Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  Many of the ambitious achievers that Bird latched on to in the 1930s came from religious groups alien to WASP East Texas, and she was struck by the breadth of their accomplishments and the depth of their interests. Abe Fortas, son of a Jewish cabinetmaker in Tennessee, had become an excellent amateur violinist by the time he enrolled at Yale Law School, and he kept playing for his friends after taking an important job at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington when he was only twenty-five.

  His wife was even more remarkable. Fortas spotted Carolyn Agger, another fervent New Dealer, only months after both arrived in Washington, and the two married in 1935. A New Yorker and graduate of Barnard College, Carol, as her friends called her, had also earned a master’s in economics from that hotbed of New Deal ideas at the time, the University of Wisconsin, academic home to Professor Edwin E. Witte, known as the “Father of Social Security.”

  Outstanding as Agger’s credentials were, her new husband encouraged her to add to them, and the couple moved to New Haven, so she could earn, in 1938, the same Yale law degree that he held. By the time Bird met her, Carol Fortas had three first-rate degrees from top-notch schools, providing her with special distinction even among super achieving Washingtonians. But it was the Fortases’ multifaceted lifestyle, mixing high-culture chamber music, tax talk, and a colorful circle of acquaintances, that intrigued Bird. The diminutive, cigar-smoking Mrs. Fortas, in her purple designer outfits, stood out in any crowd, and after she and her husband settled in Georgetown, their home became a favorite gathering spot for liberal thinkers and aficionados of classical music.

  Carol had her run-ins, some of them fierce, with Lyndon Johnson. But she refused to let those disagreements color her relationship with his wife. Open-minded Bird reciprocated the high regard, and although she, herself, would never have paraded in extravagant colors or smoked a cigar, she found something captivating about a woman who did. Nearly three decades after their first meeting, Bird was still relying on Mrs. Fortas for help in her campaign to beautify Washington, and she mused in admiration: “Carol, with her cigar . . . sentimental, and pragmatic, and tough, and soft-hearted. . . . Such a queer combination of a person.”

  Georgetown, where the Fortases and others of their circle took up residence in the 1930s, was a rather shabby section of Washington, only a few minutes’ drive from the Johnsons’ apartment. Many of the Georgetown houses were run-down, and in a bold statement of deprivation by choice, the occupants did not bother to fix up or prettify them. They had weightier matters on their minds. Bird found the home of Arthur and Wicky Goldschmidt particularly inviting, with its “narrow little staircases” and “aura of age,” and she relished trips to their part of Georgetown, before it “really became fashionable.”

  To say Georgetown had not yet become fashionable was an understatement. Once a city of its own, it had technically been part of the District of Columbia since the 1890s, but the factories lining its waterfront and the decrepit houses along Rock Creek Park made it undesirable. The massive influx of New Dealers, searching for inexpensive rentals, changed that. The little row houses were only a few minutes’ commute to government offices, and newcomers gravitated to Georgetown, beginning a transformation that would turn that section of Washington into one of the most expensive and fashionable addresses in the nation’s capital—home to a glitzy list of senators, judges, and writers.

  • • •

  As a congressman’s wife, Bird understood that the minute the House speaker’s gavel came down, ending the legislative session, she had to have everything ready to get back to Texas. With a new election every two years, it was important to keep close contact with voters in the 10th District, and she couldn’t afford to dally. “Dark didn’t catch us,” she explained, one extra night away from those precious “Constituents” (which she spelled with a capital C). Since thrifty Bird objected to paying for a place she wasn’t occupying, she either sublet her current Washington apartment or gave it up entirely, which meant she had to find a new place when she came back. She also thought it extravagant to have more than one set of housewares, and so she packed up the sheets, towels, and tableware and transported them back and forth, along with clothing. Lyndon, who refused to fritter away three days on an automobile trip, took the train or flew, leaving the driving and transfer of their belongings to his wife. One of his secretaries or a staffer would sometimes go along to spell her at the wheel, but Bird frequently had to negotiate the 1,500-mile route on her own, or with just Aunt Effie or another elderly, nondriving relative for company.

  Back in Texas, Bird encountered friends and constituents who had little in common with her liberal circle on the Potomac. The 10th District was full of voters who thought more like the Wirtzes than the Durrs and they were openly disdainful of Virginia Durr’s thinking about women’s independence and Aubrey Williams’s projects to help the disadvantaged. Fiercely self-reliant ranchers in the Hill Country saw no reason to guarantee factory workers a minimum wage, and independent-minded Austinites had little use for the plethora of New Deal rules and regulations radiating out of Washington. Although the Lone Star State was still overwhelmingly Democratic, a conservative faction was growing, led by FDR’s disgruntled vice president, John Nance Garner. Lyndon, who had won in 1937 after billing himself as closely aligned with FDR, had to find a way to appeal to those who felt less warmly toward the president. A wife who made no enemies could be an enormous asset.

  Bird became adept at tailoring her talk to the recipient. When conversing with conservative voters in the 10th District, who wanted to keep things the way they had always been, she left out any reference to positions advocated by the Fortases and the Durrs on subjects like states’ rights and the Constitution. Some of her closest friends (like Gene Boehringer, now the married Mrs. Lasseter) and beloved family (such as T. J. Taylor) were unabashedly part of the conservative faction of Democrats, and Bird listened to them all, without clarifying how she or her husband might feel differently about big government and civil rights.

  • • •

  People who wrote what others read were plum targets for Bird’s solicitous attention. Lyndon’s good friend Bill White, the newsman who hosted the New Year’s Eve party where she got woozy, was an early favorite. Like her, White had grown up in small-town Texas and become interested in journalism while still a student at the University of Texas. Unlike her, he had found a job at The Austin Statesman and quickly won promotion to Washington. When Bird first met him, much of his distinguished career still lay ahead, but she remained his ally as he piled one accomplishment on top of another, compiling the kind of record she might have envisioned for herself: writing for The New York Times by 1945; having a syndicated column running in 175 newspapers nationwide by 1955; winning a Pulitzer Prize for his book on Senator Robert A.Taft.

  These high-powered people—smart, strong-minded, ambitious men and women—were far from homogenous, and they clashed on many issues, sometimes so strongly that they had nothing to do with each other for years. But the warm camaraderie born in the 1930s persisted for decades, with careers intersecting time and time again before diverging and separating, then crisscrossing again. Names like Fortas, Durr, Rowe, and White all appeared in Johnson date books in the late 1930s, and they would still be there in the 1960s, on White House invitation lists and potential appointments to the Supreme Court. Their homes were the places Lyndon felt free to drop in on, unannounced.

  Of all the personal allies who figured in the early Johnson story, no name ranks higher than that of Charles Marsh. The six-foot-three newspaper tycoon was an imposing figure, his big nose and arrogant demeanor giving him the look of a Roman potentate. Marsh had started out poor, working his way through college, but the vast wealth he acquired by the time Lyndon arrived in Washington gave him enormous clout. While still in his twenties, he began buying newspapers and bank stock as easily as some men buy suits. He guaranteed loans for oilman Sid Richardson, and when Richardson struck it rich, so did Marsh. Although
his home base was Austin (and he kept a wife there), he considered himself a national figure and built a rambling Virginia estate, Longlea, near Washington, to accommodate that conceit.

  Longlea also accommodated a woman who was not his wife—Alice Glass. A statuesque blonde with a remarkable head of hair, she had the aura of a Hollywood star, but Bird knew her real story, how she had left small-town Texas and reinvented herself as a sophisticated, worldly intellectual. Just a year older than Bird, Alice Glass had hopped from one college to another, dropping out of Texas Christian in favor of the more cosmopolitan Columbia in New York City, and then returning to her home state. She was only twenty, working as a secretary in Austin, when she met Charles Marsh, owner of the city’s two leading newspapers.

  Marsh installed Alice as his live-in companion and travel mate. On the couple’s European trips she proved a quick study, rapidly enlarging her knowledge of wine, fashion, and foreign affairs. Longlea, with its stone facade and baronial drawing rooms, offered a perfect setting for Alice to flaunt her elegance and impress her guests. Young Lady Bird Johnson found Longlea a virtual seminar in style. Alongside Alice, in her silky evening gowns, the congressman’s wife felt woefully unsophisticated, but she resolved to learn. It was at Longlea that she absorbed her first lessons in how wealthy globe-trotters lived. Until then, she admitted, “I was happily provincial.”

  Through Marsh, Bird met international artists, like the gifted young conductor Erich Leinsdorf. In late 1937, at age twenty-five, Leinsdorf had left his native Vienna for performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His visa permitted only a six-months stay, but after the Nazi Anschluss in March 1938, he feared returning to Austria where Jews like himself were no longer safe. He applied to American officials for a visa extension, but with only days left on the old one he had not yet received a response. So he turned to Charles Marsh and Alice Glass (whom he had met the previous summer in Salzburg as “Mr. and Mrs. Marsh”) to help, and they enlisted the most can-do congressman they knew.

  Neophyte legislator Lyndon Johnson did not have the “foggiest notion,” according to Leinsdorf, how to get a visa extended, but he wanted to please the mogul Marsh, and he went to work “with the kind of energy which I think we all [later saw] in action.” Lyndon first obtained an extension on Leinsdorf’s old visa, giving him time to get himself to Cuba, where there was an abundance of visas—enough “to feed the pigs.” From Cuba, Leinsdorf reentered the United States on a permanent resident visa.

  The heterogeneity of their Washington friends (Jews, Irish Catholics, and Protestants, from all parts of the nation) suggests the Johnsons chose their associates with less regard for religion, ethnicity, or Southern roots than for brains and power. As Bird put it, she was on the lookout for “fascinating characters of the New Deal.”

  Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes and his young wife, Jane, easily qualified. As the cabinet member overseeing much of the New Deal’s big spending, he was a key player but his admittedly difficult personality (he titled his memoir Autobiography of a Curmudgeon) could be off-putting. Bird turned to his amiable young wife to cement a friendship between the two couples. Only twenty-five when she married the sixty-four-year-old secretary in 1938 (after his first wife died in an automobile accident), Jane Ickes soon was running the Maryland farm the couple acquired, and she prided herself on serving suckling pigs raised on her own land. She remained a Johnson friend long after her husband died and the pigs and the farm were sold. Three decades later, Bird looked back over the 1930s, and claimed Jane Ickes as “remarkably durable.”

  Already in the 1930s, Bird’s list of fascinating characters included a sprinkling of oddballs who flouted mainstream values. One of them was William O. Douglas. He had survived an impoverished childhood on the West Coast to earn a law degree at Columbia University and become a prized professor at Yale. Brilliant but endlessly restless, he attracted the notice of President Roosevelt, and after working for the Securities and Exchange Commission he was appointed one of its commissioners in 1936. Three years later, when Justice Louis Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court, FDR nominated the forty-year-old Douglas for the job. He served thirty-six years, longer than any other justice up to that time, and formed a camaraderie with fellow justice Hugo Black, the Johnsons’ longtime friend. In 1975, Time magazine singled out Douglas as the Supreme Court’s “most undeviating liberal voice” up to the time of “his retirement last week.”

  His libertarian views applied to his private life as well. He produced the first divorce in Supreme Court history in 1953 when he left the mother of his two children and wed a woman eighteen years his junior. Then he divorced two more times, marrying a younger woman each time. (The last two were twenty-three and twenty-two, respectively.)

  Although this parade of wives struck some Americans as scandalous for a member of the nation’s highest tribunal, nonjudgmental Bird accepted Douglas’s behavior as just part of who he was. Others might snub him socially and refuse to have anything to do with his young wives but she cheerfully saw them all, right through the White House years. She attended a weekly Spanish language class at the home of one, chatted with another whenever they met at the beauty salon both frequented, and invited the third to dinner. After meeting the justice’s latest mate in 1964, Bird described her as an emaciated adolescent: “there’s only 86 pounds of her—very young, and sweet, and trusting and nice.” But Douglas’s permanent place on Bird’s list of cherished friends was never in question: “I guess sometime I’ll give up trying to understand people—but I’ll always love Bill and hope for the best for him.”

  As a newcomer to Washington in the 1930s, Bird might have shied away from the prospect of talking with men whose pictures appeared on the covers of national magazines. But she wasn’t fazed a bit. She entertained Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran and Ben Cohen, who were touted as the “Gold Dust Twins” in the September 13, 1938, issue of Time. The fast-talking Corcoran and the shy, retiring Cohen hardly qualified as twins, except for the fact that both had come to Washington at the invitation of their former Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter and they had collaborated in the drafting of milestone New Deal legislation, including the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Leon Henderson, the financial wizard who annoyed a lot of people by vehemently disagreeing with them, was another welcome guest at Bird’s table.

  Some of those enchanting characters of New Deal Washington were women, and Bird had to face the fact that her husband was paying more than platonic and intellectual attention to several of them. It seemed he could not keep his hands off them, and from his very first campaign in 1937 gossip circulated about how he spent his nights. He showed little sign of caring what people thought and, in 1939, shocked his aide Walter Jenkins by saying he paid close attention to constituents’ opinions on all matters but two—the car he drove and the women he slept with.

  Although Lyndon had told Bird he was seeing other women while courting her in 1934, the subject of marital infidelity had not figured in their letters, and Bird apparently had not included it in their unwritten agreement on what she would tolerate from her husband. He later told his good friend Richard Russell, senator from Georgia, that she had threatened to divorce him in the 1930s. But she was more than familiar with extramarital relationships, having watched her adored father preen in his reputation as a ladies’ man. His example, among others, convinced her that many men had women who came and went, while their complaisant wives remained steadfast, the permanent centers in their families’ lives. And so Bird amended her side of the Great Bargain, adding yet another to the long list of Lyndon’s imperfections and transgressions that she would not permit to wreck their partnership. Pulling down the famous veil, she would choose not to notice his attentions to other women, and keep reminding herself that he loved her best.

  Much of Lyndon’s flirtation occurred right under Bird’s nose—in his office or his home—with the women who worked for him. He liked to employ couples—because long hours were more
easily incorporated into family routine if both husband and wife served the same boss. The wives could be convinced to accept meager pay and sometimes even work for free. Billie Bullion, the wife of the Johnsons’ tax attorney, John Bullion, refused to sign on, and she later told her son that Lyndon’s Lothario reputation was one of the reasons. (Lack of pay was another.) It was disgraceful for Lyndon to humiliate his wife, Mrs. Bullion argued, and to flaunt so openly his disregard for his marriage vows.

  Others closed an eye, or covered for Lyndon’s sexual adventures, at his request. John Connally remembered a tongue-lashing from his boss for not doing so. As Connally told it, Lyndon arranged a rendezvous with Alice Glass in New York City but failed to enlighten Connally. When Charles Marsh, with whom Glass still lived, phoned Connally to inquire about Lyndon’s whereabouts, Connally told him, unaware that the newspaperman might put that information together with what he knew about Alice and come to a conclusion disastrous for Lyndon.

  Evidence for what historians later described as a serious, decade-long romance between Lyndon Johnson and Alice Glass is not very convincing. The two no doubt enjoyed an intimate tryst from time to time, like the one reported by John Connally. Glass had a reputation for being in the adventure business and Lyndon’s weakness in the face of temptation was legendary. But theirs was hardly a relationship that threatened Bird’s marriage. Lyndon was not about to leave his wife to marry Alice, and the wife understood that. It was unthinkable for an ambitious young congressman to risk a rupture with one of his most important backers, a man so powerful he could have ended Lyndon’s political career right then. Lyndon invariably deferred to Marsh, made himself available whenever summoned, and hustled to do him favors. As Marsh’s secretary recalled, “I saw a young man [Lyndon] who wanted to be on good terms with an older man [Marsh] . . . absolutely determined to be on good terms with him.” If Connally, Lyndon’s right-hand man, had not registered that something was going on between Lyndon and Alice, how serious could it have been?