Whenever Bird was within earshot, she was the one expected to respond to his every cry for help: to reach someone on the phone, untangle a botched appointment, talk with a crotchety associate, help choose between thorny alternatives. Although relieved when others filled in for her, she registered no complaints about his dependence on her, and when he once yelled out, “Bird, where are you?” she reminded him sweetly, “Right behind you, dear. Where I’ve always been.”
Her contemporaries continued to be appalled by what they saw as her complaisance, and they questioned why she did not strike back at what sounded like excessive, even abusive demands. But she understood how important it was to keep him on an even keel. She strongly objected to descriptions of her as being treated unfairly and once told her daughter that Lyndon was “my lover, my friend, my identity.” She understood that she not only contributed to his success but found her own power through him. The need for a woman to assert an identity of her own, separate and apart from her husband’s, belonged to a later generation—not hers.
• • •
By January 1947, Lyndon was fit and ready to begin his sixth term in the House of Representatives, his first under Republican control. Annoyed at price controls and shortages of items they wanted to buy, unhappy voters had, in the November election, turned out the party that had controlled Congress as long as he had been in Washington. Bird’s good friend Sam Rayburn would no longer be holding the gavel when the House came to order—that honor would go to a Republican, as would every chairmanship of the House committees.
Fortunately for Bird, the wives remained solidly nonpartisan at their regular Congressional Club meetings. She had become a stalwart member as soon as she was eligible and relished the lectures, discussions of contemporary topics, and how-to-do-it presentations. Whether it was actress Gloria Swanson sharing tips on how to look younger or an ambassador talking about some exotic foreign destination, Bird was there. When the Congressional Club offered a course in interior decorating, she signed up and never missed a session. But it was the possibility of making friendships across the political aisle that proved most valuable of all. While chatting with the wives of congressmen from states far removed from Texas, she made sure to leave the kind of favorable impression that would serve Lyndon.
It could have been at one of these meetings that Bird came up against a test of her own. At the wives’ club, it was no secret that Bird’s husband was being seen around Washington with the beautiful new congresswoman from California—Helen Gahagan Douglas. No one would make a direct reference to the relationship in Bird’s presence, of course. That was just not done. But the tight friendship between the two members of Congress was common talk in Washington because they made such a public showing of it during House debates and in after-hours socializing. Extramarital relationships were commonplace in the capital but conducted in private, with intense effort to keep them hidden from colleagues, reporters, and spouses. Lyndon and Helen were breaking those rules—flouting them, by walking hand in hand and driving around the capital together, even in the early morning hours.
What could Bird do? If she showed any jealousy or expressed hurt to the other wives, some of them would no doubt have sided with her. But that meant they were taking her part against Lyndon, and as his “marketer” she was not in the business of making enemies for him. Any verification from her of an intimate relationship between her husband and Douglas would fuel the rumors, while keeping mum might possibly weaken those rumors by calling into question their validity. So Bird’s prior decision, to treat Lyndon’s womanizing as invisible, continued as her operating mode. Faced with irrefutable evidence of its existence, she would laugh it off or indicate it mattered not at all to her. Lyndon took his cue from her, and when Sam Rayburn warned him about the consequences of his behavior, he countered that Bird knew all about his women and didn’t care.
Helen Gahagan Douglas was formidable competition for Lyndon’s affection. Only nine women served in the 79th Congress (1945–1947), but Douglas, a curvaceous blonde from Hollywood, would have attracted attention in any gathering. In the overwhelmingly male House of Representatives, she stood out like a birthday cake on a salad bar.
But Douglas was far more than a beautiful face on a beautiful body: she had the kind of life that awed Bird. At age forty-four, Douglas had already conquered several worlds: the Broadway stage, where she rated star billing before she was twenty; European opera houses, where she sang prima donna roles; and in glamour magazines, where she was pictured alongside her handsome husband, Melvyn Douglas, reputedly the highest paid actor in the world and leading man to legendary divas Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.
That stage-and-screen gloss obscured a more serious, conscientious side of the Douglas partnership. Helen’s operatic tours in Austria in the 1930s exposed her to blatant anti-Semitism, and both she and her Jewish husband worried about the threat Nazi Germany posed to the entire world. In their cross-country drives, necessitated by their bicoastal careers, the Douglases resolved to do something about the stark poverty they witnessed—the barefoot children in Appalachia and dispossessed families in makeshift caravans moving west. While other Hollywood celebrities ridiculed the “Oakies” as good-for-nothings and showed little interest in Europe’s problems, the Douglases enthusiastically pitched in to help both poor Americans as well as targeted Europeans. Melvyn joined the Anti-Nazi League, and Helen changed her voter registration from Republican to Democrat and served on the board of the National Youth Administration. The couple’s public service brought them to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited them to stay overnight at the White House.
By 1940, Helen, whose stage talent did not transfer easily to film, decided to devote more of her energy to politics, and she agreed to head the Women’s Division of California’s Democratic Party. Her success in that organization led directly to an invitation to run for the House of Representatives in 1944, and without consulting her husband, who was thousands of miles away serving with the Army, she accepted the nomination and won the seat. President Roosevelt sent a sly congratulatory note, predicting she would be more than “just a beautiful cloak model,” an apparent slap at Connecticut Republican Clare Boothe Luce, the socialite author and wife of influential media mogul Henry Luce, who was beginning her second term in the House.
A celebrity like Helen Gahagan Douglas held enormous appeal for Lyndon Johnson: being publicly linked with her could burnish his Lothario reputation and feed his ego. Within days of Douglas’s arrival in the capital in January 1945, he was in her office, eager to mentor her in how things worked on Capitol Hill. Although eight years her junior, he had already served four terms in the House, and he knew the committee chairmen by first name. Democratic leader Rayburn treated him like a son. Who could guide a neophyte, especially a gorgeous one, more expertly than he through the intricacies of the House of Representatives?
When others attacked her for her leftist views, Lyndon rushed to defend her publicly. After ultraconservative Mississippi representative John Rankin took on a group of liberal, freshman representatives that Douglas belonged to and labled them “Communists,” she got to her feet and, in a voice perfected on Broadway stages, demanded to know “if the gentleman from Mississippi is addressing me.” Rankin ignored her completely, as if she had not spoken, and kept on warning about the threat of communism. That sent Lyndon to Speaker Rayburn with a request to make Rankin apologize. The speaker could not be ignored, and when he pressed Rankin to answer if it was indeed Douglas whom Rankin meant, the unconvincing answer came back that he was not addressing the “gentlewoman from California.” Lyndon had made his point, however, that the new congresswoman was under his protection.
Rather than snub Douglas at social events, Bird treated her like a firm ally, and it was to Douglas’s house in Chevy Chase that she went with Lyndon to commiserate with other grieving friends when President Roosevelt died. Rather than turn people off, because of its clutter and chaos, Douglas’s understaffed household
seemed to attract first-rate conversationalists, and talk centered not on the weather and social arrangements but on solutions to economic problems and changes on the international front, exactly the kind of talk that Bird called “first rate.”
But it was Lyndon’s trips to Helen’s house without his wife that set Washington talking. Creekmore Fath, an Austin lawyer who later became an outspoken Johnson critic, resided in the capital at the time, and he reported that Helen and Lyndon virtually “lived together. . . . It was an open scandal in Washington because Lyndon would park his car in front of [Helen’s] house, night after night after night and then would get up in the morning and drive off at 6:30.” Another Texas native, Mary Louise Glass, who was Alice Glass’s sister, observed that Helen and Lyndon drove together to the Capitol in the morning, and after parking in a conspicuous place they walked hand in hand to their respective offices.
Creekmore Fath exaggerated when he described the Lyndon-Helen relationship as cohabitation. The congressman had a packed schedule, with many obligations that could not possibly include the congresswoman, including a month-long European trip in 1945, and in 1946 that tough election as well as three lengthy hospitalizations. As for Helen’s real interest in Lyndon, shrewd Bird might have suspected what one Douglas biographer later concluded: Douglas had a knack from her early acting days of playing up to powerful men who could advance her career.
Lyndon was certainly the right man for that, and he could always use an extra woman of Douglas’s beauty to bolster his morale. Bird had learned long ago that she could not call him on his weaknesses—he could not handle that. She was not about to change course now. Convinced that her continued nurturing was essential to his career and that he knew that as well as she, she would incorporate his other women into her life and try to learn from them. It was not an entirely new form of accommodation. Lyndon had been up-front with Bird about his fondness for the “little radio writer” in 1934, and Bird had accepted her as useful in smoothing out his rough edges.
Lady Bird Johnson’s vow to help market her husband became critical in 1948, when Lyndon, at age forty, decided to make a second try for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Although one of the most chronicled Senate races in American history, Bird’s significant role in it is rarely mentioned. She did far more than wifely catering: she kept him in the race, and she did it more than once that year.
To gain entrée to the Senate, Lyndon had to campaign all across the huge Lone Star State rather than just a single congressional district. For this much bigger field, he opted to use a helicopter to reach sparsely populated rural areas. The chopper, with “Lyndon Johnson—US Senator” painted in big letters on the side, was a novelty at the time, and since many Texans doubted its efficacy and deemed it too newfangled and noisy, it was dubbed the “Johnson City Windmill.”
Lyndon liked the helicopter, however. Moving faster than a car, it would swoop down on short notice, delivering the candidate to a town square or farm field if even half a dozen adults had been spotted as a potential audience. A slim and cocky-looking Lyndon would bound out, ready to shake hands and deliver a rousing campaign talk. Bird worried the helicopter was unsafe and she refused to ride in it, but Lyndon blew off the risks. He liked the attention it brought him, and he relished the excitement it delivered to voters who had never before come within shouting distance of a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Helicopters were expensive, though, and cash flow became a problem during the first round of the 1948 primary. Campaign worker Joe Phipps told of one tense moment in early July when the race was tight, and the candidate and his wife were locked in an intense discussion about where they were going to find the funds to continue. They could not even pay the hotel and restaurant bills for their crew and get them on the road that morning.
While Bird kept suggesting ways to come up with more money, Lyndon wanted to give up and quit. When she recommended calling Sid Richardson, who had by now become an affluent Fort Worth investor, Lyndon scoffed at the idea, reminding her that Richardson had already come out for his opponent, Coke Stevenson. But that was “before you entered the race,” Bird chided her husband, and anyway, “It doesn’t make any difference who Sid says publicly he’s for. . . . He’s our friend. He will always be our friend.” When stubborn Lyndon couldn’t bring himself to make the call, she volunteered: “And if you’re too stiff-necked to call him, I certainly am not. Do you want me to call?” According to Joe Phipps, who witnessed the whole exchange, Lyndon uttered not a word but his “slow, lean nodding up and down movement” registered consent. As Phipps left the room, Bird was dialing the phone, and half an hour later the money was there to pay the bill for the overnight stay and get the staff moving.
The candidate performed tirelessly, starting each day early and finishing late, and he expected his employees to work equally hard. Secretaries found the schedule so grueling they rotated, one week on the road and one week back at headquarters. Under the stress of this arduous campaign, Lyndon suffered a recurrence of an old problem: kidney stones. He tried to keep going, arguing that he would eventually pass this stone, as he had passed the others, but the pain became excruciating. Racked with intermittent fever and chills, he sweated through more than his usual number of shirts each day. Shivering at night in his rail berth, he prevailed on newly hired aide Warren Woodward to crawl in beside him and share some of his body heat. For Lyndon, undergoing surgery to remove the kidney stone was out of the question—it would take him off his feet for weeks, unthinkable in a tight race.
Finally, when the pain became intolerable, Lyndon agreed to check into a Dallas hospital—but only temporarily and in absolute secrecy. With her hands virtually tied, Bird reached out to an old friend—the celebrity aviator Jacqueline Cochran, who happened to be in Dallas at the time for an event honoring Stuart Symington, secretary of the newly created air force.
Cochran first met Lyndon in 1937 when she was looking for federal funding for a pet cause of hers, research on the effects of unpressurized cabins in airplanes. She had already carried out some experiments on her own, assessing the effect of high altitudes on chickens and other farm animals. When her money ran low, she approached the Texas congressman with ties to San Antonio’s Randolph Field Medical School, one of the few places in the nation doing research on the subject. She found Lyndon Johnson “terribly interested,” and she became a regular at his Washington home, where she went for Sunday brunch and helped Lady Bird change diapers.
By 1948, Cochran was the one in a position to do favors for Lyndon. Her 1936 marriage to Floyd Odlum, head of RKO and one of the richest men in America, provided her with many luxuries, including her own airplane, which she updated at whim and used to flit between both coasts. As a result of her altitude research, she had ties to medical personnel at the most prestigious institutions. Although a lifelong registered Republican, she maintained tight ties with Democrats.
Using a back entrance to the Dallas hospital, as instructed, Cochran took one look at Lyndon and was shocked. Having trained as a nurse, she could size up a patient quickly, and this one looked bad. He lacked color and appeared so listless and dejected that she feared he might die if not treated quickly. When he refused to even consider surgery, she proposed an alternative treatment that she had heard about from her contacts at the Mayo Clinic—a new technique that crushed the kidney stones, then extracted the fragments, without surgery. Lyndon was game.
Cochran quickly converted her plane into a mini-clinic, stocked with painkillers and cots, which she had made up with fresh sheets for Lyndon and the exhausted Bird and aide Warren Woodward. With just one young flight assistant beside her, Cochran took off, headed to Rochester, Minnesota. When Lyndon’s pain got so bad he cried for help, she relinquished the controls long enough to administer a narcotic injection. When he sweated through his pajamas, she removed them and wrapped him in sheets and blankets.
On landing in Rochester, Cochran watched medics wheel Lyndon into the clinic, and then she left. She was famous
enough that her presence in Rochester might be reported in the papers, leading to speculation about Lyndon’s health. He had made very clear he wanted to avoid that. Physicians quickly went to work on him, using the noninvasive technique that required little time for convalescence. A week later Lyndon was back in Texas, ready to resume campaigning.
After all this trauma, the results of the first primary round on July 24 were hard to accept. Lyndon came in second, forcing him into a runoff scheduled for five weeks later. Front-runner Coke Stevenson’s lead (he took 40 percent) was bound to grow now that the race had narrowed to just two men and supporters of the eliminated candidates were climbing on the Stevenson bandwagon.
Lyndon went into one of his very worst funks. The prospect of facing more of those long, exhausting days was too much. After all he had put into this fight, another month seemed an impossible stretch, and he wanted to quit. “He was depressed . . . exhausted, depleted. So was I,” Lady Bird told an interviewer. Then she corrected herself, explaining she was “exhausted and depleted” but definitely not “depressed.” That was Lyndon.
Although she, too, had been disappointed with the initial round of the primary, she took it as a challenge to do better in the runoff. While Lyndon prepared his staff to give up, she offered to give her all into keeping his chances alive: “I said I would rather fight and fight and put in everything we could and get all the more money and all the more hours and lose by 50,000 than lose by 71,000. If we could reduce it to 40,000, let’s strive for that, and maybe we could bring it down to 25,000 and just possibly, barely, we might win.” She had done it again, stepped in at a crucial time to keep the campaign alive.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 16