In other ways, Bird looked for the cheapest solutions regarding her daughters. She had Lynda’s hair cut in an easy-to-keep Dutch boy bob, which suited neither her face nor contemporary style, and she negotiated with a beauty shop in Austin to cut and style her hair and that of her daughters in return for airtime on KTBC. Later in life, when she looked over photos of the girls as youngsters, she admitted, “I hadn’t been as good a mother as I should. They were too fat, and also I had not paid enough attention to their clothes. But, one divides the hours of one’s life as best we can.”
When Lynda was ready to start first grade in September 1950, her parents decided to split her school year the same way they divided their time, half in Washington and half in Austin. Since it looked like the legislative talks would continue late that summer, Bird returned to Texas ahead of Lyndon and enrolled their six-year-old in Miss Hubrick’s school just down the street from the Dillman Street duplex. Four months later, when Congress convened in January, Bird withdrew Lynda and took her back to Washington and entered her in school there. It was an unsatisfactory arrangement, and Bird could see that change upset her daughter. But she stuck to the plan because it suited her and Lyndon’s work schedules.
In September 1952, when the family was finally installed at the LBJ Ranch, Lynda started attending the Johnson City school, only a few miles away. But in January, she had to say good-bye to her newly made friends and start all over with a different teacher in Washington. Anyone could see it was a rough adaptation for an elementary school child. Bird realized her older daughter lacked playmates and was getting pudgy by the time she turned eight.
At age ten, Lynda developed a mysterious medical problem that attracted some long overdue parental attention—at least from her mother. That year—1954—was particularly stressful in the Johnson household. Bird miscarried again in April, and while the Senate grappled with how to treat Senator Joseph McCarthy for raising sullying charges against a list of persons he accused of communist leanings, Bird took off with Mary Rather for a restorative cruise in the Caribbean. That summer, when Lynda started going into baffling “spasmodic, uncontrollable movements, jerkings” that doctors in Austin could not explain, her mother took her to Scott & White, a medical center in College Station, Texas. During the three-hour drives from the ranch for each consultation, Lynda finally had her mother to herself, and the two learned to sing along together.
When doctors prescribed home rest, Lynda didn’t have to go to school anywhere for the months of September and October, giving her an unprecedented amount of time with her mother. In November, when doctors pronounced Lynda well enough to resume school half-time, she enrolled in St. Andrews, a small Episcopal School near the ranch, where she received “special care and attention.” By Christmas, she was “quite all right again.” Although Bird worried about the illness (and thought the spasms affected Lynda’s handwriting into adulthood), Lyndon showed little concern. Bird judged him “impatient” with their daughter, as if she fell ill to spite him, and years later was still “mad” that Lyndon “wasn’t as understanding as I think he ought to have been.”
Anyone doing an efficiency study of the Johnson household would have rated Lady Bird a top-notch manager. At the house on 30th Place she nosed out the best bargains on cleaning supplies, insisted on multiple estimates for repairs, and kept upgrading the property. The house had a constantly shifting cast of characters, with visiting relatives, not-yet-settled staff, and Texans passing through Washington, but they all had to fit around husband, wife, and two little girls. Lyndon remained the kingpin, his needs and wishes paramount at all times, beginning with breakfast served in bed. Bird explained to an aide that she lit on that solution after having trouble getting him to the table while his eggs were still warm.
To keep all three households running smoothly, Lady Bird supervised a constantly shifting staff of cooks, cleaners, repair people, yard workers, and caterers in each place. She had her mainstays, such as Zephyr Wright, née Black, who moved with the Johnsons back and forth between Washington and Texas, and Helen and Gene Williams, who joined the household in 1952 and became durable, valued employees. Amiable Helen got along with everyone, even “more or less” with the sometimes snappish Zephyr. Helen could size up Lyndon’s swiftly shifting moods as well as anyone. She patiently taught little Luci to bake cookies, and she helped out with child care when needed. Gene Williams did gardening, heavy household chores, and whatever else needed doing. Since he wore the same size shoe as Lyndon, he broke in his boss’s new purchases so the busy senator never had to worry about suffering from blistered heels or bruised toes. Gene Williams did balk at one assignment: When Lyndon asked him to take the family dog on his next driving trip to Texas, he refused, explaining, “It’s hard enough for me [an African American] to find a place to sleep [on these cross-country trips]. Can you imagine what it would be like if I had a dog?”
• • •
Besides everything else she did to help Lyndon win elections and stay as popular as possible with his colleagues, Bird was the one who had to look after Lyndon’s two exceedingly needy siblings. Two of his sisters—the youngest, Lucia, and the oldest, Rebekah—remained settled in apparently happy lives. Rebekah’s husband, Oscar, went to work for KTBC after finishing law school, and her son Philip (born 1948) struck Bird as incredibly neat, his clothes remaining as spanking clean as when he first put them on.
But the other two, brother Sam Houston and middle sister Josefa, continued to supply the headaches. Sam Houston couldn’t keep a job. A tall, good-looking charmer who fancied himself more talented than Lyndon, he was still drinking too much and that excess consumption, along with extravagant spending, wiped out any advantages accruing from either looks or brains. His marriage to Albertine Summers in 1940 ended in divorce after the birth of two children, and his dissipation continued. In 1948, his relationship with one of his brother’s secretaries produced a child, Rodney, who was promptly adopted by Josefa and her husband. In spite of Lyndon’s finding Sam Houston job after job, he continued to decline—in health and reliability. In the bad periods, Bird found herself checking him in and out of hospitals more often than she could count. Lyndon admitted he was inclined to give up on his brother, but Bird clung to the hope she could save him.
Josefa, the sister Bird found most congenial, was even more exasperating. Tall and attractive, Josefa achieved a reputation in college for “looseness” and “wildness” and drinking too much. Her promiscuous pairings were not youthful indiscretions that abated with the years—they continued into adulthood. As Lyndon’s career soared, he had to turn to staff and supporters to help bail her out of multiple scrapes.
Like Lyndon, Josefa had periods of very high productivity, during which she campaigned effectively for him and recruited other women to do the same. Then she dropped into listless downs or flaunted her licentious behavior. One reporter who observed her at various political conventions claimed, “If there was a man to be picked up, Josefa picked him up.” By the time Josefa turned forty, Bird described her as “bedeviled with drink and too much medication.” Hard as Bird worked to rescue her, putting her up at 30th Place for months at a time and ferrying her to doctors’ appointments, nothing worked. Josefa remained “in very bad shape.”
As if Bird did not have enough family drama on Lyndon’s side, she had to contend with the troubles of her own relatives. Her father, now in his seventies, had lost the swagger of his younger years and the ability to drive a sharp bargain. With a dubious business partner he ran up huge debts in 1949 and then could not repay them. Bird and Lyndon enlisted help to bail T.J. out, but it was a sad comedown for the once proud man who liked being called “Mr. Boss.” He eventually found some forgotten bank stock of his own to offset his debts, but he could no longer brag about either his business know-how or his physical fitness. Signs of arteriosclerosis, which complicated his circulation and made his last years miserable, were already showing up.
Bird’s strained relationship with her
stepmother, Ruth, had worsened. Worried about the possibility that T.J.’s heirs might face difficulties when he died, leaving lots of land but little cash to pay the inheritance taxes, the Johnsons engaged a lawyer friend to help him set up an irrevocable trust to shield the estate from taxes. T.J. was amenable and signed the document while his wife was away, a move that infuriated her when she came back. She insisted on invalidating the arrangement. Even after receiving a careful explanation of the meaning of “irrevocable,” she remained adamant, and the attorney was reduced to taking the blame, saying he had not fully spelled out the consequences to T.J. After the irrevocable will was nullified, T.J. was free to make a new will, which he did, without involving Lady Bird, who surmised correctly that it favored his young wife over his three children.
The bright spot in all this financial gloom was Bird’s broadcasting business. It was doing well, producing the income essential to keeping her family comfortable. Under the careful management of Jesse Kellam after 1946, KTBC had turned in steady profits, and by 1952 Bird submitted papers to the FCC showing that her original investment of $17,500 was now worth nearly half a million dollars. KTBC had returned a healthy profit the previous year of $57,983, equivalent to almost half a million in 2014 dollars. Bigger fortune lay ahead. Bird’s decision to invest in TV and bet on VHF rather than UHF would turn out to be propitious.
Embarrassing questions would continue to arise about how much she had been favored by the FCC. It looked very suspicious that the FCC had granted only one VHF license to Austin (population 160,000) and granted it to her, giving her a monopoly. Much smaller cities were assigned more stations. Johnson critics noted that channel 7, owned by the senator’s wife (whose business name was always Claudia T. Johnson), could charge high rates for TV advertising because it lacked competition.
The timing also looked suspicious. From more than seven hundred applications that the FCC received from across the nation, after its four-year freeze, it singled out only eighteen for immediate approval, and one of the eighteen came from the wife of a man who sat on the Senate’s Commerce Committee, to whom the FCC reported. Leonard Marks, the communications lawyer who had encouraged Bird to invest in television in the first place, insisted that her application had been carefully scrutinized by many investigators over many years, and not one bit of evidence surfaced to show any improper interference. But of course not all interference gets recorded on paper.
An account of the Johnsons’ intricate maneuvering in the media world of the 1940s and 1950s would make a book of its own, but the short version is that fortune came quickly. When managers of KWTX in nearby Waco objected that Bird’s proposal to increase broadcast strength would cut into their turf, she bought a small UHF station in Waco. She then negotiated with KWTX to sign over to her 29 percent of its stock in return for the right to use her network affiliation. The value of that stock grew exponentially so that by 1964 it was worth an estimated $600,000. Her investment in the Weslaco broadcasting station in the Rio Grande Valley also showed a remarkably large and quick gain—something over a hundred percent in just a couple of years. When two cable companies competed for Austin’s market, the corporation Bird controlled voted to team up with the eventual winner.
Through it all, T. J. Taylor’s daughter kept careful watch over operations. In her small office on the second floor at 30th Place, she signed every check, except for payroll, and monitored the staff’s detailed reports that came to her every week. She wanted to see how the station’s earnings on any single day compared to those of two years earlier. In the margins she made her suggestions, including how to word sales pitches to potential advertisers. She demanded a full accounting of all purchases and procedures, including what to offer new hires and how much was spent on toilet paper. Station employees understood that they couldn’t bluff when dealing with her. If she asked them a question, they had better know the answer, and it had to make sense. A Wall Street Journal reporter concluded that she “deserved credit for effective attention to both grand strategy and minutiae of business right up to the time her husband became President.”
Those profits were essential to the Johnsons’ lifestyle and to their sense of security. His salary of $12,500 was not nearly enough to staff and run three households (Washington, Austin, and the ranch). His leadership position earned him a bit extra, and he had additional allotments for staff and travel, but he needed more than he earned to keep upgrading his cattle herds, to say nothing of the expensive boats and cars he liked acquiring. Bird had absorbed her father’s intense fear of being left poor, as his own mother had been, and she knew how important a thriving business could be to Lyndon’s continued political climb.
The Texas papers left no doubt that Lyndon Johnson was headed for a bright future and he had a wife who would help. In 1949, the News had headlined one of its articles, “Young-Man-Going-Places,” and explained how Lyndon managed that by keeping everyone happy. If he had to go against the president, he gave advance notice, to ward off possible anger or disappointment. He had delivered so many favors to constituents that when he voted for measures they did not want (public housing, slum clearance, and aid to education) he knew voters would stick with him. The News concluded that the state’s young senator had figured out how to make a name for himself. He maintained strong ties with the leaders that counted while he “ate, slept and dreamed strategy that would lead to influence.”
The senator’s wife kept up a busy schedule to supplement his list of contacts, and she got noticed. As a congressman’s spouse, she had rated barely a mention at national charity benefits and political fund-raisers, but now she got a seat at the head table. Earlier she had contented herself with a cup of tea at receptions; now she was asked to pour, giving her a new level of prominence and allowing her to talk with almost everyone in attendance. She never missed a chance to make a friend for Lyndon.
In the blitz of publicity that he received, she was credited—not so much for her social skills and campaign role as for her business savvy. When respected reporter Paul F. Healy wrote a May 1951 article for the popular Saturday Evening Post, he titled it, “The Frantic Gentleman from Texas,” and described how a lovable Lyndon, though clearly not an intellectual, used his “dogged Texas charm” to win the favor of his colleagues. According to Healy, Senator Johnson had his quirks—a tendency to talk too much on the phone, an incredible ignorance about Hollywood (he didn’t even know who Lana Turner was), and so little interest in sports that he talked politics at football games. But his staff adored him. Though overworked and underpaid, they remained among the most loyal and enthusiastic employees on Capitol Hill because of their admiration for their boss.
Healy made Lady Bird sound like Superwoman, essential to Lyndon’s success and a power in her own right. Healy called her the “staple pivot,” the woman who made sure her man did not “burn out or break down.” On her own she had compiled an enviable record as a “clever business woman who owns and runs by remote control a profitable radio station in Austin and looks out for her 3000 acres of cotton and timber land in Alabama.” Besides keeping her husband’s fountain pens filled, his wardrobe laid out, and the table set for any number of guests he decided to bring home for dinner, she continued to welcome his constituents who visited Washington. Even in heavy snowstorms, she drove them around to see the sights.
By the end of 1954, Bird could read in U.S. News & World Report that her husband was on its list of “History Makers,” alongside such international powerhouses as Ho Chi Minh, Nehru, and Mao Zedong. Just weeks earlier, another article had hinted that he had presidential potential in the next election: “Knowland and Johnson in ’56?”
A lot of Washingtonians didn’t like Lyndon Johnson, and many bristled at his blatant egotism and self-promotion. Katie Louchheim, leader of the Democratic Women’s Division, listed the multiple ways he annoyed people: “antagonizing the press. . . . Giving them little admonishing lectures before and after hearings. And having a news ticker in his office.” Everything
pointed to outsized aspirations: “his eyes turned up PA Ave. His ambition . . . so overpowering, it insults you.” By early 1955, Louchheim complained that a seat alongside him at dinner meant listening to one topic the whole evening—Lyndon. After regaling her with a litany of his “operations and ailments” during the soup and fish courses, he moved on to brag about what he would do for his fellow senators. She was inclined to agree with him on the latter point (“no one will do it better”) but she found his braggadocio hard to take.
Louchheim found nothing offputting about Lady Bird. After a critical survey of all the women present one particular evening, catty Louchheim described Hubert Humphrey’s wife, Muriel, as presentable in a dress she had made herself, but the prize “for poise and peculiar beauty” went to Mrs. Johnson. Although lacking “a single good feature,” she possessed the “charm and a leisurely paced intelligent, lacquered veneer that takes on greatness.” In her “black tulle [dress] ‘with little touches of pink’ ” she remained unfailingly courteous while her needy husband was “rapidly becoming her ‘charge,’ her ridiculously impossible charge.” Together, the two showed a remarkable fit: the tightly reined wife alongside a husband “wound up from here to eternity.”
Husband and wife could divide the territory, with her showing up at social events while he took care of work. In a “Washington Scene” piece in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on May 26, 1953, columnist George Dixon described Lady Bird as enjoying what Lyndon dismissed as “gallivanting,” while he worked himself to a “frazzle.” When Bird chided him that another senator, eighty-five-year-old Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, had been at the party she just left, a party Lyndon refused to attend because of Senate work, he was annoyed. “Migawd,” he replied. “I stayed on the Hill all night working to get [Green’s] bill through.”
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 18