Welly Hopkins, a candidate for the state legislature, was in the crowd that day, and he was so struck with Lyndon’s performance that he invited him to work in his own campaign. A year later it was Hopkins who passed the young man’s name to newly elected Congressman Richard Kleberg, who immediately invited Lyndon for an interview at his gargantuan ranch near Corpus Christi. On the way, Lyndon stopped in Floresville to meet Sam Fore, publisher of the local newspaper and a respected figure throughout the state. Not yet twenty-four years old, Lyndon made such a favorable impression that Fore invited him to stay the night. After Lyndon drove away the next morning, Fore told his wife: “That’s one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him President of the United States some day.”
Congressman Kleberg quickly hired Lyndon, and only eighteen months after graduating from college he was in Washington, running the congressman’s office. Lyndon’s father and grandfather had never gone further than the state legislature, and he jumped at the prospect of beginning his political career in a place they never managed to find employment, in the nation’s capital.
It was a rocky start. Arriving as a scared twenty-three-year-old, with absolutely no experience in a congressman’s office, Lyndon faced a mountain of requests from his employer’s constituents. Since Kleberg preferred the playboy’s life to that of a diligent lawmaker, he was often absent, leaving Lyndon and his co-worker, Estelle Harbin, to act for him. Whether it was a veteran’s question about a pension or a farmer’s problem securing a loan, Lyndon knew neither the answer nor where to go to find one. Estelle Harbin admitted that the two of them appeared so utterly clueless—they had trouble finding their way through the corridors to the right office—that the boss’s wife referred to them as “children.”
But Lyndon Johnson learned fast. He befriended elderly, lonely secretaries who carried many of those answers in their heads. With a charming young newcomer who complimented them, even on their last year’s dresses, they were ready to share what they knew. In order to pick brains, Lyndon hung out at the cafeterias favored by his co-workers. One colleague noted he liked to arrive before everyone else and gobble his food so he could concentrate on the conversation while the others ate. Estelle Harbin observed he could “charm” a woman right out of her chair, and he soon learned to identify the source that would lead him to the right office or agency.
Success begat confidence, and when things went well for him, Lyndon showed a cocky buoyancy. On bad days, he could be grumpy and self-pitying, and one of the young men he had coached in debate, who had followed him to Washington and taken a job in Kleberg’s office, complained that he was not easy to work for. But it was the triumphs that his fans emphasized. William S. White, the Texas journalist who wrote for the Associated Press in Washington, singled him out from the hundred or so new congressional employees as having exceptional potential. Sam Fore, the newspaperman Lyndon met in Floresville, Texas, backed up that observation, praising Lyndon as the only employee in Congress who made a name for himself outside his circle of co-workers because “he had something.” The congressional employees had organized themselves into a “Little Congress” in 1919, and now they elected Lyndon Johnson to be their speaker. As accolades rolled in, Estelle Harbin observed that he “didn’t know what he wanted to be, but he wanted to be somebody.”
That was the up-and-coming Lyndon Johnson who met the curious and ambitious Bird Taylor on a September Wednesday in 1934. Each already knew something about the other, and they had heard it from a person they trusted—Gene Boehringer. It did not take either one very long to see what the other had. Bird’s two college degrees, especially the one in journalism, would impress Lyndon’s mother, to say nothing of the fact that she combined a rock-solid personality with an upscale background, including two years at the elite St. Mary’s. Lyndon was less than four years her senior, but his time in the nation’s capital had catapulted him way out ahead of the young men Bird had been dating at UT. She didn’t have to ask herself if this was the sort of man who would take her away from Karnack.
Gene had already lined up a dinner date for Lyndon that night with one of her other friends, but he quickly zeroed in on Bird and invited her to breakfast the next morning. After regaling everyone in the Railroad Commission office with Washington tidbits, he had her full attention, and she was flummoxed by the strong current of attraction she felt for him. She had always prided herself on being able to compartmentalize her feelings about people and keep a rein on her emotions. But not this time. Unlike the commendable, but entirely predictable, young men she knew, this big bundle of energy who called himself Lyndon Baines Johnson did not fit into any of her people-sorting categories. He dazzled her in a way she had never experienced, and set her feelings churning.
While he “came on strong . . . very direct and dynamic,” she hesitated to accept his invitation to breakfast. She already had an early morning appointment with architect Kuehne, and she prided herself on keeping her word. Yet she was intrigued by Lyndon’s talk about big-name legislators and his life in Washington, and she wanted to hear more. She felt herself being propelled toward him, like “the moth in the flame.”
The following morning, Bird still had not decided what to do. As she walked to the architect’s office, she could have avoided passing the window of the Driskill coffee shop, but she didn’t, and just inside was Lyndon, ready to flag her down. Before she knew it, she had sat down beside him. A few minutes later she had a word with the architect, then climbed into Lyndon’s shiny coupé for a drive around Austin.
For the entire day she listened as he bombarded her with details of his life, mixing braggadocio and charm, persuasion and mild warnings. He told her how hard he had struggled to get through school and then help his younger siblings earn their diplomas; he laid out the particulars of his current employment, how much he earned and what the job entailed. Although he cautioned that she was seeing only his “best side,” he asked her to marry him. Bird felt inexplicably drawn to this macho, lanky man who talked the earthy talk of a “real” Texan. But marry him? Who would agree to that on such short acquaintance?
The next day, when he drove her to meet his family in San Marcos, she had a chance to see the seamier side of his life. His father, Sam Johnson, was only fifty-six years old, but he had the face of defeat, a painful summary of disappointments. Rebekah Johnson still struggled to project a genteel image, but Bird saw right through her camouflage into a pile of discarded hopes. The woman who had once envisioned herself becoming a famous writer was now fifty-three years old, and she had not published a paragraph in years. She could still assume a superior stance when meeting someone for the first time, and Bird sized her up immediately as “very much a gentlewoman” who found herself up against “a lot of work.” The only dreams left to her were those she had pinned on her offspring—that at least one of them would find the success that had eluded her.
Bird picked up immediately the wariness in the family’s welcome, and she understood why Rebekah would naturally feel suspicious about any woman likely to take away her favorite son. Even Lyndon’s sister Josefa watched Bird with such mistrust that Bird wanted to pat both mother and daughter on the shoulder and assure them she had no intention of marrying their precious Lyndon.
After registering the poverty in his parents’ home, Bird was dazzled by where Lyndon took her next. Following a night in a Corpus Christi hotel, where they had separate rooms, he drove her to meet his boss, Congressman Kleberg, at the famous King Ranch. Even by Texas standards, the King Ranch, which Kleberg’s family owned, was mammoth. The largest privately held tract of land in the United States, it could fit the entire state of Rhode Island within its borders. Twice.
Congressman Kleberg and his wife lived in a showy style, unlike anything Bird had ever seen, more Hollywood than Karnack. They favored buttery smooth leather upholstery in their vehicles and jewels that spilled over the settings in their rings. Nearly everything they owned was emblazoned with the
two horns that formed the King Ranch brand.
Bird was so excited by all that was happening to her, she could hardly wait to tell Cecille, and she persuaded Lyndon to stop in San Antonio and meet her former roommate. Cecille liked Lyndon and found “an eagerness about his face that you didn’t see on other people,” but it was the branded leather upholstery of his boss-provided car that stuck most vividly in her memory.
As Bird introduced Lyndon to more of her friends and she met some of his, he showed the same Henry Higgins side that female employees in Kleberg’s office had observed. He was always telling them to pay more attention to their appearance—comb their hair, touch up faded lipstick, straighten their stocking seams—and now he started in with Bird. He ordered her to avoid “mule” colors, stick to straight skirts, and wear high heels to make her look taller than her five foot four. Associates who witnessed his testy bossing thought it rude, far outside the norm for a courting man, even one determined to show off his girlfriend at her very best. But Bird tossed off the humiliation of being criticized in front of others and took his advice as part of the initiation into his exhilarating world. After all, he was introducing her to people she found “rather overpowering,” like the legendary Alice Gertrudis King Kleberg, who looked to Bird like an “aging duchess.”
By Monday, September 10, only five days after meeting Lyndon, Bird was ready to introduce him to T.J., and she invited him to stay at the Brick House on his way back to Washington. The two oversized males, both six foot three, one stick thin with shiny black hair and the other paunchy and turning gray, took each other’s measure immediately. They would never spend much time together or become close allies, but each recognized something of himself in the other—a driving determination to get ahead.
Lyndon went out of his way to make a good impression, and when Malcolm Baldwell, the congressional aide who was traveling with him, showed up in pajamas at breakfast, Lyndon ordered him back to his room to get fully dressed. This was the family of the woman Lyndon meant to marry and he wanted no disrespect shown them. T.J. signaled his approval immediately. “You’ve brought home a lot of boys,” he told Bird. “This one looks like a man.”
The next morning, Lyndon repeated his invitation that Bird come away with him to Washington, but she knew she could not. Although so much about him seemed right—and he had offered to take her out of Karnack—she had known him only five days, a ridiculously short time to make a decision for a lifetime. So he drove off without her, and she would not see him again for seven long weeks.
4
MORE THAN “ELECTRIC GOING”
SEPARATED BY more than a thousand miles during the fall of 1934, Bird Taylor and Lyndon Baines Johnson communicated mostly by words on paper. They had a few phone calls, but it was via letter that both spelled out their thoughts and dreams and fears. Those dozens of letters, laying out the terms of what would become a four-decade relationship, became treasured possessions of Bird’s, and she would take them out at milestone times, such as Lyndon’s 1965 inauguration or a birthday of his, and read them over. That made her feel “so rich,” she said.
Daughter Lynda’s wedding day in 1967 provided another trigger for reliving a time when the young Lyndon was “very close.” He had bolted the wedding reception, only an hour after it started, taking daughter Luci and her baby son with him to Texas. That left Bird to toss rice at the beaming bridal couple and see the last guest off. It was nearly midnight when she went to bed.
The next morning, after a big pot of coffee and a look at the day’s newspapers, she retrieved a small green metal box from her office/sitting room. Inside were the two precious packets. The first, tied with a red ribbon, contained the forty letters, postcards, and telegrams that Lyndon sent her during their brief courtship, and the second had the forty-five letters she had mailed to him. Now, only hours after watching her daughter become a bride, she needed to revisit those few weeks in 1934, the weeks leading up to her own marriage. With all her current worries that Lyndon was falling apart, wrecked by doubt and disappointment about his Vietnam policies and Great Society programs, she needed to concentrate on another time, when both of them were young and the future lay wide open, in wait.
The fact that Lyndon had fled his own daughter’s wedding reception to go back to Texas indicated how disillusioned he had become with himself. Bird never could predict how much benefit he would gain from a few days of downtime, inspecting his cattle and fences without a single antiwar sign in sight. But she knew from the sag in his shoulders he badly needed a break. In the meanwhile, she wanted to go through the letters he had written at a time when he seemed primed to confront any challenge and she wanted nothing more than to go with him.
Once she started reading, she became so fully engrossed in the words and the memories ignited that she did not get up from her chair until three in the afternoon, when she had a commitment she could not ignore. But after fulfilling that obligation and catching a few hours sleep, she found herself wide awake and eager to get back to the letters. It was 4 a.m. and she was hungry. After finding herself some cookies and milk, she crawled back into bed, this time with the other packet, those she had written to Lyndon. Slipping back in time, she read every letter, “the excitement of Lyndon mounting” with each one. When she had finished the last one and closed the metal box, it was 6 a.m. and she decided it had been “one of the strangest, most off-key” days she could remember.
Those letters, most of them not available to researchers until Valentine’s Day in 2013 and not used by a Johnson biographer until now, contain the key to their marriage: what he saw that she could do for him, and what she saw that he could do for her. They are romantic and raw and brimming with lust. But they also reveal the implicit deal the pair struck with each other: that Lyndon would fulfill her ambition of being matched with a man as charismatic and as comfortable with power as her father while taking her away from him, and that Bird would provide Lyndon with a ferocious devotion equal to his mother’s and the emotional ballast he needed to achieve his ambition.
As daughter of T.J., the richest man around, Bird had grown up around power and the will it takes to acquire it. She loved her father’s take-charge attitude and his penchant for staying stage center, the focus of all attention. Lyndon matched T.J. in all these traits, and while he would remove Bird from T.J. country, he would retain T.J.’s spirit and his approach to life.
Bird’s value to Lyndon was equally obvious, in what both of them wrote. He made his weaknesses abundantly clear: he was often sick, and he lived on a seesaw, with his moods shifting wildly from top-of-the-world, when he thought he could do anything, to very low, when he registered only doom and failure. She could be his stabilizer. She had the toughness for both of them, the resilience to be his medicine—to encourage him to put one foot in front of the other and keep going, when all he wanted to do was quit.
Over the years, when outsiders saw Lyndon as a domineering, abusive husband, Bird knew the truth because it was right there, in the letters of 1934. She was essential to him; he needed her. His outbursts and humiliating words were the best evidence that he recognized, deep down, his reliance on her. Like anyone so dependent, he would resent her for it.
Biographers of LBJ who suggest he married Lady Bird for her money miss a major point: money—even a bigger amount than she had—would have counted for little if the woman who came with it was unwilling to take huge risks, like betting a large part of her inheritance on a candidate who looked like a loser, as she did in 1937. Money could also not provide what Lyndon needed most: someone who would engage fully in his career and keep bucking him up instead of compounding his fundamental insecurity by pointing out his failures. History shows that most American presidents before 1968 married up, but not all of them found a wife equal to Bird Taylor, with the steely resolve to help her man get what even he sometimes feared was out of reach.
There were other advantages to having Bird as a partner, starting with her natural grace. For a go-getter with r
ough edges like Lyndon, social charm and some pedigree could be at least as valuable as net worth. Besides the two college degrees—very unusual for a woman at the time—she had impeccable manners and appeared at ease wherever she went. Lyndon had watched her manage his family’s frosty reception and then converse smoothly with a congressman whose wealth made T. J. Taylor look like a pauper. The few days Lyndon spent with Bird in early September 1934 revealed some of her winning qualities, and the letters they exchanged between September 11 and mid-November underlined them all.
When Lyndon sat down to write Bird that first letter, only a few hours after he left her, he was in a Memphis hotel room at the end of the initial leg of his drive back to Washington. He told her how “hard” it was to leave her that morning and “how satisfying and gratifying it was to be with you in your home.” Although he left out any reference to her appearance or to the sexual charge between them, he had obviously placed her on a pedestal. He confessed that he “beamed with pride” at seeing how graciously she presided as “the lady of [her father’s] house.” Lyndon’s only regret, and it was a big one, was that she had not come away with him.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 7