1) Cong. Albert Thomas, the "winking congressman," was a COLLEGE ROOMMATE AT RICE UNIVERSITY with George Brown, who along with Herman Brown, was LBJ's top sugar daddy for decades. George Brown, while an executive at Halliburton, Kellogg Brown and Root, made a ton of money off of the Vietnam. KBR got some of the most lucrative contracts of the Vietnam War.
[“Conglamerateur Extraordinaire: James J. Ling: With LTV a Memory, He’s taking his Act to the Oil Patch,” Leslie Wayne, NYT, July 12, 1981]
Cong. Albert Thomas – described as a protégé of Lyndon Johnson by Houston Culture web page
https://houston.culturemap.com/eventdetail/heritage-society-see-interesting-places-ballroom/
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Albert Thomas was Houston's Democratic congressman for 29 years, an LBJ protégé, instrumental in bringing NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center to the Bayou City. A year after his death, in 1967, the city opened the Albert Thomas Convention and Exhibit Center, in the structure Bayou Place now occupies. It cost $12 million and, in true Houston fashion, closed a mere two decades later upon construction of the George R. Brown Convention Center.
Thanks to preservation efforts when the convention center was reborn as Bayou Place in 1997, you can still see a replica of the room in which Thomas wielded his power, complete with photos of the congressman chumming it up with President Kennedy. A U.S. Congressional seal hangs on the back wall, while an old red book rests in the middle of his wooden desk; appropriately, it's titled Science in Space.
There will be a short program discussing Congressman Thomas' illustrious career and his important contributions to Houston. There will also be an opportunity to view his office.
The event will be limited to 150 guests (15 percent capacity) to provide for safe health protocols. Guests are asked to wear a mask and practice safe physical distancing. Advance reservations are required. Proceeds support the general operations of The Heritage Society.
Cecil Stoughton on the infamous LBJ-Albert Thomas wink photo on Air Force One that was taken after LBJ was sworn in
Stoughton told author Richard Trask that the photo could have been “innocent or sinister. I lean toward the latter.”
[Richard Trask, That Day in Dallas, p. 47]
Cong. Albert Thomas, just after WWI, was a college roommate with George R. Brown who later became with his brother Herman Brown, Lyndon Johnson’s #1 sugar daddy
A worthy endeavor: How Albert Thomas won Houston NASA's flagship center (houstonchronicle.com) - Sept 15, 2013, Houston Chronicle
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The story begins almost 100 years ago in the dorms of Rice University. Shortly after World War I, Thomas roomed with, and befriended George R. Brown
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Albert Thomas Find-a-Grave Albert Thomas (1898-1966) - Find a Grave Memorial
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U.S. Congressman. During World War I, he served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. After the war, he graduated from Rice Institute, in 1920, the law department of the University of Texas, in 1926, was admitted to the bar in 1927 and began a law practice in Nacogdoches, Texas. He was attorney of Nacogdoches County, (1927-30), assistant U.S. District Attorney for the southern district of Texas, (1930-36). In 1937, he was elected as a Democrat to the Seventy-fifth and to the fourteen succeeding Congresses, serving until his death. At the time of his death, he was ranked eleventh in seniority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Also, his wife Lera Thomas was elected to complete his term and was the first woman to represent Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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George R. Brown attended Rice University
Henry Wade
"Washington's word to me was that it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged conspiracy-whether I could prove it or not. I was just to charge Oswald with plain murder and go for the death penalty. Johnson had Cliff Carter call me three or four times that weekend." -Henry Wade, Dallas District Attorney
Lyndon Johnson called his tax lawyer Waddy Bullion to sell his “goddamn Halliburton stock” on the day of JFK’s assassination
LBJ makes call from Parkland Hospital; JFK’s corpse was still warm at this point and the phone call had to have occurred before 1:26PM when LBJ left for Air Force One
[Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, p. 132]
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Pat Holloway, former attorney to both Poppy Bush and Jack Crichton, recounted to me an incident involving LBJ that had greatly disturbed him. This was around 1PM on November 22, 1963, just as Kennedy was being pronounced dead. Holloway was heading home from the office and was passing through the reception area. The switchboard operator excitedly noted that she was patching the vice president through from Parkland Hospital to Holloway’s boss, firm senior partner Waddy Bullion, who was LBJ’s personal tax lawyer. The operator invited Holloway to listen in. LBJ was talking “not about a conspiracy or a tragedy,” Holloway recalled. “I heard him say: ‘Oh I gotta get rid of my goddamn Halliburton stock.’ Lyndon Johnson was talking about the consequences of his political problems with his Halliburton stock at a time when the president had been officially declared dead. And that pissed me off… It really made me furious.”
There are many other examples of LBJ’s apparent unconcern after the assassination, though none so immediate. For instance, on the evening of November 25, LBJ and Martin Luther King talked, and LBJ said, “It’s just an impossible period – we’ve got a budget coming up.” That morning he told Joseph Alsop that “the President must not inject himself into, uh, local killings,” to which Alsop immediately replied, “I agree with that, but in this case it does happen to be the killing of the President.” Also, on the same day LBJ told Hoover, “We can’t be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country.”
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[Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, p. 132]
Brown and Root, as a subsidiary of Halliburton, was awarded a bevy of lucrative contracts for the Vietnam War by Lyndon Johnson
https://www.npr.org/2003/12/24/1569483/halliburton-deals-recall-vietnam-era-controversy
[“Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy,” John Burnett, All Things Considered, 12-24-2003]
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After Johnson took over the Oval Office, Brown & Root won contracts for huge construction projects for the federal government. By the mid-1960s, newspaper columnists and the Republican minority in Congress began to suggest that the company's good luck was tied to its sizable contributions to Johnson's political campaign.
More questions were raised when a consortium of which Brown & Root was a part won a $380 million contract to build airports, bases, hospitals and other facilities for the U.S. Navy in South Vietnam. By 1967, the General Accounting Office had faulted the "Vietnam builders" -- as they were known -- for massive accounting lapses and allowing thefts of materials.
Brown & Root also became a target for anti-war protesters: they called the firm the embodiment of the "military-industrial complex" and denounced it for building detention cells to hold Viet Cong prisoners in South Vietnam.
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Henry Wade used to work for both Lyndon Johnson and the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. And he was John Connally’s roommate in the Navy
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He studied law at the University of Texas, joined the Navy, became an FBI agent, worked for Lyndon Johnson, and then in 1950 was elected Dallas County prosecutor, a job he held down without challenge for 36 years.
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[“Roe v. Wade’s forgotten loser: The remarkable story of Dallas prosecutor Henry Wade,” Michael Rosenweld, Washington Post, 9-5-2018]
Henry Wade was a Navy roommate of John Connally during WWII and they were good friends. Connally, of course, was a longtime LBJ inner circle aide and supporter
https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh5/pdf/WH5_Wade.pdf
Henry Wade, Warren Commission testimony of June 8, 1964
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John Connally, you know, was shot also – and he was, he used to be a roommate of mine in the Navy and we were good friends, and are now – and the first thing I did then was went out to the hospital to see how he was getting along.
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Roe v. Wade’s forgotten loser: The remarkable story of Dallas prosecutor Henry Wade
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He studied law at the University of Texas, joined the Navy, became an FBI agent, worked for Lyndon Johnson, and then in 1950 was elected Dallas County prosecutor, a job he held down without challenge for 36 years.
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Roe v. Wade’s forgotten loser: The remarkable story of Dallas prosecutor Henry Wade
