With financial reserves dwarfing those of her immediate predecessors, Bird resolved to make more of a mark. Vice presidents did not yet have the perk of government housing, and their wives were expected to do what they could to entertain, either in their very modest homes or in local restaurants. An event like that rarely made much of a splash on the society pages, and Bird was looking for a house suitable for the family of a man who was going to make more of his job than a “bucket of warm spit.” She found it at 4040 52nd Street, in Northwest Washington, a house that had previously belonged to the legendary hostess (“with the mostest”) Perle Mesta. With a dining room large enough to seat thirty and landscaped grounds to accommodate al fresco receptions for more than one hundred, it seemed perfect. Lyndon objected that the property’s French name, “Les Ormes,” would cost him votes, but that was easily remedied by switching to the English equivalent, “The Elms.” The buying price ($200,000 in 1960, equivalent to about $1.5 million in 2014 dollars) came out of the Johnson pockets, but it seemed an investment worth making.
In preparation for the move, Bird sold off some of her less stylish furnishings and purchased Mesta’s French dining room chairs. To fit the casual entertaining style that she and her family preferred, she added a $15,000 swimming pool. But remodeling took time, and after the house on 30th Place sold, the Johnsons lived temporarily in a suite at the Shoreham Park Hotel. Not until late August did The Elms become fully habitable. While other wives might have been intimidated by the prospect of tampering with anything the illustrious Mesta had touched, Bird was not. She added some Lone Star touches throughout the house to remind her “where I came from.”
Mrs. Johnson now got the chance to put her speech training with Mrs. Provensen to use. With two small children (Caroline, born 1957, and John Jr., born 1960) Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to keep her public appearances to a minimum, especially the routine, humdrum ones, like greeting obscure dignitaries and accepting awards and citations. So she asked Lady Bird to substitute for her. Sometimes the appeal came at the very last minute, causing Johnson aides to suspect that the first lady’s staff had deliberately dallied in order to put Mrs. Johnson on the spot, but she gamely accepted every summons and refused to blame Jackie for the timing. Since Jackie also liked to escape on long vacations of her own, to Europe or India, Bird became her number one pinch hitter.
It wasn’t just in Washington that Mrs. Johnson wanted to attract favorable attention for her VP husband. She entertained countless guests at the ranch, including foreign leaders, whose different religions and ethnic preferences could prove challenging to any hostess. When the chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, a strict Catholic, arrived in heavily Protestant Texas on an April Sunday in 1961, he found a special Mass ready for him at nearby Stonewall’s tiny St. Francis Xavier church. Four hundred guests gathered at the ranch afterward to dine with the chancellor and his daughter in tents, carpeted with Oriental rugs to resemble a “rich Turk’s harem.” Catering to those who did not eat pork was especially hard—Texans like barbecues and barbecues mean pork. When Pakistani field marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan and his Muslim entourage visited the ranch, Lady Bird had to make sure that waiters received strict instructions to code the trays and pass only the chicken and beef to the Pakistanis. Any mix-up could have had serious consequences because these events received heavy press coverage, not just in the United States but abroad.
Regardless of the number and status of those who landed on the newly built airstrip behind the ranch house, journalists commented on how remarkably unflustered Lady Bird remained. In June 1962, when the Women’s National Press Club in Washington produced a skit demonstrating the hectic pace at the Johnson ranch, it was titled “Life in a Goldfish Bowl.” A few nights later, Lady Bird demonstrated the truth in the skit (and how that truth applied equally to both her homes) by welcoming twenty-six members of Congress, the press, and the cabinet to The Elms. She knew enough about each guest to tailor her comments and queries to fit the individual. Her mentor, Terrell Maverick, who had advised her back in 1937 to get involved in her husband’s job, had no idea how that counsel would be taken to heart.
Now that Mrs. Johnson was in demand as a speaker, she spent hours deploying what she had learned. Starting with an outline, she would revise through multiple drafts and then practice from notes until she had the smooth transitions and fluid, conversational delivery she wanted. One of Lyndon’s aides judged the result “awfully good. You could always depend upon Lady Bird to say exactly the right thing.” Now that she found herself frequently facing cameras, she paid more attention to her wardrobe and heeded Lyndon’s advice to visit the hair salon often. A friend suggested she could save time by having the hair stylist come to her home, but that struck her as excessively extravagant, and she kept trooping to Georgetown for a shampoo and a set. Very seldom did she allow herself time off for fun, and an aide’s report that she once spent an hour trying to learn how to dance the new craze, the twist, stands out as a rarity.
As a Senate wife, she had been one of dozens; now she had a national podium, not nearly as high-powered as Jackie’s but one she was determined to use. Behind the gracious hostess and polished public speaker was a very disciplined woman who kept herself to a tight, tough schedule. Booth Mooney, one of Lyndon’s aides at the time, observed: “If ever a woman transformed herself—deliberately, knowingly, painstakingly—it was she. A modest, introspective girl gradually became a figure of steel cloaked in velvet. Both metal and fabric were genuine.”
Lyndon was another story. The vice presidential years were the worst of his life, a fact that obviously affected his marriage. One associate described him as: “thoroughly, visibly and persistently miserable.” While his wife was obviously relishing her new celebrity status, he sank into a long torpor, despondent at his loss of power and prickly about his subservient status. He initially tried to retain a measure of his Senate leadership, but his colleagues balked, reminding him that the Constitution provided for a division of powers between the executive and legislative branches. It was their way of telling him that he should stay where he now belonged.
Unfortunately for Lyndon, a VP has very few official duties, and if the president does not pull him into the power circle, he can feel superfluous, like an insignificant bystander. The once powerful Senate leader now looked more like Bert Parks at a Miss America contest. This was a job that had him posing with Miss Muffin at the National Retail Bakers Association, then with the Cherry Blossom Queen and the Azalea Queen. At least the Azalea event put him in the same picture frame as his daughter Lynda, who wore the Azalea crown that year.
While Lyndon vegetated, Lady Bird started hiring some very competent staff to help her. She knew that busy wives of top leaders, like Eleanor Roosevelt, had typically engaged close friends or relatives to assist in handling mail and managing social events, and she understood the value of trustworthy staff. But she wanted more—expertise and experience, the same traits she looked for when hiring at her radio station. She had brought her longtime friend, newspaperwoman Liz Carpenter, onto the family team during the 1960 campaign, when she invited her to be part of “the great adventure of our lives.” At first Carpenter demurred. She hated flying and knew working for a vice presidential candidate would include a lot of time in the air. It was Carpenter’s son, Scott, who convinced her to accept, saying, “You’ll be flying with Lady Bird, and birds never crash.” All through the campaign and after the victorious election, Carpenter drew her salary from Lyndon’s payroll, but she took her assignment as aiding the boss’s wife as much as the boss, in planning public appearances, shaping speeches, and encouraging favorable press.
The other key assistant to Lady Bird came on board a little more gradually. Mrs. Johnson had known young Bess Clements since the time her father served with Lyndon in the U.S. Senate. After Bess eloped with Tyler Abell, stepson of the influential columnist Drew Pearson, it was the Johnsons who hosted the couple’s wedding reception. By 1960, Bess Abell found herself
bored with domestic duties and, tired of talking to her cats, she volunteered to assist Mrs. Johnson with her mail and entertaining. Besides her sunny personality, Bess brought a good deal of Washington savvy to the job. As the daughter of a senator and daughter-in-law of a syndicated columnist, she had access to most of official Washington and she knew how the capital operated. She and Carpenter would become Mrs. Johnson’s top staff in the White House, and they would remain until she left Washington in 1969.
The one big assignment President Kennedy gave his VP—foreign travel—was undertaken with mixed appreciation in the Johnson household. Lyndon objected that these missions were manufactured busywork, created to keep him out of the power loop, or worse, designed to make him look bad. But Bird loved seeing exotic new places. Up to that time, she had rarely moved beyond U.S. borders, and when given the chance to accompany the vice president on an Africa-Europe tour, beginning April 1, 1961, she eagerly accepted. On landing in Senegal, she marveled it was like being “dumped right down in the middle of what seemed like pages of the National Geographic.”
Lyndon could not have been more obvious about his wish to be somewhere else. He tangled with local officials, and when an ambassador strongly advised against visiting a local village, he went anyway. To show his populist side and soak up the adulation of crowds who had never before gotten close to a major world leader, he moved through throngs with little Secret Service protection. He shook hands with everyone who reached out, including lepers with mangled hands, their fingers missing because of the disease.
Bird took on her usual role—damage controller—and tried to camouflage or limit Lyndon’s misbehavior. After the vice president’s party reached Paris and checked into the George V hotel, Lyndon went shopping with Bird and secretary Mary Margaret Wiley. But that evening, at a late dinner at Maxim’s, he was in no mood to play the dignified diplomat. He drank too much and engaged in sexy bantering and suggestive physical exchanges that exceeded what even hedonistic Parisians were likely to condone. According to aide Horace Busby, Mrs. Johnson, who was seated at the far end of the table, kept silent watch on her husband—until a diplomat’s wife, with Lyndon’s full cooperation, climbed on his lap. Then Bird moved quickly, ordering Busby to call a car and escort her to it, leaving her husband little choice but to follow her out.
On another official trip a few weeks later, taking him through the Far East and then to Greece, the VP acted like a spoiled potentate, traveling with a huge entourage that included President Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law, Jean and Stephen Smith, and a posse of reporters that required a separate plane. He insisted on bringing cases of his favorite scotch, his own oversized bed, and his super shower heads, powerful enough to produce water blasts even in places where water was scarce. He loudly criticized an American diplomat in front of others, and implied in his speeches to impoverished locals that they could raise their living standards by following the example of Texans.
While he treated each of these foreign trips as a hardship, Bird acted like she had won the lottery. That she, a woman from Karnack, Texas, was actually exploring places along the South China Sea dazzled her. This was more than she had dared dream of when writing those 1934 letters to Lyndon about how much she wanted to see the world. On a swim in the Gulf of Thailand (which she knew as the Gulf of Siam) she took secretary Ashton Gonella, a Louisiana native, with her, and as the two women paddled alongside their Secret Service agents, Bird jubilantly reminded Ashton, “We’ve come a long way.”
Lady Bird’s natural curiosity kept pushing her to explore, even when her exhausted staff pled time out to recuperate. Soon after arriving in Beirut in August 1962, she phoned Bess Abell to announce that she wanted a car and guide to take her to Baalbek, fifty miles north of Beirut, to see an archaeological site dating back to the Romans. Abell tried to deter her, saying that after a very long flight aboard Air Force Two, she needed some sleep. But Abell got nowhere. Mrs. Johnson was firm: “We may never pass this way again, and I really want to see Baalbek.” Abell reluctantly made the arrangements and then went along. As they wound their way up the mountain roads, she watched her employer jot down notes in her omnipresent notebook, using Gregg shorthand to describe the people, the open-air markets, and the groves of olive trees they saw along the route.
It must have rankled Lyndon to see his wife thrive in her side of the vice presidency while he floundered in his. He had always pushed her to do more, gibing her about how her advanced education had prepared her to do just about anything. But then, when she produced, as in his congressional office or some other assignment, he seemed reluctant to concede much credit. Her excelling should have reflected well on him, but he treated it as his failing, as if the two of them were in some sort of zero sum game, where any gain on one side had to be reflected in an equivalent loss on the other.
Since Lyndon’s only official assignment as VP was to chair infrequent meetings of the National Aeronautics and Space Council and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he had a lot of time on his hands. But he wasn’t using it for physical fitness. Katie Louchheim, who had known him a long time, described him as “waggish” and “fat.” Lyndon’s aide Harry McPherson reported after a swim at The Elms that the vice president “looked absolutely gross. His belly was enormous and his face looked bad, flushed, maybe he had been drinking a good deal. . . . . His life was not causing him to come together physically, morally, intellectually, in any way.”
Obviously unhappy, cut off from what he did best—managing a legislature and converting visions into concrete laws that improved people’s lives—he took out his frustrations on those closest to him. That left Bird to clean up his messes and escape whenever she could. When on one trip to Asia, Lyndon ordered aide Horace Busby out of his plane immediately, and Busby objected “But we’re over the ocean,” the VP shouted back, “I don’t give a fucking damn.” It took Bird’s calm intervention to restore peace between the two. In Istanbul, when her husband was especially downcast and nasty, Bird took Liz Carpenter for a sail on the Bosporus and encouraged George Reedy to fulfill a lifelong dream by exploring the Hagia Sophia on his own.
The trip that included Turkey was a lemon from the start. Setting out on the afternoon of August 22, 1962, the vice president and his party made a brief stop in the Azores, where it was past midnight local time. Even at that late hour, a welcoming party of local dignitaries had gathered to fete the American officials, but, according to George Reedy, Lyndon was too drunk to get off the plane. A smiling, perfectly coiffed Bird greeted the crowd in his stead. Subsequent stops saw the vice president “deeply fatigued,” in spite of the fact that large crowds lined the roads to cheer him on.
Back home at The Elms, Lady Bird had no better luck dealing with Lyndon’s foul moods. She encouraged him to exercise, but he was an erratic complier, enthusiastic for two consecutive days about using the Senate gym, then refusing to go near it for weeks. He preferred nightly rubdowns from his always-on-call masseur. He indulged in junk food, then tried to undo the damage by limiting himself to Metrecal (a popular diet drink). At dinner parties, alcohol flowed freely and he drank enough to gain back the pounds he had taken off with the Metrecal lunches.
Some of the energy Lyndon could no longer expend as Senate leader now went to Bird’s broadcasting business. The fledgling little radio station that she bought with her own money in 1943 had grown under her careful watch to a media empire comprising radio and television stations, and Lyndon wanted a bigger role in running them. Although Bird still appeared at meetings of KTBC employees, Lyndon met more often with them solo, and it was he who conferred with outsiders, including executives of a large media conglomerate, Ling-Temco-Vought, about mergers and affiliations in February 1963. After the Johnsons began spending more time at the ranch following his heart attack, they needed an Austin residence less and gradually started relying on an apartment they kept at the broadcasting headquarters for entertaining and overnight stays. So Bird may have been more on the premises an
d involved in business decisions than the written record indicates. But Lyndon’s official diary shows a definite spike in his involvement in the business during his VP years.
By the summer of 1963, Bird was watching her husband’s frustrations grow as he dealt with old medical problems and confronted new political challenges. For one ailment or another, he was consulting White House doctors and dentists more than once a week. Even more troubling were headlines alleging that Bobby Baker, the Senate secretary, had acted improperly in the Johnsons’ behalf, soliciting a stereo set for them as a kickback on a life insurance policy they had bought. Any scandal involving Baker, dubbed “Little Lyndon” because of his close relationship with LBJ, was bound to besmirch his mentor, and this was the very worst time to weather stories about nefarious dealings. Rumors were already circulating that JFK felt confident he could drop Lyndon from the ticket in 1964, and reports of an unsavory association with Baker would provide reason for following through. The entire vice presidency had been trying for LBJ, but mid-1963 marked the nadir. With more than a year to go, Bird had reason to wonder how it would end.
In November, she spent the first weeks preparing the ranch for a visit from the Kennedys. Jack had been there, but this was a first for Jackie. Lady Bird installed the special bed that JFK required for his bad back, and she laid in a supply of Jackie’s favorite brand of cigarettes and plenty of good champagne. Just before noon on Thursday, November 21, she left the ranch with Lyndon to go to San Antonio and welcome the Kennedys to Texas. By Friday, they would all be in Dallas.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 22