Master of the Senate (49 page)

After Johnson returned to Congress, it was again not allowed out. Notably unamused by the jokes—obviously jealous—he not only relegated her to her old housewife’s role, but took pains to put to rest the notion that her role in his office had been significant. Asked once if he discussed political problems with her, he said that “of course” he did. “I talk my problems over with a lot of people,” he added. “I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her, too.” After the purchase of radio station KTBC, while for public consumption Lady Bird was listed as the station’s president and was said to be in charge of its operations and responsible for its success, in reality the success was due to Johnson’s political influence, and to the fact that he sold that influence to individuals and corporations in return for their purchase of advertising time on the station. In truth, he oversaw, in detail, every aspect of KTBC’s operations, often during these years without consulting more than cursorily with his wife. At the same time that he was telling the public that she was running the station, he was telling their friends—often in her presence, as she sat silently, not contradicting—that he was running it, making clear that her role in it was a minor one.

Now, in 1949, with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, Lady Bird’s duties hadn’t changed. She no longer brought him breakfast in bead every morning, but she still laid out his clothes, unbuttoning his shirts so that he wouldn’t have to perform that chore himself, put in the collar stays and cuff links, filled his fountain pens and put them in the proper pocket, filled his cigarette lighter and put it in its pocket, and put his handkerchief and money in their pockets. While he was shaving, she took dictation. Her other duties, too, remained the same as ever. As soon as he left for Capitol Hill, she would call his office to ask “Who’s in town from Texas today?” If any of the visitors merited a tour, she would take them on it; she was to say that she had stopped counting her trips to Mount Vernon when the number passed two hundred. Or she might invite other visitors to lunch.

Nor had there been any change in Lyndon’s treatment of her, which was still so abusive that people who witnessed it say, “You couldn’t believe it.” Orders were as brusque as ever. “Bird, go in and fix us something to eat,” or, if he wanted her out of the room when a delicate political matter was being discussed, a dismissive “See you later, Bird.” If, on a day on which he had told her in the morning that they were having guests to dinner, she ventured to call his office in the evening to ask when he might arrive, the reaction was swift. “Goddammit, tell her that I’ll be leaving when I’m done here,” he would snarl to Jenkins or Rather. “Tell her to quit calling every fucking five minutes. Now go phone her and tell her that.” When, at Thirtieth Place, he wanted something from her and she wasn’t in the room, he would shout for her—“Birrrrdd!”—in a voice one guest likened to a hog call. He told stories about her to amuse his friends, some the kind that many husbands tell about their wives, except that Johnson told them with a cutting scorn in his voice. Once when she got home from a shopping expedition after he was already there and talking with some friends, he said, “Well, Bird, did you wear out another four dollars’ worth of shoe leather shoppin’ around to save a dime?” He still mocked her appearance in front of friends, comparing it unfavorably to theirs. “Look at your hair, Bird,” he said once, in a tone of disgust. “You look like a tumbleweed. Why can’t you look nice, like Mary Louise here?” “He said it right in front of everyone,” Mary Louise said. “I couldn’t even look at her.” “His attitude towards her was utter contempt,” says his fellow congressman, the West Texan O. C. Fisher. In comments that are typical of many made by social friends of the Johnsons, Wingate Lucas of Fort Worth, who was elected to Congress in 1948 and saw them frequently, says, “Lady Bird was charming, but she was the most beaten-down woman I ever saw. You immediately felt sorry for her. Her husband was so mean to her, so publicly humiliating. He would dismiss what she said with a disgusted wave of his arm: ‘What do you mean, Bird? That’s ridiculous.’ He’d shout across the room at her at parties of Texas people—friends of hers—and just order her to do something.” Says her friend Mary Elliott: “He’d just click his fingers.
‘Bird!’
She’d have to stop whatever she was doing, and just come running. I never saw anything like it.” The tone he used with his wife was, in short, the same as he used with the staff in his office on Capitol Hill; he treated her as if she had been just another member of that staff—and not a particularly valuable one at that. “The women liked her,” Nellie Connally says. “Every woman sympathized with her. If they didn’t like her for herself—and they did—they liked her because they saw what she had to put up with. It made what they had to put up with not so bad.” A researcher trying to get a picture of the Johnsons hears, over and over, the same phrase: “I don’t know how she stood it.”

But she did stand it, and in fact her devotion to him—her love for him—seemed only to grow stronger. He had only to put his arm around her for her face to grow noticeably happier. There was obviously a strong physical tie between them. Stuart Symington was struck by two incidents that occurred in
1951 while he and the Johnsons and Mary Rather were having dinner in the little back yard behind the Thirtieth Place house. “Lady Bird said, ‘Stu, have another little piece of chicken,’ and I said, ‘Thanks but I’ve had all I can eat,’ and she said, ‘Oh, please, have just one more piece’—and Johnson blew.
‘Goddammit
, Bird, leave the man alone! Didn’t you hear what he said? Goddammit, the man doesn’t want any more chicken!
Goddammit!’
And I never forgot it, he was so brutal with her.” But that same year, Symington visited the Johnsons in Texas, and they drove out to the Hill Country for a picnic and while they were sitting on a blanket, Lyndon “said to her, putting his arm around her, ‘Let’s jest do a little ‘spoonin’ ’—and the light in her face was something to see.” Whatever the reasons, her adoration for her husband was visible to everyone. Once her biographer, Jan Jarboe Russell, asked her if she resented doing menial chores for him—bringing him breakfast in bed, etc. “Heavens, no,” Lady Bird replied. “I was delighted to do it. I adored him.”

T
HE MODEST HOUSE
on Thirtieth Place seemed too small for its furniture. Not long after the Johnsons had purchased it, Lyndon, annoyed by the amount of time Lady Bird was taking to pick out furniture, went to an auction one day and purchased an entire houseful. But the furniture—large, heavy Victorian pieces—was evidently from a much larger house. Lady Bird had thereafter decorated “every inch of that house,” as Elizabeth Rowe would recall; in the rather small dining room, for example, not only the windows but a wall mirror were hung with heavy red draperies. And the house seemed too small for all the people who lived in it—not only the Johnsons and their two girls but also Zephyr Wright and a changing cast of staff members and visitors from Texas who slept up on the third floor; “Texas friends descend on them all hours of every day, and stay for a drink, a meal, or a week,” a journalist wrote. “Lady Bird takes it in stride.” And it seemed too small for the man around whom life in it revolved.

The clock radio beside Lyndon Johnson’s bed was set for seven-thirty, but on most days the bedside buzzer with which he called for breakfast rang down in the kitchen well before that time; it wasn’t an alarm that jerked Lyndon Johnson out of sleep. He would often have made several calls to his assistants during the night when he thought of things that needed doing, and he would wake up thinking of more; as he lay in bed eating the breakfast that Ms. Wright had brought up on a tray—usually a Texas grapefruit, toast, and a big plate of spicy Hill Country sausage—drinking innumerable cups of coffee, and lighting the first of the day’s cigarettes, he would be telephoning assistants at their homes and, at about eight, telephoning SOB 231 to see what the morning’s mailbag had brought. And he would be reading: not only the
Washington Post and Times-Herald
, and the
New York Times
, but the
Congressional Record.
(Each day’s
Record
, covering the previous day’s activities, was printed at about
six o’clock in the morning, and he had asked for it to be delivered to his home; five days a week a green truck from the Government Printing Office pulled up on the quiet street at about seven o’clock and a gray-uniformed GPO employee would lay a copy at the Johnson front door; sometimes the ink would still be wet and would smear Lyndon Johnson’s fingers as he read it, turning the pages very fast but focusing on them very intently.) He would tear out articles as he read. As he shaved in the bathroom—with an electric razor because he considered it easier than a straight blade on his tender skin, and because he considered an electric razor faster, and he didn’t want to waste time—and combed his hair, concentrating on covering a growing thin spot on the back of his head, he would be dictating letters, memos, and reminders to himself to Lady Bird, who was sitting on the bed with her stenographer’s notebook. By eight-thirty or so, Walter Jenkins or Mary Rather would have arrived to take more dictation, and tension and haste would sharpen in Lyndon Johnson’s voice as he put on the clothes his wife had laid out for him. The upstairs doorknobs were decorated with knotted neckties; believing that tying a tie each day wrinkled it—and also took too much time—he simply loosened his ties to take them off at night, and hung them, knots intact, on doorknobs, ready to be slipped on again. By nine, he would be out the door, and driving down Connecticut; sometimes, if he wasn’t picking up Congresswoman Douglas, he would pick up Mary Rather and drive her to work, weaving in and out of cars, shouting at their drivers, mingling dictation and diatribes, gearing up for the day ahead. He wouldn’t return home until after the Senate had adjourned for the day at five or six o’clock, and after he had attended Rayburn’s Board of Education and had done several hours’ work in his office, and then he would often bring last-minute guests.

Sometimes, he wouldn’t have finished all his office chores when he had to get home to greet guests. The huge stack of letters that his staff had churned out that day might not all be reviewed and signed, for instance. Then that work would be done at home. While his guests were talking and having a cocktail in the living room, he would sit in a corner, a tall stack of papers in front of him, talking along with them but reading and signing as he talked.

T
HERE WERE
, of course, two individuals at 4921 Thirtieth Place who did not fit into that routine: Lynda Bird Johnson, age five in 1949, and Lucy Baines Johnson, age two.

During the first nine years of their marriage, Lady Bird Johnson had become pregnant three times, but had suffered three miscarriages. In 1943, she had conceived again. Lyndon Johnson badly wanted a son—and apparently had no doubts that his wishes would be answered. Writing on November 22, 1943, to congratulate L. E. Jones on the birth of Jones’ baby, he said, “You may be interested to know that I am expecting a boy in March.” Talking to friends in
Washington, with Lady Bird present, he seemed so convinced of this that Jim Rowe had felt called upon to inject a note of caution, writing him on March 4, 1944, “I do assure you, as a gentleman who desperately wanted a son and never told his wife about it either before or after the event, that if your fate is the same as mine you will in three months’ time no more think of having a son instead of a daughter than of voting with Pappy O’Daniel.” This caution was reinforced by Rayburn, and it apparently had some effect, for when Jones wrote Johnson the next week, “Here’s hoping it’s a boy,” Johnson wrote back, “I hope I’ll be as lucky as you, but at this point I’m not as particular about a boy as I was at first.” Lynda Bird Johnson was born, on March 19, 1944, only after twelve torturous hours of labor, and doctors, as readers may remember, strongly advised Mrs. Johnson not to become pregnant again; and when, in 1946, this advice was disregarded, its wisdom was almost tragically proven—as was Lady Bird’s courage. She knew she was miscarrying again, yet she insisted that Lyndon go to the office although she was in intense pain and running a high fever. She called the doctor as soon as he had driven away, but before an ambulance arrived she began to hemorrhage badly. As she was being carried out of the house on a stretcher, she asked a visiting friend from Austin to mail an important letter to Texas, told her how much postage to put on it, and insisted that a dinner party the following evening, to which she had invited Rayburn and two guests, not be canceled, saying, “Lyndon has to eat anyway, and they’re already invited,” and requesting that her friend act as hostess in her place. Her condition was listed as critical for more than a week, but she recovered—and became pregnant again. “We’re waiting for baby brother,” Lyndon told friends. On July 2, 1947, Lucy Baines Johnson was born, in a delivery so difficult that when the doctor held her up for the first time, he said, “I never thought I’d see you.” Johnson never stopped expressing his desire for a son; “You know I always wanted a boy,” he would tell his secretary Ashton Gonella. In an interview with Stewart Alsop published in 1959, he said, “I’ve always wished Lady Bird and I had a son. If we had [had] a boy, I’d want him to be a politician or a teacher or a preacher…. Someone who … has an influence on events.”

On the days Johnson went to his Senate office, he was telephoning, giving dictation, and reading the newspapers and the
Record
from the moment he awoke, so he had little time in the mornings to spend with his two daughters. Since he rarely returned before they were asleep, they seldom saw him during the evenings of the days on which he went to his office. And since those days were six of the seven in the week, their time with him was necessarily somewhat limited. There remained Sundays, of course, but as Lynda Bird was to say during an interview in 1989, “Daddy was the kind of man who believed it was more important to invite Richard Russell… over for Sunday breakfast than to spend the time alone with his family.”