Even if Lyndon had dared to steal Marsh’s woman, Alice was hardly the stable, centered helpmate an ambitious politico needed. According to “The Alice Glass Story,” which Dorothy Lane, a graduate student at the University of Texas, wrote for Professor Lewis L. Gould, it was a tangled life, and Alice had “invented” a husband named Manners so she could present herself as the respected “Mrs. Manners,” whose spouse was temporarily absent, while she continued to travel with Marsh. After Charles Marsh divorced his first wife in 1942, he married Alice, but she left him to wed a civil rights activist, then a professional pianist, and two more men of uncertain occupation. That makes a total of six, if the enigmatic Manners is included. After her last husband died in 1974, Alice went back to Texas, where she had started out, and lived with her sister in Marlin. Such a record raises the question: Would anyone know the name of Lyndon Johnson today if he had divorced Lady Bird to marry Alice Glass?
What is absolutely clear is that Bird regarded Marsh’s Longlea as one of her very favorite retreats. She bought a tract of land nearby, although she never built there, and when listing the few places where she liked to go to relax and put her feet up, even in the most frantic times, she singled out Longlea for its “velvet warmth.” Charles Marsh and Alice Glass continued to dot the Johnson record for the rest of their lives. President and First Lady Johnson made a final visit to Charles Marsh not long before his death in 1964, and Alice Glass was an overnight guest at the Johnson White House and then sent Lyndon a valuable sculpture just before he died.
• • •
In the spring of 1941, it was to their wide circle of friends that the Johnsons turned for advice on what to do next. After only four years in the House, Lyndon was restless to move up, and he saw his chance when U.S. senator Morris Sheppard died of a brain hemorrhage on April 9. Although only two years past the minimum age (thirty) required of senators, Lyndon felt confident his work for the 10th District had won him a following all across the huge state, enough votes to win him a seat in that very select club of ninety-four men and one woman who made up the U.S. Senate at the time. Marsh and other friends agreed that his chances looked good, and they enthusiastically backed him. Tom Clark, an attorney in the U.S. attorney general’s office, was so involved in the race that his son Ramsey (who later served as LBJ’s attorney general) remembered that the whole family tuned in on shortwave radio while on a vacation in Alaska to see how their candidate was doing.
After an upbeat start, Lyndon’s prospects plummeted when a man far more popular than he entered the picture. Texas governor Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, who had said he was not a candidate, suddenly changed his mind and entered the contest. Although born in Ohio and raised in Kansas, O’Daniel had become a legend in his adopted Texas, where he operated a profitable flour business and hosted a midday radio show.
Faced with an opponent as beloved as Santa Claus, Lyndon did what was becoming his usual—he overworked and fell apart. He spoke so loud and so often that his throat turned raw, and he became so debilitated he was hospitalized. As his time in bed grew to nearly two weeks Bird recognized that his problem was more than physical—he was badly depressed. His campaign manager, John Connally, rounded up substitutes for the speaking appearances but that could not continue indefinitely, not without giving some explanation for the candidate’s absences. When Connally decided to prepare an innocuous press release, to allay voters’ suspicions, Lyndon was furious. He countermanded Connally, ordered him out of his sight, and promised never to speak to him again.
It was Bird who saved the day. Going against everything Lyndon had said, she cajoled Connally, saying her husband’s tirade meant nothing and that Connally’s continued work in the campaign meant everything. She kept the campaign manager on the job and her husband in the race.
By primary voting day, the field had narrowed to just the two—Johnson and O’Daniel—and Lyndon’s spirits lifted. Staffs of both men kept careful watch on the numbers as the tallies dribbled in over several days. At first O’Daniel was winning; then a new box of votes put Lyndon ahead. The Johnson camp holed up in an Austin hotel, and when news accounts indicated victory for their man, congratulatory telegrams poured in. On bad days, everyone just waited. In the end, O’Daniel claimed the seat, and Lyndon’s staff admitted they had erred: by permitting preliminary unofficial results to be turned in early, they had allowed the opponent to calculate just how many votes he needed to “find” in order to take the lead. When Lyndon’s staff suggested challenging the result, he demurred, knowing any investigation could reveal shortcomings in his own operation as well.
One innovation marked that contest. For the first time a “Women’s Division” formed to help Lyndon. Bird played a small public part, preferring to let her outgoing friend Marietta Brooks, who had been a schoolteacher and relished speaking to large crowds, take charge. Bird gamely attended ladies’ lunches and tea parties, but her sweating hands left no doubt about how little she enjoyed such appearances. If any of the Johnson women were going to make Lyndon’s case to voters, it had to be his mother and his middle sister, Josefa, who felt comfortable singing Lyndon’s praises in public. Bird preferred to follow the example of Eleanor Roosevelt, who thought it unseemly for a wife to campaign for her husband—until 1940, when his audacious run for a third term drew even Eleanor into the race. Southerners, in particular, objected to wives campaigning, and Bird resolved to heed the advice of one senator’s wife who explained what worked for her: “I just go along with Mr. George and sit on the platform to show them I don’t have a cleft foot.”
That did not mean Bird sat out the campaign. In this, Lyndon’s fourth contest in as many years, she went on the road with him, sounding very unlike the young woman who wrote him in 1934 that she dreaded the prospect of his becoming a politician. Now she was toting the little movie camera that he had given her and, in what would later be called “opposition research,” she made notes of what his opponent said. In the soundtrack she subsequently added, she delivered commentary on how “Pappy O’Daniel . . . flashed like a comet across the Texas landscape” and how her nine-year-old niece passed out campaign literature. She played down her own role (“All I did those days was wait and see”) and she poked fun at her very limited wardrobe. After her movie camera, in the hands of someone else, caught her day after day in the same nondescript suit, she laughingly noted that she finally managed to show up in “a different blouse.”
Lyndon lost that election—the only one he ever lost—but one lesson from it was clear. Lady Bird could override a husband’s command, even a husband as unassailable as hers, and she would not hesitate to intervene when she judged the circumstances called for it.
The other lesson was equally significant. She had learned how exciting and invigorating a campaign can be. In those few weeks she immersed herself so completely in the purpose that marks a vibrant political contest that she called it a highlight of her life. She felt like she was “living among people who were working at the very top of their capacity.” Thrilled by the “rich wine of youth . . . running in our veins very strongly,” she decided that even though it ended in defeat, she wouldn’t have missed it for anything, not even for “a million dollars.”
Lyndon was clearly dejected with the result. As she watched him, in a rumpled seersucker suit, amble out to the plane that would take him back to Washington, she knew it was time for some high-spirited cheerleading. The morale-boosting letter she wrote him emphasized the fact that they had all done their best. “It was all right we lost. I’ll always remember the campaign of 1941 as just about my favorite campaign.”
A few weeks later, she had another reason to give a Pollyanna slant to the outcome. In July 1941, when the House of Representatives considered extending the military draft, opinion was so divided that the measure passed by a single vote. Pearl Harbor would soon startle Americans out of their complacency and spin the country into full military buildup. If Lyndon had not been there to cast the vote that kept the draft i
n place, the mobilization would have been far more difficult. Bird decided this was a good case of her husband being “in the right place at the right time.”
• • •
As Lady Bird was making her way in Washington in the early years of Lyndon’s political ascendancy, only a few people took time to size her up carefully. Jonathan Daniels, a North Carolina newspaperman, was one who did. He wrote in his diary soon after joining FDR’s staff in Washington in 1941: “Lyndon Johnson’s wife is the sharp-eyed type who looks at every piece of furniture in the house, knows its period and design—though sometimes she is wrong. She is confident that her husband is going places and in her head she is furnishing the mansions of his future.”
Even the astute Daniels had no way of knowing the kind of mansions Bird had in mind or the number of fascinating characters she would incorporate into her network along the way.
7
CEO AND FINANCE MANAGER
ON A Sunday afternoon in 1951, attorney Leonard Marks went to the home of a client in Northwest Washington. He didn’t usually do house calls and almost never on Sunday. But this case was special. The wife of Lyndon Johnson, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, had been Marks’s client for about five years, long enough for him to know that she liked to talk business in the comfort of her own home. If the day was warm, she would have drinks served on the porch or in the backyard, and since this was Sunday, the senator would be there, too. Lady Bird would get the conversation started with warm and chatty questions about Marks’s health and that of his family, making this sound to an outsider more like a social occasion than what it was—a highly charged business session with fortune-changing implications.
With pleasantries out of the way, Mrs. Johnson would move on to the subject of the day, and to the list of questions she had prepared for Marks. The time had come for her to decide whether or not to make a huge investment, and she had summoned Marks to give her some background information. She had bought her first radio station in 1943, then added others, and she was making money. But now it looked like those boxy radios in people’s homes might be supplanted by little screens with pictures in black and white, and the Federal Communications Commission would soon start taking applications from those who wanted to operate the stations that delivered television via those screens. If Lady Bird Johnson intended to get in on this new venture, she had to decide now.
Although invented decades earlier, TV had not yet caught on, and too few Americans owned sets to interest advertisers. Outlay—to equip a TV station, hire staff, and provide content—would be huge, compared to radio, and Lady Bird Johnson’s right-hand man in Texas, Jesse Kellam, was advising her to hold back. Her husband was warning her about betting on a loser. But she wanted to hear from Marks. She wouldn’t be asking him for a yes or a no. She made her own decisions. What she needed from Marks was his perspective on the costs and the risks, his predictions for making money.
It would have been hard to find a better placed expert on the subject than Leonard Marks. As a former member of the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that set rules and issued operating permits, he had been involved in broadcasting long enough to know more on the subject than even Lyndon Johnson, who sat on the Senate committee to which the FCC reported. Marks had left the federal agency to join a law firm that specialized in communications, and he was personally acquainted with leaders in the business and with their critics. No one could be sure, of course, how profitable television would turn out to be but Marks was bullish. He fully expected Americans would soon be getting the bulk of their news from TV and they would rely on those little screens in their own homes for entertainment, even educational programs that would rival what schools could teach.
Marks had scheduled only a two-hour meeting that Sunday, but as he laid out the pros and cons and the relative advantages of VHF [very high frequency] as opposed to UHF [ultra high frequency] the afternoon meeting stretched into evening. As the Johnsons mulled over what Marks said, Lyndon remained wary, unsure if this investment was sound. But Lady Bird was gung ho to go ahead with VHF. “It may take everything we have but it is a gamble that I want to make,” she told Marks. All Lyndon could say was, “Well, it’s your money.” This was T.J.’s daughter, and she wasn’t going to let a risk-averse husband hold her back.
• • •
That confidence, nurtured in her youth, had registered remarkable gains in the decade preceding that important meeting with Marks in 1951. In fact, it could be said that she had used those years, beginning with the U.S. entry into World War II, to turn herself into a confident CEO. She had never taken a course in business management but in the early stage of the war she had on-the-job training, which she valued more than years in a classroom.
Lady Bird Johnson was not in Washington on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when she heard on the radio the shocking announcement about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. She was in tiny village in Alabama, carefully checking financial records at a relative’s home. Her mother’s bachelor brother, Claude Pattillo, had died a few weeks earlier, but Bird missed the funeral because of a medical problem. Painfully aware of how much Lyndon wanted a son, she had checked herself into a hospital for a gynecological procedure to increase her chances of becoming pregnant, and only after her doctor approved travel did she make her way south. She knew her Uncle Claude owned a huge chunk of Autauga County’s valuable pine forests, and that she, as his niece and namesake, would inherit part of it. She could have waited to hear from one of her Alabama relatives or an attorney how much she was getting, but that was not how she operated. She went to Billings to examine the papers herself.
That year had already been a turbulent one for the Johnsons. Besides her medical problem, Lyndon had racked up a trio of losses—the Senate race and time out for two hospitalizations. Talk of the United States becoming involved in a war already under way in Europe had made the year even grimmer, and Congressman Johnson’s summer vote to extend the draft reflected his pessimism. Now, with the U.S. under attack, the time for debate had ended. The nation was at war. By the time Bird returned to Washington, Lyndon had already signed up for active Navy duty, fulfilling a promise made months earlier, that if any young men were drafted he would be right beside them, ready to fight.
Lyndon hadn’t bothered to say who would run his congressional office while he was gone and take care of all the requests coming in from his 10th District constituents. Like other House members, he had employed female secretaries, but the office manager and top aides were male. Now, with so many men signing up for service, new hires were in short supply, and over the Christmas holidays, which Bird and Lyndon spent with his mother (always “Mrs. Johnson” to Bird) in Austin, the decision was made. Lady Bird would run the office, and she would start her administrative duties immediately by accompanying her husband to California, his first military assignment. Her notes from that trip show how very diligent and precise she could be—she kept a record of every expenditure down to the last penny, including a tiny tip to a porter and 75 cents “for medicine.”
By January 20, 1942, after watching tearful wives and mothers say poignant good-byes to servicemen who were shipping out, Lady Bird was on a train back to Washington. Lyndon would stay stateside for now, checking on production and manpower problems for the undersecretary of the navy. It was a natural assignment for a member of the House Committee on Naval Affairs, but it would keep him out of Washington, flying around the country, leaving her to manage not only household finances but also office spending. With his pay reduced to that of a Navy man, she decided to economize by giving up her rented apartment and moving in with Nellie Connally, whose husband was on active duty.
Every day was packed, starting with classes in typing and shorthand to improve her speed. By a little past noon, she was grunting in an exercise class, hoping to shed some of the “deplorable” pounds she had put on. As long as he had known her, Lyndon kept a sharp eye on her figure, and when she added to the 113 pounds she registered in 19
39, he started nagging her to take them off. While he was away, he wanted her to update him on her waist and hip measurements in every letter she sent him.
By three or four in the afternoon, all her classes finished, she headed to his office where three or four secretaries were responding to the mail that came in every day. As the person in charge, Lady Bird went over each response, checking wording and spelling, before signing, “Mrs. Lyndon Johnson.” Her husband had insisted she be very clear about her volunteer status and include in every letter, “I am working without pay in the office.” But Bird thought something less “awful bald and ugly” could make the point just as clearly, and she came up with a subtle, slightly longer alternative: “I’m contributing my time while Lyndon is away on active duty, doing what I can to help out in the office.”
The pile of correspondence sometimes kept her busy until 10:30 at night, and by the end of February she decided to drop out of business school and quit the exercise class so she could devote full time to the “substance [of my life], the real thing,” which was, of course, Lyndon’s office. A few weeks later, she wrote an old friend in Marshall that she had a “full time job now. . . . I get down to the office about eight-thirty, stay until seven, frequently come back at night to finish up.”
A clever executive allocates her time wisely and spends as little of it as possible doing what others can do for her, and Lady Bird Johnson knew that. In April, she moved out of Nellie Connally’s apartment and back to a place of her own at Woodley Park Towers, where she hired a maid to clean and prepare her meals. It was her thirteenth move in seven years, but it freed her from domestic chores and gave her more time at the office. Then the African American maid, Otha Ree, quit. With the war opening up so many new opportunities for women, Ree could finally put her college degree to use. Rather than settling for domestic service, which was the only job she could find earlier, she started teaching school back in her hometown in Texas.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 13