Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  As the doctor and first lady rode together that night through Washington streets, he advised her to spend more time with her husband, monitor his rest and diet more closely, help him through this rough period. It was a rare case of Bird being told she was falling short of expectations, and her first reaction was to pull down the famous psychic veil and shut out what she was hearing. When Hurst saw that she was not listening to a word he said, he called her on it and she immediately “jolted herself back into this world and she apologized profusely.” Although it was well after midnight when she got to bed that night, she was in her husband’s bedroom by 7:45 the next morning.

  In the months that followed, her juggling act—preserving her own sanity and helping her beleaguered husband—grew more difficult as antiwar rallies multiplied. No U.S. city showed deeper anger and hostility toward the president than the capital. “Washington was burning, [with] endless protests,” one of Bird’s aides remembered, and the first lady could not look outside her window without seeing them. Mothers who had never demonstrated for any cause showed up with their daughters at the Women Strike for Peace march on the Pentagon in February 1967. A few months later, another women’s march turned violent after security officers ordered the demonstrators to keep their distance from the White House. In October 1967, an estimated 100,000 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, and nearly a third of that number remained for a march on the Pentagon, where they camped overnight to underscore the strength of their dissent.

  Bird’s dream of leaving the White House in a blaze of achievement had vanished, as the behemoth of Vietnam quashed hopes for a grand legacy. She is not on record as challenging at the time her husband’s decision to expand the fighting in Vietnam, but evidence accumulated later indicates she may have had misgivings about the course he chose. In a March 1967 entry in her White House diary, not open to the public until 2014, she questioned the wisdom of “looking for communists under every bed.” Long after leaving the White House she told an interviewer that a president needs some momentous justification for leading a nation into war, “like Pearl Harbor or the Alamo,” a justification her husband clearly never had.

  Even while her husband was still alive, she questioned the validity of the “domino theory,” which drove his decisions on the war. And she did it in front of a witness. Aaron Asher, the editor who worked with Lyndon on his book, The Vantage Point, in 1971, had once been an antiwar protester, and he had continued to question what really lay behind the dogged persistence to stay in Vietnam when so much of the evidence indicated victory could never be won.

  When Asher learned that President Nixon was planning to reverse American policy and turn the war back to the Vietnamese, he decided to ask what ex-President Johnson thought about that. Would it work? “Of course not,” Lyndon replied very emphatically. And then he proceeded to outline the disastrous future he foresaw: the “incompetent” South Vietnamese military will “lose Vietnam,” giving the communists the chance to overrun the Philippines and invade Hawaii. He ended his monologue with the dire prediction that his grandson would one day have to fight in Asia. Asher found himself speechless, wondering if LBJ could “really believe all that?” Then Bird spoke up, and in her soft, deferential way, asked, “But, Lyndon, don’t you think that they, the Vietnamese, if they take over, will have so much on their plates that like the Russians and their détente, they’ll turn inward?” Asher admitted that he was so “fearful of being in the middle of a domestic explosion,” he excused himself and left the room. But he later regretted that decision, realizing that it was “possible that this had not been the first time the Johnsons, in the privacy of their home, had disagreed about the war.”

  Throughout her long marriage, Bird had admitted to helping her husband navigate through serious illnesses and draconian choices, but she had not claimed any credit for influencing his thinking on Vietnam. She had once explained that she had not felt “big enough” for that. But her comment in front of Asher doesn’t sound like that of a woman who didn’t try.

  17

  OUTLANDISH LBJ

  LYNDON WAS A big-time flirt for as long as Bird knew him. He called most women “Honey” and showered them with buttery compliments, like those that gained him an extra piece of pie from the mothers of his boyhood friends back in Johnson City. In the White House, he greeted female staff with head-to-toe appraisals and questions about how each had spent the previous evening. His banter—about the boyfriend of one or the new hairstyle of another—turned what should have been a professional relationship into a confusing intimacy that mixed paternal concern with Don Juan overtures. He rewarded his favorites with expensive shoes and jewelry, and if that did not ignite jealousy, his proffer of a seat beside him on Air Force One surely did. Someone suggested the first lady post a warning for the secretarial pool: “You can play with Lyndon, but you cannot take him home with you.”

  With a husband whose interest in other women was so fully documented, Lady Bird would have looked foolish trying to disprove it. Yet the honesty with which she acknowledged his wandering eye produced the most damning charges against her. Even her most ardent fans expressed dismay that she failed to show more backbone—assert her own dignity and rein him in. Quick to entertain at her table the women whose names had been linked to his, she heartily complimented them on their looks and cleverness, even hosted them on overnight stays.

  What was she thinking? Why did she do it? Those were virtually the only questions that visibly raised her ire, as Texan journalist Jan Jarboe Russell learned during interviews in the late 1990s. After Mrs. Johnson spent amiable hours with Russell, who was preparing to write an article about her, the meetings suddenly stopped. Russell’s queries on the subject of Lyndon’s philandering had made the ex–first lady very angry. Her voice turned uncharacteristically shrill, and she lashed out: “When people ask me these sort of things, I just say, ‘Look to your own lives. . . . Fix yourselves, and keep your problems to yourself.’ ”

  Lyndon’s high-spirited physicality fueled rumors about his sex life. He wound his arms around male and female alike, and since pre-1970s women were less likely than subsequent generations to object to a hand brushing a breast or lingering on a buttock, he got away with it. A member of Mrs. Johnson’s White House staff wrote many years after leaving Washington that President Johnson “enjoyed his physical power. What I experienced nearly every time I saw him was a squeeze on the butt, or putting his arm around my wrist and pulling me to his side. These were definitely sexual expressions, but he wasn’t trying to take the next step [and I] interpreted his gestures as a natural exuberance, not a threat I had to repulse.”

  In other cases, the evidence is more substantial and the goal clearer. Early in his presidency, he warned reporters that they should take no notice of “me coming in and out of a few women’s bedrooms while I am in the White House. . . . That is none of your business.” And he bragged about the number of his sexual partners, quipping that he had had more women by chance than JFK had had on purpose. Aides became accustomed to that braggadocio, and although he avoided names, his behavior (which included frequent private sessions with one woman or another) provided enough supporting evidence to lend credence to his claims.

  Harry McPherson, who worked closely with him for more than a decade, insisted Lyndon was not priapic, using and then discarding women for his own pleasure; he genuinely cared for the women he wooed. Unlike JFK, who explained that “if he did not have a woman every three days, he would have a terrible headache,” LBJ formed relationships that lasted over time.

  One woman whose relationship did last many years stands out from all the others, and might well have presented a genuine threat to the Johnson marriage. Texan Mary Margaret Wiley, who had taken a job in Lyndon’s Washington office in 1954 before she graduated from UT, quickly became a mainstay in his work and personal life. She traveled with him on both business and pleasure trips and even lived for a while in the Johnson home. Lyndon’s on-and-off aide for many years, Joe Phipp
s, later wrote that Wiley was performing “all the wifely chores” that had previously fallen to Bird. But Phipps insisted the relationship was not intimate and that gossip to the contrary was “vicious.”

  At Washington dinner parties that Bird attended with Lyndon or hosted at home, Wiley’s name was often paired with that of Bob Waldon, a bachelor newly arrived in Washington. But in December 1961, a different man started showing up as Wiley’s escort—Jack Valenti, a forty-year-old advertising executive from Dallas, who had met Wiley while working for Lyndon in the 1960 campaign. By the spring of 1962, he was Wiley’s regular date for dinners at the Johnson homes, both at the ranch and at The Elms.

  In mid-May, Valenti’s status suddenly changed when the vice president announced to his staff that Mary Margaret was quitting her job to marry Jack. Events surrounding this decision suggest that it was made with difficulty. George Reedy, who shared a flight with the Johnsons and Mary Margaret at that time, recalled, “Well, believe me, we celebrated my father’s death with more hilarity than was exhibited on that trip.” Although a new secretary, Marie Fehmer, had been hired to take her place, Mary Margaret stayed with the Johnsons until five days before the wedding. On Friday, June 1, the vice president of the United States walked Mary Margaret down the aisle at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Houston, while her father sat in a nearby pew. (Mary Margaret was Episcopalian but Jack’s Sicilian mother wanted a Catholic wedding.) Bird and Lyndon attended the lunch following the nuptials and presented the couple with an “antique silver tray.”

  Although Mary Margaret Valenti was no longer their employee, she continued to be a featured player in the Johnsons’ lives. Only four weeks after her wedding, she flew to Washington without Jack to spend time with them. She subsequently accompanied them to Jamaica, where they all met Princess Margaret and her husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones. In October, Mrs. Valenti joined the vice president on his speech-making jaunts to California and Hawaii, and she spent considerable time at the ranch.

  Jack Valenti gradually began doing less advertising work in Houston so he could make himself useful to the VP, and he showed a dogged loyalty that quickly propelled him into the Johnsons’ innermost circle. He was at LBJ’s side at a governors conference in Florida and also at the opening session of the Senate on September 18, 1962. Both Valentis were in the Johnson delegation to the Dominican Republic in February 1963, and to the Vatican in June for the funeral of Pope John XXIII.

  By summer 1963, the now visibly pregnant Mrs. Valenti and her husband were such frequent guests at the ranch that Bird included them in nearly every family event. On July 1, they helped comfort the vice president when one of his dogs died, and they assisted in his plan to surprise Luci on her “sweet sixteen” birthday with a shiny Corvair Monza convertible. On November 1, 1963, Mrs. Valenti gave birth to a daughter, Courtenay Lynda, in Houston, but two weeks later she and Jack were back at the ranch, driving around the fields with the vice president. Lyndon may have lost a secretary but not the companionship and whatever moral support and satisfaction the relationship with Mary Margaret brought him. The Valenti family continued to figure in the Johnsons’ life all during the White House years, joining them for Sunday lunch in the residence and for weekends at Camp David.

  Naturally, rumors flew and jokes proliferated about the real relationship between the president and his former secretary. But then, speculation about Lyndon’s sex life had figured in descriptions of him for a very long time. When he first arrived in Washington, his co-workers did not detect signs of the sexual conquistador in him—he was too busy chumming up to superiors and exerting power over his colleagues. Part of his ambitious play for advancement included squiring the wives of important men around the dance floor, but no one took that for anything other than courting favor with the husbands. By the late 1930s, however, evidence accumulated, both in Washington and Texas, that he had little regard for monogamy.

  The women whose names were linked to his came from his closest circle—wives of fellow legislators and aides, family friends, journalists, and secretarial staff. His wife could hardly avoid the women mentioned—she saw them every day—at political gatherings, in his office, in their homes or hers. Snubbing them or treating them ungraciously could have backfired, reverberating through Lyndon’s office. So she incorporated them into her day without showing an ounce of bad will; she was particularly gracious to Mary Margaret, even driving out to the airport at midnight to pick her up in Washington when she returned from a speech-making trip with Lyndon.

  Friends mused that a look of sadness sometimes crossed Bird’s face when she encountered blatant evidence of her husband’s attention to other women, but she quickly rallied to the task at hand and hid whatever disappointment she felt. Marie Fehmer, Lyndon’s secretary for many years, told Randall Woods, professor of history at the University of Arkansas, that she once accompanied Mrs. Johnson to Lyndon’s California hotel, where they found Mary Margaret’s lingerie strewn about his room. Calmly and without comment, Bird began gathering up the panties and bras, and then she “went out of her way to be nice” to Mary Margaret.

  No shortage of women competed for Lyndon’s attention. Winsome journalists crowded around the president, illustrating the truth in Henry Kissinger’s famous comment that power is a potent aphrodisiac. When Time magazine reported on the 1964 Easter vacation of the Johnsons at the ranch, it made it sound like everybody was living it up. The headline, “Mr. President, You’re Fun,” appeared to be a quote from Hearst reporter Marianne Means, who had cooed that in his ear while fastening her “baby-blue eyes” on him as he drove her around in his Lincoln Continental. One of the other female reporters in the car explained that Lyndon had just shown them his prize cattle and given them “a very graphic description of the sex life of a bull.” Coincidentally, that same issue of Time carried a full-page advertisement, encouraging readers to notice how it’s always the most exciting people who drive Lincoln Continentals.

  Lady Bird had already noted Means’s powers of attraction a few weeks earlier when she accompanied Lyndon to Means’s Washington home to join a gathering she described as “a younger crowd, including lots of Roosevelts.” Bird extolled the hostess as “absolutely ravishing—like a mermaid . . . in a blue-green iridescent sequined [gown] that fit her like her skin—low neck, low back.”

  For a woman like Bird, who started life as the daughter of a gruff shopkeeper in a gritty Texas town, the chance to mix with sequined mermaids, movie stars, and bona fide Roosevelts was as exciting as extramarital affairs were commonplace. Her father’s reputation as a ladies’ man survived him in Harrison County. Bird made no secret of her preference for big, macho men like her father, and staffer Horace Busby concluded it was impossible to fathom her outsized attraction to Lyndon without understanding her deep attachment to T.J. She admired kindly, mild men, such as Adlai Stevenson, but was not physically drawn to them and could not understand why so many other women were. Liz Carpenter admitted her own tastes differed, and she said she would be delighted to have Stevenson “put his shoes under my bed any night.”

  • • •

  Although Lady Bird Johnson and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy differed in many respects, they were a lot alike in their thinking about men. Each idolized her own notoriously philandering father. In their impressionable early years, both women learned that the “manliness” of their beloved fathers did not include monogamy, and, wedding vows notwithstanding, “faithful” was not part of the marriage bargain. Lady Bird implied as much in her comment to Jan Jarboe Russell, and Mrs. Kennedy’s friend, the author Edna O’Brien, reported in her memoir that Jackie “skimmed over” JFK’s infidelities when talking about the magnetism of the Kennedy men.

  In comparing the philandering of LBJ and JFK, Theodore Sorensen, who worked for both men, noted that Johnson flaunted his extramarital relationships while Kennedy went to great lengths to keep his hidden, especially from his wife: he took pains not “to confront, humiliate, hurt or anger Jacqueline with public m
isconduct.” Sorensen admitted he did not know how much Jackie knew or suspected about her husband’s relationships with other women. “Nor do I know,” he wrote, “whether she would have responded to her husband’s womanizing with the same philosophical acceptance as Lady Bird Johnson.”

  After Jackie’s death, evidence surfaced that she knew a lot. A letter that came to public attention in 2014 indicated she was fully aware of JFK’s voracious sexual appetite before she married him in 1953. The previous year she had written to an Irish priest in Dublin, the Reverend Joseph Leonard, that John Kennedy resembled her father in his transitory interest in women: “loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents [his wife]. I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.”

  As first lady, Jackie occasionally alluded to her husband’s philandering and at least once angrily objected to having to face one of his sex mates. When she spotted a certain “blonde bimbo” in a reception line, she “wheeled around in fury” and lambasted one of her husband’s aides: “Isn’t it bad enough that you solicit this woman for my husband, but then you insult me by asking me to shake her hand!” Jackie subsequently regained her composure and greeted the woman politely, just as Lady Bird would have done. On another occasion, Jackie pointed to one of her husband’s assistants and said, in French, to a French newsman: “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.”