
Upon hearing the news of Buchanan’s death, a young, impossibly tall, aspiring politician by the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson cut short a meeting with the Kansas director of the National Youth Administration (NYA—another New Deal program), hopped into his Pontiac sedan, and sped from Houston to Austin with dreams of replacing the beloved James Buchanan as the next representative to the U.S. Congress for the Tenth District of Texas. His chances of winning the seat were as slim as his stature. He was a tender 28 years old, and had served only as Richard Kleberg’s secretary, and more recently as the director of Texas’ NYA. In addition, he was an unknown quantity in the Tenth District, which included Austin. He had been plying his trade as a congressman’s secretary in the Fourteenth District, and he faced an unnerving battle against well-known and well liked allies of James Buchanan in the Tenth. But this man was as ambitious as he was opportunistic, and he knew that a chance like this didn’t come around often. Besides, he had a powerful force on his side—good friend and mentor Alvin Wirtz.
Johnson’s first stop upon arriving in Austin that day in February was Wirtz’s office. Wirtz adored Johnson. He had met him while acting as an advisor to Texas’ chapter of the NYA and in his role as counsel to the LCRA, and had treated him like family ever since. With no sons of his own, Wirtz maintained an abnormally close relationship with Johnson, replete with bear hugs and other such uncharacteristic effusiveness. He once gave Johnson a gift, a picture of himself with the words, “To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”
By the time Johnson had reached Wirtz’s office to ask his support, Wirtz had already decided he would throw his considerable weight behind the lanky, young aspirant and had hatched a plan to win Johnson the election. But there was more to Wirtz’s support than simple filial loyalty. Wirtz knew that Johnson, and only Johnson, could get him his dam. The other potential candidates, the most prominent being either Buchanan’s wife or his popular campaign manager, C.N. Avery, would not be able to get the job done. They were both highly regarded in the community, but lacked the killer instinct that was needed to push through the crucial piece of legislation that would secure the dam. Wirtz had seen what Johnson was capable of during his time in Washington. He had seen the way people took to Johnson. And he knew that Buchanan’s wife and Avery didn’t have the drive or the personal interest in making the dam, which by now was rapidly approaching termination. Johnson would fight and fight hard because he was loyal to Wirtz. So Wirtz would fight hard to win the election for Johnson.
Wirtz immediately made calls to two of his biggest clients, the Magnolia and Humble oil companies, and shored up campaign contributions from both (the calls were made before Buchanan’s funeral). He even dictated what was to be Johnson’s strategy in winning the election: Johnson was to promote himself as a fearless supporter of President Roosevelt and a champion of the New Deal. Despite reservations about Roosevelt’s programs on the part of Wirtz, the Browns, and Johnson himself, it was Johnson’s undying loyalty to the president that would get him elected. He supported the president without reservation on all current and future programs, and if the other candidates supported Roosevelt as well, Johnson would step up his own support.
Buchanan’s wife was the clear sentimental favorite in the race. But not willing to slug it out with career politicians, she chose not to run upon hearing of Johnson’s candidacy. That meant that his chief opposition would be C.N. Avery. Wirtz pulled all the strings during the campaign. He lined up the money needed to sustain the campaign and obtained the support of Charles Marsh, an influential publisher of the two major newspapers in Austin, the Austin American and the Austin Statesman. The publisher of the Johnson City Record-Courier, Reverdy Gliddon, threw his support behind Johnson without Wirtz’s prompting and wrote a glowing editorial that crowed, “He enters his political career with ‘clean hands.’ No one ever heard of Lyndon Johnson doing anything that was not honorable and straightforward.”
To win the seat, Johnson waged one of the most expensive campaigns that Texas had ever seen; some estimate it cost between $75,000 and $100,000. The campaign rested entirely on the Roosevelt platform. By the end of the election, it was hard to tell who was running for Congress, Johnson or Roosevelt himself. Surprisingly, Herman Brown did not support Lyndon Johnson for Congress. Though he contributed a token sum to the campaign to cover his bases, Herman Brown was for Avery because he liked his politics better. Like most Texas businessmen, Brown didn’t care for Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite the fact that he was in line to make millions from it.
After a whirlwind campaign, Lyndon Johnson won the seat in Congress in a contest that wasn’t even close. The young man from the Texas Hill Country, bent on power and willing to do whatever he needed to obtain it, had won his first public election running on a platform he didn’t entirely agree with. The Brown’s didn’t waste much time in getting to know their new representative. Time was not a luxury they had. The Bureau of Reclamation had sent a routine form to the Bureau of Budget regarding the Marshall Ford Dam. The form had been rejected due to lack of Congressional authorization. It was now unclear as to whether Brown & Root would even get the initial $5 million. And even if they did get it, they would still be out $500,000. The Bureau of Reclamation sent auditors to the dam site to track expenses on an ongoing basis, signaling to the Brown brothers that the money could be stopped at any time. Auditors were watching the company’s every move, approving every expenditure, and waiting for the ax to fall.
Johnson was elected in early April 1937 and didn’t make his first trip to the Capitol until May 13. In the meantime, a mutual friend of the Browns and the Johnsons, Jim Nash, hosted a dinner party so that the new congressman could meet the founders of Brown & Root. Johnson knew who the brothers were—Alvin Wirtz had ensured that Johnson knew what his first order of business would be in Washington: to save that dam. George and Lyndon hit it off. Herman was significantly more difficult to befriend, but knew that Johnson would be the key to Brown & Root’s future. He needed Johnson at this moment, more than Johnson needed Brown. But all of that would soon change.
Time was running excruciatingly short for the Browns. The chairman of the Rivers and Harbors Committee in Washington, the organization that would ultimately have to sponsor the legislation that Wirtz and the Browns so desperately needed, the legislation that Buchanan had been ready to push through, was Joseph Jefferson Mansfield, a fellow Texan. Mansfield’s committee was to issue a report on the Marshall Ford Dam on May 24. That gave Johnson exactly 11 days to enact Wirtz’s master plan and secure funding for the dam. Johnson knew why Wirtz had backed him, and he knew how important the dam was. He went to work immediately. He convinced Mansfield of the need for the dam, and the Rivers and Harbors Committee drew up a bill, which read in part, “The project known as ‘Marshall Ford Dam,’ Colorado River project, in Texas, is hereby authorized . . . and all contracts and agreements which have been executed in connection therewith are hereby validated and ratified . . .”
The muddying of the legal waters had begun. But there was much more to be done. The bill still needed to be approved by the House and Senate. The comptroller general had started delaying payments to Brown & Root until the full approval was handed down. And whispers around Congress began to spread about the illegality of the dam and the land where it was being built. The possibility of an investigation was broached, an outcome that would surely kill the project altogether. Johnson, just a few weeks on the job, needed to throw a Hail Mary pass.
The recipient of that pass was Thomas G. Corcoran, a White House aide to President Roosevelt and the ultimate Washington insider. Like Wirtz, only far more direct, “Tommy the Cork” or “White House Tommy” was known to be a man who could get things done. Corcoran had been told by Roosevelt, after the president had first met Johnson, to “help him with anything he can.” Johnson approached Corcoran and asked him to plead his case with the dam to the president. Corcoran did, and Roosevelt’s response is the thing of legends. “Give the kid the dam,” he said.
With Roosevelt’s stamp of approval, Mansfield was able to push the bill through the House and Senate with very little resistance. The first $5 million for the dam was finally secured, and for the time being, it seemed, so was the Marshall Ford Dam. But one last eleventh-hour wrinkle appeared. An administrator at the Work Relief office noticed that the work on the dam was being done by a private contractor and not a government agency. In addition, the dam was being built by skilled laborers, and as such, violated certain tenets of the work relief program. Corcoran intervened again, persuading the low-level administrator to drop his objections—which he did. Johnson and Wirtz traveled to the White House to finally put the issue to rest, and there received paperwork approving the full $10 million for the dam. Jimmy Roosevelt, the president’s son, handed over the papers, telling them simply, “We are doing this for Congressman Johnson.”
Herman Brown had his home run—his big score. Through very little effort of his own, Brown had gained control of one of the largest public works projects ever to grace the state of Texas. He was the beneficiary of a collection of interests independent of his own: Alvin Wirtz’s need to control the flow of jobs and electricity in and around the capitol of Austin; Lyndon Johnson’s need to make good on Wirtz’s political and financial support; Mansfield’s need to assert himself in Congress and bring work to his home state. Brown & Root stood to make a $1 million profit on the first half of the $10 million appropriation (minus the $1,500,000 initial investment) and nearly $2 million on the second half. It was far more money than the company had ever seen. And the contract had been skillfully guided through the channels of Washington, fallen to within a breath of its life, and revived again by a freshman congressman with a gift for flattery. By all accounts, Herman Brown should have been thrilled, relieved, and eager to complete a quality job on the dam as a calling card for future dam work. He should have been showering Johnson and Wirtz with gratitude. But perhaps the most amazing part of this saga was that it was not nearly over. Not even close.
Herman Brown knew that Wirtz and Johnson had bent the law to secure the dam. He knew that the dam had been sold as a flood control project and, as such, qualified for public funding. He also knew that, like the Hamilton Dam before it, the dam was really intended for power generation, not flood control, and that, in fact, the dam as it was currently designed and funded, would not be an effective defense against floods. Johnson and Wirtz had managed to obscure this fact throughout their manipulations of the system and had completed the process without anyone noticing this obvious contradiction. Herman Brown decided to press his luck and put the screws to the very men who had worked so hard to get him his precious dam. He decided to push for a bigger dam.
In November 1937, with construction of the dam well under way, a Rotary Club meeting was called at the Driskill Hotel in Austin. Ross White, Brown & Root’s construction superintendent, opened the meeting by presenting his case for a higher dam. His argument was, simply, that the dam would not hold back the raging floodwaters of the Colorado. As a result, Austin and the outlying areas would continue to be imperiled. He wanted an additional $17 million to increase the height of the dam, more than the entire cost of the original dam. White’s speech was followed by a similar talk by Howard P. Bunger of the Bureau of Reclamation. He was followed by yet another speaker, who again urged the room to consider the need for a higher dam. The meeting had been arranged by Brown himself, who did not speak, but he orchestrated the entire afternoon. A crafty sort himself, he had not warned Wirtz or Johnson of his intent.
Herman Brown, at this time, didn’t particularly care for Lyndon Johnson. He had only met him a handful of times, and his wife was appalled by Johnson’s sycophantic fawning over her husband, which all but excluded the very erudite Margaret Brown from conversation. Johnson’s most powerful political weapon, the ability to make anybody like him, could not penetrate the steely pragmatist that was Herman Brown. Johnson’s flattery rang empty and, as such, was far from effective. And Brown disliked politicians in general anyway. To add to this mismatch, Brown was dead set against the New Deal and President Roosevelt, who he thought was taking his money and handing it out to lazier men. He called the New Deal programs “Gimme’s.” The fact that Johnson had campaigned solely on the New Deal ticket had upset Brown. To Herman Brown, Johnson secured the Marshall Ford Dam for Alvin Wirtz, not Brown.
It took time for Johnson to work his charm on Herman Brown. Johnson knew that with the addition of the dam to Brown & Root’s resume, the company was fast becoming a powerful financial force in Texas. It was clear that he needed Herman Brown behind him, and he set out to get a better read on the fiery businessman. As Johnson would soon discover, Herman Brown didn’t want people to agree with him without a fight. He wanted to convince people he was right. He wanted to argue politics and business long into the night, bang his fist on the table, and curse his opponent. He wanted people to be principled and stubborn. The normally malleable Johnson eventually learned to give him what he wanted. Between spring 1937, when Johnson won the final $10 million for the Marshall Ford Dam, and fall 1937, when Brown staged the high dam coup at the Rotary luncheon, Johnson thought he had made significant progress with Brown. Johnson and Brown had many things in common; a history of poverty, unbridled ambition, and Johnson even spent time working on a road building crew in his youth, much like Brown. He spent many nights at the Brown’s residence at 4 Niles Road, in Austin in 1937, and had even managed to patch things up with Margaret Brown through the advice of mutual friend and Austin attorney Ed Clark. But with the stunning turn of events now taking hold, the budding relationship, which Johnson had worked so hard on, seemed to be exposed for what it really was to Herman Brown: just business.
•••
Herman Brown had Wirtz and Johnson over a barrel, and the situation was all the more embarrassing because it was true. The original dam, now standing at an already immense 190 feet, would need an additional 78 feet to be able to hold back the flood waters. The new issue begged the question: If the dam needed an additional 78 feet for flood control, what was the purpose of the first 190 feet? It became suddenly clear that Wirtz and Johnson had sold the dam on false pretenses, and Herman Brown was poised to expose the entire scenario. At first outraged by this betrayal, Johnson, ever the politician, quickly gathered himself and chose wisely not to fight Herman Brown on the issue of the high dam. Johnson knew even then that Brown would become a crucial part of his political career. Swallowing his anger, Johnson did Herman Brown’s bidding. He immediately began the process of securing funding for the higher dam.
The problems surrounding funding the higher dam were even greater than those that had been overcome to build the low dam. Johnson needed $17 million, and with no credit left, it wasn’t going to come from the LCRA—which wouldn’t have spending power again until the dam began generating power. That day was now looking like it might never come. The Bureau of Reclamation meanwhile was only authorized to fund projects for flood control. At this point, it would be impossible to argue that the higher dam was for flood control, without by default making hydroelectric power the purpose of the low dam. This was just the kind of legal morass that Alvin Wirtz thrived on, and he went to work rewriting history.
Using his trademark legal legerdemain, Wirtz redesignated the purpose of the low dam to be power production. It was safe to do this now that the original $10 million had already been obtained. That allowed the Bureau of Reclamation to pay for the additional 78 feet of the dam that would now be designated as flood control. But the Bureau was only authorized, on the high end of the scale, to spend $14,850,000 on flood control, and any additional funds would need to be reimbursable through the sale of hydroelectric power. That money, along with the $9,515,000 that the LCRA had already committed to the dam, left a gap of $2,635,000, and nobody left to pay the bill. That’s when all heads turned to Abe Fortas, a Washington attorney and friend of Johnson’s.
Fortas was a young and talented lawyer; he sized up the situation and gave the Browns his honest assessment. He was their last hope for the higher dam, and as George Brown recalls, “The fellow [Johnson] relied on most of all and became friends with was the fellow he later appointed to the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas.” Fortas reasoned that he could convince the PWA to fund the unclaimed portion of the dam, even though the agency was not authorized to fund flood control dams or power generating dams. He told Harold Ickes, the PWA administrator, that if the unclaimed portion of the dam, approximately 33 feet, were to be designated as neither for power production nor flood control (because it was in fact for both), the PWA could foot the bill. That portion of the dam would cost about $2.5 million, as it happened. Unbelievably, Ickes agreed.
The impossibly complicated solution for funding the higher dam still needed to be rammed through the congressional approval process. Johnson had people working on his behalf to smooth things over in the Department of the Interior, cutting through endless red tape. But getting Congress’ approval on a transaction so obviously concocted would be no small task. That burden fell to Charles H. Leavy, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who, like so many others in Washington, was doing the bidding of the ambitious young congressman from Texas’ Tenth District without fully understanding why or to what end. Leavy added an amendment to the law governing projects funded by the Bureau of Reclamation that specifically exempted the Marshall Ford Dam from the usual bylaws. Several congressmen jumped upon hearing this blatant rewriting of the law. Questions flew as to why they were being asked to provide an additional $2.5 million for a dam that was originally intended for flood control, then changed to a power generating dam, then was being called neither. It made no sense, and despite the complicated and esoteric nature of the project, the committee knew it.
Leavy began to feebly explain why the additional funding was necessary, but he was unconvincing. Upon seeing this weak attempt to persuade Congress, Sam Rayburn, the Majority Leader and a loyal Texan, silently stood behind Leavy as his words tapered off. When Leavy’s convoluted explanation ended, Rayburn, one of the most powerful men in the House, said, “The gentleman is correct, yes.” That was all it took. The House voted to approve the amendment, and the PWA was back in the dam business in Texas. Johnson, along with the help of some of his new friends in Washington and some old friends from Texas, had done it again.
Legally, there had to be a new bidding on who would build the higher dam. Ostensibly, the work would go to the most qualified, lowest bidder. Brown & Root, already having invested in all of the equipment necessary to do the job, easily outbid the competition. The new cost for the entire project was $27 million, and Herman Brown began slowly ratcheting up the cost even from that lofty plateau to increase his profits on the project. It was a technique the company would employ repeatedly in its government contracting business. Using Johnson as his go-between, Brown was able to get countless requests for additional costs approved. Johnson manipulated Department of the Interior underlings while he feverishly worked on Herman Brown’s behalf. He sliced through red tape effortlessly, and Brown & Root reaped the benefits. Each change order had to be approved by several people in the Department of the Interior, and Johnson had them all working for him.
It was during this time that Johnson grew very close to George Brown, who served as liaison between him and Herman. George, closer in age and temperament to Johnson, frequently traveled to Washington. And Johnson reported back to Brown sometimes multiple times a day to update his progress. Later in life, George Brown would recall conversations he had with Johnson in which Johnson would characterize himself, Alvin Wirtz, and George Brown as “a joint venture . . . Wirtz is going to take care of the legal part, and I’m going to take care of the politics, and you’re going to take care of the business end of it. . . . The three of us together will come up with a solution that will improve the status of all three of us,” Johnson would say.
In reading Johnson’s correspondence with the Brown brothers at the time, it’s impossible not to think that he was spending a great deal of his time working for them. He was very much like a new employee at a firm, eager to impress. “It is needless for me to tell you that we are humping ourselves on the jobs we have to do here and that this little note . . . is being knocked off between conferences,” he told Herman in one note. In another telegram from November 1940, Johnson expressed frustration with the orders he was receiving from George Brown: “Why do you send me telegrams and then run out before I can follow your instructions?” Johnson’s subservience to Brown indicates just how important he knew the company would be to his future. It seems as if the majority of Johnson’s first year in Washington was spent working on behalf of Brown & Root. Tommy Corcoran would later say, “Lyndon Johnson’s whole world was built on that dam.”
The same could be said for Brown & Root’s world. The company had entered the bidding process for the original dam with zero dam building experience, hurtling toward bankruptcy. They made a $2 million profit on the low dam alone, and millions more from the higher dam, particularly as Herman Brown managed to squeeze change order after change order through the Department of Interior. The dam is a still-standing monument to the sheer will of several Texas men. Eventually renamed the Mansfield Dam, after the man who played a key role in its development, the dam served as the foundation for Brown & Root’s financial future and Lyndon Johnson’s political future.
Though their relationship had been strained, Lyndon Johnson and Herman Brown developed a mutual respect through the process of building the dam that would last through Johnson’s presidency. Johnson learned how to spar with Brown on political issues, getting so heated that the two of them nearly came to blows at times. That’s what Herman needed to see in order to grudgingly dole out his respect. He needed to know that Johnson was up to the challenge, that he stood firm and defended his views with pragmatism. “Lyndon and Herman would have some knock-down-dragouts, but they would always get back together because they all appreciated each other as a worthy opponent,” recalled Lady Bird Johnson. Besides, it didn’t hurt that Herman saw how hard Johnson had worked to make him money.
Up to this point, the relationship had been fairly one-sided. Johnson had bent over backwards for Brown, and Brown hadn’t even supported him in his first campaign for Congress. But Brown knew what was to be expected of him now. He accepted the terms of the new relationship, for Johnson had more than proven his worth. Herman Brown had graduated from his days of wining and dining local politicians to eek out a living paving roads. He had bulled his way into the world of federal contracting, where the stakes were higher and the payoffs greater. He now had his pet politician on Capitol Hill, and he was going to ride him hard. George Brown would later say, “Listen, you get a doctor, you want a doctor who does his job. You get a lawyer, you want a lawyer who does his job. You get a governor, you want a governor who does his job.” Johnson, it seemed, had a new job.
George Brown, understanding what Johnson had done for him and his brother, wrote a note to the freshman congressman. It read, in part, “Dear Lyndon, In the past I have not been very timid about asking you to do favors for me and hope that you will not get any timidity if you have anything at all that you think I can or should do. Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference whether I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100 percent.” One of the most powerful and influential alliances between a business and a politician was cemented at that moment.
next
Guns and Butter
80s
As a young boy, Erle Halliburton showed a natural inclination toward mechanics, often dismantling and reassembling devices for pure recreation. While boys his age in Henning were playing with toy trucks in sand boxes, Erle was tinkering with gears and repairing simple machines. His curiosity drove him to understand how things worked. He was an excellent student, completing both elementary and high school courses over an eight-year span by age fourteen. Yet, even then, Erle Halliburton was uninterested in the idle trappings of youth. In what would become one of his trademark characteristics, he was intensely focused on higher aims.
After his father passed away in 1904, the Halliburton family was left with little money and even less opportunity. Two years later, hopelessly impoverished at age fourteen, Erle decided it was time he left home and pursued his fortunes elsewhere. Diminutive in stature at just 5 foot 5 inches, the future of the Halliburton clan was resting on Erle’s narrow shoulders, the new man of the house. But he brimmed with confidence, promising his family he would not return to Henning until he had pocketed a million dollars, a claim that no one could have taken seriously at the time. Underestimating Erle Halliburton would be a mistake that many of his contemporaries would repeat over the years, for as author and Texas historian J. Evetts Haley put it, Halliburton was “fired by the stern disciplines of hunger and want.”
Alone, directionless, and penniless, Halliburton embarked on a worldwide journey that would take him from Brooklyn to Manila, working dozens of jobs as varied as driving a locomotive to selling automatic stokers. At age eighteen, he joined the U.S. Navy and received the first formal training of his young life, serving two tours and working engineering and hydraulics before leaving the service in 1915. The work suited Halliburton’s mechanical mind, and he ultimately ended up in Los Angeles, running a pressure irrigation project for the Dominguez Irrigation Company, pulling down $100 a month. It was there that Erle met and married his wife Vida Taber, and settled in— for the moment. It was a far cry from the $1 million he had vowed to earn, but for a dirt-poor kid from Henning, Tennessee, it was good work and a good life.
•••
At about this time, life in America was changing dramatically. While Halliburton had found himself a quiet, decent living in the easy climes of California, the real action was taking place all around him, as oil fever gripped the nation. In the late 1860s, after Edwin L. Drake first struck oil in the hills overlooking Oil Creek in Titusville, Pennsylvania, localized oil booms had sprung up like wildfires, first in Ohio in the 1880s, then in California, and finally in Texas, when a strange-looking hill called Spindletop in Beaumont spewed 75,000 barrels of Texas crude into the sky on January 10, 1901.
It is not surprising that Halliburton did not immediately recognize the impact of oil on the average American, and indeed, the worldwide economic landscape. Oil was originally produced for illumination, to replace the expensive and increasingly scarce whale oil that powered most lamps in the home. With Thomas Edison’s new invention, the heat-resistant incandescent light bulb, it seemed for a time that the oil boom was destined to be nothing but a short-lived frenzy, a mineral-based Internet boom, as the price of oil fluctuated wildly and the number of light bulbs in use soared from just 250,000 in 1885 to 18 million in 1902. Kerosene, the by-product of refined oil that was to be the future of illumination, was quickly relegated to a rural niche necessity, severely limiting its market potential and throwing the future of the oil industry into doubt.
But the predicted demise of oil was so short-lived that it was practically unnoticeable. At the same time as the specter of electric light loomed over the kerosene industry, a market with almost the same amount of potential as electric illumination was springing to life: the internal combustion engine. The “horseless carriage” had slowly begun to insinuate itself onto the muddy, bumpy American roads by 1905. At first, the noisy, smelly contraptions were not taken seriously, often met with derisive shouts of “Get a horse!” from disgusted onlookers.
Up to this point, gasoline had been a largely useless, and sometimes cumbersome, by-product of the oil-refining process on the way to making quality kerosene. Refiners were lucky to unload it for two cents a gallon as fuel for stoves. With the explosion of the automobile onto the scene, however, gasoline, the ugly stepchild of oil refining, was revitalized. Automobile registrations in the United States ballooned from 8,000 in 1900 to 902,000 in 1912. The oil industry was back, and the automobile was its impetus. It was a rapid turn of events that would forever change the life of young Erle Halliburton.
After nine years of wanderlust and job-hopping, Erle Halliburton found the oil industry. In 1918, he took a job as a driver in the Perkins Oil Well Cementing Company in California. Though oil well drilling was still a nascent industry, it had already seen several waves of change since the first successful well was drilled at Oil Creek. The first wells, like that of Colonel Drake, had steam-powered cable-tool rigs, crude machines that repeatedly pounded through rock and dirt with a massive chisel on the end of what looked like a giant see-saw. These early rigs literally punched holes in the ground. It was effective for the rocky terrain in rural Pennsylvania, but in the softer sands and clay of the Southwest, the cable-tool method of drilling was futile because the unstable earth around the hole caved in and filled the hole as quickly as it was made. This resulted in a great deal of extra work since drillers or roughnecks needed to constantly remove the cuttings from the drill hole, severely slowing down the process.
By the 1920s, cable-tool drill rigs were approaching obsolescence as rotary drilling emerged as its successor. Rotary drilling uses a drill bit with teeth attached to a long, hollow pipe that turns and grinds, lifting the earth up as its weight pushes the drill bit further and further down. As the bit bores ever deeper, roughnecks add lengths of pipe to the drill, extending its reach. The biggest advantage to rotary drilling was that highly pressurized fluid, called drilling mud, could be pushed down the hollow piping and out of the drill bit, forcing the cuttings back up to the surface, while cooling and lubricating the bit.
The early days of oil drilling were riddled with problems, stemming from the fact that few in the industry had a good understanding of how oil reservoirs worked, where they were to be found, and how to best mine the oil. Wildcatters peppered the landscape of every oil discovery, randomly drilling every inch of the earth in a desperate attempt to strike it rich. Entire oil fields were pumped dry in weeks, leaving much of the valuable crude still locked in the pores of the earth. Often, careless drilling allowed water and underground gases to seep into wells and contaminate the oil, rendering it useless. It was a time of wild speculation, trial and error, and many dashed dreams.
It was in this frenzied environment that Erle Halliburton now found himself, working for Almond A. Perkins and his oil well cementing company. At the time, oil well cementing was unheard of, and the oil industry regarded the practice with skepticism. The process consists of forcing a cement “slurry” down the hollow pipe of a rotary drill, forcing the cement back up through the walls of the hole, and sealing out the water and other unwanted contaminants from the well. It also served to stabilize the drill itself.
After laboring as a truck driver for Perkins, Erle was soon promoted to cementer and learned the craft of oil well cementing firsthand. It’s hard to imagine a less romantic job, but the work excited Halliburton and his enthusiasm for the oil business fired his imagination. He began to relentlessly offer suggestions to his new boss on ways to improve the company, but Perkins was not a man open to suggestion, and Halliburton, just one year later, found himself between jobs once again. As it turned out, this break was exactly what Halliburton needed, as he himself would go on to say, “The two best things that ever happened to me were being hired, then fired, by the Perkins Oil Well Cementing Company.”
•••
Down on his luck, but bitten by the oil bug, Halliburton and his wife Vida picked up and moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, a place that had already been thoroughly gripped by oil fever. Two nearby oil fields were in full swing, and Halliburton, armed with his new knowledge of oil well cementing, aimed to capitalize in full. He began working the Burkburnett oil fields, selling drillers on what he called the “Halliburton process.” Halliburton was a tireless salesman, constantly figuring and refiguring ways to build his young business up. Nevertheless, business went “a-begging.” Drillers were a salty, greedy, distrustful bunch, and to them it looked as if this nervous little man from Tennessee was trying to sell them nothing more than snake oil. Besides, the wildcatters who had struck oil were already rich and didn’t need any help, and the ones that hadn’t struck oil were as poor as Halliburton himself. Boomtowns attracted every kind of would-be entrepreneur and scam artist, and to the drillers and rig owners, it was impossible to tell into which category Halliburton fit. There were even clairvoyants who claimed they could sniff out oil, for the right price. His was one voice of a thousand trying to sell everything from oil barrels to drill bits.
Even in the face of this adversity, Halliburton would not back down. His stubbornness and ambition intact, he again moved his wife and two kids to another boomtown, Wilson, Oklahoma. The town was already overrun with wildcatters and roughnecks, so the Halliburton family set up shop in a oneroom house on the side of the road, built in two days by Erle himself, where they lived and worked. The conditions were atrocious and the rent for the land astronomical. No electricity, water, or gas. Just a telephone and a makeshift office, which Vida ran. She dutifully answered business calls and kept the books, all while raising their kids. Oil towns in those days were no place to raise a family. Whiskey-fueled fights broke out nightly, some ending in death, and many of the workers ended up in jail over weekends. The Halliburton's seemed to have hit rock bottom. Still, Erle was undeterred. “At any other time and place, his self-confidence, radiating in fluent, cocky self assurance from his tiny frame, might have been insufferable. But in this feverish rush for fortune, time was of the essence, and nothing counted but success,” says the historian Haley.
Erle bought a wagon and pump, convinced some friends to invest $1,000, and called his new project the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Business was not forthcoming. It was a hectic time, as prospectors “drilled, drained, and abandoned site after site.” Halliburton was chasing down business all over the region, driving endless days and nights through mud-drenched roads, to little or no avail. Money had gotten so tight, that Vida would later recall their bank account was “low, seriously low. . . . The lamp shone on my ring and I sat there admiring it when the thought came to me, ‘Here is the money we need.’ ” Erle reluctantly agreed to pawn Vida’s wedding ring as a last attempt at saving the business.
With the money from the ring, Halliburton bought materials to enhance the oil well cementing process, despite the almost total lack of interest in the process from the drillers. His belief in the process, fostered during his year stint with Perkins, was unshakeable. He designed a measuring line that could gauge the depth of the cement in the well, adding more precision to cementing. He patented the measuring line, which would eventually become a standard device in the oil well cementing business. But still, the family struggled to make ends meet, selling off its furniture to pay its workers on one occasion. Halliburton needed something to happen, and he needed it soon. They had very little left to sell. As far as he had come since leaving Henning, Tennessee, he was rapidly approaching utter poverty. The Halliburton's were, once again, broke. The company had a balance of only $50.27, a mere $999,949.73 short of the $1 million Erle was still aiming for.
Halliburton’s unyielding faith in his business and process paid off in January 1920. As was common in those days, an oil well was spewing oil into the air, wasting thousands of dollars worth of crude. The well, in Hewitt Field, outside of Wilson, Oklahoma, belonged to William G. Skelly, president of the Skelly Oil Company, and he was losing money by the barrelful. Erle Halliburton called Skelly and offered to subdue the well using the Halliburton process of oil well cementing. Skelly, not in a position to argue, gave the cocky little man the go-ahead, and shortly thereafter, the well was under control and Skelly was regulating the flow of oil with precision. It had worked. Oil well cementing really worked. And word began to spread throughout the drilling communities in Oklahoma and into Texas that a fiery Tennessean had a new method to control their wells. The Halliburton's had their first big break, and poverty would never again show its sallow face in their house.
•••
It was an exciting time for Erle, Vida, and their children. Orders began to come in from the dozens of oil fields dotting the landscape. Halliburton kept busy driving from town to town, field to field, throughout the Southwest. Vida handled the financial side of the business while Erle racked up miles on the family truck. It was not uncommon for Erle to drive for days to reach a potential customer, sometimes putting 700 miles behind him before bedding down for the night. Outfitted in his corduroy cap and leather jacket, Erle was as much a roughneck as he was an entrepreneur, lending him the credibility he needed when cutting deals with his peers. He did business over a scotch-whiskey, and he was more at home in the mud and grime of the drilling floor than he was in the office crunching numbers and doling out payroll to his crews.
The work itself was brutal but relatively simple. Each job consisted of first getting a cement truck to the well site, no easy task with the deplorable state of Texas roads in the 1920s. Often, entire days were lost wrenching a truck out of waist high mud. Once at the site, the roughnecks mixed bags of cement with water and rushed to funnel the slurry into the well hole before it hardened. Halliburton, always working on ways to refine the process, would eventually patent the Jet Mixer or Halliburton Cement Mixer, which allowed workers to pour large amounts of concrete mix into a tub that automatically added the water. What seems like an obvious invention today, was nothing short of a revolution in oil well cementing at the time. Halliburton and his New Method Oil Well Cementing Company quickly gained a reputation for innovation and diligence throughout the industry.
While Halliburton devised a number of ingenious enhancements to the cementing process, one fundamental problem with his business remained: Erle Halliburton had not invented oil well cementing. In fact, his old boss Almond Perkins had patented the process long before Halliburton brought the idea to the Southwest. When Perkins got wind of Halliburton’s New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, he filed suit for patent infringement. Halliburton did not deny that he had infringed on Perkins’ patent. Rather, he was quoted as often telling his own patent attorney, “Don’t ever tell me I cannot do something because it will infringe somebody’s patent. I started in business infringing.” The dispute was settled when Erle gave Perkins rights to his Jet Mixer process in California, while Perkins conceded the oil well cementing process to New Method in the Southwest. This would not be the last time that Halliburton tangled with patent attorneys.
•••
Though Halliburton had gained a reputation for a hard nosed, blue-collar work ethic, he was equally effective at negotiating deals. In the year 1920 alone, his crews cemented 500 wells. Halliburton was astute at following the money, moving the company and his family once again to new oil fields in Duncan, Oklahoma, in 1921. There he continued to grow the company from just three cementing trucks in 1920 to twenty in 1923. Even so, business was still shaky and inconsistent, and payment often relied on the success of a given well. Erle himself was earning only $260 a month, less than some of his employees were making. Halliburton knew that he would have to provide some stability and steady cash flow to his business. He had proven the value of oil well cementing, now he needed a more solid commitment from the industry. In 1924, Halliburton engineered a deal that would secure the future of his company and prove that his business acumen was grossly underrated.
The solution came when Halliburton convinced his seven largest customers, the biggest oil producers in the area, to invest in his business. He issued 3,500 shares of stock at $100 a share, and renamed the company the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company, or Howco. Magnolia, Texas Company, Gulf, Humble, Pure, and Atlantic were in for 200 shares apiece, while Sun bought 100 shares. The Halliburton family owned 1,700 shares, and the Republic National Bank of Dallas held the rest in trust.
By inviting his customers in as investors, Erle Halliburton increased his salary from $260 a month to $15,000 a year. He also took $130,000 in exchange for the use of his patents and used that money to further build the business. Howco now employed 57 people and had achieved the stability and cash flow the company so desperately needed. Suddenly, Erle’s million dollar boast was starting to look more attainable.
•••
With his investors secured, and his position as president of Howco settled, Halliburton set about the business of building a truly professional corporation. For a company that employed mostly roustabouts and roughnecks, this was no easy task. But Halliburton’s hands-on approach and gritty reputation earned the respect of his employees. While his personal fortune grew, Halliburton never lost touch with his down-and out roots, and his work ethic and diligence remained intact. Howco was a successful company, and its books, now kept by professional accountants, were evidence of that.
A year after the company was incorporated in 1924, it paid a dividend of $30 per share. By 1927, the dividend had increased to $100 per share. With 1,700 shares of their own, the Halliburton’s were becoming a wealthy family. They continued to expand the business and bring in other family members. Erle’s brothers Paul and George founded the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company, Ltd., of Canada. They even began to win international business in 1926 when Howco exported cementing trucks to a British petroleum company.
In an effort to diversify, Halliburton bought a fleet of passenger planes and opened the Southwest Air Fast Express airline, known as SAFEway, which ferried people around the Texas panhandle. The airline would introduce Erle to the role of politics in American business. At the onset of the Great Depression, the airline fell on hard times, and Erle made a final attempt to save it by competing for a contract with the U.S. Postal Service to fly mail in the area. It was an entirely new kind of business for Halliburton, and not surprisingly, his bid was not accepted. In a fit of rage, Halliburton took his fight to Capitol Hill, flying to Washington to plead for the deal. At this point in his professional life, Halliburton was not familiar with the subtleties of government contracting, and his weeks of protest in Washington proved fruitless. Further, the experience engendered a lifelong distrust of politicians, whom he referred to as “those people in Washington.” As we now know, this was not an attitude that his company would maintain.
•••
Another lesson Halliburton learned the hard way was the importance of patent protection. In stark contrast to his early disregard for other people’s patents, Halliburton fiercely protected his own patent rights, often filing suit in multiple states throughout the country. His legal battles met with mixed results, but Halliburton was fearless in pursuit of patent justice.
There were myriad cases of small, local companies infringing on Howco patents, like a band of blacksmiths in Guthrie, Oklahoma, who were using Howco’s Jet Mixer process without permission. Cases like that were cleared up quickly, and usually found in Howco’s favor. But in 1926, Howco tangled with the most powerful corporation in the world at the time—none other than John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The claim was that Standard Oil was using the oil well cementing process patented by Perkins but licensed by Howco in Louisiana. Halliburton was undaunted by Standard’s sheer mass and endless parade of expert attorneys and settled the case by requiring Standard to pay $75 for every well drilled below 200 feet deep.
As the drilling field became more and more advanced, innovation and patent protection grew in importance to Halliburton’s business. Oil field services was a rapidly maturing area, and the pressure on Howco to stay ahead of the curve mounted daily. In an effort to do so, Erle bought the rights to something called the Simmons Drill Stem Tester, a device used to collect samples of rock and fluid at a drill site for analysis. Halliburton met the inventor, John Simmons, and over a drink paid him $15,000 on the spot for the device. Unfortunately, for Halliburton, Simmons was not the only person working on that type of device, and he soon found himself involved in yet another patent dispute.
Because there were multiple applications for similar devices being filed at the U.S. Patent Office, the regulators set up an Interference Proceeding, which Howco won. One of the men who had contested Howco’s ownership of the patent in Texas skirted the ruling, however, by setting his brother up in California, using the same process. Halliburton was enraged, writing angry letters to oil companies throughout California who were using the process. He sued both the company that was selling the tester and the oil companies that were using it. The plan backfired, and Halliburton inadvertently galvanized the oil companies, many of whom were his customers and investors, against Howco. The California court found in favor of the defendants. In court, Halliburton lived up to his fiery reputation, banging the bench with his fists and prompting the judge to rebuke him repeatedly.
Halliburton would not let go, though. He took the battle all the way to the State Supreme Court, which ultimately found Howco’s patent to be invalid. Upon the rendering of the decision, Halliburton commented that “If the courts will not sustain my patents, I am not going to respect anybody else’s.” He fought hard, worked hard, and lived hard, and though life for Erle Halliburton had certainly improved since his days in Tennessee, you wouldn’t know it from looking at the stern, leathery face of a man always determined to do more.
By the end of the 1920s and the onset of the Great Depression, Howco was by all measures a successful company. The work remained arduous, back-breaking labor that required constant vigilance and endless hours of driving. But Erle Halliburton had made good on his promise of making $1 million, and he continued to pour every ounce of his considerable energy into the business. Despite his remarkable success, he would never rest easy.
2
The Road to Riches
The story of Herman and George Brown, the founders of
Brown & Root, is the story of how American politics and entrepreneurship evolved together, through the entire twentieth
century. At first, Brown & Root, like Howco, was built on the
backs of determined men, slogging their way through the mud
of rural Texas in pursuit of financial independence. But
whereas Howco continued to thrive through the years on innovation and classic salesmanship, Brown & Root veered into the
complicated world of government contracting and political influence. The Browns were drawn early to the easy money to be
gained through cultivating political benefactors, a style of business that would carry the company through successive decades
of war and profit cycles. Though the nature of America’s military engagements, and the political zeitgeist that served as the
context for each, would change constantly, Brown & Root’s
ability to play the game would only improve with time. In the early 1900s, the company would cut its teeth on the immature
and business-driven political environment of Texas. It was the
new Wild West. It is hard to imagine a state in more flux and disarray than Texas at the turn of the twentieth century. Overrun by wildcatters, torn apart by political scandal, and laced with numerous pockets of abject poverty, the state was going through a severe and wrenching identity crisis. From 1870 to 1900, the population of the region had increased from 818,579 to 3,048,710. Speculators and the disenfranchised from the East in search of cheap land made up the bulk of the newcomers, and the state was ill equipped to handle the influx. There was very little infrastructure of any kind. Entire regions were without electricity or running water. The state government was virtually penniless. Compounding the problem was the fact that Texas had some of the worst roads in the country.
The importance of good roads to a state experiencing the type of growth that Texas was seeing cannot be overstated. While an extensive highway system is something that Americans take for granted today, at the turn of the last century, bad roads could cripple industry, restrict passenger travel, and delay mail delivery for weeks. This wasn’t about a few potholes on the interstate. This was about primitive trails of cleared brush, dusty in the dry months and quagmires in the rainy season.
Up to this point, most roads in Texas were old Indian trails that had been widened and matted down from repeated use. Some of the paths had improved considerably when the cattle trade sent seas of longhorns thundering across the landscape, pounding down the dirt and trampling down grass and brush. But still, by the early 1900s, some roads were no better than openings of “endless and everlasting mud.”
The situation was intolerable for a state with the dawning potential of Texas, hindering the state’s economic growth as it became bogged down in an endless cycle of poverty. Due to the poor roads, growth industries spurned most areas of the state, resulting in more poverty and an inability to fund new roads. There were few bridges, and travelers were often up to their waists in rushing water while crossing rivers that meandered so much they blocked a direct path three or more times a trip. The existing roads did not intersect, making it impossible to navigate the terrain without leaving the road. General Roy Stone, head of the U.S. Office of Road Inquiry, publicly berated the state for the lack of progress it had made in building better roads in 1895, singling out Texas as having the worst roads in America.
Yet, it was on these roads that Erle Halliburton slogged back and forth across the state in search of new business for Howco, and it was on these roads that Herman and George Brown, two kids from Belton, Texas, would grow rich beyond their dreams.
•••
Central Texas in the early 1900s was a tough area to live in for more reasons than the bad roads. Tired of the harsh winters of Ohio, in 1879 Rhinehart “Riney” Brown moved to Belton, a budding commercial center in Bell County, and what he found there was not entirely to his liking. The majority of the residents were independent out of necessity, unable to move freely about the state due to the horrid conditions of the roads. They were farmers and cattle herders mostly, and there was little community in the area. Theft, vagrancy, and even murder were not uncommon in Belton, and Riney Brown was appalled by what he saw upon arriving: “More deceitful people in Texas than anywhere I’ve been—every man for himself, and everybody trying to steal from or cheat his neighbor.”
This was the Belton of Herman and George R. Brown, two sons of Riney born in 1892 and 1898, respectively. Riney ran a dry goods store in town, and his initial instincts about Texans proved tragically accurate when one of his business partners in The Brown Hardware Company stole money and merchandise and left town for the sunny climes of South America. These hard-learned lessons were passed on to Riney’s sons who worked hard from a very young age, selling newspapers and doing odd jobs around town. Riney also taught his sons the importance of saving money. Instead of buying fireworks for the family, Riney explained his homespun thinking to his boys: “They were just as pretty to look at when the other fellow was shooting them and cost us nothing.”
When Herman was twelve, the family moved to Temple, Texas, a town more centrally located on the local rail line. At Temple High School, Herman earned a reputation for his intensity and work ethic. He drove a grocery truck, worked at the family store, and did chores around the house. He went on to the University of Texas at Austin, but quickly discovered that academics were not his strong suit, and instead took a job at the Bell County Engineering Department. Various accounts of Herman Brown describe him as serious, contentious, and fantastically hardworking. With his young career in construction at the County Engineering Department now beginning, Herman put those traits to work, and the results were nothing short of phenomenal.
Pulling down $2 a day checking building materials for the county was decent work for a kid from Belton, but the money 22 The Road to Riches was inconsistent because rain would regularly wash out days of work at a time. In a theme that would repeat itself throughout his life, the simple county job was not enough for the ambitious Herman Brown, and he took his talents elsewhere. Herman took a foreman’s job with Carl Swinford, a local road contractor who was struggling to keep his business afloat. The position paid $75 a month, but Brown didn’t get to see much of that money. In fact, he rarely got paid. Swinford eventually ran the business into the ground, offering up his mules and road scraper in exchange for Herman’s back pay. Herman was finally in business for himself, albeit with a team of tired, old mules and some outdated equipment. “I had not been paid any salary for approximately two years, so I was given part of his worn-out mule outfit from which to collect my back pay, as if, and when I had paid off the mortgage . . . I struggled on, not only paying it off, but managing to buy additional teams on credit.”
•••
George R. Brown, six years his brother’s junior, had an entirely different disposition than his older brother. Whereas Herman Brown was intense, brooding, and at times distant, George Brown was affable and engaged. He was a born salesman: charming, handsome, and well liked. He sold rabbits to his neighbors, he sold the Saturday Evening Post around town, and, most importantly, he sold himself. In high school, he was involved in activities as far ranging as the glee club, debate team, and business clubs. He was utterly aware of his allure and not the least bit modest.
After high school, George enrolled at Houston’s Rice Institute, which later became Rice University and the object of much of the Browns’ philanthropy. Life in Houston was far different than Belton or Temple. By 1916, when George arrived, the city was already being transformed by the oil boom into one of the fastest growing municipalities in the country. He thrived on the energy of the big city. But he cut short his education at Rice to join the U.S. Marines during the First World War, though he never saw any combat action. After the war, he enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines, intending to become an engineer. Having grown up in Central Texas, where floods and bad roads routinely disrupted life, George Brown recognized early on the growing need for public works projects, most of which required the skills of trained engineers. He enjoyed tremendous success in Colorado, graduating in 1922, with an inscription in his yearbook that read, “gains his power through his ability to make friends.” It was a simple but powerful phrase that would foretell the roots of the Brown brothers’ remarkable success.
With his new degree in hand, George headed to Butte, Montana, to work in the mines of the Anaconda Copper Company. It was dangerous and difficult work, exploring cavernous underground mines for veins of copper. One night, while exploring 2,200 feet underground, the walls of the mine caved in around George and left him bleeding from the head and with a fractured skull and cracked ribs. He spent the night alone, pressing his head against a rock to stem the bleeding, unable to move, waiting for help on a twelve-inch wide beam overlooking a bottomless chasm. “I pressed the vein in my head against a rock, with that side of my head down, and when I became unconscious, that shut off the bleeding.” He was rescued 12 hours later, returning home to Texas to convalesce. That was enough for Herman who offered George a job with his nascent road-building business for $100 a month. And that was the end of George Brown’s mining career.
•••
By this time, Herman Brown had built up a decent business in road building. Much like Erle Halliburton and his wife, Herman and his wife, Margaret Root, a schoolteacher from Georgetown, Texas, started out living hand-to-mouth, honeymooning in a tent near one of Herman’s work sites. Herman spent endless hours performing heavy labor, moving dirt from one place to another, grading and paving roads with his beatup mules. He drove more than 75,000 miles in one year bidding on work and hustling for contracts. Along with his mules, Herman commanded small crews of reckless day laborers, working them hard all week and bailing them out of jail every Monday. The growing demand for roads in Texas, bolstered by the onslaught of cheap automobiles in 1917, provided enough work for a small-time contractor like Herman Brown to feed his family.
The only problem was that Herman Brown never wanted to be a small-time contractor. Like Halliburton, he was always on the prowl for bigger jobs, never content to scrape out a living. He had already imagined his future well beyond the dusty roads of Texas, and it was big. He needed to grow the business, and fast, but he confronted a major obstacle: His creditors were growing anxious and threatening to pull their funding in the middle of Herman’s largest job to date. That money was to be the source of his expansion. Facing an abrupt end to the fairy tale he’d yet to complete, he tapped a new, more familiar, source of capital: Margaret’s brother, Dan Root.
The owner of an enormous ranch near Granger, Texas, Dan Root used his good credit to lend Herman $20,000 to grow the fledgling business. After paying off his creditors, Brown thanked Root by naming the company Brown & Root. Dan Root had little interest in the road-building industry and was virtually uninvolved in the day-to-day activities of his brother in-law’s company. He died in 1929, but the name survives to this day.
In sharp contrast to Dan Root, Herman Brown was intimately involved in the workings of his company. The same inexorable force that drove Erle Halliburton’s oil well cementing business was driving the road-building business—the automobile. By 1925, there were 975,000 automobiles registered in the state of Texas, and the enormity of the road-building job was daunting. Most of the work consisted of clearing, grading, and sanding roads, unlike paving that would later become the standard. Herman Brown lived with his crews in sprawling tent cities along the side of the roads they were building. He mixed well with the motley crews, even giving his men money to shoot craps. One night, he was arrested and fined along with the rest of his crew for gambling, but was back at work the next day. Like Halliburton, Brown gained the respect of his crews through his grit and hard work. He was considered one of them as he later acknowledged, “I grew up in the days when the relationship between myself and my employees was a personal one. If he had a grievance, he could come to me with it. There was no disinterested third party between us.” Herman Brown was, and would continue to be, the heart and soul of Brown & Root. Though his brother George would play an increasingly important role in the development of new business ventures, it was Herman’s ambition and determination that fueled the company.
•••
Road contracting was a business that required more than just hard labor. A tremendous amount of business acumen, political finesse, and relationship building was necessary as well—this was particularly true in 1920s’ Texas. At the time, government funding of road projects was nothing short of a political crapshoot. Power struggles between the state and county governments were routine, and the issue of Texas roads was repeatedly used to obtain political power, and to abuse it. By 1925, the politics of Texas roads had evolved into full-blown scandal—the Wild West of government contracting. Like it would do eighty years later when it hired Dick Cheney, Brown & Root needed to identify the political power base in its highly competitive business and curry favor with the key players. Relationships were everything.
As the rush to build new roads for the influx of people and automobiles reached a fevered pitch, allegations of waste, mismanagement, and favoritism began to surface against the newly formed Texas Highway Department, the statewide oversight commission for all new roads in Texas. In one case, a highway commissioner, who also happened to be in insurance and real estate, granted numerous contracts to Jim Smith of Smith Brothers Contractors. As it turns out, the commissioner also sold Smith a life insurance policy and collected $11,500 in real estate commissions. In another case, the American Road Company, which had close friends on the Texas Highway Commission, was issued several contracts without participating in the mandatory competitive bidding process. The company was eventually found guilty of corruption and excessive profits, fined $600,368, and banned from doing business in Texas.
The Texas road scandals went on for years, involving payoffs and kickbacks to everyone from governors to ex-governors and their wives. It was a thoroughly corrupt, highly political, and extremely profitable business. And Herman and George Brown now found themselves smack in the middle of it. In terms of business ethics, it probably could not have been a worse time and place to be learning the ropes in a new business. But for those with a willingness and ability to play the game, there was a lot of money to be made. The Brown brothers learned this lesson quickly. The groundwork was being laid for a pattern of influence peddling that would characterize Texas business and politics to this day.
In the early going, Brown & Root contented itself to take the scraps that the larger road companies left behind. With the sums of money that were required to gain contracts from highway commissioners, it was all Brown & Root could do. They had no great fortune and very little political clout. Paying off politicians was a little over their head. But gradually, they gained experience in how to influence the decisions of policymakers. At first, it was just taking out a commissioner for a nice dinner. Then they learned how to submit a low-bid then ratchet up costs over time. Finally, they became adept at the more sophisticated lobbying of public officials. Herman Brown was not some naïve kid who just happened to become involved in industrial and political intrigue, he was keenly aware of what it took to be successful and grow the business. He reveled in this environment of power, influence, and money and from the very beginning had no qualms about maneuvering within this world. One anecdote that confirms Herman’s comfort level at an early age involves how his company obtained its very first job. After he had acquired the broken-down mules, Herman walked into the county commissioner’s office and walked out with a contract. Not exactly a standard competitive bidding process, but that was how business in Texas got done, and Herman Brown knew it.
No one knows exactly what took place in that fateful meeting between Herman Brown and the county commissioner, but whatever it was, it went far beyond the open and competitive bidding process that was supposed to be taking place. To Herman Brown, it was strictly business, and in the corrupt world of Texas road politics, probably not that great a sin. But Herman Brown had taken his first steps out onto the slippery slope of inappropriate influence. To him, it probably felt good and right. He knew he could do the job, it was just a matter of getting his foot in the door. Very little has changed since those days, and Brown & Root (now called Kellogg Brown & Root), and its parent company Halliburton, still understand the lessons Herman Brown learned eighty years ago: politics is business, and business is politics.
The Brown brothers realized the nature of the business they had chosen and embraced it completely. While they may have started out with little idea of how to wield political influence, the Texas road business of the 1920s taught them everything they would ever need to know. It was never an issue of right and wrong with the Browns. As Brown brothers’ biographers Joseph Pratt and Christopher Castaneda point out, “They had to become more adept at playing the game of political influence. This was a natural part of doing business in the world of public works contracts. They accepted this reality.” Though our understanding of business ethics is far more advanced today, the methods of gaining contracts changed little for Brown & Root over the years. Indeed, with the work being done in Iraq today, the company is grappling with the very same issues they did in Texas in the 1920s, but the level of scrutiny and acceptability of their business practices has changed.
The burgeoning needs for roads eventually drew Brown & Root toward Houston, where George had first gone to college, and where road paving was now the hot new trend. To date, Brown & Root had done mostly grading jobs in which dirt was leveled and compacted, then covered with small rocks to make a smoother ride on what was essentially still a dirt road. As one long time Brown & Root road crew employee, Bill Trott, says, “It was real simple work, you get the water off and the rocks on.” Paving was a more complicated and more lucrative procedure that involved either asphalt or concrete. The company was also slowly getting more intricate work, building a few small bridges as part of its longer road-paving jobs. Every day the company became a little more sophisticated, a little more entrenched, and a little more profitable.
As payment for many of the jobs, the Browns took promissory notes that matured over a five-year period. By the late 1920s, the Browns were doing quite well building roads, and in addition to the cash they had made, were sitting on a mountain of promissory notes. The notes were secured by municipal real estate, and as the stock market crash of 1929 approached, the Browns were urged by their financial consultants to liquidate the immature notes. Demonstrating his legendary stubbornness and frugality, Herman continued to accept the notes and refused to cash them in before they had reached maturity. In July 1929, Dan Root passed away and Brown & Root officially incorporated. Upon incorporation, their financial advisor again pleaded with them to cash in the notes. “You’re broke and you don’t know it. All you’ve got is paper. Credit’s running wild; it’s out of hand. I tell you again, sell your paper and sell it quick.” Finally, George Brown took the advice and went to Chicago to cash in the notes. The company took a 10 percent hit on the notes, but saved its future—the stock market crashed only a few months later. If not for cashing those notes, Brown & Root would have been just another company that withered and died during the longest and darkest economic winter America has ever known. Instead, the money from the notes sustained the company through the Great Depression, barely, and delivered to them the project that would elevate Brown & Root to the next level.
•••
With the onset of the Great Depression, the road-building business came to a virtual halt. By this time, Brown & Root had close to 600 employees on staff, fleets of trucks and equipment, and a number of road-paving contracts that were suddenly worth nothing. Up to this point, the company had prided itself on keeping its employees working, all year long, rain or shine. But the Depression was something different entirely, and drastic measures had to be taken if the company itself was to survive, let alone keep its employees busy. The Depression would be the sternest test of Herman Brown’s tenacity, and would bring his young company to the brink of dissolution.
For the first few years of the Depression, Brown & Root relied on the money they had made in cashing their promissory notes. Herman and George Brown learned some important lessons during that time; lessons that would serve them well for decades to come and serve as a basis for those that would come to decry the company in 2003.
The first was that the hardest part of their business was obtaining contracts, and they would need to employ any means at their disposal to do this. The second lesson, and perhaps most important to their long-term success, was that in order to adapt and survive, Brown & Root had to be willing to do any kind of work that was available in any kind of economic climate, no matter how demeaning or diverse. They had to scramble for every job; a reality that Herman Brown, who for once saw little use for his pride and stubbornness, readily accepted. By 1932, the situation had become dire. Brown & Root, as a last resort, took on work hauling garbage from the city of Houston. To make the business more profitable, Herman had his men separate the organic waste they collected, feed it to pigs, and then sell the pigs on the side. Times were indeed desperate, and even the garbage-hauling business was hotly contested. Brown & Root soon found itself involved in its first controversy involving municipal contracts—the first of many. As the company would learn, with any public works contract—whether supporting the military, rebuilding the oil infrastructure in Iraq, or even hauling garbage—a higher code of ethics is required. Public money comes with public scrutiny, an unavoidable and warranted fact of the government contracting business. Damage control, like that in which the company is currently engaged in Iraq, is a cost of doing business.
The subsidiary that did the garbage work for Brown & Root was the Houston Public Service Corporation, and it won a three-year contract worth $1,254,000 to collect and dispose of Houston’s trash. But at the eleventh hour, another contractor submitted a bid for $750,000. Brown & Root was given the opportunity to rebid, and lowered its bid to $792,000, and won the contract. The Houston press was outraged, and claimed that corruption and favoritism were at play. Yet, the contract stood. “The way things were handled in awarding the garbage contract, nobody else had a chance except Brown & Root,” wrote Nat Terence, editor of the Houstonian. Herman Brown was putting all that he learned during the 1920s Texas road building business to work during the Depression, but he was no longer the eager outsider trying to break into the corrupt establishment. He was on the other side now.
Garbage hauling was not the only odd job that Brown & Root would stoop to during these lean years. The company did everything from repurposing World War I surplus equipment to forming the Texas Railway Equipment Company. They also had a brief foray into the transportation business, hauling construction materials by mule over, ironically, unpaved roads to remote construction sites. Though varied and unglamorous, the businesses that Brown & Root adopted during the Depression had two things in common: they all involved unskilled labor and they all, collectively, kept Brown & Root out of bankruptcy.
Herman Brown, the undisputed leader of Brown & Root, had already known hardship in his life growing up in rural Texas. The Depression simply further educated him on the business needs for diversification, frugality, and above all, adaptability. Now forty years old, he more than ever yearned for the big score. He wanted so badly to make his mark on the world with significant projects that having to haul garbage and scrap metal was a bitter pill. He never gave up, though, and continued to look for the one contract that would make the difference. However, despite all of his hard work, scrambling for meager contracts and accepting any and all work that was thrown his way, Herman Brown was slowly going broke. The Depression was steadily sucking the cash out of the company coffers, eating up the money they had so reluctantly secured when George liquidated Brown & Root’s paving notes. Herman Brown needed a big score, and he needed it quickly. And he would do almost anything to get it.
PART II
Public Money,
Private Profits
3
The Man Behind the Dam
That Built Brown & Root
For the average acquaintance, it was very difficult to understand the full extent of Wirtz’s power in 1930s’ Texas. That was because he went to great lengths to conceal it. Gregarious and sociable, Alvin Wirtz drew people to him, invariably gaining their trust. There was a lot to like about Wirtz. A big man who favored good cigars and mint juleps, he was always relaxed, charming, warm, and generous. He was a wonderful storyteller. He had a quiet, unassuming manner and never needed to raise his voice to command the full attention of a room. He was able to listen silently to a heated and emotional debate on virtually any topic and offer a soft-spoken, measured summary of the topic with stunning clarity. “He was very deliberate in everything he did, even to walking or talking, but it gave people confidence in him because he was slow in reaching any decision,” recalled George Brown of his close friend. People actively solicited his opinions and often abided by his judgment. It was this silent, entrancing power that enabled Alvin Wirtz to be a mover of men. In almost any group or organization there is that one individual who operates completely behind the scenes, wielding great power and ultimately pulling every string. Alvin Wirtz was that person in Texas in the 1930s.
Former Senator Wirtz moved effortlessly through the Texas power scene, playing the role of a simple country boy. Lyndon Johnson called him “my dearest friend, my most trusted counselor,” adding, “from him . . . I gained a glimpse of what greatness there is in the human race.” Lady Bird Johnson dubbed him, “The Captain of My Ship, Any Day.” Acquaintances referred to him simply as “The Senator,” even decades after his stint in the Texas Senate was over. But Wirtz’s inviting, warm, and humble exterior thickly veiled both his seething ambition and a “mind as quick as chain lightning.” He thought three steps ahead of everyone else in the room and was always working an angle. He was an indirect operator, aligning political forces against each other, deftly maneuvering men like chess pieces, and working the system to his own benefit. Many of the men who did Alvin Wirtz’s bidding were never aware they were being manipulated, including Lyndon Johnson. “A. J. Wirtz, I believe, as you say, had as much influence on Lyndon Johnson’s concept of what he should do as a public servant and what his obligations were as any man he came in contact with in his early political life,” said George Brown. In many ways, Alvin Wirtz was what Herman Brown would eventually become: a man who subtly but powerfully pulled the strings of government, without the knowledge or consent of the people that government represented.
Ultimately, it was power that Wirtz wanted, and in his position as partner in the law firm of Powell, Wirtz, Rauhut & Gideon, he was in a better role to attain that power than at any time during his eight years in public office. He worked alone in his dimly lit library and hatched plans, sometimes exceedingly complex plans, to further his goals. He burned and shredded documents and memos, instructing the recipients to do the same. During the Depression, most men found it difficult to find work at all, let alone work that would vault them into power and financial fortune. Alvin Wirtz operated outside the constraints of crumbling economies, however, and during the most trying time in America’s history, built his fortune beyond reasonable expectations. And he did it, in part, through Brown & Root.
•••
By 1936, Herman Brown’s company was fighting for its life, after nearly two decades of scraping and scrapping for road contracts. Prior to the Depression when times were good, Brown & Root had made it clear that the company was ready and able to take on the more complex tasks in road building, like paving and even constructing small bridges. Getting this work, however, required more than willingness to do the job, as Herman Brown discovered when he saw the larger construction jobs continually being given to larger firms with better connections and more experience. With Texas’ public funds circling the drain during the Depression, it was clear that the pittance of roadwork being done was not nearly enough for the company to survive. Brown & Root was slowly sinking, drawing from its limited funds to make payroll, hopelessly casting about for a job that would save the ship. But the company had a powerful ally on its side: its counsel Alvin Wirtz.
Wirtz had already determined that the only available path to personal riches lay in the massive public works’ projects being doled out by the federal government under President Roosevelt’s New Deal program. These public works projects gave way to a new era of federally funded construction in an effort to put people to work and spur the national economy. It created a number of instant business success stories, like Bechtel, which built the historic Hoover Dam (then known as the Boulder Dam) between 1930 and 1936. Many of the companies that capitalized on government spending during this time became the largest and most powerful heavy construction firms in the world. The New Deal spawned some of the largest government contracting companies on earth, and Brown & Root would be no exception.
Wirtz had already worked on behalf of a large Chicago-based construction company to secure government funding and procure land for the building of several dams along the Guadalupe River, and he was now angling for another, much larger dam, along the Lower Colorado. The dam was to provide hydroelectric power to the Texas Hill Country, which was at the time largely in the dark. As the chief architect of the deal, which involved some tricky legal maneuvering to obtain the land where the dam was to be built, Wirtz anticipated having a powerful say in how the jobs were distributed, as well as how and where the electricity was distributed. Half way through the project, the company he represented, Insull of Chicago, went belly up, and further financing for the project was not forthcoming.
To remedy the situation, Wirtz pulled off an extraordinary magic act. First, he convinced the Texas Legislature that the purpose of the Hamilton Dam was not electricity production, but rather flood control. The Texas Hill Country was regularly ravaged by flooding of the Colorado. From the start of the century through 1936, the flooding had caused $80 million in damages, flooded the capital of Austin, killed hundreds of people, and left the valley in peril every rainy season. A series of attempts to build flood-control dams along the river had been met with every conceivable form of obstacle, from a dearth of financing to entire construction projects in progress being washed away by the unrelenting flood waters. Persuading the legislature of the need for flood control was the easy part.
Wirtz’s gifts were in full display during the second phase of his plan when he manipulated the legislature into forming a new public authority, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA). Designed to take advantage of the $3.3 billion Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, LCRA was ready to receive money that was allocated by the federal Public Works Administration, an organization set up as part of the New Deal. The LCRA was created despite suspicions on the part of the Texas legislature that the new dams were not intended for flood control at all and therefore qualified for public funding, as Wirtz had maintained, but for the generation of hydroelectric power. Wirtz, with his calm reassurance and trademark charm, allayed the fears of the legislature, and the LCRA was formed in 1935. Wirtz was nothing if not convincing; for him to persuade a handful of local politicians, many of whom he had worked with in the past, was hardly a challenge.
Wirtz was appointed chief counsel of the new public authority and immediately set off for Washington, DC, to secure Public Works Administration (PWA) funding for his dam. It was during these trips to the capitol that Wirtz met and befriended Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg’s ambitious young secretary, Lyndon Johnson, a relationship that would have a lasting impact on both Wirtz and, eventually, Brown & Root.
Convincing the PWA to authorize funding of the Hamilton Dam was the third step of Wirtz’s plan. At first, the PWA was tight-fisted with its massive relief fund and failed to see the urgent necessity of the dam. Wirtz skirted this roadblock by engineering a redistricting of Texas—a technique that Wirtz employed regularly and that Texas politicians use even today—such that the dam now fell under the district of Texas Congressman James P. Buchanan, who also happened to be the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. In a not-so subtle nod to the influential congressman, a classic Wirtz maneuver, he renamed the dam; it was now to be called the James P. Buchanan Dam. Buchanan, who was tight with Roosevelt, had little problem securing funding for the dam. The story goes that in the summer of 1936, he met with the president, told him he had recently had a birthday, and the president asked him what he wanted. Buchanan replied, “My dam.” The president responded, “Well, then, I guess we’d better give it to you, Buck.”
There was one problem: The Buchanan Dam, abandoned and half-completed by this time, was not designed for flood control, and everyone knew it. Wirtz had hoodwinked the entire Texas Legislature and half of Congress into approving a flood-control dam that was clearly meant for hydroelectric power. It simply would not be an effective measure against floodwaters. For Wirtz, this was less a problem than an opportunity. The solution would be to build another dam, downstream from the Buchanan, but bigger—much bigger. This dam, the Marshall Ford Dam, would ultimately cost $10 million to build, and the company in charge was none other than Alvin Wirtz’s suffering client, Brown & Root.
•••
The closest Brown & Root had ever come to constructing a dam was the few bridges they had built before the Depression. But that hardly qualified them for a job of this magnitude and complexity. Realistically, Brown & Root had no business even submitting a bid for the Marshall Ford Dam. However, Herman Brown believed strongly that given enough men and money, his company could do any task. He reviled so-called “skilled laborers” and rejected union workers at every turn. His philosophy was to get the contract at all costs and worry about how to fulfill it later, a business practice that characterizes the company to this day. Securing contracts has become one of the company’s greatest skills.
Brown & Root competed against two other bidders, both infinitely more experienced, for the Marshall Ford Dam contract. So Herman Brown decided he’d better partner with at least one company that knew what it was doing, both to help educate Brown & Root on dam building and share in the risk. “Joint ventures in the early days not only spread the risk for us, it also permitted us to acquire a lot of know-how we didn’t have much of,” explained George Brown. “When we’d take on a big one, we wanted some company up in that dark alley with us.” McKenzie Construction Company went in on the bid with Brown & Root, and the joint venture underbid the nearest competitor, Utah Construction, by a margin of $127,000. In December of 1936, the LCRA and its chief counsel Alvin Wirtz, awarded the construction contract for the Marshall Ford Dam to Brown & Root McKenzie, also represented by Wirtz.
Brown & Root’s lack of experience did not faze the company’s ultra-confident leaders in the least. George Brown would later rationalize, “We originally were road builders. To be road builders, you have to know about concrete and asphalt. You have to learn something about bridges. Once you learn these things, it’s only a step, if you’re not afraid, to pour concrete for a dam. And if you get into the dam business, you’ll pick up a lot of information about power plants. . . . Each component of a new job involves things you’ve done before.” It didn’t matter that Brown & Root had no idea how to build a dam; they were hungry for work, for the big score. This was the job they had been waiting for, the job that would vault them to a whole new level. And besides, they had Alvin Wirtz there to smooth out all the wrinkles for them. The Browns knew something then that most government contractors understand now: 90 percent of the work in government contracting is getting the job. Once you have the contract in hand, prices can be systematically ratcheted up, and the government’s costs for switching contractors midstream exceeds the cost increases being handed down by the current contractor. It’s that dependency on the contractor that allowed Brown & Root to grow its contracts once they were obtained, everywhere from Austin to Iraq.
•••
The wrinkles would be considerable. Though the money ultimately came from the same place as the Buchanan Dam, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the Marshall Ford Dam was not to be funded by the PWA. Instead, the $10 million dam was being funded by a grant from the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. As such, each project had to be approved by congressional committee. In this case, the relevant committee was the Rivers and Harbors Committee. But the Marshall Ford Dam had not been approved by that or any other committee yet. Because of Roosevelt’s informal awarding of the Buchanan Dam to James Buchanan, the appropriations for the Marshall Ford Dam (that had been tied to the Buchanan Dam), money that had already begun to flow to Brown & Root, had not been formally approved. In fact, there had been no hearings whatsoever on the project. Roosevelt had granted the go ahead on a project that required Congress’ approval while Congress was not even in session. It appeared that the dam was a nonstarter.
The Comptroller General’s office caught the mistake and refused payment on the first of two planned installments of the appropriation, $5 million. Enraged, Buchanan set about convincing the Comptroller General that the authorization of the dam was imminent and would be obtained first thing during the 1937 session of Congress. Against his better judgment, the comptroller relented and approved the $5 million installment. The comptroller was unambiguous though: The second half of the payment would not be made if congressional approval was not obtained.
Brown & Root, meanwhile, had already begun working on the dam. Because they had no prior experience in dam building, the Brown brothers were forced to outlay significant capital just to acquire the proper equipment. Railroads had to be built to the remote location, tent cities erected, and major construction equipment procured. The biggest expenditure was a massive cableway over the gorge of the dam site. The cable carried large buckets of concrete over the dam site and poured the cement down into block forms. The total cost of the planning and preparation of the site was $1,500,000— money that Brown & Root would never see again. Money they had to borrow in the first place. Now the whole project was in jeopardy because of Buchanan’s backroom deal.
The situation had the Brown’s very much on edge. “The appropriations were for one year at a time—piecemeal,” said George Brown. “And they were illegal. Wirtz was telling us all along that the money was wrong, and that if someone in Congress raised a question they would stop it.” The way Brown & Root had budgeted the job left them with only a $1 million profit on the first half of the work. That meant that if the second payment never came, they would be out $500,000, deficit enough to break them forever. This project was the biggest gamble the company had ever, or would ever, take. The fate of Brown & Root was resting solely on the shoulders of one politician and his ability to clear the way for congressional approval.
•••
After Herman and George Brown decided that they had no other option but to risk it, things quickly turned from bad to worse. It turned out that the land on which the Marshall Ford Dam was to be built was not owned by the federal government after all. It was owned by the state of Texas. The Bureau of Reclamation’s charter strictly forbade the agency from building anything on land owned by anyone other than the federal government. Not only had the bureau allocated money for a dam that was not authorized, but it had allocated money for a dam that it was, in fact, forbidden to build.
In most states, this would not have been an issue. Upon admittance to the union, most of the western states had given up land rights of their riverbeds to the federal government. Not Texas. The state had guarded its public lands and kept them under state control. Its proud heritage as an independent Republic had dictated that stipulation. Of the 17 western states the Bureau presided over, only Texas had this arrangement.
Of course, Texas could just sign away its rights to the land, and the problem would go way. But when the LCRA was created, part of its charter strictly forbade the state from ever selling its public land, for example, the land that was the proposed site of the Marshall Ford Dam, to anyone, especially the federal government. The idea was to prevent the union from ever “federalizing” its public utilities, like the Tennessee Valley Authority. It worked. And now Brown & Root was stuck in the mother of all legal impasses. As Robert A. Caro puts it, “Under federal law, then, the Bureau of Reclamation was required to own the land on which its dams were built; under state law, it could not own the land on which this dam was being built.”
George Brown later related Brown & Root’s predicament in his own words. “We had put a million and a half dollars in that dam, and then we found out it wasn’t legal. We found out the appropriation wasn’t legal, but we had already built the cableway. That cost several hundred thousand dollars, which we owed the banks. And we had had to set up a quarry for the stone and build a conveyor belt from the quarry to the dam site. And we had had to buy all sorts of equipment—big, heavy equipment. Heavy cranes. We had put in a million and a half dollars. And the appropriation wasn’t legal!”
Alvin Wirtz knew the law and he planned and devised a way around the whole mess. Buchanan would have to persuade Congress to pass a law so specific that it would approve the building of this particular dam on Texas land. If that were to happen, the original issue of land ownership and the laws that governed both Texas and federal land procurement would be so thoroughly obscured, the dam would have no problem getting approved. In other words, Buchanan’s law would muddy the waters enough that the comptroller general would appropriate the funds. The plan had a chance, a real chance. In fact, with Buchanan’s power in Congress, and the esoteric nature of the laws involved, few congressmen were likely to put up a fight. Understanding Wirtz’s plan, Buchanan told the Browns not to worry, he would handle it in March 1937 when Congress reconvened.
Though the company was teetering on the brink of ruin, Brown & Root had faith in Buchanan. He was a powerful force in Washington, and besides, most congressmen couldn’t be bothered with such a complicated and seemingly insignificant issue, even if it did violate the law. But Buchanan never got that chance. In February 1937, one month before he was to rectify the situation, Buchanan died of a heart attack. The Marshall Ford Dam was the first project in which Brown & Root was doing business directly with the federal government, and thus far, it was a complete disaster.
•••
Upon hearing the news of Buchanan’s death, a young, impossibly tall, aspiring politician by the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson cut short a meeting with the Kansas director of the National Youth Administration (NYA—another New Deal program), hopped into his Pontiac sedan, and sped from Houston to Austin with dreams of replacing the beloved James Buchanan as the next representative to the U.S. Congress for the Tenth District of Texas. His chances of winning the seat were as slim as his stature. He was a tender 28 years old, and had served only as Richard Kleberg’s secretary, and more recently as the director of Texas’ NYA. In addition, he was an unknown quantity in the Tenth District, which included Austin. He had been plying his trade as a congressman’s secretary in the Fourteenth District, and he faced an unnerving battle against well-known and well liked allies of James Buchanan in the Tenth. But this man was as ambitious as he was opportunistic, and he knew that a chance like this didn’t come around often. Besides, he had a powerful force on his side—good friend and mentor Alvin Wirtz.
Johnson’s first stop upon arriving in Austin that day in February was Wirtz’s office. Wirtz adored Johnson. He had met him while acting as an advisor to Texas’ chapter of the NYA and in his role as counsel to the LCRA, and had treated him like family ever since. With no sons of his own, Wirtz maintained an abnormally close relationship with Johnson, replete with bear hugs and other such uncharacteristic effusiveness. He once gave Johnson a gift, a picture of himself with the words, “To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”
By the time Johnson had reached Wirtz’s office to ask his support, Wirtz had already decided he would throw his considerable weight behind the lanky, young aspirant and had hatched a plan to win Johnson the election. But there was more to Wirtz’s support than simple filial loyalty. Wirtz knew that Johnson, and only Johnson, could get him his dam. The other potential candidates, the most prominent being either Buchanan’s wife or his popular campaign manager, C.N. Avery, would not be able to get the job done. They were both highly regarded in the community, but lacked the killer instinct that was needed to push through the crucial piece of legislation that would secure the dam. Wirtz had seen what Johnson was capable of during his time in Washington. He had seen the way people took to Johnson. And he knew that Buchanan’s wife and Avery didn’t have the drive or the personal interest in making the dam, which by now was rapidly approaching termination. Johnson would fight and fight hard because he was loyal to Wirtz. So Wirtz would fight hard to win the election for Johnson.
Wirtz immediately made calls to two of his biggest clients, the Magnolia and Humble oil companies, and shored up campaign contributions from both (the calls were made before Buchanan’s funeral). He even dictated what was to be Johnson’s strategy in winning the election: Johnson was to promote himself as a fearless supporter of President Roosevelt and a champion of the New Deal. Despite reservations about Roosevelt’s programs on the part of Wirtz, the Browns, and Johnson himself, it was Johnson’s undying loyalty to the president that would get him elected. He supported the president without reservation on all current and future programs, and if the other candidates supported Roosevelt as well, Johnson would step up his own support.
Buchanan’s wife was the clear sentimental favorite in the race. But not willing to slug it out with career politicians, she chose not to run upon hearing of Johnson’s candidacy. That meant that his chief opposition would be C.N. Avery. Wirtz pulled all the strings during the campaign. He lined up the money needed to sustain the campaign and obtained the support of Charles Marsh, an influential publisher of the two major newspapers in Austin, the Austin American and the Austin Statesman. The publisher of the Johnson City Record-Courier, Reverdy Gliddon, threw his support behind Johnson without Wirtz’s prompting and wrote a glowing editorial that crowed, “He enters his political career with ‘clean hands.’ No one ever heard of Lyndon Johnson doing anything that was not honorable and straightforward.”
To win the seat, Johnson waged one of the most expensive campaigns that Texas had ever seen; some estimate it cost between $75,000 and $100,000. The campaign rested entirely on the Roosevelt platform. By the end of the election, it was hard to tell who was running for Congress, Johnson or Roosevelt himself. Surprisingly, Herman Brown did not support Lyndon Johnson for Congress. Though he contributed a token sum to the campaign to cover his bases, Herman Brown was for Avery because he liked his politics better. Like most Texas businessmen, Brown didn’t care for Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite the fact that he was in line to make millions from it.
After a whirlwind campaign, Lyndon Johnson won the seat in Congress in a contest that wasn’t even close. The young man from the Texas Hill Country, bent on power and willing to do whatever he needed to obtain it, had won his first public election running on a platform he didn’t entirely agree with. The Brown’s didn’t waste much time in getting to know their new representative. Time was not a luxury they had. The Bureau of Reclamation had sent a routine form to the Bureau of Budget regarding the Marshall Ford Dam. The form had been rejected due to lack of Congressional authorization. It was now unclear as to whether Brown & Root would even get the initial $5 million. And even if they did get it, they would still be out $500,000. The Bureau of Reclamation sent auditors to the dam site to track expenses on an ongoing basis, signaling to the Brown brothers that the money could be stopped at any time. Auditors were watching the company’s every move, approving every expenditure, and waiting for the ax to fall.
Johnson was elected in early April 1937 and didn’t make his first trip to the Capitol until May 13. In the meantime, a mutual friend of the Browns and the Johnsons, Jim Nash, hosted a dinner party so that the new congressman could meet the founders of Brown & Root. Johnson knew who the brothers were—Alvin Wirtz had ensured that Johnson knew what his first order of business would be in Washington: to save that dam. George and Lyndon hit it off. Herman was significantly more difficult to befriend, but knew that Johnson would be the key to Brown & Root’s future. He needed Johnson at this moment, more than Johnson needed Brown. But all of that would soon change.
Time was running excruciatingly short for the Browns. The chairman of the Rivers and Harbors Committee in Washington, the organization that would ultimately have to sponsor the legislation that Wirtz and the Browns so desperately needed, the legislation that Buchanan had been ready to push through, was Joseph Jefferson Mansfield, a fellow Texan. Mansfield’s committee was to issue a report on the Marshall Ford Dam on May 24. That gave Johnson exactly 11 days to enact Wirtz’s master plan and secure funding for the dam. Johnson knew why Wirtz had backed him, and he knew how important the dam was. He went to work immediately. He convinced Mansfield of the need for the dam, and the Rivers and Harbors Committee drew up a bill, which read in part, “The project known as ‘Marshall Ford Dam,’ Colorado River project, in Texas, is hereby authorized . . . and all contracts and agreements which have been executed in connection therewith are hereby validated and ratified . . .”
The muddying of the legal waters had begun. But there was much more to be done. The bill still needed to be approved by the House and Senate. The comptroller general had started delaying payments to Brown & Root until the full approval was handed down. And whispers around Congress began to spread about the illegality of the dam and the land where it was being built. The possibility of an investigation was broached, an outcome that would surely kill the project altogether. Johnson, just a few weeks on the job, needed to throw a Hail Mary pass.
The recipient of that pass was Thomas G. Corcoran, a White House aide to President Roosevelt and the ultimate Washington insider. Like Wirtz, only far more direct, “Tommy the Cork” or “White House Tommy” was known to be a man who could get things done. Corcoran had been told by Roosevelt, after the president had first met Johnson, to “help him with anything he can.” Johnson approached Corcoran and asked him to plead his case with the dam to the president. Corcoran did, and Roosevelt’s response is the thing of legends. “Give the kid the dam,” he said.
With Roosevelt’s stamp of approval, Mansfield was able to push the bill through the House and Senate with very little resistance. The first $5 million for the dam was finally secured, and for the time being, it seemed, so was the Marshall Ford Dam. But one last eleventh-hour wrinkle appeared. An administrator at the Work Relief office noticed that the work on the dam was being done by a private contractor and not a government agency. In addition, the dam was being built by skilled laborers, and as such, violated certain tenets of the work relief program. Corcoran intervened again, persuading the low-level administrator to drop his objections—which he did. Johnson and Wirtz traveled to the White House to finally put the issue to rest, and there received paperwork approving the full $10 million for the dam. Jimmy Roosevelt, the president’s son, handed over the papers, telling them simply, “We are doing this for Congressman Johnson.”
•••
Herman Brown had his home run—his big score. Through very little effort of his own, Brown had gained control of one of the largest public works projects ever to grace the state of Texas. He was the beneficiary of a collection of interests independent of his own: Alvin Wirtz’s need to control the flow of jobs and electricity in and around the capitol of Austin; Lyndon Johnson’s need to make good on Wirtz’s political and financial support; Mansfield’s need to assert himself in Congress and bring work to his home state. Brown & Root stood to make a $1 million profit on the first half of the $10 million appropriation (minus the $1,500,000 initial investment) and nearly $2 million on the second half. It was far more money than the company had ever seen. And the contract had been skillfully guided through the channels of Washington, fallen to within a breath of its life, and revived again by a freshman congressman with a gift for flattery. By all accounts, Herman Brown should have been thrilled, relieved, and eager to complete a quality job on the dam as a calling card for future dam work. He should have been showering Johnson and Wirtz with gratitude. But perhaps the most amazing part of this saga was that it was not nearly over. Not even close.
Herman Brown knew that Wirtz and Johnson had bent the law to secure the dam. He knew that the dam had been sold as a flood control project and, as such, qualified for public funding. He also knew that, like the Hamilton Dam before it, the dam was really intended for power generation, not flood control, and that, in fact, the dam as it was currently designed and funded, would not be an effective defense against floods. Johnson and Wirtz had managed to obscure this fact throughout their manipulations of the system and had completed the process without anyone noticing this obvious contradiction. Herman Brown decided to press his luck and put the screws to the very men who had worked so hard to get him his precious dam. He decided to push for a bigger dam.
In November 1937, with construction of the dam well under way, a Rotary Club meeting was called at the Driskill Hotel in Austin. Ross White, Brown & Root’s construction superintendent, opened the meeting by presenting his case for a higher dam. His argument was, simply, that the dam would not hold back the raging floodwaters of the Colorado. As a result, Austin and the outlying areas would continue to be imperiled. He wanted an additional $17 million to increase the height of the dam, more than the entire cost of the original dam. White’s speech was followed by a similar talk by Howard P. Bunger of the Bureau of Reclamation. He was followed by yet another speaker, who again urged the room to consider the need for a higher dam. The meeting had been arranged by Brown himself, who did not speak, but he orchestrated the entire afternoon. A crafty sort himself, he had not warned Wirtz or Johnson of his intent.
Herman Brown, at this time, didn’t particularly care for Lyndon Johnson. He had only met him a handful of times, and his wife was appalled by Johnson’s sycophantic fawning over her husband, which all but excluded the very erudite Margaret Brown from conversation. Johnson’s most powerful political weapon, the ability to make anybody like him, could not penetrate the steely pragmatist that was Herman Brown. Johnson’s flattery rang empty and, as such, was far from effective. And Brown disliked politicians in general anyway. To add to this mismatch, Brown was dead set against the New Deal and President Roosevelt, who he thought was taking his money and handing it out to lazier men. He called the New Deal programs “Gimme’s.” The fact that Johnson had campaigned solely on the New Deal ticket had upset Brown. To Herman Brown, Johnson secured the Marshall Ford Dam for Alvin Wirtz, not Brown.
It took time for Johnson to work his charm on Herman Brown. Johnson knew that with the addition of the dam to Brown & Root’s resume, the company was fast becoming a powerful financial force in Texas. It was clear that he needed Herman Brown behind him, and he set out to get a better read on the fiery businessman. As Johnson would soon discover, Herman Brown didn’t want people to agree with him without a fight. He wanted to convince people he was right. He wanted to argue politics and business long into the night, bang his fist on the table, and curse his opponent. He wanted people to be principled and stubborn. The normally malleable Johnson eventually learned to give him what he wanted. Between spring 1937, when Johnson won the final $10 million for the Marshall Ford Dam, and fall 1937, when Brown staged the high dam coup at the Rotary luncheon, Johnson thought he had made significant progress with Brown. Johnson and Brown had many things in common; a history of poverty, unbridled ambition, and Johnson even spent time working on a road building crew in his youth, much like Brown. He spent many nights at the Brown’s residence at 4 Niles Road, in Austin in 1937, and had even managed to patch things up with Margaret Brown through the advice of mutual friend and Austin attorney Ed Clark. But with the stunning turn of events now taking hold, the budding relationship, which Johnson had worked so hard on, seemed to be exposed for what it really was to Herman Brown: just business.
•••
Herman Brown had Wirtz and Johnson over a barrel, and the situation was all the more embarrassing because it was true. The original dam, now standing at an already immense 190 feet, would need an additional 78 feet to be able to hold back the flood waters. The new issue begged the question: If the dam needed an additional 78 feet for flood control, what was the purpose of the first 190 feet? It became suddenly clear that Wirtz and Johnson had sold the dam on false pretenses, and Herman Brown was poised to expose the entire scenario. At first outraged by this betrayal, Johnson, ever the politician, quickly gathered himself and chose wisely not to fight Herman Brown on the issue of the high dam. Johnson knew even then that Brown would become a crucial part of his political career. Swallowing his anger, Johnson did Herman Brown’s bidding. He immediately began the process of securing funding for the higher dam.
The problems surrounding funding the higher dam were even greater than those that had been overcome to build the low dam. Johnson needed $17 million, and with no credit left, it wasn’t going to come from the LCRA—which wouldn’t have spending power again until the dam began generating power. That day was now looking like it might never come. The Bureau of Reclamation meanwhile was only authorized to fund projects for flood control. At this point, it would be impossible to argue that the higher dam was for flood control, without by default making hydroelectric power the purpose of the low dam. This was just the kind of legal morass that Alvin Wirtz thrived on, and he went to work rewriting history.
Using his trademark legal legerdemain, Wirtz redesignated the purpose of the low dam to be power production. It was safe to do this now that the original $10 million had already been obtained. That allowed the Bureau of Reclamation to pay for the additional 78 feet of the dam that would now be designated as flood control. But the Bureau was only authorized, on the high end of the scale, to spend $14,850,000 on flood control, and any additional funds would need to be reimbursable through the sale of hydroelectric power. That money, along with the $9,515,000 that the LCRA had already committed to the dam, left a gap of $2,635,000, and nobody left to pay the bill. That’s when all heads turned to Abe Fortas, a Washington attorney and friend of Johnson’s.
Fortas was a young and talented lawyer; he sized up the situation and gave the Browns his honest assessment. He was their last hope for the higher dam, and as George Brown recalls, “The fellow [Johnson] relied on most of all and became friends with was the fellow he later appointed to the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas.” Fortas reasoned that he could convince the PWA to fund the unclaimed portion of the dam, even though the agency was not authorized to fund flood control dams or power generating dams. He told Harold Ickes, the PWA administrator, that if the unclaimed portion of the dam, approximately 33 feet, were to be designated as neither for power production nor flood control (because it was in fact for both), the PWA could foot the bill. That portion of the dam would cost about $2.5 million, as it happened. Unbelievably, Ickes agreed.
The impossibly complicated solution for funding the higher dam still needed to be rammed through the congressional approval process. Johnson had people working on his behalf to smooth things over in the Department of the Interior, cutting through endless red tape. But getting Congress’ approval on a transaction so obviously concocted would be no small task. That burden fell to Charles H. Leavy, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who, like so many others in Washington, was doing the bidding of the ambitious young congressman from Texas’ Tenth District without fully understanding why or to what end. Leavy added an amendment to the law governing projects funded by the Bureau of Reclamation that specifically exempted the Marshall Ford Dam from the usual bylaws. Several congressmen jumped upon hearing this blatant rewriting of the law. Questions flew as to why they were being asked to provide an additional $2.5 million for a dam that was originally intended for flood control, then changed to a power generating dam, then was being called neither. It made no sense, and despite the complicated and esoteric nature of the project, the committee knew it.
Leavy began to feebly explain why the additional funding was necessary, but he was unconvincing. Upon seeing this weak attempt to persuade Congress, Sam Rayburn, the Majority Leader and a loyal Texan, silently stood behind Leavy as his words tapered off. When Leavy’s convoluted explanation ended, Rayburn, one of the most powerful men in the House, said, “The gentleman is correct, yes.” That was all it took. The House voted to approve the amendment, and the PWA was back in the dam business in Texas. Johnson, along with the help of some of his new friends in Washington and some old friends from Texas, had done it again.
•••
Legally, there had to be a new bidding on who would build the higher dam. Ostensibly, the work would go to the most qualified, lowest bidder. Brown & Root, already having invested in all of the equipment necessary to do the job, easily outbid the competition. The new cost for the entire project was $27 million, and Herman Brown began slowly ratcheting up the cost even from that lofty plateau to increase his profits on the project. It was a technique the company would employ repeatedly in its government contracting business. Using Johnson as his go-between, Brown was able to get countless requests for additional costs approved. Johnson manipulated Department of the Interior underlings while he feverishly worked on Herman Brown’s behalf. He sliced through red tape effortlessly, and Brown & Root reaped the benefits. Each change order had to be approved by several people in the Department of the Interior, and Johnson had them all working for him.
It was during this time that Johnson grew very close to George Brown, who served as liaison between him and Herman. George, closer in age and temperament to Johnson, frequently traveled to Washington. And Johnson reported back to Brown sometimes multiple times a day to update his progress. Later in life, George Brown would recall conversations he had with Johnson in which Johnson would characterize himself, Alvin Wirtz, and George Brown as “a joint venture . . . Wirtz is going to take care of the legal part, and I’m going to take care of the politics, and you’re going to take care of the business end of it. . . . The three of us together will come up with a solution that will improve the status of all three of us,” Johnson would say.
In reading Johnson’s correspondence with the Brown brothers at the time, it’s impossible not to think that he was spending a great deal of his time working for them. He was very much like a new employee at a firm, eager to impress. “It is needless for me to tell you that we are humping ourselves on the jobs we have to do here and that this little note . . . is being knocked off between conferences,” he told Herman in one note. In another telegram from November 1940, Johnson expressed frustration with the orders he was receiving from George Brown: “Why do you send me telegrams and then run out before I can follow your instructions?” Johnson’s subservience to Brown indicates just how important he knew the company would be to his future. It seems as if the majority of Johnson’s first year in Washington was spent working on behalf of Brown & Root. Tommy Corcoran would later say, “Lyndon Johnson’s whole world was built on that dam.”
The same could be said for Brown & Root’s world. The company had entered the bidding process for the original dam with zero dam building experience, hurtling toward bankruptcy. They made a $2 million profit on the low dam alone, and millions more from the higher dam, particularly as Herman Brown managed to squeeze change order after change order through the Department of Interior. The dam is a still-standing monument to the sheer will of several Texas men. Eventually renamed the Mansfield Dam, after the man who played a key role in its development, the dam served as the foundation for Brown & Root’s financial future and Lyndon Johnson’s political future.
Though their relationship had been strained, Lyndon Johnson and Herman Brown developed a mutual respect through the process of building the dam that would last through Johnson’s presidency. Johnson learned how to spar with Brown on political issues, getting so heated that the two of them nearly came to blows at times. That’s what Herman needed to see in order to grudgingly dole out his respect. He needed to know that Johnson was up to the challenge, that he stood firm and defended his views with pragmatism. “Lyndon and Herman would have some knock-down-dragouts, but they would always get back together because they all appreciated each other as a worthy opponent,” recalled Lady Bird Johnson. Besides, it didn’t hurt that Herman saw how hard Johnson had worked to make him money.
Up to this point, the relationship had been fairly one-sided. Johnson had bent over backwards for Brown, and Brown hadn’t even supported him in his first campaign for Congress. But Brown knew what was to be expected of him now. He accepted the terms of the new relationship, for Johnson had more than proven his worth. Herman Brown had graduated from his days of wining and dining local politicians to eek out a living paving roads. He had bulled his way into the world of federal contracting, where the stakes were higher and the payoffs greater. He now had his pet politician on Capitol Hill, and he was going to ride him hard. George Brown would later say, “Listen, you get a doctor, you want a doctor who does his job. You get a lawyer, you want a lawyer who does his job. You get a governor, you want a governor who does his job.” Johnson, it seemed, had a new job.
George Brown, understanding what Johnson had done for him and his brother, wrote a note to the freshman congressman. It read, in part, “Dear Lyndon, In the past I have not been very timid about asking you to do favors for me and hope that you will not get any timidity if you have anything at all that you think I can or should do. Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference whether I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100 percent.” One of the most powerful and influential alliances between a business and a politician was cemented at that moment.
next
Guns and Butter
80s
No comments:
Post a Comment