That lofty elation could not last—Bird knew—not with the next presidential election coming up fast. Immediately after signing the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon had become depressed. He had confided to aide Bill Moyers his fear that, with their endorsement of that measure, the Democrats had effectively relinquished the South to the Republican Party for the next fifty years. November would be the first test of his prediction.
With all her other worries, Bird had to keep an eye on her husband’s health. It was the top item on her checklist in deciding whether she even wanted him to run. She had already sounded out the physicians whose opinion she valued most, the same two who had been treating him since his heart attack: Dr. Hurst and Dr. Cain. Before their examination of Lyndon in Washington on May 15, she scheduled her own conference with them at Huntland, where Lyndon had his heart attack and where she often went for some private time of her own.
By the time the doctors arrived at the Virginia estate, she had a nine-page, handwritten letter waiting for them, listing what she saw as the pros and cons of going for another term. She and Lyndon had been talking this over for a while, from every vantage point, and the letter summarized her thinking on the subject. The reasons for quitting were appealing: he would have more free time to do what he wanted, and he might possibly live longer. But the prospects for what might happen if he dropped out were frightening: questions might arise about “skeletons in the closet”; and, most pertinent to her, he risked falling into periods of “depression and frustration” as he watched someone else run the country.
The bottom line was that she wanted him to run. Although she included points he ought to include in announcing his withdrawal, she hoped he wouldn’t use them. However, she made very clear that this should be his last hurrah. “February or March 1968,” she wrote, would be the time to announce he was retiring. That was nearly four years away, and she didn’t even know if “the Lord [will let] him live that long.” If, as she fervently hoped, Lyndon did survive a full term, he would be sixty years old. By then, “the juices of life will be sufficiently still in him” and he would agree to leave politics behind. Then the two of them could “return to the ranch” and “live the rest of our days quietly.”
When Lady Bird Johnson published her White House Diary after leaving Washington, she paraphrased only tidbits from that letter, but Lyndon, in his own The Vantage Point, published the full version. He wrote that he had talked over the pros and cons of a run with Lady Bird “of course,” and that she had been gung ho. One line of her letter to him, omitted from her book, gave a key reason. Out of office he would feel frustrated and useless, drink too much, and look for a scapegoat. She did not want to be “it.”
When physicians Hurst and Cain came to Huntland to talk with Bird, she solicited their advice in front of a blazing fireplace. Specifically, she wanted their opinions on how Lyndon could deal with the stresses of a four-year term. Dr. Hurst assured her that the 1955 heart attack did not doom her husband to the sidelines of public life. Dwight Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack on September 24, 1955, when he was sixty-four years old, Hurst reminded Bird, but Ike then won and served out a second presidential term before leaving the White House in 1961. He had suffered other ailments by 1964, but he was currently enjoying a comfortable, rewarding life with Mamie at their Gettysburg farm. He remained involved in public affairs, and was one of the first people Lyndon turned to for counsel after Kennedy’s assassination. Reassured by what the doctors told her, Bird gave them her letter, with instructions to deliver it to Lyndon when they examined him the following day.
• • •
Even with his wife’s endorsement, the president questioned whether he should run. Some days he was buoyantly confident, as if no one could beat him, but on others he foresaw a disastrous finale. When a Gallup poll reported that 77 percent of Americans liked what he was doing, he worried about what he had done to disappoint the other 23 percent.
A race riot, starting in New York City three days after he signed the Civil Rights Act, added to his anxieties. The uprising started in Harlem, where a white, off-duty police officer had shot a black fifteen-year-old dead, and quickly spread to Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant section and then to Rochester, three hundred miles north. Individual narratives varied with the neighborhood but charges of excessive police force ran through them all. After reporting that angry protesters had hurled bottles and bricks, looted homes and stores, overturned cars, and set fire to buildings, The New York Times opined that the long hot summer had begun. Governor Nelson Rockefeller called up the state’s National Guard to restore order in Rochester, and the worst of the rioting stopped. But questions remained about how such protests might alarm voters and siphon votes away from the president.
More devastating to Lady Bird was an outpouring of articles and books that summer that questioned her integrity, especially regarding the accumulation of the Johnsons’ wealth. It was not yet required—or even expected—that presidential candidates would file a public report of their approximate net worth, and Lyndon had no intention of doing so. But that left The Wall Street Journal and other periodicals free to conduct their own investigations and publish their findings. Many of the articles reported stupendous gains in the Johnson holdings and attributed them not to old-fashioned hard and honest work, but to chicanery and favoritism, even outright illegal maneuverings. The most disturbing of the indictments, because it contained extensive, careful research, came from fellow Texan J. Evetts Haley, whose 35-cent edition of his little book sold more than seven million copies that summer. Haley’s title left no doubt about where he stood on his subject: A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power.
Haley’s book might have been discredited as a petty assault by one Texan on another, but other journalists, highly respected, had already come to similar conclusions. Wall Street Journal reporter Louis Kohlmeier had spearheaded the attack with a series that began on March 23, with a front-page headline that zeroed in on Lady Bird: “The Johnson Wealth: How President’s Wife Built $17,500 into a Big Fortune in Television.” Although Kohlmeier’s first piece credited Lady Bird’s acumen and luck (instead of suggesting LBJ made nefarious interventions), his follow-up articles were not so kind. Some outlined how the president and first lady remained in close contact with the trustees who controlled their holdings, an obvious flouting of “blind” in their “blind trust,” and an outright challenge to announcements coming from the White House that the presidential family no longer had any voice at all in the management of their broadcasting empire.
Wildly different numbers were tossed around about the extent of the Johnson wealth, and they alone were enough to arouse suspicion. How could a public official, whose salary was public knowledge, get that rich that fast? And whose numbers were correct? The accounting firm hired by the Johnsons, Haskins & Sells, reported the presidential family had total assets of less than $4 million, but one wag quipped that a similar accounting method would put the value of the island of Manhattan at a measly $24. Everyone agreed that whatever the exact number, Johnson holdings dwarfed what the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, owned, reportedly little more than a modest house in Arizona.
By the end of July, the money story consumed inordinate public attention, and the first lady was central to the plot. Not only was she principal owner of a profitable broadcasting company but she also held title to Alabama land where renters lived in abject poverty. In May, two Republican congressmen had visited parts of Autauga and Chilton counties, near Montgomery, where Bird’s property was located, and chided the presidential family “to put their own ‘squalid’ tenant houses in order before trying to establish a billion-dollar [national] program to combat poverty.”
One of the investigating congressmen admitted he was “shocked” at the “squalor” of what he saw: “shanties” with broken windows, leaking roofs, and floors with holes big enough to see the earth down below. He counted eleven persons crowded into one tiny, dilapidated dwelling. Ma
ny Alabamians in that area lived in poverty, and the surrounding counties were not prosperous, but the Republicans deemed those tenants “on the Johnson land were the worst.”
Voters across the nation registered outrage. One Delaware schoolteacher wrote the White House to ask how she should “explain Slum Lord Johnson” to her students. At first Bird struggled to defend herself, saying some of the tenant families had lived there for generations, virtually rent free, and making them move would be cruel. But of course that did not quell the criticism and Bird prepared to “batten down the hatches for a nasty storm.” Lyndon advised her to hunker down and take it, like a “jackass in a hailstorm,” and she opted not to issue any more public statements on the subject.
As stories about the family’s wealth continued to pile up, the first lady worked with the president behind the scenes to combat the bad press. On Saturday afternoon, July 25, after learning that Life magazine was preparing its own exposé, they met with their political troubleshooters, Clark Clifford, Walter Jenkins, Bill Moyers, and Cliff Carter, for a forty-five-minute, off-the-record strategy session. The following Monday, the president followed up with a call to media tycoon Henry Luce, chair of the corporation that owned both Life and Fortune. After chatting amiably about the general state of the nation, LBJ suggested that Luce encourage his reporters to widen their investigation of presidential wealth. Rather than settling for unsubstantiated gossip, they ought to talk with a “trusted person” (the president was ready to recommend one) because there was “a lot of politics” in what they were writing. It would also be a good idea, LBJ added, to take a closer look at Goldwater, whom Luce was supporting.
In trying to convince Luce that he was not a rich man, Lyndon used numbers that he said came from a “national auditing person,” but they tended to be smallish. He, himself, was worth only a paltry $400,000—the rest belonged to Lady Bird and their two daughters. No one could accurately calculate the value of the broadcast empire without selling it, he claimed, but the yearly earnings averaged only about $162,000. As for the Alabama farmland, it barely yielded enough to pay the taxes on it.
All through the president’s rambling explanation, Luce said very little, but his response came soon after, on August 14, when Life put a picture of a grim LBJ on its cover and began an unflattering series of articles on his career, summing up details of how he became a multimillionaire and how badly he was performing as president. This was one time that Lyndon’s persuasive power, often dubbed “the treatment,” did not work.
No president’s wife had ever faced such a searing attack on her finances. But then none of Bird’s first lady predecessors had ever racked up such a fortune by her own making. Many had been wealthy, starting with Martha Washington, the “wealthiest widow in Virginia” when George married her, but Bird’s inheritances had been modest. Life reporters Keith Wheeler and William Lambert decided that her net worth was the product more of her husband’s interventions than of anything she did. According to Life, that intervention reached all the way back to her 1943 acquisition of KTBC, when Congressman Johnson had used favors, including a West Point appointment for a son of one of the principals, to wangle a good price on the station.
As for how the station prospered, Life’s Wheeler and Lambert came up against the same cold paper trail that other reporters found—no documentation of malfeasance existed. But the reporters concluded that Bird’s “Midas touch” was only “legend.” Although they found no hard evidence of Lyndon’s intervention “by word or deed” in obtaining special treatment for any of her TV or radio stations, they strongly hinted that he had done so. The list of charges leveled against him, including hardnosed tactics on potential advertisers and out-and-out threats against competing stations, was simply too long to ignore. The article in Life suggested strongly that where there’s smoke there must be fire, and stoked Lyndon’s fears that he could lose the upcoming election, clearly the most important of his life.
Unfortunately, the outpouring of articles about money peaked in August, just as the Democrats were about to name their nominee, and had contributed to the president’s reluctance to go to Atlantic City. He still feared as well that a spontaneous outburst of Kennedy support could undercut him. In looking over a proposed schedule of convention events, he had spotted a laudatory film about JFK and insisted it be relegated to the last spot on the program, after the nomination was securely nailed down.
But the convention in Atlantic City had a potentially more inflammatory issue, and it required immediate resolution. Two different sets of delegates demanded the right to cast Mississippi’s sixty-eight votes at the convention, and someone had to decide between them. Members of the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) argued they were the rightful representatives, having opened the selection process to blacks, who had historically been shut out. The all-white delegation they were competing against resulted from a different election, officially sanctioned by the state’s Democratic Party, but excluding black voters.
Lady Bird advised Lyndon that it should be the “legal delegation” that got seated. Her memo to him even outlined the points he should use to justify that decision: it would not do to bend to “emotionalism.” Lyndon had already done a lot to make a more nearly equal playing field for blacks and he should vow to do more. But political parties had to operate within the laws on the books, and in this case, Bird argued, that meant seating the Mississippi delegation selected under current Democratic Party rules, notwithstanding the fact that under those rules black voters had been shut out.
Lyndon, more politically attuned than his wife, knew that a decision giving full victory to one side would infuriate the other; he had to come up with a compromise that gave something to both. By pressuring the MFDP to accept two at large seats at the convention, in lieu of the state’s full sixty-eight, he tossed them a bone without seriously diminishing the clout of what Bird had called the “legal delegation.” Although his argument, that this was the best that could be gotten, resonated with some of the would-be delegates from Alabama and Mississippi, others were so outraged by the decision that they decided to boycott the convention and go home. As the nominating process finally got started, hostility was obvious among Democrats inside the convention hall and outside. Who knew how that rancor would make itself felt in November?
With Lyndon’s nomination tied up on August 27, the campaign against the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater, could begin. But Mrs. Johnson had already started her planning months earlier, and it centered on the part of the nation she knew and loved best: the South. It was exactly the region where the Republican nominee was running far ahead of Lyndon, who had, since signing the Civil Rights Act, become a reviled figure there. Back in Marshall, Texas, where Bird went to high school, he was being called a traitor.
Not all Southerners were so scathing in their judgments. Bird happily relayed the story of one African American woman who exuberantly greeted the passage of the Civil Rights Act by shouting, “I’ll throw away the bottle.” Pushed to explain, the woman, whose husband was a prominent educator, told about trips across the South where she found “Whites Only” signs on public toilets. She had started carrying a screw top bottle to relieve herself. With access to public accommodations now the law of the land, she could dispense with the bottle.
Bird knew Lyndon had the support of voters like that woman; the problem was to persuade white Southerners who abhorred his civil rights stand to vote for him. She also wanted to restore some dignity to Southerners. Tired of hearing them denigrated with “snide jokes” and mentions of “cornpone and red neck,” she resolved to go there and prove that “as far as this President and his wife are concerned,” the South was a valued part of the nation. She did not conceal her own convictions: “I know the Civil Rights Act was right, and I don’t mind saying so.” But she refused to disparage those who thought differently: “I’m tired of people making the South the whipping boy of the Democratic Party.” She had beloved relatives in
Alabama, and she still warmed to the slow rhythms of the lives they led, to memories of the generosity they once showed a motherless girl.
Bird recognized that she was better able to present Lyndon’s case throughout the South than he. Voters were less likely to connect her to the Civil Rights Act, and they would see her as more human and approachable. Since she could count on the region’s ideas about chivalry to women to limit hostility toward her, she would undertake what no presidential candidate’s spouse had ever done—a solo campaign trip of her own. She called it a “journey of the heart,” but it was actually a carefully calculated excursion to win votes.
Planning for a campaign swing through the South, on a train dubbed the Lady Bird Special, started in May, although Bird had been assessing her options for weeks. Whistle-stop campaigning had once been a staple of presidential campaigns, and Harry Truman had showed its effectiveness in 1948 when he came from behind to win a tough election. Truman had observed that trains chugged through small towns that had no airports, reaching communities where national candidates had never set foot, so he set out to reach them. In 1960, the Kennedys had ignored that counsel, preferring fast-moving planes and comfy hotel suites, but Lady Bird and Lyndon undertook their own whistle-stop campaign through the South, on behalf of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. This time, in 1964, she was on her own.
The first lady had definite ideas about scheduling. She favored small towns “because I feel at home [there] and I want my speeches to make the people feel I am at home, too.” But she would not limit herself to friendly territory or easy towns. “Anyone can get into Atlanta,” she reminded Liz Carpenter, “[because Atlanta is] the new, modern South. Let me take the tough ones.”
Staff scrounged through abandoned cars in rail yards to find a car with a platform at the back, so that Bird could greet people up close, as Truman had done. The Democratic National Committee paid the bills, but the first lady’s office executed every small detail of the planning and preparation. Her staff pored over maps, made calculations about the best places to stop and about how much time to spend in each. She and Liz Carpenter compiled lists of local officials to contact and invite aboard the Lady Bird Special along the way.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 26