Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  • • •

  On the morning of July 2, 1955, Bird had to choose how to spend the day. Daughter Luci turned eight that day, and she wanted a party; Lyndon, frazzled by the stress of Senate leadership (he had been elected Democratic majority leader in January), had other plans. With his ego swollen by recent national attention, he thought he deserved some time to himself, without rambunctious eight-year-olds anywhere around. Just a week earlier, Newsweek headlined him as the “Texan Who Is Jolting Washington”; earlier that year, The New York Times had named him one of the few “Who Will Run Congress.” But in spite of all the kudos, he had had a tough year, and the long days, heavy smoking, and poor eating habits showed in his lined face. He clearly needed respite from a punishing schedule, but that morning his wife chose their daughter, a decision she would reverse by nightfall.

  While Bird tended to her daughter that Saturday, Lyndon confronted inquisitive journalists, who pressed him with questions until he lost his temper and gave one of the reporters a tongue-lashing. Then, discouraged by how things were going, Lyndon wolfed down an unhealthy lunch of baked beans and frankfurters and directed his driver to take him to Middleburg, Virginia. He could always count on finding refuge at Huntland, the farm retreat owned by his longtime backer, George Brown. Although Brown’s official residence was still in Texas, he and his wife often entertained at Huntland, and the Johnsons had an open invitation to join them. With old cronies like the Browns, Lyndon could forget D.C. troubles and irritating reporters. He could say whatever he wanted without worrying that it would show up in the next morning’s paper. The fact that Bird stayed behind meant that Lyndon would feel freer to drink more, without worrying about her keeping tabs on his intake.

  By late afternoon when he reached Huntland, he had an upset stomach but attributed it to the heavy lunch. His friends thought otherwise. Senator Clinton Anderson, another guest, recognized the symptoms of a heart attack because he had recently suffered the same himself. The Browns summoned a local doctor, who advised rushing Lyndon to a hospital. Within the hour, he was on a stretcher, headed to Bethesda Medical Center. The pain was excruciating but, when told that stopping to administer medication would cost precious time, he instructed the driver to “keep going.”

  Through the hour-long trip, Lyndon kept up a conversation with Frank Oltorf, the Brown employee who sat beside him in the back of a hearse that doubled as ambulance. The two men had known each other for more than a decade, and they tried to get through the stressful ride by reminiscing about a woman they both knew—Alice Glass—although Oltorf would refuse to divulge what either of them said. Lyndon clearly understood the gravity of his condition when he queried the physician, who was riding in the front seat beside the driver: “Doctor, let me ask you something. Will I ever be able to smoke again if this is a heart attack?” When the doctor replied that he would not, Lyndon sighed and said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.”

  Then Lyndon turned talk back to end-of-life matters. He told Oltorf about the will he had made, a copy of which he had left in the bottom drawer of his desk at the radio station. To thwart any misunderstanding of his intentions, Lyndon spelled out the will’s provisions: “I just want to tell you what I want. I want Lady Bird to have everything I have. . . . She’s been a wonderful, wonderful wife, and she’s done so much for me. She just deserves everything that I have.”

  10

  STRUGGLING WITH BALANCE AND MOMENTUM

  THE PHONE CALL Lady Bird Johnson made one Sunday morning in 1959 could not have been easy. She was in Texas with Lyndon and realized that there was no way she could keep her promise to her daughters to be back in Washington with them by that evening. Lyndon needed her, and he always came first. Yet the telephone call was distressing. As she kept trying to explain that something had come up to detain her, Luci threw a tantrum. She became very emotional, “got frantic . . . screamed and yelled” that she wanted her mother back by nightfall. Finally Lynda took the phone and said, “Don’t worry, Mamma. We’ll take care of her. You stay. I understand that you have to stay. You come as soon as you can, and we’ll look after Luci.”

  That call, showing the difficulties of balancing family and work, took place when the Johnson daughters were in their early teens. But they had lost their mother’s primary attention years earlier. In fairness to her, it should be noted that the children of other political couples complained of being similarly shuffled aside by career-conscious parents. Sally MacDonald, daughter of journalist Sarah McClendon and part of the same informal group of “Texas kids” as Luci and Lynda, explained how peripheral she and the others felt to their parents’ busy lives. The “kids” were taught to smile for photographers and look for their “toe marks” in picture lineups, but otherwise remain invisible. MacDonald decided political couples “didn’t know or care” what happened to family. They preferred to “step over the kids, throw people out.” She remembered Lyndon as particularly insensitive to his daughters’ feelings—he referred to Lynda as the brainy one and Luci as the beauty.

  Although Lady Bird did better than her husband at showing her affection, it was a struggle to give attention to family while also overseeing a thriving business and adding momentum to a flourishing political career. Whenever she phoned, to catch up on what her daughters were doing, she always ended the conversation with, “Remember you are loved.” Sally MacDonald, who witnessed many of these exchanges, found the sign-off “hokey” at the time, but as an adult, with a daughter of her own, she admitted she became “teary” just thinking about how hard the busy senator’s wife, pulled in many directions, kept trying to remain connected to the girls she obviously loved. Sally did not note, but it is all too clear: the message was delivered in the passive voice, rather than the more direct “I love you.”

  Never the recipient of much mothering herself, Bird remained detached, out of touch with what young girls needed and what their contemporaries were wearing and doing. She took Lynda to a pediatrician until age twelve, when the daughter rebelled. With height and heft to appear older than her years, she had been mistaken by the receptionist as the mother of nine-year-old Luci. Splitting the academic year, half in Washington and half in Texas, made it hard for the girls to keep friends and maintain academic continuity. But their mother kept them in that pattern until 1958, when school officials intervened and insisted the girls stick with the same school through the academic year.

  The choice was Washington, which meant that, except for vacations, they lived at 30th Place, even when their parents were back in Texas for long stretches and could speak only by phone. Luci likened her treatment to neglect and described her youth as deprived. She accused Bird of not being “a real mother. A real mother stays home.” The more sanguine Lynda blamed the situation, more than the individuals, and she often reminded her mother that Washington was made for legislators and their spouses but it was no place for children.

  • • •

  It wasn’t that Bird didn’t love her daughters—she simply put other responsibilities ahead of them. That was the life she had chosen. She was not the only first lady to make that choice. Theodore Roosevelt’s wife, Edith, usually described by historians as a model for all presidents’ wives, admitted privately that she would “not have hesitated to chop all my children into pieces for their father.” In the twenty-nine years that Edith survived Theodore, she remained so cruelly judgmental and neglectful of her children and their offspring that one of her great-granddaughters described her as “mean as a snake.” Bird, who had a little longer than Edith to mend family ties, did much better. She traveled in her widowed years with her daughters and showered their children and grandchildren with enormous affection. At her funeral, the outpouring of warmth and fondness for “Nini,” as the younger set dubbed her, showed no hint of the disappointment registered earlier by Luci and Lynda.

  Lady Bird’s decision to elevate her husband’s needs over those of her children became abundantly clear in 1955, when he was hospitalized for a month afte
r his heart attack. Except for two brief breaks, she remained within hearing distance around-the-clock so that her feet could “hit the floor” whenever he called for her. That meant that Lynda, aged eleven, and Luci, eight, were left to the care of Willie Day Taylor and other hired help, and they were, as George Reedy, their father’s aide, pointed out, further “deprived of [Bird’s] presence and her motherhood.”

  Of course Lady Bird was concerned, as any wife would be, to receive a phone call July 2 telling her that her husband was being rushed to the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda with what appeared to be a heart attack. The center was less than ten miles from 30th Place, and in the light traffic of the holiday weekend she drove herself quickly to the hospital and arrived before Lyndon. From the waiting room, she could not see his big frame being lifted out on a stretcher but when he was carried into the cardiac unit on the seventeenth floor, the sight of his pallid, sunken face shocked her. In twenty-one years of marriage, she had seen him hospitalized again and again for respiratory infections and kidney stones, but never, even with the excruciating pain of a ready-to-burst appendix, had he looked this bad. His attempt at humor did nothing to quell her fears. He had just been measured for two new suits, and now he told her to “go ahead with the blue” since he could use that “no matter what happens.”

  Aides Walter Jenkins and George Reedy, who had also been summoned to Bethesda that sultry Saturday evening, knew Bird well enough to expect full control, total calm. The woman who rarely cried (and was mortified when Lyndon began weeping during a scene of the movie The Grapes of Wrath) stayed stoic. Her face a mirror of composure, she kept reassuring Lyndon, “Honey, everything will be all right.” She watched, without a word, as he smoked what he promised would be his last cigarette, and turned “gray as pavement, motionless as stone, and cold to touch.” Then Dr. J. Willis Hurst, the young cardiologist on duty that Independence Day weekend, explained that in cases like this, of myocardial infarction, the survival rate was only fifty-fifty; the first few hours would be critical.

  Before Lyndon went into shock and was wheeled away, he rattled off instructions—how to find his will and where to get a second opinion on the competence of Dr. Hurst. But his most emphatic order concerned Bird: “stay here. I’d rather fight this with you beside me.” He could have saved his breath on that one.

  Since Lyndon’s election to Senate majority leader in January, Bird had struggled to get him in better health. He had put on noticeable weight, and none of her subtle advice to eat less had the least restraining effect. He had already been hospitalized once that year, for kidney stone surgery, and was going frequently to doctors with complaints of sore throat and fatigue. He looked stressed, but she knew it was useless to encourage him to slow down—too much depended on making his mark as the most effective Senate leader in history. Much as she wanted him to take things easier, she could not forget that it had been his tremendous ambition that had attracted her to him in the first place.

  For the entire four weeks he stayed at the medical center, she watched over him like a mother in a neonatal ward, and as his chances of survival improved, his hospital suite became a virtual office, with her in charge. With typewriter-topped desks filling much of the space and his aides coming and going, the white-capped nurses looked oddly out of place. This setup was against all the rules, and Dr. Hurst knew that. Complete rest was the prescribed medicine for cardiac patients. But in this case, he had decided he had a patient who didn’t heal without the spur of work; only the push of a bustling office would pull him through.

  Even with that concession, Lyndon’s recuperation did not proceed smoothly. Always a worrier, he kept voicing reservations about how his replacement as majority leader was doing. Even more, he worried that he himself was losing precious ground. The 1956 presidential election was little more than a year away, and newspapers across the nation had taken his name off the list of potential candidates. After an AP story ran under the headline “Heart Attack Drops Johnson from White House Hopefuls,” Lyndon became really depressed. His brother insisted that he had found him in tears, mumbling, “I’ll never get a chance to be President now.”

  Lady Bird could see how distraught he had become, and she called in a physician she trusted even more than Dr. Hurst—Dr. James Cain, the Mayo Clinic internist who had married Senator Wirtz’s daughter Ida May and become close to the Johnsons. Cain’s diagnosis was alarming. Although he emphasized that heart attack patients typically become depressed, he had rarely seen a depression as deep as Lyndon’s.

  Cain’s dire pronouncements were underscored by reports of aides and secretarial staff who had to deal with Lyndon’s despondency every day. Much as they tried to make allowances, mindful of the disappointment he would understandably feel at being sidelined at age forty-seven, possibly for life, they found his mood swings exasperating. George Reedy struggled to wring decisions out of him and then to navigate through conflicting orders and unreasonable demands. Secretary Mary Rather remembered the convalescence as a “quiet, long, lonesome, sad” time. Booth Mooney, a Johnson staffer since 1953, reported that his boss started having nightmares about his incapacity. In the worst episodes, he panicked at the prospect of becoming as immobilized as his paralyzed Grandmother Bunton or as dispossessed and impotent as President Woodrow Wilson after his 1919 stroke.

  Lady Bird had two decades of dealing with Lyndon’s mood slumps, and she started looking for what would bring him out now. As the person who knew him best, she zeroed in on the thousands of well-wishing letters and cards that poured in, mostly from Texas but some from as far away as India. Knowing how her man cherished words of loving support, she started reading the messages to him, even when he lacked the energy to lift his head from the pillow. She pasted the most poignant, handwritten messages in fat scrapbooks so he could keep them at his side and pat them for reassurance, even in the dark of night. In addition to the letters, he received an array of gifts, and she kept reminding him of them: enough flowers to open a shop, along with piles of books, crates of soft drinks, and half a dozen watermelons. Staff followed Bird’s lead and clipped upbeat editorials from formerly unfriendly newspapers to add to the cheerleading pile.

  For a man who fed on adulation, it was a virtual feast. Lyndon became obsessive about those letters, picking them up and tracing the writing on the page as if to confirm the existence of each word. Then he decided every one of them deserved an individual response. Completely disregarding the fact that his staff was already overworked and worn out, he ordered them to answer every single letter. Bird would handle the personal ones, writing by hand to people she and her husband knew, but staff had to type up all the others. Laboring long hours, aides accomplished a seemingly impossible task, and thousands of letters went out.

  Even with all that encouragement, Lyndon had times when he despaired of ever resuming his old life. Walter Jenkins reported that he would be fine for a few days, outlining big plans for the future. Then, suddenly, for no observable reason, he would lapse into a dejected silence and lose interest in everything around him. One minute he was barking orders like a general and the next he became morose; he wanted no one near him.

  When doctors pronounced the patient well enough to travel, he flew in a private plane to Texas to observe his August 27 birthday and continue his convalescence at the ranch. This began the Johnsons’ fourth year in that house, and what looked like the home of a relatively prosperous rancher was quickly converted to a rehab center. Bird installed everything required for the patient’s comfort and recovery—a special bed, a huge TV, multiple sunlamps, and an array of exercise equipment. To accommodate his staffers George Reedy, Jim Rowe, and others, she put up card tables in the living room so three secretaries could work simultaneously. She installed extra phone lines to maintain communication with the rest of the world, and made hospitality arrangements for the parade of important visitors she expected to pass through.

  Among the many guests who came to talk with the newly skinny, tanned Lyndon were p
olitical leaders from all over the state, along with national celebrities, including Arthur Godfrey and Adlai Stevenson. Old friends like Sam Rayburn and Les and Liz Carpenter stopped by to cheer the patient up. The Carpenters may have regretted their visit. After Lyndon provided Les with one of his hunting guns that “kicked back,” he left with a bandaged right eye.

  The Johnsons used those months of recuperation to make further improvements around the ranch. They installed an irrigation system to get them through dry stretches. To increase space for visitors, they built a new guesthouse, so appealing to Hubert and Muriel Humphrey, who stopped by on their way home from an Arizona vacation, that they took a set of the architect’s drawings back to Minnesota. The swimming pool in the Johnsons’ yard, with a white board fence around it, still had no landscaping, but it remained a favorite gathering place because temperatures stayed warm enough to swim well into December.

  The fall of 1955 had its high points. During one of Lyndon’s good patches, the whole family went to California, where the girls, on one of only a handful of vacations they ever took with their father, had the “time of their life” at Disneyland. Bird’s home movies of those months show a placid, happy family, quite at odds with the sad reality described by staff. Lyndon pats the family dog and examines his prize Herefords. He swims across the pool, wearing dark glasses like a movie star, while a slim, smiling Bird floats faceup, savoring the blue sky overhead. Plump Lynda teases her younger sister with water splashes, and the two girls pose with “Daddy” at one end of the pool. This last footage is especially notable, since secretary Mary Rather reported the girls spent very little time with their parents that fall.