Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  Speechwriter Richard Goodwin described enormous physical changes in the president that summer as his moodiness and outbursts became more apparent: His “public mask . . . [began] to stiffen . . . the face seemed frozen, the once-gesturing arms held tightly to the side or grasping a podium.” With scant or no reason, the president would change his mind, requiring Goodwin to rewrite speeches at the last minute. One especially troubling substitution occurred after Goodwin had crafted a bold statement for the president to deliver at the United Nations’ twentieth birthday celebration on June 25. The first draft, emphasizing the need to limit atomic weapons, had apparently pleased the president, but then, after he heard that Robert Kennedy had recently spoken in the Senate on the same topic, he ordered a rewrite, with barely a mention of arms control.

  Increasingly concerned about what he considered irrational shifts in the president’s moods and behavior, Goodwin consulted with Bill Moyers, who had worked with his fellow Texan longer and was personally closer to him. Moyers had become accustomed to seeing Lyndon erupt in anger over some small mishap, like a telephone call that did not go through or a lunch plate that was not hot enough, but he had considered these outbursts harmless quirks or eccentricities. Now he was seeing something far more serious, and he confided to Goodwin that Secretary of State Dean Rusk had expressed similar doubts about the president’s mental state. Moyers agreed with Goodwin that the flare-ups came more often now, and were more extreme and less rational.

  Goodwin looked for clues in medical textbooks, and he talked with psychiatrists, who alerted him that he was describing a “paranoid” personality, who could function well for long, productive stretches, but could also show excessive reliance on secrecy and an inordinate need to control his surroundings. This type of personality, when bent on action, often produced remarkable results—like leading “a Senate or even an entire country.”

  As if to demonstrate the validity of the psychiatrists’ descriptions, the president was astoundingly productive during the summer of 1965. Within the space of only one week, he signed two of the most significant acts of his generation. Each ceremony was accompanied with fanfare in a picture-perfect setting.

  Bird participated in only one, the Medicare signing on July 30. Since Air Force One could not accommodate all those who wanted to accompany the president to the Truman Library in tiny Independence, Missouri, Air Force Two went also, with Lady Bird aboard, along with a contingent of aides, legislators, and reporters who were eager to witness the event. Back in November 1945, President Truman had proposed to Congress a national program of health insurance under Social Security, but Southern legislators, including Texas congressman Lyndon Johnson, stymied passage. In the interim two decades, Lyndon’s public position on the subject had shifted, and now in what The New York Times described as a “moving tribute” to Truman, he took the signing of Medicare to him. The eighty-one-year-old Truman, retired a dozen years, found it hard to find words to convey his gratitude for the presidential visit and attendant fuss: “It’s an honor that I haven’t had done to me—[for] quite a while.”

  In typical Johnson fashion, the visit ended so quickly the Trumans barely had time to register it. The president and first lady landed in Kansas City at two in the afternoon and, together with their entourages, immediately boarded buses to go to neighboring Independence where runways were too small for their planes to land. On the stage of the very modest Truman Presidential Library, LBJ dwarfed the frail HST. After signing Medicare into law, Lyndon handed the first pen to Bess Truman (the second went to Harry) and rushed out so he and his party could be airborne again by 4:30 to the LBJ Ranch.

  But it was a very brief stay. In those first days of August, when many Americans were enjoying family vacations, the Johnsons gave themselves little time off. By Wednesday, Bird had checked into the Carlyle Hotel in New York, to clothes shop with daughter Lynda while eighteen-year-old Luci remained in Washington on “Daddy duty.” It fell to her to accompany him to Capitol Hill on August 6 to sign the Voting Rights Act, a breakthrough measure giving the federal government authority to monitor elections and punish states that did not treat all voters fairly on balloting day.

  The first lady did not linger in New York. After trying on fall outfits that Friday morning, she made a quick trip to the Connecticut estate of Joseph Hirshhorn to see his collection of sculpture and paintings. But Bess Abell, who accompanied her, kept an eye on the clock, and by 5:30 the first lady was airborne for Washington. Intent on escorting her husband to a restful weekend, Bird was in the Oval Office by 7:40. She had to wait while he finished some phone calls, but she had him on a helicopter by nine, headed to Camp David.

  Cabins at the presidential retreat could accommodate a large party, and Lady Bird filled them that weekend with more than a dozen people to serve Lyndon’s various needs and provide diversion: men he could relax with (boyhood friend Bill Deason and journalist Bill White); staff he could work with (George Reedy and speechwriter Horace Busby); Hollywood producer and bigtime contributor to the Democratic Party Arthur Krim and his attractive young wife, Mathilde, whose German accent (“Now A’tur, I t’ink . . .”) Lyndon found amusing. Bird fed Lyndon’s soul (inviting Dr. George Davis to conduct a religious service on Sunday) and his eyes with comely reporters Marianne Means and Cissy Morrissey (of Life). For forty-eight hours, the president enjoyed a secluded, circumscribed world where he could take to his bed whenever he wanted. He could enjoy a game of dominoes with Deason or an extra scotch with a lineup of women who could have passed for contestants in a beauty competition.

  The weekend proved a short respite. Any satisfaction derived from the upbeat Voting Rights ceremony on Friday evaporated the following Wednesday when word came that rioting had broken out in Watts, a low-income section of Los Angeles. Headlines across the country reported that African Americans were attacking police officers, looting stores, and burning cars. The Johnsons did not need an editorial in The New York Times to make them see the irony: Watts, one of the places where residents stood to gain most from the Voting Rights Act, greeted it with violence. Lyndon was mystified. How could African Americans, whom he had sought to help with his War on Poverty programs, be anything but grateful? He concluded his enemies must have orchestrated the riots. He suspected the media of poisoning minds with exaggerated reports and suggested Watts residents had been incited to lawlessness by someone out to get him— “probably the Kennedys.”

  As word of the violent protests spread, Lady Bird kept glued to the work to be done, upholding her end of the Great Society initiative. While the president cruised down the Potomac with thirty-five visiting ambassadors, she proceeded with previously scheduled visits to check out two Head Start centers. The program was less than three months old, but, as the Honorary Chairman, she wanted to assess its effectiveness at two very different sites: highly urbanized Newark, New Jersey, where enthusiasm for Head Start had been obvious from the beginning, and rural Lambertville, Pennsylvania, where she viewed pockets of poverty that brought back memories of her own childhood, in the “backwoods of East Texas or Alabama.” As she met what seemed to her dazed and frustrated parents, the real “impact of Head Start” struck her. “I do not want to turn America over to another generation as listless and dull as many of these parents looked.”

  After starting her day at seven, she had completed her Head Start visits and was bracing to greet hundreds of guests at a reception at the New Jersey governor’s mansion when Lyndon phoned with one of his abrupt schedule changes. Instead of the quiet evening in Washington she had been anticipating, they were going to leave for the ranch. That meant she would not get to bed until after 2 a.m. Although she registered a gentle objection to what she called “not-so-restful news,” she did not attempt to change his mind, certainly not at a time like this when he was wrestling with bad news from the West Coast.

  During the night, rioting in Los Angeles escalated, but there was not a sign from the LBJ Ranch that anyone was taking note. The president spent m
uch of the weekend driving around the fields and boating on a nearby reservoir that had been named Lake Lyndon B. Johnson. Lady Bird uncharacteristically left those four days blank in her diary, but the president’s diary shows she was extremely busy looking after him. She accompanied him on long walks and entertained his favorite friends (including Jesse Kellam and the Valentis) at poolside dinners. Especially soothing to a beleaguered president was a visit to his nearby birthplace, which his wife had been carefully restoring as a tourist site. She took him there on Sunday and he went back on his own the next day.

  What the president was not doing was taking phone calls from his legislative liaison, Joe Califano, back in Washington. Califano needed desperately to speak with the president about how to respond to the situation in Watts, which had grown increasingly violent and ugly. Before it ended, thirty-four people would die and more than a thousand were treated for injuries. Califano wanted instructions about calling up the National Guard. Should the White House issue a statement? But a president famous for staying virtually attached to a phone, with one under the dining room table and another in a nearby tree whenever he went outside, was not picking up the receiver. Not until Saturday evening, nearly forty-eight hours after leaving Washington and after newspapers reported the violence was spreading to white neighborhoods, did LBJ finally speak with Califano.

  On Sunday morning the president issued a statement calling for calm, but his earlier failure to communicate fit into a larger pattern of not facing up to circumstances, of not always reacting with the utmost integrity and urgency. Califano had been in Washington long enough to hear the litany of complaints against his boss for fudging on numbers (such as his net worth), denying relationships (saying he hardly knew Bobby Baker when all the capital considered theirs a father-son relationship), and tilting the truth when it came to troop buildups in Vietnam. A joke had begun circulating about how to assess the president’s veracity: “When he pulls his ear lobe, scratches his chin, he’s telling the truth. When he begins to move his lips, you know he’s lying.”

  That duplicity had shown itself way back in his courtship letters, and Bird had learned to factor it into any of her dealings with him. Like a mischievous little boy, he enjoyed delivering the unexpected, and he would withhold information and then spring it when it suited him. Adept at adjusting, Bird took every schedule change or new revelation in stride, making the necessary accommodation without objection. But reporters assigned to follow the president and report his movements were less tolerant. Having to leave on a few minutes’ notice for 90-degree Texas when they had to come to work dressed for 50-degree Washington was no fun. Nor was explaining to their families why they would have to miss a weekend event they had promised to attend.

  Any leak about a pending matter could lead to cancellation of the action and a vicious verbal attack on the person deemed responsible. In one instance, after the president decided on a new ambassador, word got out, and Lyndon struck his name from the list, saying: “I wouldn’t appoint him to dog catcher now.” When press secretary Bill Moyers tried to mollify reporters by giving out information he had not been authorized to release, the president denounced him as a traitor. Aide Jack Valenti observed that Lyndon got so angry when he lost control of his news coverage, he was fit “to crawl the walls of the White House.”

  That was the year—1965—when the media started referring to a credibility gap, between the president and the people, but no such phrase fastened on Lady Bird. Her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, maintained that she and her boss had, from the start, agreed that reporters deserved open and honest treatment. The first lady (or her representative) would answer all questions, or, if they could not, they would explain why. As a result of her openness, Mrs. Johnson had few enemies in the press.

  Nor did she seem bothered by unflattering accounts published about her. The August 28, 1964, issue of Time had put her picture on the cover and described her as decidedly lacking in physical beauty: “Her nose is a bit too long, her mouth a bit too wide, her ankles a bit less than trim . . . and her voice [sounds] something like a brassy low note on a trumpet.” The quotes of those who knew her during high school and college were vicious. One classmate remembered her as a perennial wallflower, who was “never accepted into our clique,” so pathetic that the other female students felt obliged to press their brothers into escorting her to school dances. Even the formerly loyal Gene Boehringer chose to highlight Bird’s frugal streak for Time rather than the adventuresome spirit she had once admired.

  Mrs. Johnson knew her true value could not be measured in a popularity poll—but in an assessment of how she helped Lyndon work “to the best of his ability and to make some steps forward.” He could be incredibly insensitive, as Joe Califano, a Brooklyn-born Harvard man, found out on his first day working in the White House. It was midsummer, and Califano appeared in a light-colored poplin suit, only to find everyone else wearing dark blue or black. Rather than keep quiet and assume Califano would register the gaffe on his own, the president embarrassed him by yelling, in front of others, that he looked like an “ice cream salesman.” The next time Lyndon belittled Califano, Bird was there to intervene. After the president compared Califano’s necktie to a “limp prick” and started to retie it, the first lady interjected one of her gentle reproaches: “Maybe Joe likes his tie the other way, darling.”

  The first lady engineered more significant interventions, impressing her husband’s aides and endearing her to them. Always on the watch for rifts developing between her husband and his associates, she would attempt to bring the two sides back together. She could be subtle in her fence-mending, and Califano admitted it took him some time to decipher her strategy. After she had invited him to dinner more than once and he had refused, she became more forthright about her motive. He had been delivering one catastrophic announcement after another to the president, and the first lady, having noticed, warned him: “You know Lyndon sometimes can confuse the messenger with the message and I wouldn’t ever want that to happen to you.” Touched by her concern, Califano accepted her invitation, and then noticed at dinner how she showered him with compliments about the great job he was doing. She coaxed Lyndon into a jovial mood by lifting her usual ban on dessert and then passed him the candy dish (although she did draw the line at smoking).

  That mixing of the personal with the professional, always a hallmark of the Johnsons’ marriage, became more marked and significant in their White House years. Bird had always run an “open house” for employees at all hours and for family in all seasons, and with the added perks of the presidency she could increase the numbers. She made sure to include a few relatives and longtime friends at every state dinner, so that her brother Tony and Karnack neighbors got the thrill of meeting world leaders. At events outside the White House, both the first lady and the president were quick to invite friends along. Their trip to New York City the first weekend in October 1965 provided yet one more example of the seamless life they lived. They used the signing of an important law as an opportunity to reconnect with loyal friends, spend time with family, and strengthen political alliances.

  Neither Bird nor Lyndon had any personal connection to Ellis Island immigrants—their families had settled in the colonies before the United States existed. But the Johnsons recognized the poignant symbolism of his highlighting a new immigration policy while standing in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, with Emma Lazarus’s words about “huddled masses” above him. Bird realized others thought it “corny,” and she knew that one unfriendly congressman, well aware of Lyndon’s cinematic choices for important announcements, had singled out this very place as over-the-top. But she wrote defiantly in her diary, let them “make the most of it! . . . The ceremony was a jewel of an hour that I won’t forget.”

  The day the president signed the act, Sunday, October 3, illustrated how easily the Johnsons mixed family and neighbors with world leaders. They started the day at the White House, with a late breakfast and then church services nearb
y, where they encountered old friends who were visiting Washington. Spontaneous as always, Lyndon invited the two couples to come to the White House for lunch, and without even asking them, he sent for their suitcases so that they could accompany him and Mrs. Johnson to New York City that afternoon. When one of the guests confessed she had not packed a coat, the first lady lent her one, and by the time their helicopter landed on Liberty Island, huge crowds had gathered.

  As Lyndon stood tall in front of them, the Manhattan skyline behind him, flags snapped in the wind and Anna Moffo, the operatic soprano, sang “America” in tones that made spines tingle. Bird admitted her eyes went “from Lyndon’s face to the flag, to the great old statue, [and] I was caught up in the magnificent drama of the moment. It was good history and good theater and there was many a wet cheek in that crowd.” Erich Leinsdorf, the renowned orchestra conductor (who was now with the Boston Symphony), had a special reason to be on Liberty Island that day—to thank the former congressman from Texas who had come to his aid in 1938, when he risked being forced to return to his native Austria because of visa problems.

  After the signing ceremony ended, the presidential entourage moved from Liberty Island to the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue, and although the setting shifted from a site reminiscent of “huddled masses” to one tinged with gold, the ecumenical theme continued. New York was preparing for the arrival the next day of Pope Paul VI, who was making the very first papal visit to the Western Hemisphere. Luci, who had just converted to Catholicism on her eighteenth birthday the previous July, was eager to meet the head of the world’s Roman Catholics, and she came to the city with her boyfriend, Patrick Nugent, for the occasion. Luci maintained that she abandoned the Protestantism of her parents (the Disciples of Christ of her father and the Episcopalianism of her mother) in a search for ritual and meaning more resonant with her; she had not meant it as a rebuff or a denial of anyone. But Bird viewed the decision as a rejection of the family, and she wrote in her diary about the day of Luci’s conversion ceremony: “We went in [to the church] as four and came out three.”