As the Johnsons began amassing what would become a huge fortune in broadcasting, both husband and wife played crucial, but very different parts, illustrating the synergy in their partnership. Neither could have made a success of the station without the other. Although she had the money to buy the station and she kept a careful eye on daily operations, he was the one, with his reputation as a can-do congressman, who could make the alliances to put a station on the national map. Donning his Stetson, he went to the New York office of CBS chairman William Paley, who had no idea why a congressman from Texas’s 10th District would show up without an appointment. But Paley took time from a busy schedule to see him. Like most people who met the young Lyndon Johnson, Paley was struck by his energy and ambition. The CBS chair quickly grasped the fact that KTBC was far more important than the investment of a Texas housewife, and he arranged for its affiliation with his network.
Lyndon intervened at other key times. In early 1946, when it appeared Austin was slated to receive a second station license, giving KTBC competition for listeners and advertiser dollars, a group of ten Texans applied. All veterans, just back from war service, they took the call letters KVET, and Congressman Johnson, who insisted he had no objection to competition but wanted the “responsible” kind, put in a good word for them. Why wouldn’t he? KVET’s owners came right off his old buddies list, and they included Jake Pickle and John Connally, who had worked for him since before the war, as well as others he had known even longer. KVET owners indicated they would focus on sports, a subject Bird’s KTBC rarely touched.
Until the vets got their station up and running, Lyndon suggested some of them work at KTBC, and they did. Jesse Kellam, his friend from San Marcos days, stayed on, managing the Johnson station for decades; Sherman Birdwell, whose connection to Lyndon’s family went back three generations, sold advertising time. He found it easy—even people who disliked Lyndon bought because KTBC had a virtual monopoly on Austin’s airwaves. Since radio advertising was relatively new, Lyndon kept coming up with strategies to attract new clients. He suggested the station’s salesmen line up people to go into stores and announce they were there because of what they heard on KTBC.
Charges later surfaced that the Johnsons’ staff applied much more direct pressure on clients, such as requiring them to purchase advertising time in return for political favors or perform personal service as part of the deal. But the proof of these claims failed to materialize.
Broadcasting was in takeoff mode in 1943, a little like California before the 1849 Gold Rush, with very visible risks and rules not yet written. Following the right hunch could mean a big payout, but in the meantime expenses added up as new equipment was purchased and staff salaries climbed. Carol Fortas, the attorney friend of the Johnsons, insisted anyone who went into broadcasting in the 1940s with a little money and a bit of luck stood a good chance of striking gold. But the Johnsons had more than luck. They had personal friends on the FCC and the access and credibility that Lyndon’s elective office provided. Their advantages soared after Lyndon was seated on the Senate Commerce Committee, with its mandate to oversee the nation’s broadcasting. A word from him could have enormous effect on other stations. But in the early 1940s, the Johnson fortune was not yet made, and when KTBC reported its first tiny profit ($18 in August 1943) Bird used the entire amount to pay a dental bill.
As the station’s profits began to climb, Bird marked a huge milestone in her personal life. After nearly ten years of marriage, she had finally become pregnant. It was a snowy Sunday morning, March 19, 1944, when delivery seemed imminent, and Lyndon should have been available to drive her to the hospital. But he already had a reputation for liking to talk on the phone and even in a personally charged time like that he was reluctant to hang up the receiver. When Bird went out to the car and got in it, he remained in the house, and she had tapped her foot a while before he finally got into the car and drove her to the hospital. He didn’t stick around to see how the delivery went. In his usual not-wanting-to-be-alone mode, he gathered up a few male friends and drove around Washington, stopping frequently to phone the hospital for an update. When word came that delivery had proceeded smoothly, he took the “whole crowd,” his wife remembered, to the hospital for a viewing of the baby. It was vintage Lyndon, seeking companionship at what others might think the most private of family times.
The new parents had been so sure they were getting a son they had discussed only boys’ names, and now the appearance of a healthy baby girl required a turn in thinking. It was Grandmother Rebekah Johnson who came up with “Lynda Bird.” Not every newborn in Washington that year received the kind of welcome that the firstborn of a Texas congressman did. President Roosevelt sent her a book about his dog, Fala. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, who had become a frequent guest at the Johnsons’ home by the time Lynda Bird was born, immediately took a liking to the scrappy child.
Bird parented in the same CEO style that she used at the radio station, at Lyndon’s office, or in running her busy household. She directed and delegated, hiring the best help she could find and then keeping an eye on results. Lynda walked and had her own tricycle by the time she was one, and Bird recorded her antics in home movies. In the filmed footage of birthday parties and play group gatherings that followed, Lyndon rarely figures, and in one of his short appearances, he looks oddly out of place as he squats beside little Lynda Bird on the lawn and she keeps staring at him, as if seeing him for the first time.
The inconveniences of caring for a youngster stretched the patience of both parents and put serious pressure on the marriage. The already overextended congressman and his wife had little time or energy left to tend to a child, and friends and staffers later described some tense, unpleasant scenes during Lynda’s early years. Bird’s expertise at bookkeeping and business management did not extend to caring for fidgety infants, and when she failed to keep Lynda quiet, Lyndon complained. Billie Bullion remembered going to the house on 30th Place with her husband and a few other couples for “drinks, sandwiches and talk.” The wives all pitched in to help Bird with the food while “Lyndon pretty much monopolized the talk.” But infant Lynda soon put an end to it all. As Mrs. Bullion recalled: “Colicky babies . . . can cry and cry, until they start howling.” Even with all the doors shut, the sound of the bawling baby reverberated throughout the house. The other wives offered their own solutions for how to calm her, but nothing worked. She kept crying, stopping only to catch her breath before resuming at even higher volume until she drowned out Lyndon. That made him so mad, he yelled, “Dammit, Bird, do something to shut that kid up.” That sent guests heading for the door, leaving Bird with a sick baby and a furious husband. “How she handled that I don’t know,” Billie Bullion later told her son.
Bird’s management skills translated more easily into property renovation and management, and in the last two years of the war she began upgrading the house on 30th Place. No larger than the average American home, it had a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor, and three bedrooms and a small office for Bird on the second. She converted the basement into housing for domestic staff and turned over the unfinished attic to servicemen who needed a place to sleep for a night or two. Following the lead of her friendly next-door neighbor, who raised his own vegetables and a patch of corn, Bird tried growing tomatoes. But she paid much more attention to the flowers that bloomed in succession: in early spring, she counted on forsythia and hydrangeas, followed by peonies, her very favorite, in May. She planted morning glories outside the dining room window and roses that climbed up the sides of the screened porch.
With a house that size, Bird could accommodate Aunt Effie more easily. Now in her early sixties, with her demure, outdated outfits, featuring lace at the neck and long, swishy skirts, she injected a hint of another world into her niece’s chaotic household. Myopic and slow-moving, Aunt Effie gave the impression of a misplaced Dresden doll, as oblivious to the political talk around her as if it were in a foreign tongue. Whi
le the rest of the household worried about the excessive alcohol consumption of Lyndon’s brother, Sam Houston, who also stayed from time to time at 30th Place, Aunt Effie blithely continued mixing drinks for him.
On April 12, 1945, after hearing a radio announcement, Aunt Effie rushed into her niece’s tiny home office to share the news that President Roosevelt had died. At first, Bird discounted the report, thinking it just another example of the older woman’s confused state. But when confirming broadcasts followed, Bird came to the shocking realization that it was accurate. She had accompanied Lyndon to FDR’s fourth inauguration three months earlier but had taken the president’s ashen complexion as a sign of overwork, not drastic deterioration. Unprepared for his death, she was stunned, as was much of the nation, who had to face the prospect of a new leader in wartime.
FDR was the only president some Americans had ever known. His jaunty attitude throughout the darkest days of the Great Depression and the traumatic attack on Pearl Harbor had made him a hero in many homes. At the Johnsons’ home, he was much more. Lyndon, who described him as “like a Daddy to me,” reacted to the death as if it were that of a close family member. He went to bed, and he stayed there. When Bird suggested they go to Union Station and view the cortege bringing the body back to the capital, Lyndon accused her of callousness and not caring. “This is not a circus, you know,” he reminded her sarcastically, thus shaming her into staying home, a decision she later regretted.
A few months later, the war ended, and as car horns blasted victory sounds around Washington, thirty-two-year-old Lady Bird Johnson had reasons for joining the merriment. She had made enormous strides since Pearl Harbor. Although she had never collected a salary, she had developed the confidence of an eager entrepreneur and was already the sole owner of a radio station. She no longer had to make do with a shabby, rented apartments—she had her own two-story, brick, colonial house, where she supervised the cook and other domestic help as efficiently as she managed child care for her toddler daughter.
But along with celebrating the war’s end, Mrs. Johnson had some concerns. She had just left the hospital after multiple blood transfusions needed when a tubal pregnancy ended, and she worried she would never be able to deliver that son her husband desired so much. On the public front, she could see Lyndon’s visibility increasing, both in Washington and back in Texas, but if he continued in politics she needed to nurture her broadcasting business into something far more profitable in order to provide the level of financial security she wanted for her family. She had not yet encountered communications wizard Leonard Marks or learned anything about television’s potential for making money.
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CRUCIAL CAMPAIGNER AND MARKETER
WHEN BIRD blithely promised Lyndon in a before-marriage letter that she could sell him to his “worst enemy” if he “ever had one,” she had no idea what lay ahead. Or how that vow would be put to the test. By 1946, her husband, a congressman since 1937, was in a nasty political campaign, facing his first real challenge for reelection to the House of Representatives. To make matters worse, she herself had become an issue, her business record under scrutiny for evidence of impropriety. Congressional wives were used to snide, private remarks about how they dressed or spoke, but Lady Bird Johnson was facing questions about how she made her money, and how she spent it, and voters wanted answers before they marked their ballots.
Lyndon always ran scared in elections. Even when he was way out ahead, he kept focused on the possible misstep or unexpected event that could derail him. In 1946, those anxieties had some foundation because his political base was falling apart. With the turmoil of the war and its aftermath, Texas Democrats had split into two factions, and Lyndon, as one of the “Loyal” Democrats, was going to have to defend himself in the primary election against the “Regular” Democrats, who were fed up with what they saw as excessive federal intervention in their lives, in matters such as price controls, rationing, and labor laws.
The Johnsons had a hint of coming trouble in 1944, when Lyndon’s strongest opponent in the Democratic primary, Buck Taylor, attacked him on both political and ethical grounds. Taylor, one of the Regulars, put Lyndon on the defensive by pressing him to explain why he had backed all those big federal programs. It was Buck Taylor’s second charge, however, that stung deepest. He pointed out that the Johnsons had become very wealthy and he challenged them to show how they came into that money, since it was far more than a congressman’s salary could have produced.
Buck Taylor was a bit of a windbag, without the personal credibility to make his charges stick, and Lyndon beat him. But a stronger opponent appeared in 1946 to raise the same nettlesome questions. Hardy Hollers, a forty-five-year-old attorney and decorated war veteran, ridiculed Congressman Johnson as an “errand boy for war-rich contractors” and implicated Bird, claiming that her KTBC had received favorable treatment from the FCC because of her husband’s intervention. Hollers even brought T. J. Taylor into the debate, asking voters how a seventy-year-old man like Lady Bird’s father could have started a construction business and immediately made so much money.
The then popular singer Gene Autry agreed to help Lyndon out by opening up political rallies with “Back in the Saddle Again,” but it was going to take more than a sentimental cowboy song to win this race. Bird went into action. First, she turned to her able, “not a bit timorous” friend Marietta Brooks, who would “just as soon talk to a bunch of men” as at a ladies’ lunch. Through family connections and her successful architect husband, Brooks knew her way around the 10th District and had access to people who mattered. She immediately turned to a network already in place, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, to line up volunteers in every county. Women who had already committed to Lyndon’s renomination were encouraged to speak to their undecided friends and to send out campaign literature to people they didn’t know.
Like most political campaigns at the time, this one expected a lot of women volunteers. They had to cover all their own expenses, such as gasoline and meals while on the road, while the men working directly with Lyndon were given a sizable expense account to pay for their whiskey, steaks, and hotel suites. Although husbands and sons could be recruited to tack up campaign posters on remote country roads, the women themselves had the task of going to local merchants and asking for space to put up Lyndon’s posters in the storefront windows. The women would be a lot more effective, Bird suggested, if they were bill-paying customers and went with a smile.
When the female brigade proved insufficient to deal with Hollers’s charges, both Johnsons knew they had to do more. Lyndon scheduled a big public rally at Austin’s Wooldridge Park on July 6. He publicized the event in county newspapers, with ads that questioned his opponent’s integrity (“Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness”) and promised complete honesty in his own campaign (“Statesmanship Not Slander”). To all who came to the park (or listened in on radio station KTBC) Lyndon pledged to “Read the Record . . . Call the Roll! . . . Empty the Garbage Can.”
As hundreds gathered in Wooldridge Park that Saturday evening, they saw Lyndon, all alone on the platform except for his mother and his wife, both dressed in righteous white. With arms swinging and voice ringing, he reminded the audience that Texas Regulars had started attacking him in the previous election. Now they were continuing to smear him “with slanderous yellow sheets . . . every foul rumor these evil minds could concoct.” They even “dragged into the mire the name of my sweet wife.”
The sweet wife came prepared with ammunition to shoot back. For days, she had gathered up documents to substantiate what she had made herself believe—that neither she nor Lyndon had profited unfairly from his office. She collected papers on KTBC, the 30th Place house in Washington, and the duplex the Johnsons had recently bought in Austin for what Hollers was calling a suspiciously low price. She went through her files for letters from Aunt Effie and Uncle Claude; she located canceled checks and statements of what her father had given her. While Lyndon talked to the cro
wd, he kept gesturing to the pile of documents she had put together, and invited anyone dubious of Johnson integrity to come up and check the written records.
Bird admitted she was disappointed when, after all her hard work, not a single person stepped up for even a glance. The lack of interest may well have resulted from doubts that the full record was there—Lyndon was already known for not leaving much documentation behind. But the campaign, even though it resulted in an overwhelming victory (Lyndon’s 42,672 to Hollers’s 17,628), left Bird with a bad taste, “kind of a slur, a dark mark on our life that existed . . . for all the rest of time.”
Having prevailed in the primary, the Johnsons could skip the general election and that was fortunate because Lyndon was a physical wreck. As Bird described the situation: “His body finally reached the point of exhaustion and the physical bill came in.” It was at times like this that Bird’s help and encouragement were most crucial.
Although his aides publicly described this latest confinement as due to a recurring respiratory infection, they admitted privately that he suffered from “nervous exhaustion.” Walter Jenkins, Lyndon’s chief aide, went further, calling it “bad.” Lyndon acknowledged it was “six weeks or two months of not being worth much.” This was one of those times he had predicted back in 1934 when he warned her he would need a woman to nurse him and help him to climb.
Even at his most robust, Lyndon required considerable caretaking. Like a potentate with a throng of lackeys, he counted on someone always at the ready, to fetch his glasses, find him the right newspaper, take notes. On the road he depended on a secretary or female reporter to deal with personal needs—keep tabs on his supply of fresh shirts and whatever medicine he was taking. Margaret Mayer, who covered the 1946 campaign for the Austin-American, complained she had to provide “semi-valet” service. In addition to writing favorable articles about him, she carried his throat lozenges and hand cream. At each stop, he waited for her to hand over the right Stetson. In the car, he liked to wear the clean one, but when he got out to face a crowd, he wanted the worn, greasy one.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 15