In preparation for the runoff on August 28, the Johnson camp shifted strategy. Instead of flying helicopters over remote farm fields, they concentrated their efforts on densely populated urban centers. Women organized rallies to attract the female vote, and Bird started accepting invitations to speak at gatherings and on the radio.
Even a serious car accident could not keep her from a scheduled appearance. On the very last day of the campaign, Marietta Brooks was driving her to Seguin for a reception hosted by friends, when on a wet, slippery patch of road Brooks lost control of the car. It flipped, rolled over, and ended up wedged in a ditch, nose in the air. Bird couldn’t even get the car door open, and Brooks was too seriously injured to move. Squeezing through a window, Bird made her way to the road and tried to flag down a passing car. The sight of a disheveled woman waving at them caused the first two drivers to speed up, but the next car, with an elderly gentleman at the wheel, stopped. Bird never knew his name, but he helped extricate Brooks, and while he was driving the two women to a doctor, Bird kept regretting that both of them had not voted absentee. The doctor hospitalized Brooks but released Bird, who immediately proceeded to the reception where she was scheduled to greet voters. She had another dress in her overnight bag to replace the torn, dirty one she was wearing, but she had to borrow stockings from her hostess.
After she finished that event, Bird continued another forty miles to San Antonio, where a big rally had been scheduled to celebrate both her husband’s birthday and election eve. She didn’t say a word to Lyndon about the accident, and he was too busy playing to the crowd to notice her cuts and bruises, severe enough to discolor her legs for months and leave a hard bump on her right thigh.
Unaware of her close call, he issued her an assignment for the following day, which was election Saturday. He wanted her to join his three sisters and mother in a phone blitz of Austin. In a last-minute move to get out the vote, the Johnson women tore the city’s phone directory into five segments, and each took responsibility for calling every name on her sheaf of pages.
The first reported tallies justified Bird’s optimism about the election. Lyndon looked like a winner. Then Coke Stevenson pulled ahead. For four long days the Johnson camp waited in an Austin hotel, watching the numbers shift and change. Bird likened the tension to that on “a violin string,” but she refused to give up the fight. The final count in the primary, showing Lyndon with a paltry eighty-seven votes more than Stevenson, provided a nickname that stuck: “Landslide Lyndon.” Charges immediately surfaced that Lyndon’s side had tampered with ballot boxes, an embarrassing development after all those campaign spots highlighting Lyndon’s honesty and authenticity, touting him as the “Straight Shooter” candidate who could “look you in the eye.”
Bird remembered the 1948 election as a turning point in Texas politics. The division between the Regular branch of the Democratic Party and the Loyal segment had widened, and some of the Johnsons’ old support had moved away. Even the woman who brought Lyndon and Bird together, Gene Boehringer Lasseter, was deserting them and siding with less liberal Democrats. Losses were part of politics—and the shrewd campaigner in Bird knew that one has to accept some.
The long campaign in 1948 and the anxious wait for results left Bird feeling like she had “climbed to the mountain.” It was nearly Christmas before she was ready to celebrate. Back at the house on 30th Place, where nurse Patsy White looked after four-year-old Lynda and toddler Luci (born July 2, 1947), Bird prepared to entertain family and aides over the holidays. Exhausted staffers Mary Rather and Warren Woodward joined with Walter Jenkins and his family to make merry over the political victory and watch Lyndon pass out presents. John Connally, although tired from overseeing the campaign, drove up from Texas with Nellie and their children, arriving on Christmas Eve. It was a jolly end to an exhausting year.
As Bird prepared to join the Senate Wives’ Club in 1949, she could look back over a dozen full years as a Washington wife. Once a neophyte, she now considered herself a seasoned player, with two healthy daughters, a flourishing radio station, and a husband eager to make his mark in the U.S. Senate. No one could say she hadn’t made good on that vow—to sell him to his worst enemy, who sometimes seemed to be Lyndon himself.
9
“A WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL WIFE”
IN THE Johnson White House, reporter Sarah McClendon was about the last person the president wanted to see. A small woman with a very big voice, she had been covering the capital for a string of small-town newspapers since the 1940s, and he knew her questions could be brazen, her penchant for revealing secrets absolutely infuriating. But in earlier times, McClendon enjoyed a more congenial relationship with the Johnsons. She and Bird came from the same part of East Texas, and in Washington they got together frequently with other transplanted Southerners for after-hours partying and weekend fun. McClendon’s daughter, Sally, and Lynda Bird Johnson were classmates at Mrs. Gladstone Williams’s charm school.
During that amiable phase, McClendon would go to Lyndon’s Washington office for news she could use in an article, and in 1952 she got a story that surprised her. It would have surprised others, too, if she had dared print it at the time. The senator, who had a reputation for paying much more attention to other women than to his wife, had just received a telegram from Lady Bird, who was in Texas, recovering from another miscarriage. Lyndon was so exuberant over the contents of the telegram that he read it aloud to McClendon. His wife had written that she had felt so discouraged after this latest loss that she had considered “dropping out altogether” and not returning to Washington. But then she had changed her mind. She was going to stick with Lyndon and “plan her life along with his, to work beside him in politics or anything that might come up.”
It was not Bird’s dejection that surprised McClendon. That would be expected in a time of bereavement. Nor was it her resolution—Bird was not a quitter. But Lyndon’s reaction to the telegram was as bright as a big neon light proclaiming his feelings for his wife. His face “lit up with love and joy,” showing the tough reporter a side of him that she thought few people ever witnessed or understood. The man often depicted as cruel and insensitive to his wife was actually head over heels in love with her. He needed her, and he knew it, and her promise to come back to Washington and continue their partnership was such welcome news he could not keep it to himself.
In fact, Lady Bird Johnson had become what he would later call “a wonderful, wonderful wife,” an invaluable asset who served as sounding board, financial manager, network builder, and resolver of family problems. Only she could talk him out of his depressed funks and keep him moving. That was clear by the time he entered the Senate in 1949, and it would be underscored again and again as he kept climbing, first to a leadership position in the Senate and then higher.
Lyndon hadn’t been in his Senate seat a week when he and Lady Bird had to decide how to handle a very tricky problem. Southern Democrats were caucusing on how to kill a proposed civil rights bill, and the filibuster was at the top of their list of tools to use. By relying on an old Senate rule that allowed unlimited debate, a minority could talk a bill they despised right into oblivion. The Dallas Morning News, where Dawson Duncan, Bird’s one-time date at UT, still worked, was watching the state’s brand-new senator very closely, and when he didn’t show up at the Southern Democrats’ meeting, the News reported his absence. Puzzled readers understandably questioned why anyone would skip a caucus, especially one on this important topic. Did Senator Johnson have something to hide about how he stood on civil rights?
Lyndon had already unveiled his thinking on the subject to his aide, Horace Busby, telling him that he and Lady Bird had been talking over the matter “for the last several nights . . . And we both feel very strongly that we did not come to the Senate to engage in filibusters, and I don’t expect to be part of a filibuster this year.” Of course, Lyndon couldn’t admit that publicly. Not when so many of his Texas voters were counting on the filibuster to save t
hem from a change they abhorred. When reporters tried to track him down, he used every trick he knew to avoid them, darting in and out of doorways and then taking refuge in the dining room reserved for “Members Only.”
But he couldn’t keep running, and Dawson Duncan’s paper reported that the senator and his wife both changed their minds. Rather than play the maverick (and endanger his reelection) Lyndon would go along with his Southern colleagues on the filibuster. Georgia senator Richard Russell, a staunch opponent of the proposed civil rights bill, offered to mentor him, as Speaker Sam Rayburn had in the House of Representatives, and both Johnsons were more than willing. Bird began inviting Russell to her home, where he was such a frequent guest that the Johnson daughters started calling him “Uncle Dickie.” The patrician bachelor could be a bit reserved and aloof, not a relaxed, casual guest like Speaker Rayburn. But that did not deter Bird from finding out how Russell liked his black-eyed peas and turnip greens and then serving them whenever he came over.
Bird was in the visitors’ gallery, along with secretary Mary Rather, when Lyndon gave his “maiden” speech to the Senate on March 9. She listened as he attacked President Harry Truman’s new civil rights initiative and defended the filibuster as a legitimate tool to use against its passage. Lyndon pointed out that President Truman faced no limits on how long he spoke, and neither should senators. Using a bit of cowboy talk, he concluded: “No mount is free once the bit is in his mouth.”
Fully aware that her husband had to straddle a barbed ideological fence to survive in Texas politics, Lady Bird turned on her warmest smile and gracious hospitality to keep him from getting bloodied. While he won over colleagues with genial cloakroom talk, leading to his election as his party’s whip in 1951 at the phenomenally young age of forty-two, she showered everyone with generous invitations and unfailing charm. Criticism was a language she never mastered; confrontation was not in her vocabulary. A wife like Eleanor Roosevelt, who expressed strong views of her own, would have made Lyndon’s balancing act more difficult. A less supportive wife, or one with a greater commitment to self and children, would not have had the time and energy to host as many dinners and teas as Bird did. If she had refused to pick up and move twice a year, between Texas and Washington, she would not have been able to chat up powerful figures in the capital and then stand at Lyndon’s side when he spoke to voters back home.
Mrs. Johnson had always maintained an open house for staff and friends, and now, as a senator’s wife, she operated a virtual hospitality center for a wide range of guests, including the capital’s most powerful leaders and their spouses. The house on 30th Place was not large, but she could accommodate a dozen or so Senate wives for lunch, and she knew how hard it was for senators to be harsh on each other if their wives were sharing a chicken salad a few blocks away.
Single men and men whose wives remained back in their home state were often at a loss for something to do on weekends, and they knew that the Johnsons’ door was always open. Even those who appeared without warning at mealtime were warmly welcomed. Bird would just tell the cook to add some filler to the main course.
Bill Moyers, who joined Senator Johnson’s staff in 1954, described how Bird’s generosity worked. When she invited him for Sunday brunch, Moyers, a Texas Baptist, had no idea what she was talking about, and knowing she was Episcopalian, he decided brunch might be something that Episcopalians did on Sunday. He arrived about eleven in the morning of the appointed day and found three of the most influential men in Washington sitting in the dining room, reading the morning papers—Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn; Senate icon Richard Russell; and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who lived across the street.
Each of those men played an important part in Lyndon’s success and two of them would continue to figure in his viability in the White House. (Rayburn died in November 1961.) What other Washington wife could have attracted such a distinguished lineup to her table?
Women who knew Bird best maintained she always stayed a bit detached in her relationships. She never became so fully involved in an effort or so committed to an individual that she could not disassociate herself, in order to reposition herself into more neutral territory. Marjorie “Marny” Clifford, wife of the prominent attorney Clark Clifford, observed that Bird remembered “everything,” but she kept things separate, using “pigeonholes in her mind that open when she wants them to.” She had the gift of making the person with her at any given minute feel her full attention—an ego enhancer for even the loftiest of senators. When Lyndon inquired how she managed to capture the attention of the most important person in the room and then keep it for much of the evening, she replied: “I don’t know. I just asked him, ‘Tell me all about yourself.’ ”
• • •
Lyndon’s Senate colleagues included some very wealthy men, like Robert Kerr, of the famed Kansas oil family, and Clinton Anderson, who had made a fortune in insurance in New Mexico. Both Kerr and Anderson entertained with flair in their home states, staging grandiose parties in houses that easily accommodated dozens. If Lyndon planned to stay in their league, he needed a showier residence in his home state than the unremarkable duplex on Austin’s Dillman Street, and he immediately focused on an area he knew well—the Hill Country where he had grown up.
One place in particular appealed—the 240-acre ranch that had been in his family for decades. Just down the road from the little house where he was born, it had most recently belonged to his Aunt Frank and her husband, who liked to host summer picnics and holiday get-togethers. Lyndon treasured such special memories of the house, it was one of the first places he took Bird, and in 1951 he bought what would quickly become known as the LBJ Ranch.
The house had deteriorated considerably under Aunt Frank’s ownership. After her husband died and her son went his own way, she lacked the energy to oversee repairs and updating. With its sagging beams and dangling eaves, the structure looked to Bird like a haunted house out of Charles Addams. Rather than try to rehabilitate it, she thought it wiser to follow the advice of her friend Neva West, who suggested demolishing it. It was the house’s superb setting that made the new owners reconsider. Perched high enough to provide a good view of both the winding Pedernales River down below and the setting sun behind the undulating hills to the back, it stood on the perfect spot for a house. Why not salvage at least the foundation and some of the walls? Bird set to work to turn the ruins into what she called her “heart’s home.”
In order to make the house livable as quickly as possible, Bird spent several weeks in early 1952 in the Austin area. Making innumerable drives between her mother-in-law’s house on Harris Boulevard, where she slept, and the ranch seventy miles west, Bird acted as contractor and purchasing agent. For advice, she relied on old friends, including architect Max Brooks. Before his sudden death in October 1951, Senator Wirtz had walked the land with her to advise on where to block the river’s flow with small dams; neighbor A. W. Moursund contributed his ideas on converting the neglected fields and slumping buildings into a working ranch.
This was not the first time Bird had left Lyndon in Washington for an extended period, but this separation was different from the one in 1943 when she got KTBC up and running. Now the couple had two daughters, aged eight and five, and Lyndon found himself in the rare role of parent-in-charge.
Lynda, the older, had developed a special simpatia with her grandmother Rebekah Johnson, whom she called “Madda,” but neither girl had had much chance to form a tight bond with either parent. Lyndon worked late hours, and both he and Bird were often separated from the girls for days or weeks at a time. Marie Fehmer, one of Lyndon’s secretaries, observed that they grew up “almost orphans in a sense.” Fehmer concluded that her boss never understood his daughters and “they don’t understand him.”
That disconnect was already obvious in a letter he wrote to Bird, describing a Sunday in May 1952 when she was busy at the ranch. Thinking to please his daughters, he took them to an amusement park. But the outing q
uickly soured for all three. The bossy older Lynda insisted on supervising her little sister and choosing rides for both of them. That riled Luci. To smooth things over, their father joined them in a ride on fast-moving, colliding cars, which he called “whip outfits,” but he found it scary and unpleasant. Although he was only forty-three, he was “completely worn out” and decided the girls “should be my grandchildren instead of my children.” Grateful when a light rain started, he welcomed an excuse to cut the excursion short.
He fared even worse when he got the girls home. They continued to wrangle, and when Luci, who had a cold, refused to sleep with Lynda, Lynda “got her feelings hurt at her sister’s lack of affection and insisted on sleeping with me. That meant I did not sleep any.” Then “Luci woke up and insisted that she did not want to sleep alone and that she had a sore throat.” Finally, the girls wound up in their own beds, leaving him free to watch the 7 a.m. morning news. In framing what is probably the most extensive written account he ever gave of his relationship with his daughters during their early years, Lyndon relied on a typist. So the words may not be all his. But he left no doubt that he was “counting the days” until Bird returned to take charge. If parenting was not Bird’s forte, it was even less Lyndon’s.
After the girls passed the age of needing a baby nurse, Bird expanded the list of caregivers whom she could count on to take over while she tended to her investments and catered to Lyndon. Besides the domestic staff, she used her husband’s secretaries and other office aides, and Willie Day Taylor (no relation to Bird) became a favorite. She had left the University of Texas just before graduation in 1948 to join the Johnson election team, and the job became her life. Unmarried, with a pronounced limp and a very limited social life, she worked a full day in the office as press aide and then stayed after five to take care of Lynda and Luci. While Bird attended Senate wives’ gatherings and went off with Lyndon to receptions with other power couples, it was Willie Day Taylor who oversaw play dates and became such a beloved nurturer that Luci begged to spend weekends at her home.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 17