At the White House, the food-and-drink tables were set up and the entertainers ready to perform. But the only guests present were cabinet members and other Washingtonians not involved in the House debate. Not until 10 p.m., when the Republicans called it quits, did the Highway Act pass. House members and spouses who still had the stamina could finally start partying.
The president and first lady stayed only a few minutes to greet the late arrivals. For the preceding weeks, while wrangling over the bill continued, the Johnsons had been guarding their secret about Lyndon’s upcoming gall bladder operation. Now, with approval in both houses of Congress secure, they could proceed. Within an hour of the House vote, Lyndon had checked into the Bethesda Medical Center, where he would undergo surgery the next day. His signature on the Highway Beautification Act would have to wait until after he was released from the hospital two weeks later.
Although the 1965 Highway Beautification Act would be further diluted in subsequent legislation, its initial passage permanently associated Lady Bird with the anti-billboard fight. In one of his most famous cartoons, Bill Mauldin showed her driving through unspoiled forest, and the caption, implying she had assumed too much power, was: “Impeach Lady Bird.” Mrs. Johnson, who knew Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren was currently under attack and threatened with impeachment because of his liberal decisions, was delighted. She wrote gleefully in her diary: “Imagine me keeping company with Chief Justice Warren!”
While the results fell short of her goals, Lady Bird Johnson showed how a president’s wife can leave a legacy of her own without subtracting anything from her husband’s achievement. Hers was an example that each of her successors for the next fifty years would try to match. Each took a project of her own, although it would be difficult to argue that they all equaled her genuine enthusiasm, efficient management, and continued involvement after leaving the White House. For Pat Nixon it was volunteerism; for Betty Ford, the Equal Rights Amendment and dance; for Rosalynn Carter, mental health reform; for Nancy Reagan, “Just Say No to Drugs”; for Barbara Bush, literacy; for Hillary Clinton, health care reform; and for Laura Bush, literacy programs. One of the first questions Michelle Obama had to answer after her husband entered the 2008 race for president was: What will be your project if you become first lady? The answer came after the election: an anti-obesity campaign for juveniles and support for military families.
• • •
On that March 1965 day, when civil rights activists knelt in the snow, chanting “We Shall Overcome,” Sharon Francis thought she saw a tear roll down the first lady’s face. But before she could be sure, Mrs. Johnson called the beautification meeting to order, right on schedule. It had been fifty years since Minnie Pattillo Taylor introduced her daughter to the solace of nature’s beauty, and now that daughter was not about to miss her chance to pass on to others what made her “heart sing.” In the process, she also changed what Americans expected of their president’s spouse.
16
WAR CLOUDS
WHEN LADY BIRD Johnson looked back on her White House time and divided it into two distinctly different periods, the first of “wine and roses” and the second, “pure hell,” it was the Vietnam War that produced the “pure hell.” Criticism of the president’s war decisions caused deep anguish in the White House and threatened to blot out gains already made toward the Great Society and forestall new programs. Lyndon Johnson sometimes came near tears while witnessing the body bags of fallen soldiers being unloaded at Union Station, but he kept sending more young men to take their places. Although he agonized about the deaths, he could not justify reversing the buildup of troops. Frustrated, unhappy with himself and with the world around him, he became even more difficult to live with. Lady Bird had a long record of stepping in when he faltered or drew back, and she felt she had made a difference more than once. Could she be of any help now?
A U.S. strategy for Southeast Asia was already in place in November 1963 when the Johnsons moved into the White House, and the president’s top foreign affairs advisers, mostly holdovers from JFK, advocated continuing it. To bolster South Vietnam’s independence and help it resist pressures to unite with communist North Vietnam, the United States had agreed to supply weapons and a core of “advisers” to train local soldiers. At the same time, Americans would assist in showering South Vietnam villages with “imaginative propaganda” about how much better life would be for them if they remained outside the communist bloc. Although directed by military generals in an “advisory” capacity, the policy did not, in the parlance of today, put any American “boots on the ground” in Vietnam.
That suddenly changed. Eight months after President Johnson moved into the Oval Office, Congress wrote him a blank check to “take all necessary action” to protect American forces abroad. The red letter day was August 4, 1964, a date that Lady Bird would never forget. Nor would others. Long after Lyndon’s death, when Steven Stucky and Gene Scheer were commissioned to write an opera to commemorate the centenary of his birth, they titled it simply August 4, 1964.
The first lady does not appear in the opera, but in real life she was right there, doing “rather trivial things” while knowing it was a “momentous day” and that “great decisions [were] being shaped . . . by the man closest to me.” After registering the “extraordinarily grave” expression on the face of foreign affairs adviser McGeorge Bundy when she met him by chance in the hallway, she concluded, “We might have a small war on our hands.” As she worked her way through the day’s appointments, going to her hairdresser, conferring with her tailor, and welcoming visitors for afternoon tea, she kept wondering what Lyndon and his three top advisers (Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Rusk) were discussing and why their regular Tuesday lunch went on so long. In spite of her worry, she managed a two-hour nap in the afternoon, showing she could “relax at the most amazing times . . . almost as though you’d have to wake me up in order to get me to the execution on time.”
That evening big black limos kept dropping off congressional leaders and military advisers outside the Oval Office, and after thirty years in politics Lady Bird Johnson needed no one to spell out for her the seriousness of the situation. This was going to be another of those days when dinner had to wait. In fact, she did not get her husband to the table until nearly 11 p.m.
August 4, 1964, was the day President Johnson received reports on two unrelated but tragically significant incidents: an attack on an American military ship in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam, and the discovery in an earthen dam in Mississippi of the bodies of three civil rights workers who had been missing for seven weeks. Either calamity was of the magnitude to consume the president’s full attention, but on this hot Tuesday, he had to deal with both, juggling phone calls and in-person consultations with dozens of people. In between discussions with legislators and foreign policy advisers on how to respond to the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and ward off further strikes, he made his most painful phone calls, offering condolences to the families of the young, martyred civil rights workers. In the opera August 4, 1964 voices of two grieving mothers mix with those of Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Johnson in a cacophony of misery and despair.
Lyndon Johnson acted more decisively in the event than in the opera, and sought congressional approval to proceed as he thought appropriate. Although the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (passed on August 7) would later haunt him and embarrass those who supported it, it caused little comment at the time. Only two senators, neither particularly influential with his colleagues, voted against what one of them, Ernest Gruening of Alaska, called a misguided license to send Americans to fight a war in which the United States had no business. Other senators who would later become outspoken critics of the president’s actions (William Fulbright, George McGovern, and Frank Church) all voted in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. They had been persuaded by Lyndon’s call for authority to strike back at what he termed “open aggression on the high sea
s against the United States of America.”
During the next few months, the president rejected suggestions of Senator Gruening and others that he should hold back. Instead, he did just the opposite, turning what had been a limited initiative into full-scale war, an “Americanized” war, that lacked allies’ support and became increasingly unpopular at home. As his critics multiplied, his frustrations grew, and his behavior, formerly viewed as inappropriate but harmless, now became incredibly bizarre and worrisome.
Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, gave one example. At a surprise anniversary party that Lyndon gave for Bird, he was very grumpy, and then called Graham and Abe Fortas into his bedroom to rant at them for not supporting him on a recent appointment. So far, nothing unusual, but then the president started taking off his clothes, shedding first his jacket, then tie and shirt. As he began unzipping his pants, Mrs. Graham found herself “frozen with dismay” and thinking: “This can’t be me being bawled out by the President of the United States while he’s undressing.” When he abruptly commanded her to “Turn around,” she obeyed, and his harangue continued while she faced the wall. At his second order to “Turn around,” she was relieved to see him in pajamas, and at the very first lull in his tirade, she and Fortas beat their retreat.
On another occasion, the president dumbfounded reporters who pressed him to explain why he was escalating the war in Vietnam. Unzipping his fly and taking out “his substantial organ,” he shouted at them: “This is why!”
Accounts like these continued to surface after LBJ left the White House, inviting academics and psychologists to consider what effect, if any, his mental state had on his decision making. Two traits in particular were singled out—his insistence on secrecy and his tendency to blame his failures on a conspiracy of others. The title of D. Jablow Hershman’s 2002 book left no doubt about the author’s point of view: Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson. Using a term popular during Lyndon’s lifetime but later replaced by bi-polar, Hershman described Lyndon Johnson as manic depressive.
Hershman never treated or even met Lyndon Johnson, who had been dead a quarter of a century when Hershman published his book. But the continuing debate over LBJ’s handling of the Vietnam War had focused renewed attention on his mental state, and interviews with LBJ staffers after he died tended to back Hershman up. Harry McPherson, who served throughout the Johnson presidency, remembered the month of February 1965 as the most “dismaying” period in the White House, because LBJ was what “an analyst would call manic depressive.” Secretary Vicky McCammon noted that the president’s moods were extreme—either he was “very up and monopolized all conversation” or “very down” and sat mute. Press secretary George Reedy complained that LBJ walked “on air” one minute and then was ready to “slash his wrists” the next. Reedy said he described these extreme swings to physicians who assured him that the president was “manic depressive.”
Robert E. Gilbert, who has written and lectured widely on the mental health of U.S. leaders, concluded that Lyndon Johnson’s insecurities provoked such erratic behavior, especially in regard to Robert Kennedy and other critics of his Vietnam policies, that the nation suffered as a result. Gilbert went further, and using diagnostic criteria of the American Psychiatric Association, he argued that throughout his long political career, “Lyndon Johnson exhibited behavior patterns that conform to those associated with a ‘narcissistic personality.’ ” According to Gilbert, narcissistic personality types, while under stress, can show many paranoid features, and America paid a price for Johnson’s temperamental outbursts, excessive secretiveness, fear of losing control, and outlandish suspicions. But Gilbert was lavish in his praise of President Johnson’s domestic policies, which he judged “perhaps as extraordinary as [those] of Franklin D. Roosevelt, making him one of the most effective legislative leaders in American history.” Echoing Dr. Willis Hurst, who had noted what “a very great asset” Lady Bird was to her husband, Gilbert labeled her a “key helper . . . a central figure in [the Johnson] Administration.”
But how did she do it? Besides trying to monitor her husband’s diet and exercise she had a litany of morale boosters. One of her frequent refrains, when Lyndon was too discouraged to get out of bed, was that all he had to do was put “one foot in front of the other and do the best you can.” She surrounded him with people he enjoyed and could be counted on to flatter and boost his ego. And she was a genius at mending the fences he tore down, soothing the feelings of those he ridiculed and disparaged.
Eric Goldman, the Princeton professor who worked closely with the first lady’s office, listed an arsenal of tools Mrs. Johnson employed to clean up her husband’s messes. After he had insulted someone, word would get back to her, often via Lyndon himself. She would make a phone call, sometimes to the spouse of the offended party, perhaps mentioning the incident, perhaps not, but cooing in her most amiable tones how much the Johnsons valued a friendship such as theirs. She followed up with more substantial appeasements, such as an invitation to the ranch or an intimate dinner at the White House. Goldman rated her instincts as nearly infallible in such matters—and far-reaching. Lyndon would go over a dinner guest list, striking out names on the basis of his most recent clashes and peeves. But she would unerringly put back the names of those who needed special consideration.
Bill Fisher, a Navy photographer assigned to the White House, gave a specific example of how Mrs. Johnson worked to undo the president’s harsh words. Fisher was at the ranch one of those perfect Sunday mornings in spring when the first lady suggested he go to a nearby field and photograph the bluebonnets. A short time later, as Fisher and an associate were busy taking pictures, a helicopter came to summon them back to the ranch, where they found a very angry president. He had been looking for the photographers and not found them where he thought they ought to be. Fisher was dismayed by the inconsistency. The president was right there when Mrs. Johnson’s discussion with Fisher took place, and he had registered no objection. Now Fisher was angry—he felt he was being punished unfairly. It remained for Bird to do what she had been doing for years. She didn’t contradict her husband in front of anyone, but she made a point of telling Fisher later, in private, that she was sorry for getting him into trouble and she thanked him profusely. In a sentiment echoed by most people who knew her, Fisher concluded: “I would walk over hot coals for her.”
Mrs. Johnson was less successful at helping her husband navigate difficult foreign policy decisions. In their three decades of marriage, she had sometimes managed to “influence” him or pass on what she considered “good judgment.” But under the barrage of criticism regarding Vietnam, she felt overwhelmed, the questions seemed too big. As she lived every day “against the backdrop of air strikes by our planes in Vietnam,” she watched Lyndon move “in a cloud of troubles, with few rays of light.”
The antiwar protest that had begun with a few disaffected youths had mushroomed into a huge movement that united people of different ages, politics, professions, and places. On June 5, 1966, The New York Times took three pages to publish an advertisement with the names of more than 6,400 educators and other professionals who were appealing to President Johnson to withdraw troops from Vietnam. Some of the service men and women who had returned from duty in Vietnam registered their disapproval by forming Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Rallies to register antiwar sentiment were organized all across the country, and U.S. embassies in London, Paris, and Rome reinforced security to protect their staffs from assault by antiwar protesters
Although Mrs. Johnson prided herself on an ability to ferret out a tranquil spot in even the most turbulent waters, she admitted she was stymied now: “It’s like shooting the rapids, every moment a new struggle, every moment a new direction—trying to keep the craft level and away from the rocks, and no still water in sight.” She felt herself “swimming upstream against a feeling of depression and relative inertia.” Struggling to free herself and take control, she lamented: “I
flinch from activity and involvement and yet I rust without them.” Lyndon’s description of their dilemma lacked her eloquence but matched her desperation: “I can’t get out [of Vietnam]. I can’t finish it with what I have got. So what the hell can I do?”
Lady Bird saw their predicament as a uniquely troubling challenge for her husband. “It was just a hell of a thorn stuck in his throat,” she later told historian Robert Dallek. “It wouldn’t come up; it wouldn’t go down . . . It was just pure hell.” Starting preschool programs and formulating environmental measures made sense; she could get excited about either one of those because “Win or lose, it’s the right thing to do.” But on Vietnam there was no “reassuring, strong feeling” about what was right. “So uncertainty . . . we had a rich dose of that.” Lyndon described their quandary in less elegant terms, telling aide Bill Moyers that he was accustomed to looking “for the light at the end of the tunnel.” But in this case, “Hell, we don’t even have a tunnel; we don’t even know where the tunnel is.”
• • •
Mrs. Johnson may have lacked a tunnel but she had resources, and she enlisted them all. When she ventured outside and encountered angry signs and shouts, she relied on her famous ability to shut out what she did not want to see or hear. Her myopia helped, making it hard to read all but the biggest lettering on the signs. Even when physical assault seemed a real possibility, she proceeded. On her trip to give conservation speeches on the campuses of Williams College and Yale University in October 1967, she encountered crowds that her aide Cynthia Wilson thought looked like they might physically attack the first lady, but Mrs. Johnson gave no indication she even saw them. She just kept walking, eyes straight ahead, remaining “amazingly calm.”
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