Everything revolved around Lyndon and how he could resume his leadership of the Senate. During her visit to the ranch, Katie Louchheim noted that he wore monogrammed socks and reclined imperially in a chair, spewing out big plans, while Bird “perched on the bed” and listened. To Louchheim, the patient sounded like an enthusiastic athletic coach, putting together a team. He quizzed her for names of women he could appoint to important jobs and talked excitedly about all he was going to do when he returned to Washington.
These meetings with Louchheim and others were all part of a careful strategy by Lyndon’s PR team to make him look productive and upbeat. George Reedy and Horace Busby planted stories that made him sound like a changed, contented, and grateful man. Once reputed to relish driving fast around the ranch, he now claimed to enjoy nature walks; the father who had never paid much attention to his daughters bragged about getting acquainted with them; the man who famously eschewed reading books now expressed a liking for biography and Plato. An article written by Busby but published under Lyndon’s name, claimed the heart attack had actually been a plus: “My Heart Attack Taught Me How to Live.”
Many of the articles about Lyndon credited Lady Bird as his chief caretaker. The Dallas Morning News praised “her devotion and intelligence and diligence,” measuring every calorie that Lyndon consumed and greeting every guest who dropped in. She enlisted the help of longtime secretary Juanita Roberts, who had acquired nutrition training during a previous job, to help her keep Lyndon on a high-protein diet of only 1,500 calories a day. Joining him in that regime, Bird lost ten pounds herself, and like a proud teacher showing off her prize student, she told the Morning News, “I’ve never seen anybody go after something the way Lyndon has this new way of living.”
What she did not tell the papers was another, much less happy story: Lyndon Johnson was a cranky, incredibly difficult patient and, cut out of much control over anything, he made life miserable for everyone around him. He shouted at Juanita Roberts that he never wanted to hear the word “protein” again. After he lambasted Bird for telling him what he could and could not eat, she started making up lists, like restaurant menus, so he could place his orders himself. Dealing with the fallout from his other temperamental outbursts was not so easy. When he chastised office staff, she could ease the sting of his ugly words by reminding them that they were dealing with a sick man; when he tore into salesmen at the broadcasting company for not making more money, she could gently cut him off, with, “Now I think that’s enough of that, Lyndon.” But she was finding this recuperation very difficult and she admitted to a friend that when it was all over, she just wanted to “cry for about two hours.”
By mid-October, the recuperation was going better. Lyndon had regained enough strength and confidence to accept an invitation to speak to an audience of one thousand in Whitney, Texas. It was a rousing performance. As he outlined his vision for America, he touched on a whole range of subjects, from education and housing to civil rights and full employment. Echoing an energetic young FDR, he made Adlai Stevenson, the current Democratic favorite, sound old-fashioned, and that speech was later singled out as a major milestone in elevating Lyndon to national prominence. Boosted by his showing in Whitney, he started giving more speeches, and Bird was right there beside him, slipping him little reminders or tugging his jacket tails when she thought he had talked long enough.
By January 1956, Lyndon Johnson was back in the Senate, but his associates found him more cantankerous than ever. Katie Louchheim questioned some of his committee appointments, and, after a discussion with Texas newspaperman Bill White, she decided that the effects of a coronary on an ambitious man could be disastrous. Lyndon had “gone sour,” in her opinion, and become “sick mentally as well as physically . . . impossible . . . [and his arrogance] worse than ever.”
Rather than cultivating members of the press, Lyndon seemed bent on provoking them. After keeping reporters waiting more than an hour, he antagonized them further by saying he had to leave for another appointment. White, who had been a Johnson friend since the early 1930s, continued to defend him but admitted “he’s somewhat unbalanced because of his bottomless ambition and the frustration his heart attack imposes upon him. Can’t stand any criticism . . . [or any] thwarting.” Louchheim agreed that Lyndon needed a lot of attention; it was up to Bird to keep him happy.
By May 1956, media outside Texas were reporting that Senator Johnson had made a surprisingly strong comeback. The Cleveland Plain Dealer retracted its earlier, pessimistic conclusion that his career was over and now included him in the “two or three most powerful men in the Democratic Party . . . [with] a strong, perhaps decisive voice at the [upcoming presidential nominating] convention.” While his place as front-runner was still in question, Lyndon was his usual undecided self. He would not go after the nomination, he insisted, but “if it comes [my] way. . . .”
Bird strongly opposed a presidential run at that point—it was too soon after his heart attack. When she accompanied him to the Democratic nominating convention in August 1956, the first national convention she had ever attended, The Dallas Morning News ran a headline: “Lady Bird Likes Job in Senate.” After describing her as “a slim, pretty brunette with sparkling brown eyes” who serves as her husband’s sounding board, the News quoted her: “I think being a Senator from Texas is a wonderful job for which Lyndon is well suited, and he loves it. I like it where he is.”
The same Dallas paper indicated Lyndon had problems beyond his health if he ran for national office. Simply put, he was considered too conservative for Northern liberals and too liberal for Southerners who saw him as too pro-labor and too pro-blacks. To capture the Democratic nomination, Lyndon would have to appeal to voters with widely different views on labor laws, taxes, and the role of the federal government in their lives.
After Adlai Stevenson lost to Republican incumbent Dwight Eisenhower in November, Senator Johnson began tweaking his credentials on civil rights, one of the most divisive issues in the nation. He had already edged away from the anti–civil rights stance he had taken in House votes on the poll tax and lynching and in his strident speech to the Senate in March 1949. In 1954, when one hundred of his fellow legislators (nineteen senators and eighty-one congressmen) defied the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision by signing what was known as the Southern Manifesto, vowing never to obey it, Lyndon Johnson was one of only three Southerners who refused to join them. But he was still on very friendly terms with some of the most outspoken opponents of equal rights for blacks, including Senator Richard Russell, and Bird was still serving Russell his favorite meals whenever he dropped by.
When Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, outlined a new civil rights act in 1957, Lyndon saw his chance to gain some points with liberal voters without antagonizing Senator Russell and like-minded Southerners. Lyndon’s assistant, Jim Rowe, had warned him he had to move quickly. Either he jumped on the civil rights bandwagon now or he was doomed to be stranded, a sectional leader without any hope of ever reaching the White House. This was the kind of challenge that brought out the political genius of LBJ, and he zeroed in on the one segment of the civil rights act that held potential for compromise—the section that segregationists would never accept and liberals might be persuaded to give up. Without that section, giving the federal government expanded power to prosecute discrimination, the Senate might pass the civil rights act, and Senate leader Johnson would collect credit from both sides—from the South for warding off the worst and from the North for backing the section of the act that extended voting rights to blacks.
To have round-the-clock access to his Senate colleagues while the bill was being hashed out, Senator Johnson set up a cot in his office. Bird provided him with fresh shirts, some hot meals cooked by Zephyr Wright, and the latest family news. Probably more important to the eventual outcome, she remained equally charming to the wives of senators opposed to Lyndon’s compromise and to those who supported him. She hadn’t bee
n meeting with other Senate wives for nearly a decade just to roll bandages. She knew most of the women by first name, had entertained many of them at 30th Place, and knew the value of her solicitous inquiries about their health and that of their families.
Enacted on September 9, the 1957 Civil Rights Act did not accomplish all that its initiators wanted, but it was the first civil rights act passed in nearly one hundred years, and Senator Johnson deserved some of the credit. As did his wife, who later saw this victory as part of “a chain.”
People who had previously written LBJ off for national office now began taking another look, and Lady Bird figured in the assessments. The New Orleans Times-Picayune on December 8, 1957, ran a headline, “Wife of Senate Majority Leader Highly Efficient.” The article extolled her ability to adapt to her husband’s frenetic schedule and its constant changes. With the cooperation of her “fabulous” cook, she sometimes stretched a meal prepared for four to feed twelve. After all was set for a big dinner, he might cancel entirely, to go elsewhere or work late. “Only a wife with the patience of Job” would manage to say, as Lady Bird did, “Oh well, we’ll eat it tomorrow night.” In addition to the usual portrayal of her as a “slender, pretty brunette” and good household manager, she was now being praised as “smart . . . one of the most astute business women in Texas, chairman of the board of the Texas Broadcasting company which owns three television and radio stations.” It would be difficult to find any spouse in American political history up to that time with credentials to match those of Senator Johnson’s wife in 1957. The article noted that besides managing her households, she “runs up to New York to confer with the big networks and national advertisers and keeps a weather eye out for a way to expand.”
Like Dolley Madison, Lady Bird Johnson refused to admit the existence of enemies, and like Mrs. Madison, she confused some Washingtonians with her equanimity. Katie Louchheim mused in her diary about whether the “poised and sure” Bird knew more than she was letting on. When she gushed with admiration for her dinner partners, many of whom detested Lyndon, was she being “as arch as I think her,” or did she really not know what those dinner partners thought of her husband?
Only rarely did Bird lower her guard among friendly faces, and once Louchheim overheard her complaining about how hard it was to please everybody: “If only people knew . . .” But mostly, Bird kept the smile pasted on and the flattery flowing—to make up for her husband’s brashness and gaffes. She had long ago learned to conceal her true feelings so that only she had the key to them, and even the shrewd, inquisitive Louchheim couldn’t get access.
• • •
Although both her husband’s political prospects and her own broadcasting business were thriving in the late 1950s, Mrs. Johnson singled out those years as a low point in her life. Or, as she put it, not “personally my most joyous [years].” Her biggest problems were indeed personal—with family, both her husband’s and hers, and matters of the heart.
In 1959 she hit a nadir when she realized she was going to lose a brother without ever having taken the time to get to know him. Tommy, the elder of her two brothers, had received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and when Bird phoned her friend Dr. Cain for clarification of what that meant, she learned that it was almost always fatal. Nearly a dozen years older than she, Tommy had been away at boarding school during much of her youth, and after she married Lyndon and became so focused on his career, she had seen very little of her brother. Now his death sentence came as a painful reminder of how she had sacrificed blood relatives for the man she married, and it must have caused some soul-searching. Alone at the ranch at the time, she felt a sorrow deeper than any she could ever remember, and the woman who rarely cried let herself explode in grief. She confessed that she “cried and cried and cried. And I really don’t know,” she remarked twenty-five years later, after Lyndon’s death, “whether I have ever cried since.”
More than Tommy’s death pushed the late 1950s into one of the worst periods of Bird’s life, as she faced a litany of disappointments. She was in her late forties, and after the 1954 miscarriage, she had little hope left of ever bearing Lyndon a son. The ongoing friction between her daughters and herself was bound to grow as they matured and asserted their independence, and her combative relationship with her stepmother was affecting Bird’s access to T.J.
But her top worry might well have been something else. For the first time in nearly a quarter century of marriage, she had to consider the possibility that her husband might leave her for another woman. She had plenty of evidence of his philandering—he made no secret of it—and of his other-than-employer relationship with his young secretaries. But now he was singling out one particular secretary as a favorite. Hired in 1954, Mary Margaret Wiley had gradually taken center stage in his Washington office, where she sat at a desk right alongside his, privy to every discussion he had. Her ubiquitous presence was noted in the press, and one newspaper described her as his “cute-as-a-button secretary” who went everywhere with Senator Johnson and recorded his speeches on her “little machine.”
Bird treated this secretary as she treated all the women who caught Lyndon’s eye—she incorporated them into the family routine and included them in social events. But this particular secretary’s omnipresence and her apparent delight in her boss’s generous attention fueled speculation that his interest in her might be more than short term. Wiley seemed highly tuned to her boss’s moods and preferences and able to accommodate them as smoothly as Bird did. And this secretary was young enough to be his daughter, easily of an age to bear him a son.
To add to Bird’s concern, Lyndon seemed changed. His recovery from the heart attack had not been accompanied by renewed satisfaction with his job and his life. He appeared disgruntled with politics and talked longingly about having a more relaxed workday, maybe in a low-key business of his own, like selling insurance. It seemed unthinkable that a man in his early fifties, with a flourishing national reputation, would do what he had often threatened—quit politics and start a new life. But some of his closest associates thought he meant it this time. The heart attack had caused a reassessment of goals, and the Senate had begun to bore him. His wife wasn’t the only one who saw signs that Lyndon might make a drastic change in his life. One of his top aides later confessed to biographer Herbert Parmet that he thought Lyndon would “divorce” his wife and marry the secretary.
How does any wife treat a threat like that? By either opting out and letting someone else decide what happens or taking charge and doing everything she can to steer toward the outcome she wants.
Bird did the latter, by trying to increase her political visibility and thus her value to Lyndon, and she started by signing up for a course in public speaking. She had been giving short campaign talks since the mid-1940s, but addressing an audience on any subject but her husband’s candidacy required an entirely different kind of preparation and Bird decided to take classes with Hester Provensen, who had an excellent reputation in the capital for tutoring inexperienced orators, both male and female. Provensen operated pretty much like a college professor—she required her students to avoid manuscripts and give short extemporaneous speeches, with only a few notes in front of them, and then critique each other. For Bird, who much preferred turning out a newspaper article, this was a big challenge, and she had to outline carefully what she wanted to say and then rehearse again and again before she attained the natural, convincing delivery that Provensen required.
When reporters came for an interview about Lyndon’s presidential prospects and how she figured in his future, Bird made sure she had something substantial to say. The job of first lady, she told the Portland Oregonian, included a lot more than just lying “by the pool.” It was not her style to be snide, and there is no reason to think that she was making a gratuitous comparison between herself and the others that Newsweek would later include in an article, “Will One of These Five Be First Lady?” But any discerning reader could see that none of the others—Muriel
Humphrey, Jacqueline Kennedy, Pat Nixon, and Evelyn Symington—could begin to match Lady Bird’s record, not in Washington experience or supportive networks or business accomplishments. All five were current or former Senate wives (and Pat Nixon’s husband was completing a second term as vice president) but only Lady Bird was dubbed by Newsweek a “Human Dynamo.” As the 1960 Democratic nominating convention grew near, the “Human Dynamo” was being pulled in multiple directions, as she tried to maintain balance in her personal life and help keep up the momentum in Lyndon’s climb. Although there was much talk about how he coveted the nomination, he had refused to formally declare himself a candidate until a week before the convention opened. In the meantime, Senator John F. Kennedy had captured enough primaries to make him a front-runner.
Bird, who accompanied Lyndon to the convention in Los Angeles, still loved the man she had fallen hard for in 1934, the man who embodied her ambition and dreams. Although he could dumbfound her with some of his actions and words, she could not envision life without him. But the future looked uncertain. He seemed fully recovered from his 1955 heart attack, but who could tell how upcoming stresses might affect him? If he somehow managed to get his party’s nod, would he not face even longer hours and tougher decisions in an exhausting campaign? In the unlikely event he triumphed in November and won the Oval Office, she would be up against more daunting challenges than she could yet imagine. If, on the other hand, one of his competitors became president, Lyndon could count on keeping his Senate seat. But would he want it? Would he want her?
11
OUTSHINING HER HUSBAND
ON FRIDAY, November 4, 1960, only hours before Americans were scheduled to select their next president, polls showed John Kennedy and Richard Nixon locked in a dead heat, with Texas’s twenty-four electoral votes still in doubt. Lady Bird knew that Dallas, where Lyndon was scheduled to speak at noon at the Adolphus Hotel, was hostile territory: “Never . . . a strong hold for us. . . . Very conservative town.” But even she was shocked by what happened that day. As she made her way alongside her husband to the hotel entrance, a boisterous crowd surrounded them, shouting obscenities and blocking their way.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 20