White’s assumption was an early example of how people underrated Mrs. Johnson. She never missed an opportunity to learn and, in this case, she made sure it was the last time she over-imbibed. She also set to work becoming the perfect political partner, and in this she had a mentor in Terrell Maverick, wife of Texas congressman Maury Maverick. Although only a dozen years Bird’s senior, Mrs. Maverick was a city woman, from San Antonio, and self-appointed guide to those younger and newer than herself to Washington. She gathered up a group of young wives, including Bird, and took them on a tour of the Capitol, followed by lunch in the VIP dining room. There she delivered her lecture on how to survive in the city. She told the neophyte wives that each had to get deeply involved in her husband’s work, learn the names of his colleagues, read up on the issues he was voting on, understand his responsibility to the voters who put him there. Otherwise, the women risked ending up like so many Washington wives before them, drifting apart from their husbands and getting divorced.
That advice fit neatly with Bird’s own ideas, and she set to work immediately, showing the same adaptability she had shown earlier on her summer stays with relatives in Alabama and at the Matthewses’ rooming house in Austin. No matter how drastically her circumstances changed, she never complained. She simply sized up the scene and fit in, dealing with what she had rather than wishing for something else.
If she had been as well-heeled as Lyndon’s biographers would later describe her, she might have hired a maid and found a large, elegant place like the seventeen-room house where she grew up. But T.J. was not about to subsidize his married daughter, and she didn’t expect that. She knew she could count on him and Aunt Effie to help out in a real pinch. Maybe they would pitch in on something extra, like a car, but for day-to-day expenses she meant to manage on what her husband earned.
The apartment the Johnsons found in Northwest Washington, at 1910 Kalorama Road, was pathetically small. It had only two rooms and a tiny kitchen, which meant that when Aunt Effie came to visit (and claimed the bedroom) Bird and Lyndon had to sleep on the living room couch.
None of that mattered for long because Bird had to pack up and move out a few months later. She had gone for a summer visit to her father in Karnack when Lyndon phoned to tell her that he had been chosen to head the Texas division of the National Youth Administration, a new federal program to retrain young people and place them in jobs. For Bird, the most thrilling aspect about the job was its location: they would be living in Austin, a place she still thought of as “sheer heaven.”
Those next eighteen months turned out to be one of the very best times in Bird’s marriage, as she found new ways of following Mrs. Maverick’s advice. Lyndon, at twenty-seven, was the youngest of all NYA directors, and he needed a large staff to develop NYA programs for his gigantic state. He started hiring even before receiving final clearance for his own job. Although a couple of his underlings were already familiar to Bird because they had worked with Lyndon in Washington, most were new, and she immediately started treating them all like family.
Whether at the “romantic and charming” house she rented first at 2808 San Pedro Street, or at the “dull little place” at 4 Happy Hollow Lane, where the Johnsons moved next, the door was always open. Bird was still doing most of her own housework and trying to learn to cook, but she welcomed her husband’s co-workers and contacts at any hour of the day with a coffeepot perking and a home-baked cake ready for cutting. If an unexpected visitor needed a full meal, she prepared it, and she attempted to please the finickiest eater. Lyndon’s second in command, Jesse Kellam, maintained that his mother, although an excellent cook, was no match for Lady Bird, who did something special to spinach so that even he liked it.
All this entertaining cost money, and Lyndon’s starting NYA salary was only slightly more than he had made as a congressman’s assistant. Even after he got a raise, to $5,000 on August 1, 1936 (equivalent to about $83,000 in 2014 dollars), she had to scrutinize every purchase. He lopped off a good chunk for personal incidentals, like cigarettes and car expenses, and continued to send money to his parents and younger siblings. From what was left, she bought a $25 savings bond every month and stretched the rest to cover groceries, utilities, and everything else.
Staff tended to congregate at her place on weekends and these gatherings set the stage for her own environmental and highway beautification work decades later. One evening when NYA aides were sitting in her living room, mulling over ideas for new ways to put young people to work, they began talking about a recent highway tragedy. A Mexican family had stopped at the side of the road to rest, when their car was struck from behind, killing them all. If a space had been provided for resting, at a safe distance from the traffic, the tragedy could have been avoided. Someone suggested using NYA workers to build those rest stops, and that conversation stayed with Bird, triggering a lifelong interest in roadside parks. She was still handing out prizes for superior park projects fifty years later.
Staff members were not the only guests at Bird’s table. Lyndon was always bringing home extra mouths to feed, without so much as a warning telephone call to her. It could be someone he had just met, or a group of people he wanted to impress or influence. To stay within her budget she shopped for liquor by the case and ferreted out the butcher’s cheapest cuts. Objecting to the extra guests was not an option. Bird knew the value of a gracious hostess, and she was not going to miss a chance to win points for Lyndon.
• • •
While others used force of nature terms—“hurricane,” “tornado,” “volcano”—to describe how Lyndon operated, Bird saw him as a machine, in full throttle much of the time. Although his high-energy mode remained a mystery to her, she fully recognized his zeal in moving toward a definite, worthwhile goal. He didn’t have to explain to her why he worked such long hours and was incredibly demanding of those he hired to help him. At the central office he rented in downtown Austin, he kept badgering his staff to come up with programs suitable for Texas, and he arranged with building management to keep the electricity on until midnight so everyone could work late and still have an elevator running to take them down.
In spite of her close involvement with her husband’s aides and work, Lady Bird didn’t know everything that was going through his mind because he didn’t tell her. He still had that fixation with secrecy that she had observed in the courtship letters. So when one of his aides alerted her in mid-1936 that Lyndon would soon leave the NYA job to run for office himself, it came as such a shock that she nearly drove the car off the road.
Lyndon’s chance came just a few months later, when popular James Buchanan, representative of Texas’s 10th District, died suddenly on February 22, 1937. This was the district where Lyndon grew up, and many of his best friends still lived there. But his prospects did not look good. Eight other men, older and more experienced, had also filed to run, and Lyndon’s strength was in the western, sparsely populated Hill Country rather than in the city of Austin, which had the bulk of the 10th District’s votes.
Lyndon did have one advantage, and Alvin Wirtz, one of the district’s savvy politicos, spotted it. During those three years working for Congressman Kleberg, Lyndon had learned a lot about how things worked in Washington. He knew the people who got money funneled to the states. For attorney Wirtz—always called Senator Wirtz because of his service in the state senate—that Washington experience could be extremely valuable. Wirtz was currently heading a project that required heavy federal funding, and he threw his support to Lyndon and engaged one of the best campaign managers in the state, Claude C. Wild Sr., to take charge.
Now that Bird had a chance to participate in her husband’s first campaign, she provided much more than fresh shirts and a hot meal at the end of a long day. Lyndon needed cash, and Bird’s inheritance from her mother remained untapped. The first installment of $7,000 was not due for another six months, but Bird thought T.J. would advance that payment if she asked him.
First, however, she wante
d to do some checking of her own about the soundness of this investment. Even to advance the career of a husband she adored, she was not about to risk her money without checking out the odds. So she went to Senator Wirtz, the man she called our “adviser . . . our brain trust,” and asked him two questions: Did Lyndon have any chance at all? And how much would a campaign cost? Wirtz replied in the affirmative and set the price at $10,000.
That was twice what her husband made in a year, a sum likely to dismay many a wife, but Bird never flinched. She phoned her father immediately, and when he tried to bargain her down to $5,000, she remained firm, showing she could stand on her own, even against tough T.J. “We have to have ten,” she insisted, and he transferred the money to Lyndon’s bank within hours.
The candidate’s wife soon clashed with the campaign manager over tactics. Wild had convinced Lyndon that he had to come on stronger, go on the offensive, and attack the other candidates. He could never win with just a meek presentation of his own record; he needed to go negative. When Bird heard Lyndon delivering what sounded to her like mudslinging, labeling one of the other candidates a lobbyist, another guilty of unsavory connections, she didn’t just sit back and watch. She went to Wild to complain that she had put up money for this race and she deserved a say in how it was run. She didn’t like the tone Lyndon was taking, and she wanted him to stop the name-calling.
Wild immediately gave her a choice: “Mrs. Johnson, you’re going to have to make up your mind whether you want your husband to be a Congressman or a gentleman.” Put that way, the decision was easy, and she raised no more objections. But to remind herself of the important part she had in that campaign, she carried the bank withdrawal slip in her purse until it became ragged and faint.
Like so many other people, Wild underestimated how well those wheels in Bird’s head turned. He acknowledged that she tried to get her husband to eat better, something healthier than the canned sardines and cured sausage he picked up along the way, and she answered the phone and drove voters to the polls on election day. But she was, Wild naively concluded, “quite young . . . a delightful person at that time” but without any interest in politics.
That was what she looked like to outsiders, but she was fooling Wild the way she would fool others for the rest of her life. She had quickly recognized that Wild “did not want women in politics. No, Sir,” and she wasn’t going to annoy him by making herself too visible. Already, at twenty-four, she had learned rule number one for a successful politician’s spouse: give your advice privately if it might antagonize when delivered in public.
The total amount spent on that race ballooned far beyond her $10,000, and although campaign rules did not yet require precise filings, one insider speculated that Lyndon’s six-week campaign cost between $75,000 and $100,000, making it one of the most expensive in the nation for a House seat at the time. Beyond Bird’s inheritance, Lyndon drew on her father and her brother, Tony Taylor, and on his own kin, including bachelor Uncle George, who put up his life savings. But family contributions made up only a fraction of what came from Senator Wirtz’s wealthy clients.
The race for victory on April 10 was a fast-paced, winner-take-all contest, with no provision for a runoff between the top two, and Lyndon used every ounce of his powerhouse energy to follow the strategy his team worked out. Ray Lee, the pipe-smoking journalist who quit his teaching job at the University of Texas to help in the campaign, explained that Lyndon campaigned the old-fashioned way, going after one vote at a time. Targeting undecided voters, he moved doggedly down unpaved country roads, shaking hands with one farm couple after another. He never missed a rally, regardless of weather, and he kept attention focused on himself. As one local newspaper reported, Lyndon Johnson “spoke first, last and the loudest.”
The exhausting schedule exacted a price, and Lyndon lost pounds, as well as his voice. He complained of stomach pains, even vomited from time to time, but he kept going and refused to see a doctor. Then, just two days before the election, his condition worsened. While greeting a line of voters, including Mr. and Mrs. Matthews, who owned the rooming house where Bird stayed as a UT student, he collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed acute appendicitis and ordered immediate surgery. While Lyndon worried that voters might suspect his illness was just a ruse to win their sympathy, he had no choice—not when doctors told him he had an appendix ready to burst.
Election the following Saturday produced a huge victory. Lyndon was still recuperating from his surgery on Thursday when news came that he had won big, with nearly three thousand votes more than his closest rival. Suddenly it seemed everyone he ever knew wanted to congratulate him, and as a parade of well-wishers streamed by his hospital bed, the doctors insisted Bird stop them. She just laughed and pointed out that he was encouraging the flow of enthusiastic fans. Far be it from her to quash his celebration or hold him back.
By the time President Franklin Roosevelt completed his spring fishing trip off the Texas coast, Bird had Lyndon in good enough shape to greet him personally and get photographed at his side. A few weeks at the Brick House had put some of those lost pounds back on Lyndon’s slim frame, and he wanted to underscore his campaign pledge to back whatever the president proposed. The 10th District had given FDR four out of every five presidential votes cast in 1936, and for the district’s brand-new congressman, a picture at his side would mean a lot. FDR took an immediate liking to Lyndon, in spite of his rather brash questions about the Roosevelt family and how much fish the president caught. FDR instructed one of his cabinet members to help the young congressman “with anything you can.”
Bird stayed behind to organize things when Lyndon took the train to Washington in early May to start his service in the House of Representatives. This would be her fourth move in three years, and she needed some time to decide what to take with her. After packing bed linens and housewares into her car, she started driving east, accompanied by the wife of one of Lyndon’s aides. With only a slight detour, she could spend some time with Aunt Effie, who never failed to tell her how much she enjoyed those visits.
As soon as she arrived in Washington, Bird immediately set out to be her husband’s number one aide, without appearing on his payroll or putting a foot in his office. Most congressmen’s wives who accompanied their husbands to Washington stuck to social events and planned their days around hairdressers and wardrobes, but not Bird. In the few months she spent in Washington in 1935, she had begun guiding visiting Texans around, showing them the chief monuments, and she observed how grateful they were. Now, as a congressman’s wife, she became a one-woman welcome wagon for any 10th District Texans visiting the capital. She obtained tickets for them to hear House debates, ferried them from one landmark to another in her own car, and invited some of them back to her apartment for a meal.
Now that she had a bigger apartment than the one in 1935, she found entertaining easier. It was furnished, which meant she was still using someone else’s chairs and tables, but it had two bedrooms so that Aunt Effie could stay for weeks at a time. Even when she was there in the guest room, Lyndon’s brother or one of his staffers could sleep on the living room sofa or put up an extra cot. It was a hectic household, with a constantly shifting list of residents, and Bird could never be sure who or how many would turn up at breakfast. “Friends of friends” moved in and out in such antic succession that she felt like she was living in a Marx Brothers movie. After one overnight guest left, she and Lyndon conferred, then concluded that neither of them had any idea who that last guest was.
That the unflappable Lady Bird adapted so easily and without complaint to what another wife might call excessive intrusions was a big part of her social genius. It was certainly a considerable advantage for a congressman, especially since she managed to make a favorable impression on nearly everyone she met. Lyndon was a mastermind at picking out the most important people in any room or situation and then currying their favor, but he didn’t always succeed in winning them over. Bird did. While
his brash, public courting of VIPs could strike associates as blatant self-promotion, her wide smiles and frequent invitations signaled caring and genuine concern. Virtually everyone liked her, and most people liked her a lot.
Sam Rayburn is a case in point. Lyndon had known the Texas congressman since childhood, and now with Rayburn newly elected to be house majority leader, Lyndon flattered him shamelessly. When Lyndon planted a kiss on Rayburn’s shiny bald pate, the recipient accepted it as his due, in the manner of a Mafia godfather collecting respect, but other colleagues thought the gesture ridiculously inappropriate.
Bird used softer, subtler tactics to win favor with people who counted. As soon as she realized that bachelor Rayburn was a lonely man after his workday ended, she started inviting him to Friday suppers and Sunday lunches that she cooked herself. Other Washington wives found it awkward to include a solitary male at their dinner tables. But Bird treated him like a favorite uncle. She made a big fuss over his birthday each January and inquired frequently about his health and well-being. By 1940, when he became the powerful speaker of the House of Representatives, she had become one of his top favorites. He sometimes clashed with Lyndon, on both substance and style, but his fondness for Bird never wavered. He stood up for her when Lyndon criticized her cooking and decided she was the best woman he ever knew.
More evidence of her social skills showed up in her conversation. The woman who once warned Lyndon that she loved to debate hot topics, like whether New Deal laws were socialist, now calibrated carefully what she said. She wasn’t about to argue or take sides if that offended anyone. Although she had once relished discussions involving differences, about politics and theater and life, she now recognized that confrontation rarely won friends, and she advised other newcomers to Washington to just “ask questions” if they wanted to make a good impression. That deference won her many admirers, including some who actively disliked her outspoken husband, and he, realizing that fact, started taking her along to dinners when no other wives were present.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 10