Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  Mrs. Johnson recognized some of the women, whom she knew as well-to-do, courteous Republicans. Now they looked more like a street mob, jostling her and shouting in her face. Unaccustomed to physical assault, she kept nodding and trying to smile, as Lyndon wrapped his arms around her and started a slow, trancelike walk that made her feel like “Marie Antoinette in the tumbrel.” The Johnsons could have covered the distance to the ballroom, where an audience awaited them, in a few minutes, but they inched along, multiplying the time of the walk by four.

  The protesters turned rowdier and more menacing when photographers started snapping their pictures and TV cameras shot footage for the evening news. One sign labeled the senator “Judas,” and shouters demeaned his wife as the “Yellow Thorn of Texas.” Police offered the Johnsons protection, but Lyndon declined, and he later explained why: “If the time had come when I couldn’t walk unaided through the lobby of a Dallas hotel with my lady, I wanted to know it.”

  Those few minutes provided a turning point for Bird and for the campaign. After she was safely in the Adolphus ballroom and found a window from which to observe the fracas outside, she observed sadly to herself, “Things will never be the same.” Many of her fellow Americans agreed. After seeing the confrontation played out in vivid images in newspapers and on TV screens, they registered their dismay that Texas Republicans had behaved so badly.

  Georgia senator Richard Russell, Lyndon’s onetime mentor but more recently his adversary because of differences on civil rights, had retained his fondness for Bird. That she should suffer such abuse outraged him, and he volunteered to campaign for the Democratic ticket he had formerly scorned. The courtly bachelor vowed to concentrate on parts of the nation where his accent still carried some weight. Other Southerners mirrored his chagrin at how their reputation for chivalry had been besmirched, and historians have concluded the result was an upswing in favor of the Democrats. Bird’s calm response to an explosive situation had helped create a sympathy factor for the Johnsons, siphoning votes away from the Republican ticket and aiding JFK’s bid for the presidency.

  Ironically, by helping Kennedy win, the Johnsons would be saddling Lyndon with a job that neither he nor Bird wanted him to have—the vice presidency. Texan John Nance Garner, who served unhappily as FDR’s VP from 1933 to 1941, is remembered mostly for declaring it “not worth a bucket of warm spit” (although he used a less polite word than “spit”). Presidential candidates had a record of using that slot on the ticket to get rid of loudmouths or to send them into obscurity, and neither of the Johnsons wanted such an indignity for Lyndon.

  Lady Bird initially urged her husband to turn down JFK’s invitation to join the ticket when he phoned the Johnsons’ convention suite the day after his own nomination. Like most of her husband’s supporters, she found humiliating the prospect that Lyndon would take the subordinate position to a man younger and less able than himself. With twenty-three years of experience in Congress, nine of them as a Senate leader, Lyndon saw himself as infinitely better suited for the Oval Office than “sonny boy,” as he referred to JFK, who could claim less than half that time, none of it in a leadership position. It wasn’t that the Johnsons disliked the young Kennedy—they just thought him green, impatient to wait his turn, and backed by a wealthy, overly pushy father.

  But the Democratic nominee was facing a tough battle that year, and Lyndon’s team realized a Texan running mate could give JFK an enormous boost. A Roman Catholic had never claimed the White House, and if Kennedy was going to be the first, he had to increase his appeal among voters who were suspicious of—even fiercely opposed to—a pope-friendly family living in the White House. Lyndon’s Texas roots and accent could help offset the Eastern/Catholic taint to the top of the ticket, and if he declined to run, and the ticket lost, who would collect the blame?

  Besides that consideration, the Johnsons had other incentives for deciding to join Senator Kennedy on the Democratic ticket. Even with his big negatives of youth and inexperience, he was a far more palatable occupant of the Oval Office than the likely Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. For Bird personally, the motive was partly selfish. She judged the VP job less stressful than managing an unruly Senate, and since his heart attack she had given a lot of thought to keeping him healthy. She loved him, and that scare in 1955 had clarified how quickly she could lose him.

  After several hectic hours of discussion with Bird and Democratic colleagues, Lyndon agreed to join the Democratic ticket, and on July 29 he and Bird went to the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod to work out the details of the upcoming campaign. The Johnsons and the Kennedys were hardly strangers. The men had worked together in the Senate, and Lady Bird had included Jackie in one of the lunches she gave for Senate wives at 30th Place. But the Cape Cod get-together had little of the camaraderie of old-time friends. It was more like a forced meeting of wary business associates, who had resolved to be on best behavior and show only the utmost respect for each other. The Kennedys, who had no guest suite, cleared all clothing and family photos out of their own bedroom, and gave it to the Johnsons.

  The stay lasted less than twenty-four hours, but it produced enough fallout to fill a book. Johnson aides, who had to be billeted at a local hotel, picked up what they deemed clear evidence for what would become a tangled, long story about how little regard the Kennedy camp had for the Johnsons. Although JFK treated his running mate with dignity and respect, his aides heard a different assessment when he warned them that Lyndon was a “very insecure, sensitive man with a huge ego” and they were to “literally kiss his ass from one end of Washington to the other.”

  Some of the snide comments attributed to Kennedy loyalists may have been exaggerated—or even invented—for humorous effect, but that did not keep them from turning up in conversations at Georgetown dinner parties and in the pages of tabloids. Among the nastiest (and oft repeated) was the one that dubbed the Johnsons “Uncle Cornpone” and his “little Pork Chop,” which seemed especially cruel to five-foot-four Bird, who struggled to keep her weight down and knew how ruthlessly Easterners ridiculed her Southern accent.

  If Bird registered any signs of disrespect on that visit, she never showed it. She could not have been more cordial. When Jackie admitted she was confused about what she could do to help in this campaign when she was “pregnant and helpless,” the older, more experienced Mrs. Johnson immediately offered advice that Jackie took: “Why don’t you call reporters in and show them the lovely sketches you have done of sailboats. . . . You can do that.” It was unprecedented counsel: the spouse of a vice presidential nominee telling the wife of the top of the ticket how to behave. In stepping in to help the floundering Jackie, Bird was offering a preview of what lay ahead.

  In the next three years, as LBJ struggled in JFK’s shadow, Lady Bird emerged as a strong and active political spouse, complementing a ticket and then an administration as none of her predecessors had ever done. In the very last interview of her life, when asked what years she enjoyed the most, she picked the VP years, citing the chance to travel and meet important people. But, she admitted, those were very bleak years for Lyndon.

  On the Cape Cod visit, Mrs. Kennedy got a chance to observe how Lady Bird worked. While the husbands conferred in one corner of the house, the wives chatted nearby, and Bird kept her little spiral notebook open at all times. Whenever she heard a name or a number from the men’s side, she jotted it down without missing a beat of her own conversation with Jackie and her sister, Lee Radziwill. Although Jackie later disdained Bird’s attentiveness to Lyndon as resembling that of a servile “hunting dog,” she recognized the cool competence that accompanied it. Lady Bird looked “so calm,” Jackie marveled. “I was very impressed.”

  That judgment would be underlined time and again in the weeks following the Cape Cod meeting. This was Lady Bird’s tenth campaign as Lyndon’s partner and she had ratcheted up her visibility in each one. This time, as Jackie’s pregnancy sidelined her, Bird carried the load for both of them. Consideri
ng the fact that she still harbored misgivings about JFK’s qualifications, it is remarkable that she expended so much energy on getting him elected. If the comments from the Kennedy camp about her were as unkind as later reported (on her accent, her subservience, her appearance) why didn’t she withdraw to the ranch and sit this election out? After all, spouses of vice presidential candidates were not yet expected to exert much effort in campaigns.

  But Lady Bird worked as if her very life depended on winning. Even while her father lay near death in Karnack, she stayed at Lyndon’s side on a whistle-stop train trip through the South. His leadership in passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act had made him a pariah in those parts, and now she wanted to help mitigate that anger and keep disaffected voters in the Democratic fold. While Lyndon launched a practical appeal, saying that a vote for Kennedy was a vote for a stronger, more prosperous South, Lady Bird knew that it was the personal connection that moved people. She talked about her memories of Sunday picnics and watermelon evenings with her Alabama cousins, and how she felt most at home in that part of the nation. To Southerners, Lyndon’s accent marked him as a Westerner, but Bird was one of them.

  Then Mrs. Johnson did something far more daring—she went out campaigning without Lyndon, either on her own or with one of the Kennedy women. Jack’s mother, Rose, had already enlisted to help her son win primaries, and she soon found herself in “great demand as a speaker.” She had started giving talks about her travels while still in her forties, and now, at seventy, had become a confident speaker. She boasted that she could “carry a women’s audience myself,” while her daughters were “apt to be with [Jack].”

  In the general election, when Rose Kennedy teamed up with Lady Bird to woo voters in fourteen states, the two women had some differences on how to proceed. Efficiency-minded Rose disliked losing precious time by engaging in small talk with the masses, and she liked to deliver her remarks as soon as she arrived, shake a few hands, and move on. Let them drink their coffee on their own time, she reasoned. Bird had been doing these events for a long time, and she had her rules. Every single person there, even if the total ran into hundreds, was to be greeted individually, hand shaken, and a few words, including names, exchanged. Even the content of two women’s speeches differed: Rose kept replaying the same stories about how she had raised an achieving, handsome brood; Lady Bird tailored each speech to the audience, with references to some local hero or historic site. Rather than talk about her children, she extolled Lyndon’s ability to produce results.

  Although Rose mildly praised Bird for working hard and handling volunteer campaign workers well, she never doubted for a minute that she was the more effective speaker. But the fact is the two women did not communicate in the same language. Alongside the septuagenarian beauty, Lady Bird resorted to a Texas colloquialism to describe where she found herself—in “tall cotton.” Southerners used the phrase to describe feeling good about themselves, as if in the midst of an excellent crop ready to yield big profits. But haughty Rose Kennedy mistakenly interpreted it as meaning “not quite up to me.”

  Other Kennedy females, including Rose’s daughter Eunice Shriver and daughter-in-law Ethel Kennedy (Robert’s wife), agreed to appear with Lady Bird in areas where opposition to a Catholic candidate remained high. With the help of Liz Carpenter, Bird planned large receptions and teas across the country, with special emphasis on her home state, where Carpenter vowed to show Texans that Roman Catholics possessed no “horns or tails.” Not yet reconciled to the sacrifices of gritty, on-the-road campaigning, Ethel Kennedy and Eunice Shriver objected to sharing hotel quarters, and Carpenter had to provide two suites of equal size and luxury so that neither woman felt slighted. Like Rose Kennedy, Ethel and Eunice attracted large crowds, with their designer clothes and movie star magnetism, but they drew the line at some parts of vote courting. When Liz Carpenter provided them with perky little campaign hats, they refused to wear them and “practically sat on them.”

  Even in a campaign as tense as this one, Bird had to peel off a couple times to check on her father in East Texas. He had already undergone amputation of one leg, and the once powerfully built “Mr. Boss” had shrunk to a feeble invalid. On October 22, he died. Lyndon’s daily diary is blank for October 23, but the next day, a Monday, he was back on the campaign trail, headed to Los Angeles. Bird, whose relationship with her stepmother, Ruth, had remained sour after the episode with the irrevocable trust, soon learned that her father’s will left the bulk of his estate to his wife and only a pittance to Bird. The two children of her deceased brother, Tommy, inherited portions of T.J’s Texas land, as did her brother Tony and some of her cousins.

  It was a painful slap from the grave, to be virtually dismissed from her adored father’s affections, and it underscored how a woman who had virtually no enemies had made a powerful one this time—her stepmother. But Bird could not take off from electioneering to pursue her case against the will. That would come later and take a long time. Eight years elapsed before the executor dealt with all the challenges to the document, including those of Mrs. Johnson, who hated to see her father’s estate “eaten up and eroded” in a way that reminded her of one of those dark plots in the plays of Tennessee Williams or the books of William Faulkner. In the final distribution of T.J.’s estate, she received only an insignificant building in Mauldin, Missouri, that yielded a mere $1,500 a year in rent.

  In any tight race, Lyndon’s mercurial moods became more pronounced, and the 1960 contest looked very close. When he didn’t have Bird with him, he became morose and often spent the better part of the day in bed. In the log his secretaries kept, they sometimes cited a worn-out voice as reason for his inactivity, but more often they gave no reason at all. At the ranch, he stayed in bed until nearly noon, then went for a swim and took a nap before dinner. In Washington, with less than three weeks to go, he loafed two whole days away.

  Of course he wanted to win, and he campaigned vigorously on some days. But a victory this time was going to be tinged with regret—the VP desk had not been a goal of his. That ambivalence might explain why he vented his frustrations so freely on subordinates. He complained about whatever disappointed him: puny crowds, an inadequate supply of fresh shirts, malfunctioning microphones. He quarreled with his schedulers—for giving him too much free time or too little. Aide Jim Rowe got so tired of his tirades he accused Lyndon of acting like a “Mogul emperor” and wondered to himself why someone on the staff didn’t kill him.

  Bird responded to Lyndon’s verbal attacks as she had done in the past—she pulled down her protective veil and acted like she didn’t hear them. When the commercial flight she was on arrived late, he “bawled her out” in front of others, using terms too foul for his aide George Reedy to repeat: “The whole thing was so revolting that it’s the sort of thing you wanted to forget.”

  Lady Bird encouraged staff to treat Lyndon’s outbursts the same way she did. After he lambasted aides, calling them “a bunch of goddamn, son-of-a-bitching bastards” who couldn’t do anything right, she would come in afterward to assure them that he hadn’t meant a word of it. Reedy, whom Lyndon ridiculed unmercifully for his corpulent behind and hammertoed walk, admitted that some of the staff became so upset with Lyndon’s outrageous behavior they quit. But Reedy stayed, along with most of the others, because they did not want to desert their co-workers in the middle of a tight campaign and disappoint Bird. On his best days Lyndon excited aides with his vision and energy, and he enticed them to their highest productivity by setting an example. But on the down days, he repulsed, rather than attracted, and that was when he needed Bird, to talk him out of his funk and cauterize the hurt he caused.

  • • •

  The 1960 presidential election was one of the closest in American history, and victory went to Kennedy by a tiny margin, less than one tenth of 1 percent in the popular vote. The electoral college produced a clearer winner, with the Democrats claiming 303 votes to Nixon’s 219 (Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia got 15). A big
chunk of the 303 votes came from the South, where Bird had campaigned alone or with Lyndon. Her home state, which had seemed very iffy, provided its 24, and the Carolinas another 22. If the combined (24 plus 22) 46 electoral votes had gone to the Republicans, Richard Nixon would have been taking the inaugural oath on January 20 instead of JFK. Mrs. Johnson’s energetic campaigning did not go unnoticed. Robert Kennedy observed: “Lady Bird carried Texas.” Although she cannot be credited directly for attracting a precise number of votes to the Democratic ticket, she certainly helped—in ways that no vice presidential candidate’s spouse had ever done before.

  As Bird began preparing to take up the job often dubbed “second lady,” she had nearly three decades of watching how her five predecessors had done, and she did not want to duplicate their mistakes. The very private Bess Truman had only a few months in the role, but during that time she had lived in a small apartment, rarely entertained, and was such a nonentity in the capital that she could do her own shopping without being recognized. Both Mrs. Truman’s predecessor, Ilo Wallace, and her successor, Jane Barkley, had longer tenures but limited themselves to social roles, hostessing dinners and teas. VP Garner’s wife, Mariette “Ettie” Rheiner Garner, left a slightly larger mark because, as her husband’s secretary, she was acquainted with many of his colleagues and knew who his enemies were. But Bird was used to having a secretary, not being one. Pat Nixon had received very favorable publicity for her bravery in South America, where she faced demonstrators who attacked the car she and her husband were riding in. But in Washington, she lived the low-profile life of an ordinary housewife. With only part-time domestic help and a tiny family budget, she had to do most of her housework herself, and she told reporters she still pressed her husband’s pants.