First Ladies (25 page)

Meanwhile, Lady Bird was engulfed by the thousand and one details of moving into the White House and simultaneously dismantling and selling The Elms, the gracious Washington home where she and Lyndon Johnson had lived for so long. She had to cope with two supercharged daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci, each a very distinct personality, and worry about how life in the White House would affect them. She somehow found time to meet and shake hands with every single member of the White House staff—and managed to begin one of the most important sides of her partnership with Lyndon Johnson—entertaining key members of Congress.

On December 14, 1963, only a week after she moved in, the new First Lady presided at a dinner for a half dozen panjandrums of the House of Representatives and gave their wives a tour of the second-floor quarters. As she watched the guests depart, Lady Bird, with that objectivity that is one of her most remarkable characteristics, thought it was a good evening but “what feelings of warmth it created remains to be seen.”

As a vice president filling out the last fourteen months of John F. Kennedy’s term, Lyndon Johnson was anxious about getting elected President in his own right. But he courageously pressed ahead with some very controversial legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act, which infuriated southern conservatives. When the Republicans nominated the conservatives’ hero, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, as their standard-bearer in 1964, a classic confrontation seemed in the making, with the South one of the principal battlegrounds. Friends told the President he would face pickets and violent demonstrations if he ventured into the land of cotton. “We’ll send Lady Bird instead,” LBJ said.

This was not nearly as off the wall as it sounds. During the 1960 campaign, Lady Bird had traveled thirty-five thousand miles, mostly in the Deep South and Texas, speaking for the ticket. After the razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, the manager of
JFK’s campaign, paid her a rare tribute: “Lady Bird carried Texas for us.” It was an amazing achievement for a woman who in 1954 was too shy to make a speech. When LBJ became Senate majority leader in 1955, considerably upping their public exposure, Lady Bird said she “got really annoyed with myself for being so shy and quiet”—and took speech lessons. She was soon calling the course “one of the most delightful expanding experiences I ever had.”

Expanding is a key word here. Growth was at the heart of Lady Bird’s very special relationship with her husband. Not a few people have wondered how she managed to stay in love with this driven, abrasive man, who often publicly criticized her taste in clothes, sometimes ordered her around like a servant, and was not always faithful. Liz Carpenter says part of the explanation is genetic. Lady Bird’s father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, was another tall Texan who always expected to get his own way about everything. But I prefer Lady Bird’s explanation: “Lyndon stretches you,” she said once. “He always expects more of you than you’re really mentally or physically capable of putting out.”

There is more to any love story than a single idea, of course. Although Lyndon may have wandered to other women more than once, Lady Bird knew she was the center of his life. She found that out the day in July 1955 that Senator Johnson collapsed with a massive heart attack. “Take my hand and stay with me,” he said as she rushed him to the hospital. “I want to know you’re here while I’m trying to fight this thing.” For six weeks, she lived in the room next to his; she was with him literally day and night.

That experience—and a large dose of southern womanhood and the Tall Texan explanation—underlies an extraordinary scene Liz Carpenter recalls from the 1960 campaign. Texas was in the grip of a September heat wave, which means temperatures in the hundreds. Several times Lady Bird was assailed by hecklers who accused her of treason and worse for trying to put John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, in the White House. Early in the day she sprained her ankle, but she kept going until she reached her hotel room late that afternoon and collapsed on the bed with the ankle swollen to three times its normal size.

The phone rang. It was LBJ calling from Washington, to find out how the day had gone. “Just perfectly, dear,” Lady Bird said, omitting all mention of the murderous heat, the vicious hecklers, the swollen ankle. Pacing beside the bed, an exhausted, sweat-drenched Liz Carpenter told herself to stay calm and learn something about the arcane art of dealing with a man. But she kept seeing LBJ in his air-conditioned Senate office, blissfully unaware of what his “wimmen,” as he probably called them, had gone through for him in the previous ten beastly hours.

“And how are
you
, dear?” Lady Bird said, almost causing Liz to keel over with apoplexy. She decided then and there (and I heartily agree with her) that Lady Bird was unique, and there was no point—or hope—in trying to imitate her.

Four years later, in his own campaign for president, LBJ’s respect for Lady Bird increased exponentially with her 1964 invasion of the South aboard “the Lady Bird Special”—an eighteen-car train on which she loaded some 250 reporters and a handpicked staff under Liz Carpenter’s unerring eye. “Don’t give me the easy towns, Liz,” she said, as they planned the trip. “Anyone can get into Atlanta. Let me take the tough ones.”

Of course she was snipping a leaf out of the Truman campaign notebook with this whistle-stop tour. Both Johnsons were Truman aficionados; LBJ thought Dad was a great President, and Lady Bird just thought he was great. Early in her First Lady days, she had taken a trip to Greece with him to attend the funeral of King Paul. After the ceremony they met a Greek prince who told them his great-great-grandfather had been an aide to General Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War. Ex-President Truman, perhaps influenced by several days of listening to Lady Bird’s southern accent, decided he no longer had to conceal his true sympathies in that ancient conflict. “Young man,” he said, giving Lady Bird a conspiratorial wink, “as far as this lady and I are concerned, your great-great-grandpa was on the wrong side.”

Lest this tale upset the uninitiated, perhaps I should add that Dad’s mother was an unreconstructed Missouri Confederate until the day she died. When he joined the Army reserve and came home one day
in a blue uniform, she told him never to wear it again in her house. She also told him why she felt that way. More than once during the Civil War, her life had been threatened by bushwhacking, barn-burning Yankee guerrillas from Kansas. I can practically guarantee Dad told this story to Lady Bird at some point in their twenty or so hours in the air going to and coming from Greece. To a very small, carefully selected circle, he revealed his southern roots.

Lady Bird did a lot of the crucial advance work for the 1964 tour of the South herself. She personally called most of the congressmen and senators and the governor in each state and asked for their help. “Guv-nuh,” she would purr, “I’m thinkin’ about comin’ down to your state—” She also enlisted a cadre of wives of southern politicians, such as Lindy Boggs of Louisiana and Betty Talmadge of Georgia. Liz Carpenter remarked that they all had the exquisite manners of Melanie in
Gone with the Wind
—and the steel-trap mind of Scarlett O’Hara.

The initial response of the old-boy politicians to this female onslaught was panic and flight. Lady Bird was handed the worst collection of lame excuses in history. One senator said he was still mourning his wife, who had died two years before. A congressman claimed he had a date to go antelope hunting that he could not possibly break. In the early days of our 1948 whistle-stop hegira, the Trumans, written off as losers by every Democrat from Maine to New Mexico, got the same sort of baloney by the carload.

Excuses be damned, the Lady Bird Special rolled out of Washington on October 5, 1964—and began making history. It was, I need hardly add, the first time a First Lady ever went after votes on her own in this totally professional fashion, with advance men—and women—out in front of the scheduled stops rounding up the crowds and lining up the local officials to do the greeting. It was a presidential-style campaign with a First Lady instead of the candidate as the centerpiece.

For four days the Lady Bird Special snaked through the South, making forty-seven stops in eight states from Alexandria, Virginia, to New Orleans, covering an amazing 1,682 miles. Everywhere Lady
Bird delivered a message that was perfectly designed to win southern hearts and even a few minds. She did not spend a lot of time defending the Civil Rights Act of 1964; she simply said she thought it was “right,” and in time she was sure most southerners would agree with her. She was really there to tell people that “for this President and his wife the South is a respected and valued and beloved part of the country.” She wanted to defend the South against the rest of the nation, against snide jokes about rednecks and cornpone. She wanted to let everyone know she was a southerner and proud of it. “For me,” she often said in summary, “this is a journey of the heart.”

The first time Lady Bird said that, speaking off the cuff to her advance people, she got a standing ovation from a bunch of mostly cynical pols. From Norfolk to Mobile, she got the same reaction from average southerners—times ten. Day after day, the crowds coming out to wave and listen grew larger. Pretty soon—and once more the memory of a similar experience aboard the Truman train in 1948 made me smile—the skittery governors and congressmen who had been hiding out in the tall timber were fighting to board the Lady Bird Special and get their pictures taken beside the First Lady.

Back in Washington, D.C., an ecstatic LBJ greeted his wife with Texas-size accolades. He called her “one of the greatest campaigners in America” and perhaps surprised himself by exclaiming: “I’m proud to be her husband.” I need hardly add that he rolled to a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. Half of those contested southern states voted for him, thanks to Lady Bird.

Before LBJ reached that happy climax, however, his campaign was shaken to its foundations by one of those White House tragedies that seem to strike Presidents with the random ferocity of a lightning bolt. Without Lady Bird, the Johnson presidency might not have survived the blow. A few weeks before the election, one of LBJ’s closest personal aides, Walter Jenkins, who had worked for him since the 1940s, was arrested in a public men’s room performing a homosexual act.

Lyndon Johnson was in New York to give a speech. Reporters besieged him for a comment. He went into hiding and put through a call to Lady Bird. She had already decided what they should do. She
would make a statement for both of them. Liz Carpenter was with her when she took LBJ’s call. She read him her statement and talked to him in a low, reassuring voice for a long time. Finally she said: “I’ve never loved you so much as I do this minute.”

Lady Bird summoned reporters to the White House and read her statement, which proclaimed the Johnsons’ total loyalty to Walter Jenkins and his tormented family. It was a deeply sympathetic, profoundly moving document, which lifted the scandal from vicious gossip to a spiritual plane. Best of all, Lady Bird meant every word of it.

This, I submit, is what a White House partnership is really about—being there for each other when need is paramount. There is a lot more to being First Lady than giving advice on policy. Lady Bird repeatedly proved that matters of the heart are at least as vital.

Along with the campaigning and rescue operations such as the Jenkins affair, Lady Bird concentrated a lot of effort on structuring the White House to give her husband an island of peace on the second floor. When it came to working, Lyndon Johnson made James K. Polk, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry S Truman look like layabouts. The man never stopped long enough to look at a clock; he was immune to orders and exhortations. Only Lady Bird knew how to lure him out of the Oval Office to a quiet dinner with a few friends on the second floor. Without her expert intervention, LBJ might have become a burnout case in his first White House year.

Once Lyndon was President in his own right, Lady Bird felt free to give some thought to other aspects of her job. She was very conscious of the symbolic power of the First Lady, and she wanted to put it to good use. She made a start with “Women Doers” luncheons, which brought together women from Washington and the rest of the country to hear one of their number tell what women were accomplishing in, say, the United Nations. But these luncheons lacked a thematic focus, something that the public at large could respond to and participate in on a national scale.

Typically, Lady Bird found her inspiration in her husband’s vision of a greater America, in which not only would poverty be conquered but the natural beauty of the land would be restored and preserved. In
his 1964 inaugural address, Lyndon Johnson had called for programs to preserve and enhance America’s natural beauty. In that speech and another speech in May of 1964, in which he called on Americans to establish a “Great Society,” Lady Bird found what she described as “interests that made my heart sing, the ones I knew most about and cared most about. These were the environment and beautification.”

Liz Carpenter once compared Lady Bird Johnson and Eleanor Roosevelt. She noted that Eleanor was an “instigator.” She frequently tackled causes on her own, without her husband’s endorsement. Lady Bird, on the other hand, was always an implementer, an embellisher and translator of her husband’s ideas. “She was a WIFE in capital letters,” Liz says.

Cautious as always not to overcommit herself, Lady Bird decided to start her beautification program in Washington, D.C., which was badly in need of a face-lift. Everyone from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to
The Washington Post
had been condemning the capital for its mangy lawns, its crime-ridden parks, its hideous, rat-infested vacant lots. Worst of all was the condition of the 761 miniparks the capital’s original planner, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, had inserted into his heroic vision of magnificent avenues and splendid circles. They were mostly, in Lady Bird’s words, “gray and dismal, with a little scabrous grass and a couple of leaning benches.”