Upgrading the nation’s capital had never been high on the agenda of the wife of Congressman/Senator/Vice President Johnson. Nor had charitable work for the city’s African American residents. With the exception of Lyndon’s eighteen-month stint with the National Youth Administration in the 1930s, the couple had lived part of every year in Washington, where Lady Bird could have volunteered at a soup kitchen or joined a local garden club. But she, like most congressional wives, remained focused on her family’s needs: managing moves between Washington and the home district; keeping multiple households running smoothly; entertaining in a style befitting a legislator. The Senate Wives’ Club, where Bird rarely missed a Tuesday meeting, rolled bandages while exchanging travel tips and other useful information. The only garden she worked in Washington was in her own backyard. Now, as first lady, she enlarged her scope, and with the encouragement of Lasker, Udall, Rowe, and others, formed the Committee for a More Beautiful Capital.
Lyndon also qualified as a new convert to conservationists’ ranks. In 1958, when Congress considered rewarding states that limited billboards, Senator Johnson voted “nay,” and it is not clear that his wife even knew the matter was under discussion. The following year Lyndon again sided with the billboard industry in a debate on the placement of outdoor signs. Lady Bird had driven the route between Texas and Washington too many times to count, and she credited those trips with fueling her aversion to highway advertising. But she had been raised with a healthy respect for the bottom line, and billboards were clearly valuable to those who wanted to tout their product to motorists as well as to those who rented them the space to do so.
By 1965, Mrs. Johnson altered her view, and in fairness to her, so did many other Americans who converted their own personal love of nature into a cry for legislation to protect it. Rather than crediting herself with initiating the change in attitude, she explained that she had just “jumped on a moving train,” propelled by the arguments of Rachel Carson, Stewart Udall, and others.
But there is absolutely no question that Mrs. Johnson’s interest in the subject was authentic. Her cousin, Patsy Chaney, was one of several people who reported that the only time they ever saw her really angry was when she witnessed an assault on the landscape. Chaney remembered returning to the ranch with Lady Bird and catching sight of a crew cutting down a particular variety of cypress that is difficult to grow in the Hill Country. Visibly agitated, Bird couldn’t wait to get to a phone. When she connected with the person responsible, she tore into him and made her objection very clear.
Thomas Donahue, who came to Texas to be interviewed by the president for a job in the Labor Department, reported a similar outburst on a cold December day while Lady Bird was driving him and Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson around the ranch. When she spotted a broken irrigation tube that was spraying cold water on a tree, icing it up and killing it, she grabbed the car phone and “really tore [the ranch hand responsible] up for destroying that beautiful tree . . . ripped” him out. Then, remembering that she had two passengers in the car, she switched to a more affable “tone . . . much more measured and controlled.” It was enough to convince Donahue that she possessed “a lot of steel,” and her dedication to conservation was not just a posturing for publicity.
Equally committed to environmental concerns was Laurance Rockefeller, who became one of her staunchest allies. After President Eisenhower selected him in 1958 to chair a commission to evaluate the nation’s outdoor recreation resources, he sank almost $800,000 of his own money into the effort. The report of his commission was grim. By the year 2000, he argued, Americans would be working shorter days, almost entirely indoors, and would want more parks and athletic fields, hiking trails and bike paths, within easy reach of the cities where they lived. But who would provide these? It was not a matter of charity, Rockefeller noted—“just plain good business.”
Lady Bird Johnson officially kicked off her environmental campaign on February 5, 1965, by dedicating one of what had become an ongoing series of Women’s Doer lunches to the topic of beautification. Her husband was still recovering from the flu that had hospitalized him on January 24, and his mood was very low, but along with careful monitoring of him, she crammed her appointment book with enough interviews to attract considerable attention to her project. U.S. News & World Report published a lengthy favorable article on her in the February 22 issue. A couple of weeks later, James Perry wrote a glowing piece in The National Observer, describing her concern as genuine and her power as considerable. Mrs. Johnson had, Perry wrote, as much influence as “any First Lady we’ve seen in this century.”
Her beautification team split almost immediately into factions. Those dubbed the “nationals” wanted to focus on parks and highways across the country, while the “locals” insisted on spending their energy and funds right there in Washington, D.C. A second rift, within the “locals” camp, pitted the “daffodils and dogwood set,” who saw their mission as planting trees and polishing statues, against the ghetto reformers, who thought it more pressing to improve living conditions in the slums. The nation’s capital was clearly a divided city, with a wide chasm separating the rich from the poor into what historian Lewis L. Gould would later describe as the “two Washingtons.”
By the March 17 meeting, when Bird heard the civil rights chanters outside, she had already decided that her beautification agenda would range wide, to include national parks and highways, as well as Washington’s ghettos, parks, and monuments. She knew she would need a lot of help to do all that. Besides asking her current staff to work extra hours, she recruited new talent for the East Wing. Press secretary Liz Carpenter, intent on putting the first lady on the front page, hired Cynthia Wilson, with a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas, to write catchy press releases and do advance work on the first lady’s trips.
Just how many people worked on Mrs. Johnson’s project is difficult to say, because she “borrowed” experts from various departments, sometimes for short stints and other times for years. That meant the first lady’s office did not have to pay them—they continued to collect their salaries from their employer of record. Udall had recruited Sharon Francis, an enthusiastic environmentalist, soon after she graduated from college, and she helped him write his book. But when the first lady initiated her beautification campaign it was Francis, still collecting her paycheck from the Interior Department, who dedicated herself full time to Mrs. Johnson, assisting her in spinning out ideas, drafting speeches, and forging ties with conservation groups across the country. Nash Castro, who, as an employee of the National Park Service, had supervised sites from Mount Rushmore to the Rocky Mountains, was now regional director for Washington, D.C., and he became one of Mrs. Johnson’s most valuable sources of information and aid (while still an employee of the Park Service).
Besides those who were paid, an army of volunteers signed up to help. On her own time, Lee Udall, wife of the interior secretary, organized a speakers bureau, composed of Senate and cabinet wives, to help the first lady fulfill the many requests that came in. Using kits of background information prepared by Sharon Francis and Liz Carpenter, the surrogates fanned out to audiences that Mrs. Johnson could not reach on her own. Not since Eleanor Roosevelt had a first lady headed a publicity machine of her own, and Mrs. Roosevelt’s was neither so extensive nor so efficiently run.
Nobody liked the term “beautification,” and Lady Bird ordered it used as little as possible because it sounded “cosmetic and trivial and . . . prissy.” It lacked precision, and some Americans connected it to beauty salons rather than landscapes. When Jane Freeman, wife of Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, was introduced in Alaska as a member of Mrs. Johnson’s beautification team, a woman in the audience queried her about “the latest hair styles” in the rest of the country. At another event, one of the first lady’s stand-ins was asked: “Do you just do Mrs. Johnson’s hair or do you do Lynda’s and Luci’s too?”
But “beautification” remained th
e label of choice because no one came up with anything better. “Conservation” and “Environmental Beauty” sounded too old-fashioned and stodgy for the dynamic program Bird envisioned. For her, what would later be called “green” issues did not deal with cosmetic, prettifying extras to life. She would always connect spots of soul-feeding serenity with what made life worth living.
Mary Lasker wanted to forget about the ghettos, because, she said, it was useless to build playgrounds for people who wouldn’t take care of them. Bird disagreed. Professor Haar’s task force had ignored the capital’s poor neighborhoods, but she thought it important to engage the people who lived there. After escorting committee members on a tour of Greenleaf Gardens, a public housing area in Southwest Washington, she told Stewart Udall that nothing the committee did would mean anything unless “people in these neighborhoods can see the challenge and do the work in their own front yards.”
Among her strongest allies on the “people” side of beautification was African American Walter Washington. Born in Georgia and raised in upstate New York, he quickly earned a respected place in the can-do circles of the nation’s capital. At age fifty, he headed the National Capital Housing Authority, and his marriage to Bennetta Bullock, daughter of a prominent Washington minister, guaranteed him entrée to a network of influential blacks, including one who described him as “a smooth briefcase operator who had learned the white man’s game and was excellent at it.” Walter Washington was Bird’s personal guide through the capital’s black neighborhoods and, seeing how she worked, he became an admirer. He noted how quickly she absorbed details, how easily she greeted crowds, and how eagerly she took on the grimmest problems.
In May 1965, President Johnson hosted a Conference on Natural Beauty to follow up on his task force’s recommendations. Mrs. Johnson, although never a member of that task force, had a starring role at the conference, delivering the keynote speech on May 24. When rain threatened to cut short an outdoor session, the garrulous president invited everyone inside the White House where he rambled on about many matters, including his plan to send four highway beautification bills to Congress the next day.
The conference disappointed many who wanted much stricter regulation of highway advertising, but it underlined both Johnsons’ genuine commitment to the cause. As Henry L. Diamond, a young associate of Laurance Rockefeller, told historian Lewis Gould years later, “The word went out” that both the President and first lady “cared.” It remained to see if they could steer the relevant legislation through Congress.
At the same time she was moving full speed ahead on environmental issues, Lady Bird engaged in another project that had nothing to do with nature (although plenty to do with beautification). Working with S. Dillon Ripley, the energetic secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, she helped bring the enormous Joseph Hirshhorn collection of paintings and sculpture to Washington. Some of it went into the White House collection, but the bulk of it became a museum of its own within the Smithsonian, whose leadership Ripley, a renowned ornithologist, had taken on in 1964. He had vowed to expand and invigorate the stodgy institution, and in his twenty-year tenure, he would add nine new museums, including the National Air and Space and the National Museum of African Art. On the first of the nine, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, he turned to the first lady for essential help.
Joseph Hirshhorn, an immigrant to the United States from Latvia, had acquired a fortune by investing in uranium and other precious metals, and he had used his millions to build one of the world’s premier privately held art collections. As he approached his seventies, word went out that he was looking for a place to deposit his art treasures, and multiple offers came in. Israel wanted the collection, and London’s Tate Gallery proposed building a magnificent Taj Mahal–type structure to house it near the Thames. Other bids came from Pasadena, California, and from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who suggested Hirshhorn’s art would enhance his state university’s collection.
To outdo all that competition and bring the collection to Washington, Lady Bird used her most self-effacing, solicitous manner. She admitted to Hirshhorn, known as the “Medici from Brooklyn,” that she knew little about modern art, and she invited the connoisseur and his new, much younger wife, Olga, to lunch at the White House. Several weeks later, on a hot August day, Mrs. Johnson trooped up to his Connecticut estate with her brother Tony and walked through Hirshhorn’s garden. Its modern sculpture, including creations of Giacometti, Calder, and Rodin, rivaled that of a world-class museum. After admiring the art, Bird expressed surprise that two of her favorite French painters, Matisse and Degas, had also sculpted. But it was the paintings inside Hirshhorn’s country house that she really coveted. The Eakins portraits struck her as “commanding . . . [with] something of the quality of the Flemish masters,” and she concluded that any one of them would look very good in either the Green Room or the Red Room of the White House.
Bird issued more invitations to Hirshhorn, who brought his lawyers to broker a deal that suited him. The Smithsonian was bound by a rule, imposed by Congress, that none of its museums would be named for a living human being. Hirshhorn wanted to break that rule. If the president could convince Congress to humor Hirshhorn on this, he was ready to donate thousands of artworks and set up an endowment to provide for their maintenance. Congressional approval and the necessary paperwork for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden went smoothly, but groundbreaking for the startling modern edifice did not occur until January 1969, only a few days before the Johnsons retired to Texas. Not until 1974 did the museum open.
The first lady had won over Hirshhorn as she had so many others with her affable manner and lack of artifice. Impressed by her humble admission that she was “prepared to learn [about art],” Hirshhorn told his biographer, “That was honest and I respected her.” When the acquisition was announced, Smithsonian director Ripley acknowledged that Bird was the “decisive factor” in making it happen: “Hirshhorn is crazy about her and the president.”
Proud as Bird was of her role in bringing Hirshhorn’s collection to Washington, she gained far more recognition for beautifying the streets of the capital. When Mary Lasker donated nine thousand azaleas to prettify Pennsylvania Avenue, Bird’s committee found the money to have them planted. The first lady’s efforts made her a hero to local residents, and decades after she moved back to Texas, taxi drivers would point to the capital’s flowering parks and say, “Lady Bird Johnson did that.”
The Highway Beautification Act of 1965 carved Bird into the national consciousness in even larger letters, but that effort evoked criticism, involving her in one of the very few controversies surrounding her name. Considering her aversion to airing differences in opinion, it is remarkable that she pursued a plan to get rid of billboards. Virtually no one opposed planting flowers, but the billboard lobby was powerful and well financed, representing both builders and advertisers. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America had already sent lobbyists to state capitals to fight against any restriction at all on the size or placement of their signs. Bird knew that the billboard association had potent allies in Congress; her husband had once been one of them. Now she was taking the other side, and some of her aides feared she was initiating a battle she couldn’t win.
Bird proceeded with her usual low-keyed, well-mannered tactics. Privately, she phoned congressmen to make her case, and she invited their kin to tea. She saw that every White House guest list had its share of conservation activists and she made sure they had a chance to talk with the legislators who remained undecided. When journalists wrote favorable articles or newspapers ran kind editorials, she sent thank-you notes, an obvious ploy to encourage more good publicity.
But passage of the Highway Act, which provided for relocating junkyards as well as limiting billboards, still looked doubtful, and Liz Carpenter turned to the president for advice. He instructed the plump press secretary to put on her tightest girdle and best perfume and go talk individually with three recalcit
rant House members whose votes were needed for passage. When she won over two of them but failed to convince the third, he suggested how to increase the pressure. The obstinate congressman had just procured a plum of a military installation for his home district, and the president told Carpenter to remind the congressman that military bases can be given and they can be taken away.
The Outdoor Advertising Association and the White House eventually hammered out a compromise bill to put before Congress. It banned billboards, but not in “areas of commercial and industrial use.” That left a huge loophole, of course, since “commercial and industrial use” could be interpreted very broadly. Now the House and Senate would have to pass the bill.
The final vote in the House was set for October 7, the same day as one of the biggest social events of the season—a Salute to Congress at the White House that evening. The party was scheduled to start at the State Department with a program, then move to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for festive imbibing. When a contingent of congressional wives, dressed in their party best, arrived on Capitol Hill about 7 p.m. to join their husbands for what they thought was going to be a celebratory evening, they were told they had to wait. On the House floor, a lively debate on the Highway Beautification Act was still under way, and the legislators had been warned not to leave until it passed. President Johnson had sent word via his aides: “You know I love that woman and she wants that highway beauty bill and by God we’re going to get it for her.”
Buses hired to transport legislators and their spouses around D.C. that evening stood empty on Capitol Hill as Republicans proposed amendment after amendment to water it down. With the votes already lined up among Democrats, it was going to pass in some form, but in the process the Republican minority meant to dilute its provisions and ridicule its backers. The first lady came in for special mockery. Robert Dole, Republican congressman from Kansas, suggested striking “Secretary of Commerce” in the bill and inserting “Lady Bird,” to imply that an overly aggressive, nonelected woman was now dictating policy. One of Dole’s fellow Republicans brandished a picture that he suggested the president use as backdrop when he signed the anti-billboard measure into law: it showed a roadside sign advertising Lady Bird’s broadcasting company.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 31