Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  The four Johnsons so rarely sat down together at the same table that the prospect of their doing so became a joke. When the White House photographer announced that he wanted to take some pictures of a relaxed presidential family, enjoying a quiet dinner together, the staff howled that he would never get the chance. The first lady finally managed to corral her husband and daughters for a film showing them lunching together, but the result was decidedly awkward. Sitting in the family dining room, at a perfectly set table, with Lyndon at the head and Bird on his right, the four exchange pleasantries that sound like those of strangers on a train. Then the president announces he has to leave, plants a kiss on each of the three women, and walks out. Instead of showing a warm, happy family, glowingly content to share time and thoughts, the few minutes of footage document detachment and discomfort.

  That Bird was continuing to manage her children much like her television stations is illustrated in her telephone conversation with Lyndon on February 7, 1964. At 3:20 that afternoon, he phoned to tell her to prepare to leave for Texas around 6 p.m., a trip necessitated by the death of their dear friend Louise Kellam, wife of their business manager. The Kellams’ daughter, Carolyn, was scheduled to marry a few days later, making Louise’s death all the more tragic. Even though Bird was suffering a bout of influenza and diarrhea, she immediately started preparing to attend the funeral in Austin.

  In working out travel plans, Lyndon inquired: “Taking any children?” and she shot back a resounding “No.” Sounding a little disappointed, he signaled his willingness to accommodate them by saying tentatively, “They can go if they want to.” But her mind was made up and she wasn’t going to change it: “I just believe I won’t take them.” Although she called him “Darling” and “Love,” the tone of the call is that of minor executives divvying up office assignments, and of the two, she sounds the more authoritative. In the parenting part of their partnership, she was calling the shots.

  Later that afternoon, President Johnson phoned his wife again to invite her to the celebration of a big legislative victory. The Senate had just passed his tax bill, and Lady Bird figured in the triumph. He had put that measure high on his immediate to-do list and had urged Congress to honor the slain Kennedy’s memory by passing it, along with a new civil rights law. But it was going to take more than sentiment for a dead president to get either bill through. The political mastermind in Lyndon told him to seek the tax reduction first because it would boost his chances in the upcoming presidential election, while a bitter debate over civil rights could bog down into a stalemate that left him looking weak.

  In preparation for getting both measures (and others) through Congress, the Johnsons worked together to woo votes. Bird was not involved in the drafting of bills or in the intricate maneuvering that precedes passage—that was Lyndon’s forte—but she was very much involved in the socializing that could convert a “No” vote to a “Yes.” As a congressman’s wife she had attended countless receptions where she was one of many, and she knew how good it feels to be singled out, as someone special, in a small group. When she and the president started planning the first-of-the-year parties they would give for legislators and their spouses, they decided to avoid mass gatherings and give several small receptions instead so they could greet each guest warmly by name and ask about the family.

  As soon as the black mourning draperies on the White House came down, the tables in the State Dining Room went up, and the Johnsons issued invitations like a lobbyist dispenses booze—to effect a sale, promote an idea, make an ally. Two or three times a week, after a hard day in the Oval Office, Lyndon trooped back to the residence for handshaking and small talk. While he led a couple dozen elected representatives to the East Wing theater for more schmoozing or a short film, Bird escorted spouses to the second-floor family quarters. Many of the wives had lived in the capital for years but never been invited beyond the State Floor that every tourist sees. Bird knew they would be thrilled to see the private quarters, and they would remember who made that possible.

  One small cluster of Washingtonians qualified for special attention from the Johnsons—the Kennedy loyalists who had stayed to work for LBJ. Many of them had once committed their futures to JFK, planning to see him through two terms in the White House and then continue the association at a public policy institute or in an academic setting. After his assassination, they found themselves cut loose, afloat, listening to Lyndon’s pleas that they work for him. Part of his motive was simple continuity, but he also saw their presence as valuable validation of his succession.

  Kennedy staffers were not easy to win over. They doubted Lyndon’s commitment to their goals and made little attempt to hide their disdain for his style. His earthy vocabulary and outsize ego had continued to make him an easy butt for their jokes. Georgetown dinner parties relayed nasty gossip more rapidly than the parlor game “Telephone,” and some of it reached the Johnsons. Lyndon fumed that, no matter what he did for them, he would never get the Kennedy crowd to like him; obtaining a fair hearing was out of the question. Bird also detected condescension in the treatment she received. She thought Ted Sorensen wrote excellent speeches, but behind the words he was “making fun of Lyndon and me.”

  Bird lost no time deploying her usual arsenal of hospitality and genial gestures to keep Sorensen and other JFK loyalists on Lyndon’s team. On her fourth day in the White House, she invited Sorensen to dinner, along with Nancy and Pierre Salinger, the high-powered press secretary. Sorensen, who was busy writing Lyndon’s first State of the Union message, came to the ranch over Christmas, and Bird set aside one of the guesthouses for the exclusive use of him and his three young sons.

  After Sorensen quit in February, Bird kept plotting how to retain other Kennedy people. In a telephone call with Jack Valenti, a newcomer to Lyndon’s staff, she explained that she thought small dinners, mixing people from both camps, could help. It was important to keep the numbers “kind of even-steven,” so that JFK’s aides would not feel overpowered “with Johnson.” But she did not do well. The key players in the Kennedy White House she had singled out (Myer Feldman, Ralph A. Dungan, and Kenneth O’Donnell) were gone within the year, and Salinger dropped the bombshell about his departure within days of her talk with Valenti. This was one of those times when Bird’s hard work and careful planning did not produce the desired results.

  Mrs. Johnson did much better at keeping reporters on her side. Jacqueline Kennedy had antagonized journalists by treating them like nuisances. Although Jackie had pursued stories about politicians’ families when she worked as a reporter herself (and had even managed an impromptu interview with Vice President Nixon’s young daughters), she wanted reporters nowhere near her children when she became first lady. She routinely snubbed the “harpies” who ferreted out tidbits about her, and reminded her husband’s press secretary that it was his job to keep reporters at bay.

  Lady Bird Johnson never earned a cent as a working reporter, but she accepted the fact that public attention inevitably comes with holding office. She agreed with her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, that a first lady should “Be Available” and “Never Lie,” and the two kept reaching out to journalists in hopes of obtaining positive coverage.

  Immediately after the official mourning month ended, the first lady invited female reporters to the second floor of the White House. Several of those women were old enough to have attended Eleanor Roosevelt’s groundbreaking press conferences in the Treaty Room decades earlier, and Mrs. Johnson wanted to emphasize that her “informal meetings” were not going to produce the kind of controversy that surrounded those events. Mrs. Roosevelt had taken questions and sometimes scooped the president with her answers; Mrs. Johnson intended to duplicate the same openness but not upstage her husband. She was modernizing a very traditional role.

  After leading sixty-five women reporters through the private quarters on January 10, Bird sounded pleased with herself. “Because I have lived openly and unafraid and quite candidly with people all my l
ife,” she added to her diary, “I found this press party pleasant. I like to show people my way of life.” Jackie Kennedy thought it unseemly to guide visitors through one’s bathroom, where they could check out the brand of toothpaste and the quality of the towels. But Bird didn’t mind. Her one regret was having left out in plain sight the books she was reading, and she resolved to stow them away next time.

  Her openness and authenticity was not catching—at least to Lyndon. From his earliest days in Congress, he had been wary of reporters. In an attempt to win them over, he shamelessly flattered and courted them, but as soon as he picked up even a hint of criticism issuing from their typewriters, he cut them cold, relegated them to his version of exile, and refused to furnish them with any news. As president, he continued those same self-defeating tactics, but with more miserable repercussions.

  Dozens of reporters now depended for their jobs on how accurately they collected information about his decisions and actions and on how quickly they relayed that information to their editors. But he withheld news on appointments and travel arrangements, then taunted reporters about what they did not know. After he purposely misled them, resulting in inaccurate articles, journalists felt blindsided and tricked. He made them look incompetent or stupid, then gloated about outsmarting them.

  Lady Bird is a living example of the famous St. Francis prayer—about knowing the difference between what can be changed and what cannot. She took her husband’s childlike delight in secrecy as a given. It was part of his makeup for as long as she had known him, and being president of the United States was not going to change that. She also understood that his earthy humor and nearly perfect timing when telling a joke in private did not work with larger audiences or in front of TV cameras. To compensate, he turned excessively formal and reserved, trying to convey a dignity that was not part of his natural style. Rather than banter with the press and exchange witticisms, as JFK did so well, Lyndon became defensive when questioned on a sensitive subject.

  Sometimes President Johnson sounded outright snarky, as the text of his press conference on January 25, 1964, shows. After ponderously defending his handling of the current uprising in Panama, he chastised reporters for prying into his private life, writing about his aged, deaf cousin, Oriole Bailey. He suggested they ask him more questions, then stonewalled when they brought up a subject he wanted to avoid, his relationship with Bobby Baker. Lyndon’s answer: “I have said all I’m going to say on that.”

  No, Bird couldn’t turn him into a star performer, but she could coach him on content and delivery. And she did. Her critique of the January 25 press conference is not available but a later one, on March 7, shows how cannily she could take him apart without riling his anger. First, she inquired if he wanted to hear her opinions now or later, and he meekly replied, like a student ready for the paddle, “Yes, ma’am, I’m willing now.” She praised the parts where he gave a “good crisp answer” or showed a “pickup in drama and interest.” But she tore him apart on eye contact and speed: “You were a little breathless and there was too much looking down and I think it was a little too fast.” She noted a contradiction between what he was saying now and what he had said in the past. When she gave him a chance to defend himself, he made a brief attempt, protesting that he was pushed for time. But mostly he listened and acquiesced. How often she delivered such appraisals is not known, but the fact that this was among the telephone conversations that he recorded, without her knowledge, suggests that he did not mind that people recognize that she offered him advice and he took it.

  Presidents’ wives had always supervised the social side of state visits by foreign leaders—menus, entertainment, protocol—and employed a sizable staff to help them. But Lady Bird Johnson wanted to make a more substantive impression, one that enlarged and added to, rather than merely provided backdrop for, her husband’s interaction with a foreign leader. Although she lacked Mrs. Kennedy’s language skills and had to rely on translators, she prepared carefully for each visit, pinning up a map of the country, reading about its people and traditions, like a high school student cramming for a final exam.

  Italy’s president Antonio Segni was her first test, and she trooped down to Union Station to welcome him and his party. She found it easy to converse with the “elderly gnome, with spidery white hair and a gentle smile” and his “plump and gentle” wife. But Foreign Minister Giuseppe Saragat, who accompanied them, proved a bigger challenge: “I had to try a bit on that.”

  Entertainment at the state dinner for President Segni featured both Metropolitan Opera star Robert Merrill and a popular young group, Christy Minstrels. Bird loved the opera arias but decided she was just “too old” to appreciate the Christy Minstrels. “I love folk music,” she recorded for her diary, “but the Hootnanny sort of throws me off.” Paul Hume, music critic at The Washington Post, agreed with her and found Robert Merrill’s opera arias more to his liking. Bird regretted she didn’t have a chance to tell Merrill about how her mother had introduced her to “Scotti and Severini and Tetrazzini and Galli Curci and all of the Verdi things.” At the Italian embassy the next day, President Segni offered some advice that she carefully recorded in her diary, although culinary sophistication never rated a high place on her list of priorities: a good chef is more important to the success of an embassy than a good ambassador.

  After two months in the White House, the Johnsons had reason to feel good. Polls showed that four out of five Americans approved of the job the president was doing. The assassination was too fresh in people’s minds for them to feel unqualified enthusiasm for LBJ, but his humble-sounding appeals and calls for action touched many. When he insisted he needed everyone’s help, that this was a difficult time for the nation, he won over many who had formerly shown little affection for him.

  Bird had just returned to Washington from a short trip to New York on February 26 to have more of her old clothes altered when she received the “big news” that the tax bill had “completely, irrevocably, finally” passed both houses of Congress and was ready for the president’s signature. With only a quick change of outfit and a lipstick fix, she made it down to the East Room and found a seat in the back row before TV cameras started rolling. At 6:30 Lyndon announced to the nation what she called, “Victory Number One . . . the largest [reduction in income taxes] in the history of the United States.” In praising senators who helped, he saved his “highest accolade” for Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, who had publicly opposed the tax bill but had not blocked it in the Senate Finance Committee, which he could have done, Lady Bird explained in her diary, for “God knows how long.” As she listened to Lyndon purr proudly about his success, she admitted she felt good about how things were going. “I must say it’s pleasant.”

  After signing the tax bill, the president decided to show his regard for JFK by going to Jackie Kennedy’s residence in Georgetown and giving her the pens used in the ceremony. One or two pens would not suffice to convey his gratitude—he took four: one for Jackie, one for each of her children, and one for the future JFK presidential library. Lyndon had previously reached out to the young widow, phoning her several times in December to say he wished he could make her happier. He called her “Honey” and “Darling” and repeatedly invited her back to the White House, threatening to spank her if she didn’t come see him. Although Jackie accepted the president’s calls and wrote to thank him and his family for their many kind gestures (including the fire engine they delivered for John Jr.’s Christmas), she refused to set foot in the executive mansion. The Johnsons had to go to her.

  After the quick pen passing at Jackie’s house, Lyndon and Lady Bird proceeded to the home of Jack Valenti, the advertising executive from Houston who had married Mary Margaret Wiley, Lyndon’s secretary, and moved to Washington to join Lyndon’s staff. At the Valenti home, the Johnsons found a more relaxed setting than at the Kennedy house. Mary Margaret grilled impromptu steaks; Lyndon fussed over three-months-old Courtenay Lynda, and Bird kept an eye on reporter Mar
ianne Means, who joined the party. Famous as much for her looks and fetching ways as for her writing, Means was, Bird noted, “somebody that Lyndon and all men, in fact, have their eye on. . . . So I guess I’ll have to look her over harder!” Means was known as “soft and cheerful and pretty,” and rather than object to what appeared flirtatious behavior between her husband and the reporter, Bird reminded herself that Means’s articles “about Lyndon have all been very favorable.”

  When Bird returned to the White House later that evening she could reread on the bedroom mantel the haunting reminder that her predecessor had put there: “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline” during the time he was “president of the United States.” It was only ninety-three days since the horrific tragedy in Dallas, but Bird had already begun to define a new kind of first lady, very different from Jackie or, for that matter, most of the women who preceded her in the White House. Rather than act the fashion icon or very private helpmate, Bird intended to show how a spouse can be a full collaborator. She would continue to privately critique Lyndon’s speeches and press conferences, publicly help him court legislators and the press, and act as his sounding board. On her own, she would travel to the nation’s troubled spots to highlight problems and explore solutions. It was a tall order for a presidential partner, but the Texan in her understood that in some quarters a workhorse counted for more than a show horse.