First Ladies (26 page)

Once more the First Lady demonstrated what a professional approach could accomplish. To her Committee for a More Beautiful National Capital she lured the great names—and great wealth—of Laurance Rockefeller, Mary Lasker, and Brooke Astor. She backed them with Katharine Graham, publisher of
The Washington Post
, plus Stewart Udall and various other government honchos, such as Nash Castro of the National Park Service. Finally she brought aboard leaders of Washington’s African-American community, notably Walter Washington, who with Lady Bird’s backing eventually became the city’s first mayor.

This shrewd mix not only guaranteed top-of-the-line effectiveness but also prevented the committee from turning into an elitist operation that planted flowers and trees in downtown Washington for the
tourists and congressmen and ignored the city’s eight hundred thousand segregated, often impoverished black residents. This committee planted downtown
and in
the neighborhoods.

Without Lady Bird, the committee might have split into quarreling factions: the neighborhood wing sometimes referred to the downtowners as “the daffodil and dogwood set.” The downtowners sometimes opined it was a waste of money to plant flowers and trees for people who did not seem to appreciate them—and occasionally destroyed them. Lady Bird supported both programs with equal enthusiasm.

She also breathed new life into related programs, such as the revival of Pennsylvania Avenue, which had been kicking around Washington since Helen Taft’s days. (I exaggerate only slightly.) The architect in charge, Nathaniel Owings, had been supposed to make a report on the project to John E Kennedy on November 23, 1963. Owings was sure he had been born under an unlucky star, until he met Lady Bird. She not only adopted his plan but also adopted him onto her capital committee. Soon, whenever Owings had a problem getting congressional approval for something tricky, like building a reflecting pool in front of the Capitol, he would procure an endorsement from Lady Bird. “It was like a contract in your file,” he said.

Then he would head for the Hill. In the reflecting pool imbroglio (almost everything in Washington is an imbroglio), he approached the austere Speaker of the House, John McCormack, with a roll of plans and sketches a foot thick. “Does Mrs. Johnson like it?” McCormack asked.

“I’m authorized to tell you she approves it completely.”

“Never mind the sketches,” the Speaker said. “Where do I sign?”

McCormack also found Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate and got them to sign up. In thirty minutes Owings had six signatures it would have taken him a month to obtain on his own. “I was in a dream,” he said.

Led by her wealthy members, Lady Bird’s Committee for the Capital raised two million dollars and in the next two years landscaped eighty parks, plus nine schools and eight playgrounds, planted 83,000
spring flowering plants, 50,000 shrubs, 25,000 trees, and 137,000 annuals. Mary Lasker, whose generosity had already spread beautiful flowers around New York, was so enthusiastic, she told Lady Bird her only worry now was whether the nation’s nurseries would have enough stock to plant “the whole United States.”

The neighborhood program evolved into something really worthwhile—Project Pride, which enlisted local residents to “clean up,” “fix up,” “paint up,” and “plant up” some of the most deprived sections of the city. Walter Washington became as enthusiastic about Lady Bird as Nathaniel Owings. “When this program started, there were some who regarded it as Marie Antoinette’s piece of cake,” Washington said. “After all, how many rats can you kill with a tulip? But it hasn’t been that way at all.”

With Washington, D.C., on its way to a new look, Lady Bird went national with beautification. She flew around the country, urging all Americans to join her campaign. A tidal wave of speaking invitations poured into the White House. Lady Bird organized cabinet and Senate wives, many of them old friends, to form a speakers’ bureau to handle the appearances she could not make without cloning herself. Meanwhile, she began leading “See America” tours to national parks and other scenic sights. These expeditions included several hundred reporters, federal officials, and local folk—the sort of thing that only a pro like Liz Carpenter could orchestrate.

Perhaps the most memorable tour was the trek into the spare, stark Big Bend region of Texas, climaxed by rafting down the Rio Grande. Liz summed up one opinion of this particular outing (with which a comfort lover like me concurs) when she said she preferred the parks where all the concessions were run by the Rockefellers. But Lady Bird loved every minute of the Big Bend adventure. She filled her diary with descriptions of “the awesome spires of the canyon walls pierced by centuries of wind.”

Next this tireless woman tackled the legislative side of beautification. She and her staff sponsored and partly wrote a law that LBJ submitted to Congress, to eliminate the proliferation of junkyards and billboards along our nation’s highways. Both these industries had
powerful lobbyists who battled the bill in every imaginable way—especially in the West. Some of the more outspoken billboard owners printed
IMPEACH LADY BIRD
on their endangered assets.

Here Lady Bird relaxes in a field of bluebonnets, reminding us she was the First Lady who revitalized America’s love of natural beauty
.
(Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)

Lady Bird personally oversaw the White House lobbying for the bill, making numerous calls herself. LBJ put on the pressure in his own hell for leather way. The bill was being considered by the House on the day of a scheduled “Salute to Congress” reception at the White House. The President sent the solons a message: there would be no salute if they didn’t pass the bill first. It was quite late in the evening by the time they stopped wrangling and showed up at the White House with a voted bill. One Republican congressman, a certain Robert Dole of Kansas, was so annoyed he moved to insert Lady Bird’s name in the language of the bill, as if he wanted to identify her as the culprit not only behind the controversial measure but also behind the deflated White House party.

While she was raising the national consciousness about America’s natural beauty, Lady Bird somehow found time to be one of the mostest hostesses the White House has ever seen. At everything from formal state dinners to back lawn hoedowns, she and LBJ entertained a staggering two hundred thousand people in their five years in residence. Unlike most White House denizens, Lady Bird never seemed to grow weary of these handshaking marathons. She studied briefing books and consulted aides so she had something friendly and personal to say to almost everyone on the guest list. She topped this hospitality extravaganza by overseeing both her daughters’ weddings in the White House, an exercise in press relations and guest list juggling that can safely be compared to restaging D day twice.

Lady Bird’s achievements are all the more remarkable for another reason. She played her vibrant, creative role in an administration that was sideswiped by history, almost from the day Lyndon Johnson took office. The Kennedy assassination was only one factor in the creation of a torn country. Northern big city black ghettos seethed with anger, the rural South boiled with racial antagonism, as Martin Luther King and other leaders strove to win basic civil rights for their people. Multiplying the turbulence was the war in Vietnam, which LBJ reluctantly expanded in 1965, when it looked as if our small ally, South Vietnam, was on the brink of defeat by Communist North Vietnam.

As more and more Americans turned against the war, Lady Bird found herself drawn into the controversy. By 1967 protesters gathered whenever she visited a college campus to talk about beautification or the environment. Finally, they invaded the White House. First, the singer Eartha Kitt rose at one of the Women Doers luncheons and ranted against the Johnson administration. According to some reports, she even spat at the First Lady. Then a salute to the nation’s writers and artists in the Rose Garden turned into a boycott by some and diatribes by others who showed up only to denounce the President to his face. Day and night, through the windows drifted the chant of protesters in Lafayette Park, across from the White House: “Hey hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Lady Bird watched this nightmare take a fearful toll on her husband. As old Senate friends, such as William Fulbright of Arkansas, turned against him, depression ravaged LBJ’s sleep. In her diary, Lady Bird would note with relief that his bedroom light was out at 11:00 and then discover he had awakened at 2:00
A.M
. and worked for the rest of the night. She told me how she fought a losing battle with “the night box,” in which aides put urgent documents to be signed or reports to be read. No doubt thinking of these latter days, Lady Bird said she really only deserved a B-minus as a First Lady who protected her husband from overwork.

Some mornings, according to an aide, LBJ would lie in bed with the covers pulled up almost to his chin, and the window shades pulled down, reluctant to get up. “I can’t read
The Washington Post
this morning,” he would groan. As his political partner, Lady Bird felt the vicious accusations, the anguish and frustration and deaths of the endless war, as acutely as her husband. By 1968, she noted ruefully in her diary, when they appeared in public, they moved in what she called “riding in the tumbrel” attitudes, shoulders just a bit squarer, head just a bit higher. One Sunday in March, she wrote: “I have a growing feeling of Prometheus Bound, just as though we were lying there on the rock, exposed to the vultures and restrained from fighting back.”

Finally there came a historic moment when Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird had to decide whether he should seek a second term. Most people have imagined—I know I did until I discussed it with Lady Bird—that they began to ponder this decision in 1968, when opponents of the war such as Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the primaries and demonstrated they could challenge LBJ for the Democratic nomination. In fact, thoughts of a single term had been in Lady Bird’s mind since 1965, long before Vietnam became a national obsession. She showed me a passage in her White House diary from that year in which she lamented the “intractable problems” confronting Lyndon. “I am counting the months until March 1968,” she wrote, “when, like Truman, it will be possible to say, ‘I don’t want this office, this responsibility, any longer, even if you want me. Find the strongest, the most able man and God bless you. Goodbye.’”

But the day of decision, when it finally arrived, was more agonizing for the Johnsons than I or almost anyone else has imagined. The ordeal began with Lynda Bird arriving at 7:00
A.M
. on the red-eye flight from California, where she had said good-bye to her husband, Charles Robb, as he departed with his Marine company for Vietnam. After church, LBJ went back to work on a speech he was giving to the nation that night, on the war. Lady Bird had spent much of the previous two days reading and rereading it and making suggestions.

Suddenly, as she read the latest draft, Lyndon said: “What do you think about this? This is what I’m going to put at the end of the speech.” A pause, and he read a statement which ended with the stunning words “Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Even though she and Lyndon had discussed it “over and over, hour by hour” in the past, the decision came as a blow to Lady Bird. Struggling for her customary objectivity, she saw there was a part of her that cried out “to go on, to call on every friend we have… to spend and fight, right up to the last.” But uppermost in her mind was what she sensed was also dominating Lyndon’s mind, the words she had heard him say more than once in recent months: “I don’t believe I can unite this country.”

In midafternoon of this stressful day, Lady Bird broke the news to Lynda and Luci. Both young women burst into tears. With undisguised bitterness, Lynda said: “Chuck will hear this on his way to Vietnam.” Luci’s husband, Patrick Nugent, was scheduled to depart for Vietnam in a few days. How could their father do this? they cried. He was betraying the soldiers, betraying in particular the men they loved.

Somehow, Lady Bird calmed her distraught daughters and convinced them to stand by their father. She joined aides in the task of inviting close friends, such as the Clark Cliffords, to the White House for the speech. Again and again she struggled with the temptation to try to change Lyndon’s mind, only to realize she more than anyone had played a crucial role in helping him reach this wrenching decision. In the end, she simply told him to make the speech as great as
possible. “Remember, pacing and drama,” she whispered, as he sat at his desk in the Oval Office.

Until LBJ got to the very end of the speech, which was essentially an announcement that the United States was going to call a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam as part of an attempt to reach a negotiated peace, Lady Bird was not absolutely certain the withdrawal from the presidency would be made. When it finally came, she said she felt an incredible sense of relief, of becoming “immeasurably lighter.” She was able to deal calmly with the deluge of phone calls from people like Liz Carpenter, who could not believe it, who begged her to do something, anything, to change LBJ’s mind.