It was no secret that Jacqueline Kennedy had escaped Washington woes with trips to exotic places, riding elephants with her sister in India; swimming with daughter Caroline off Italy’s Amalfi coast; cruising in the Greek islands with European jet-setters. But Lyndon Johnson frowned on his family indulging in expensive vacations abroad, even if paid for out of their own pockets. So the extended international travel that Lady Bird had relished during her husband’s vice presidency was almost entirely eliminated now. Her official trips as first lady, such as representing the president at the funeral of a Greek monarch, did not count as time off. Not when Secret Service agents surrounded her, reporters scrutinized every facial expression, and European royalty weighed in on whether she removed the correct glove at the proper moment. She needed an escape, a place to unwind, and she orchestrated one such trip in June 1965, while her husband wrestled with Vietnam problems.
On that Caribbean outing, she took along Herman Wouk’s newly published Don’t Stop the Carnival, about living it up on a sunny, laid-back island, and she included only a tiny work assignment for herself. To justify spending taxpayers’ money and appease Lyndon, she promised to deliver the commencement speech at the University of the Virgin Islands. With that obligation out of the way, she proceeded to enjoy the sea and sun on the island, St. John, with her brother Tony and his wife, Matianna. Bird, slim in a two-piece, powder blue bathing suit, mugged for her home movie camera and strutted like a winner at the Miss America contest. Her security detail kept a polite distance while she and her closest aides, Bess Abell and Liz Carpenter, cavorted in the sand. The first lady donned snorkel gear and a slicker before scampering to a little boat waiting to take her to a secluded cove. She laughed so hard, her face screwed up, squeezing her eyes shut.
But such ventures beyond U.S. borders were rare. The first lady found some relief from the cares of her job at the LBJ Ranch, and she started whittling out more time to spend there. After an action-packed day of greeting hundreds and giving a major speech in Lincoln, Nebraska, on June 15, 1966, she let her staff and accompanying reporters return to Washington while she headed to the ranch. She remained there for nine days. Sounding like a kid let out of school, she penned in her own hand her diary entry for June 18: “drove myself” around the ranch, “watched ‘Gun Smoke,’ ” and “read.”
Back in Washington, the president was distraught. On top of all his other disappointments, one of his beagles had been killed the day Bird left, right there on the White House grounds, accidentally run over by one of the chauffeurs. Staff had been so reluctant to tell him, they sent Lynda Bird to relay the sad news. But even revelation of tragedy did not induce Mrs. Johnson to rejoin her husband. She wanted some time for herself, to savor “supper alone at pool” and the pleasure of going to bed “early.”
While she was in Texas, the president alternated spurts of buoyant, high spirits with troughs of brooding discontent. His secretaries recorded jovial bantering between him and congressional leaders at one meeting; a subsequent photographic session erupted in laughter. He hosted a stag dinner for more than one hundred in honor of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. But on unscheduled evenings, LBJ moped and fidgeted, trying to figure out “what to do tonight.” On June 18, he phoned his secretarial pool more than once, asking if the weather looked good for a boat ride. Unable to come up with a plan, he took a nap. By a little before 8 p.m., he was on the phone again, lining up companions for a dinner cruise on the Potomac. Quiet time with only a good book for company, or watching an old movie with one of his daughters, did not suit his high-octane style. To put the pressures of his job out of mind, he needed an audience, an extremely appreciative one, and that usually meant a congenial mix of high-powered, sympathetic males and attractive, complaisant females. On June 18 his first call went to Eloise Thornberry, wife of the judge who once represented Lyndon’s old congressional district.
To relieve the pressure of their jobs, both the president and first lady looked for small diversions while on duty in Washington. Lyndon liked to turn one workday into two: after getting to his office, he typically stayed until late afternoon, then had lunch, took a nap, and started again. After a shower and full change of clothes, he would continue until nine or so in the evening. Under the high tension surrounding Vietnam decisions, he turned one nap into two, and routinely summoned a masseur for a rubdown before bedtime. By 1966, Bird was incorporating the same relaxation techniques, naps lasting sometimes two hours and a daily massage. During one twenty-four-hour period, she summoned the masseur twice.
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For exercise, which their physicians encouraged, both the president and first lady walked on the South Lawn, often together, and she dutifully took herself to the Executive Office Building for a measured thirty minutes of bowling. Since these were often spur-of-the-moment decisions, she didn’t have time to book anyone to join her, and she never liked to plan ahead anyway—Lyndon could call for her at any time and expect her to show up in a matter of minutes. With the White House pool at her disposal, she might have indulged in solo swims, one of her favorite forms of exercise, but the cost of getting her hair done deterred her. “It takes $8 to make me presentable to the public after I have had a swim,” she noted in her diary.
As Lyndon’s anxieties ballooned, he spent fewer hours in the Oval Office and more in the pool. In the first frenetic months of his presidency, he typically dressed for work before 9 a.m. so he could cram breakfast meetings with legislators in between conferences with aides and photo sessions with foreign dignitaries. Now, in a besieged White House, he dwelt longer on the morning papers. Day after day, he did not leave the residence until nearly noon. His calendar is dotted with “swim,” even on weekday mornings at eleven, when most busy executives stayed at their desks.
Bird felt guilty spending time away from her overwhelmed husband, but she did it anyway. After a July 4, 1965, weekend at the ranch, she stayed behind while he returned to the White House to host a dinner for Australian prime minister Robert Menzies. The next evening, when Lynda Bird phoned her father from Wyoming, where she was vacationing, she thought he sounded “lonesome,” and she immediately sent out an SOS to the person who could help: “You know, Mother, he’s never the same without you.” Although Bird stood her ground and refused to budge, she wrote in her diary, “I felt selfish, as though I was insulating myself from pain and troubles down here.” In a touch of defiance, she added: “I do know I need [time alone at the ranch].” Not until the next day did she phone her husband.
The president assuaged her guilt a bit by joining her at the ranch the following weekend, and he engaged some of his favorite people—Jack and Mary Margaret Valenti, secretary Vicky McCammon, and aide Joe Califano—to help him have fun. When he ushered them onto his boat on Saturday evening, Bird joined the party. But she brought her own circle of congenial company—a group from Karnack who were trying to buy the Brick House, where she was born, and turn it into a historical site. In the midst of so many disappointments and trials, it must have been gratifying to know that her hometown wanted to recognize her by turning her birthplace into a tourist site, although they were unsuccessful. The Brick House remained the private residence of her stepmother Ruth and of Ruth’s heirs.
As the anti-Vietnam protests escalated, the Johnsons turned more inward, taking a measure of satisfaction in seeing movies about themselves. When they first moved into the White House, they used the East Wing theater to watch Hollywood’s latest releases, but by 1966, they showed a preference for more familiar subjects. The first lady had enlisted presidential aide Harry Middleton to give a professional touch to the documentary films that Navy photographers made about the president and his family. Some sounded like newsreels, reporting on travels and meetings. Others showed family fun—pictures of Luci and Lynda and their friends. All were flattering. Rather than the TV documentaries on body counts in Vietnam, the Johnsons saw tranquil pictures of people and places they loved. They watched The President’s Country, full of ranc
hlands and lakes, more than a dozen times, and the White House projectionist, who served several presidential families, noted that the Johnsons were unusual in how much they liked watching themselves.
Courtenay Lynda Valenti, the curly-headed toddler daughter of Mary Margaret and Jack Valenti, became a featured player in the Navy photographers’ films because she was one of the president’s pet diversions. She had the ability, Bird noted, to keep Lyndon “in the palm of her small cherub hand.” He would phone the Valenti home, sometimes twice a day, just to hear her babble, and he included her on Potomac cruises even when her parents couldn’t come. After he permitted her to climb on his lap during a meeting of the National Security Council and tweak his nose, journalists scrambled for more information on the child, and Maxine Cheshire of The Washington Post requested a picture of her. She didn’t get it.
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Neither of the president’s daughters had ever provided the same escape as Courtenay, and Bird lamented that it was “almost sad” that in his mid-fifties Lyndon had more time for another child than he ever had for his own. The negligence was not a fault, however, as far as Bird was concerned. She thought he “was cut out for destiny and doing anything less would be a waste.” She would have to handle for both of them “the troubles that came along.”
Those troubles included dealing with the needs of their two very different daughters: the solid, “reliable, planning-ahead” Lynda and the unpredictable Luci, a “lark,” who met “each day on tiptoe.” The bubbly, younger daughter had struggled to get passing grades at school, while Lynda excelled. But in the spring of 1964, as a sophomore in high school, Luci began treatment with Washington optometrist Dr. Robert A. Kraskin, who diagnosed an eye coordination problem and prescribed eye exercises. Her grades quickly improved, as did her attitude. She had always been outspoken about her objections to her father’s job and how it impinged on her life—separating her from both parents for long periods and showering her with unwelcome scrutiny. But once in the White House she appeared more amenable to the demands of a politician’s life, and Lady Bird marveled at the change: “You might as well try to bottle sunshine as to suppress her.” Luci shared her father’s love of animals, and after the death of one of his favorite beagles, she picked up a stray at a Texas gas station and it quickly became his treasured companion, Yuki. In times of despair, when he asked staff to “call in the dogs” for a little diversion, it was Yuki he wanted to see.
Lynda shared many of her mother’s interests—in history and theater—but lacked her press savvy and social skills. After grousing about living in the White House for the spring semester of 1964, she returned to her sorority house in Austin the following September and finished college at the University of Texas. When she came east for vacations, she occasionally accompanied her mother to a local art gallery or on shopping excursions to New York, where the two liked to end the day with a Broadway show. But on her solo trips, Lynda annoyed the press by refusing requests for pictures and interviews. Bird admitted Lynda could be “impossible” at times, and worried that she was missing out on “the world” and the chance “to taste it all.”
With such diverging personalities, it is not surprising the two sisters fought a lot—or as their mother put it, they failed to show much “mutual appreciation.” After Luci’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, Lynda objected that she “looks down” on the rest of the family, judging them inferior for choosing to remain Protestant. Luci complained about her sister’s inability to “reach out to other people,” and when Women’s Wear Daily gave all three Johnson women bad marks for how they dressed, Luci blamed Lynda’s “bobby socks and loafers” for the humiliation.
The Johnson White House years coincided with tumultuous changes in both daughters’ lives. After announcing and then breaking her engagement to a young man from Comfort, Texas, Lynda became involved in a highly publicized romance with Hollywood actor George Hamilton, then met and married White House aide Chuck Robb, and gave birth to a daughter. In just two years, July 1965 to June 1967, Luci converted to Catholicism, married Pat Nugent, and gave birth to the Johnsons’ first grandchild.
The normal anxieties of early adulthood were underscored for the Johnson daughters by the intense publicity and Secret Service surveillance they received. Luci complained, “I had just gotten my driver’s license and my first car and all of a sudden I had a twenty-four-hour chaperone.” What remained strictly family business in other households—youthful romances, wardrobe mistakes, honor rolls, career choices—made national news when a daughter of the president was involved, and neither the daughters nor their parents were happy with the result. Lyndon found fault with much of what they did. He objected to how Lynda dressed and instructed her to go out and buy some good clothes and send the bill to him. After an article appeared about a projected trip to Europe, he was livid. When Katie Louchheim mentioned to Liz Carpenter that she found Lady Bird “rushed . . . helpless and disturbed,” Liz shot back, “What would you be, if you had a husband who constantly raised hell with you about your two daughters’ difficult behavior?”
When eighteen-year-old Luci announced in late 1965 that she wanted to marry Midwesterner Pat Nugent, she set off a string of worries and problems for her parents. First, that she was too young. Bird was hardly in a position to object to short courtships—hers lasted only a few weeks. But she had been nearly twenty-two years old, with two university degrees in hand, when she married Lyndon; Luci had only high school and a few nursing school classes. Bird had tried to expose both daughters to career women with exciting jobs in some “wicked and delightful city” like Rome. But neither one showed much interest in “leading the sort of life” that Bird had imagined for herself after college. She had wanted them to “taste the cream of life and fall in love a dozen times” before marrying anyone.
But here Luci was, setting her wedding date for August 6, 1966, when she would be barely nineteen. Loud objections suddenly surfaced, objections that would never have arisen concerning the offspring of less famous parents. It seemed that even the slightest acquaintance expected an invitation, and Washington’s Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, although large, could not accommodate them all. Katie Louchheim complained that she was one of those left off the list, even though she had generously offered to put up some of the bride’s out-of-town guests.
While agonizing over the particulars of a wedding—attendants’ gowns and flowers and food at the reception—Luci faced a barrage of criticism. One busybody suggested it was insensitive to choose a date that much of the world associated with the American bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Luci countered that perhaps December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, would have been preferable. Labor union leaders objected that the bridal gown lacked a union label; and when an airline executive offered to provide air-conditioning for the church, the president had to refuse the offer—because the airline’s workers were currently on strike. The Immaculate Conception church became so overheated that August Saturday that the bride’s sister fainted. Rather than a happy family milestone, the Nugent wedding was a mixture of calamitous events, and Bird was happy to escape to Huntland, the Virginia estate of her friends Alice and George Brown, when it was over.
That same summer saw Lynda dating George Hamilton, the tall, perpetually tanned movie star with facial features resembling those seen in shaving cream ads. Five years her senior, Hamilton had been around Hollywood long enough to know something about makeup and fashion, and he started encouraging Lynda in a remarkable makeover. She had tended to be overweight and once quipped that her “awkward age” extended from “five to twenty-five,” a statement her mother deemed “a ridiculous exaggeration.” But Bird did admit that Lynda “was a fat little girl for quite a number of years,” and blamed herself: “I’m afraid I’m the one who gets the black marks for that.”
Lynda had started taking off excess weight in her sophomore year in college, and her much publicized romance with Hamilton gave her the chance to show off her lithe
figure in sleeveless sheath dresses in Jackie Kennedy size. In an AP photo of a beaming, elegant Lynda beside Hamilton at a social event in Los Angeles, she bore a striking resemblance to Audrey Hepburn. Bird’s home movies caught the grinning couple lounging at the ranch pool, and although she thought Hamilton overrated, with “a few too many women crazy about him,” she liked his effect on her daughter. “Excitement is a new mood for Lynda,” Bird wrote in her diary, “and it becomes her. She looks radiant, happy, in the swift current of her life.”
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On October 3, 1967, Bird was at the ranch, happily arranging her collection of Doughty birds on shelves and thinking about the time when she and Lyndon would live full time in that house, when she received a phone call that sent her rushing back to the capital. It was from Dr. Hurst and he needed to see her—about Lyndon. Three hours later she was on the JetStar, headed east. When her plane landed in Washington just before midnight, Dr. Hurst was there waiting, and as he rode with her in the backseat of her soundproof limo to the White House, he updated her on the president’s condition.
Hurst had been treating Lyndon long enough to feel he could size up his condition pretty quickly, without an extended examination. Just by looking at him, assessing his color and energy level, and talking with the staff who saw him every day, Hurst felt confident of his diagnosis, which he would then substantiate with the tests and measurements commonly used in physical examinations. The doctor had already stopped at the White House twice that year, and although others commented that the president looked excessively tired, Hurst did not agree with them. This time was different—he saw reason for alarm. His most famous patient looked fatigued; energy depleted; mood glum. The prescription that Hurst knew worked best—attention from Lady Bird—had to be increased in dosage.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 33