Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  In the wake of the assassination, most books on the Kennedys portrayed their marriage as fairyland perfect, but the chimera of Camelot lifts with hindsight. Jackie was often away or found ways to distance herself from potentially embarrassing scenes. Accounts proliferated of JFK’s “after-hours” parties, especially in the summer when husbands, whose wives were vacationing elsewhere, felt free to squire other women to the president’s soirees. When Marilyn Monroe delivered her notoriously suggestive rendering of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” at a large fund-raiser in Madison Square Garden in May 1962, it was televised, and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen described the performance as “nothing less than making love to the president in the direct view of forty million Americans.” But Jackie was not among the forty million—she had gone horseback riding in Virginia, taking daughter Caroline with her.

  After Jackie’s death in 1994, Mimi Beardsley Alford and Helen Chavchavadze both revealed details of their own intimate encounters with President Kennedy. Alford was a young intern at the White House in 1963, and the book she published half a century later, describing her bedroom meetings with President Kennedy, sounds a bit like the dallying between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Chavchavadze’s association with JFK, as she described it to biographer Sally Bedell Smith, was more substantial. The affair had begun before the 1960 election and continued after his inauguration, when he invited Chavchavadze “from time to time for intimate evenings when Jackie was away.” Although Chavchavadze admitted she never was sure what Jackie knew and always “felt ambivalent [about the relationship] and wanted to end it,” she could not. Jack was “irresistible.”

  In appearing not to notice what was going on, Jackie Kennedy followed a long line of first ladies who kept mum about their husbands’ other women. Rather than derail a political career, Ellen Axson Wilson, the first wife of Woodrow Wilson, even incorporated her husband’s “other woman,” Mary Peck, into the Wilson family circle and invited her to meet with the Wilson daughters in the White House. Florence Harding died without ever facing journalists’ questions on the subject of her husband, Warren’s, philandering, but her rivals supplied ample evidence of his wandering eye. In 1927, Nan Britton published a book, The President’s Daughter, claiming that her liaison with Warren had produced a child. Four decades later, newly discovered letters between Warren and his Marion, Ohio, neighbor (and his wife’s close friend) Carrie Phillips revealed details of an extramarital relationship extending over many years. When those letters were fully opened to researchers in 2014, they left no doubt that Mrs. Phillips and Warren Harding liked to exchange sexually explicit messages, including pet names for private body parts.

  Lady Bird Johnson was too young to observe either Florence Harding or Ellen Wilson firsthand but she saw Eleanor Roosevelt plenty of times, and it is unlikely that she did not hear about FDR’s relationship with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor had discovered it back in 1918, when she accidentally opened letters between the two lovers. Although the liaison was not documented in print until years later, it rocked the Roosevelt clan at the time, and Eleanor’s cousin Alice Longworth liked to tattle mercilessly about Eleanor’s marital troubles. So any congressman’s wife who lived in Washington as long as Lady Bird Johnson did would have picked up hints about Mercer, who, as the widowed Mrs. Rutherfurd, resumed visits with Franklin in the White House. Regardless of when she heard about it, Lady Bird’s reaction is a matter of record: she dismissed the affair as only “a fly on the wedding cake.”

  By the 1960s, tidbits about the private lives of the nation’s leaders started turning up in tabloids, alongside gossip about movie stars and big-time athletes. Mamie Eisenhower got a taste of the coming change when photos of her husband, the Allied commander in Europe in World War II, showed him smiling broadly at the side of his willowy, winsome, young driver, Kay Summersby. Rumors of a romance spread, and Harry Truman, president at war’s end, told a biographer that Ike had intended to divorce Mamie and marry Summersby. Although Truman’s claim is not entirely accepted by historians, speculation about Ike’s relationship with Summersby was still floating around Washington after he became president in 1953. Reporter Ruth Montgomery, preparing an article about Mamie’s first year in the White House, broke an old unwritten rule and asked the first lady directly about her husband’s relationship with Summersby. Mamie quickly dismissed any possibility of impropriety, because, she said, “I know Ike.” Lady Bird Johnson, a senator’s wife at the time, may have hoped she could treat speculation about Lyndon’s other women just as breezily.

  But she was wrong. As media competed among themselves to feed a public hungry for salacious details about their leaders, LBJ, unlike JFK, was eager to accommodate them. He permitted news cameras to follow him as he drove around the ranch or lounged on a lake boat with one or more attractive woman at his side. For years, he had been nurturing stories about his huge sexual appetite, and now he had a bigger audience eager to hear about it. Aide Horace Busby provided one example, describing how he had observed from the backseat of a car how Lyndon drove with one hand and used the other to go “under the . . . skirt” of the woman seated between him and Bird. Other staff and advisers who stayed overnight at the ranch hinted at heavy use of the back stairs, which connected Lyndon’s office with second-floor bedrooms where female guests and secretaries slept. Ann Brinkley, wife of TV commentator David Brinkley, was among those who reported they had to rebuff Lyndon’s overtures.

  With a record as public and blatant as that, Lady Bird had to find her own accommodation with the role of transgressed wife. She could not rely on the examples of previous first ladies. The stances they had used to protect themselves from scandal and appear sophisticated and classy (Jackie Kennedy), shrewdly political (Ellen Wilson and Florence Harding), admirably involved in more serious issues (Eleanor Roosevelt), or harmlessly naive (Mamie Eisenhower) would not work for Mrs. Johnson.

  To Lady Bird’s advantage, she had decades of experience dealing with a womanizing husband before she got to the White House. As long as she had known him, he had hired secretaries who could double as Hollywood extras. No “tired old maids” for him. As a young congressman, he had shocked residents of his congressional district by appearing to be intimately involved with the females on his staff. He posed for campaign photos alongside the most glamorous of them and made little attempt to hide the fact that he enjoyed after-work hours with them. Marietta Brooks, head of the Women’s Division in one campaign, refused to travel with him. In Washington, the word spread, and Helen Thomas, who took her first newspaper job there in 1942, immediately observed that Congressman Johnson “liked women.”

  What had been only insignificant local rumor gained importance as he climbed the legislative ladder. He seemed to relish including sexual references in his everyday conversation, and he even alluded to intimate relations with his wife. In one press conference, with Bird present, he announced that his sleep had been interrupted the previous night by some “vigorous activity.” He winked, to make sure reporters got his point, and then invited them to verify his story with Lady Bird.

  The “sexual gorilla” image he liked to project tempted press and aides to put a tag of suspicion on every interlude he spent in the company of a sole female. And there were plenty. On Air Force One, he would lock himself in his private compartment with a secretary, even with his wife aboard. His official diary records dozens of forty-five-minute sessions in the Oval Office with only one woman present. He did make one concession to propriety, according to a White House employee. After Lady Bird walked unannounced into the Oval Office and found him on the sofa with one of his secretaries, he had an alarm system installed to alert him to her arrival.

  • • •

  Lyndon’s reputation as a Don Juan has to be viewed alongside other evidence that he respected smart women. During his first White House year, he exhorted his cabinet to promote more women, and he issued a specific goal of fifty for them to reach. He later explained the fact that his administration di
d not do better than it did because so many of the women refused to serve, citing family responsibilities or timidity or personal preference for not taking a demanding job.

  One of those who turned him down was his old friend Mary Lasker, whom he had tried to cajole into serving as ambassador to Finland. Even though he promised considerable latitude in the job (he told her she could come back home to the United States as often as she liked) she refused, saying she had no taste for the diplomat’s life, or what she called being an “actress.”

  The president had better luck getting a female ambassador to Luxembourg. He had leaned on Secretary of State Dean Rusk to name Patricia Roberts Harris, saying, “These women—I want to move them up.” Although only forty years old, African American Harris already had national name recognition (she had seconded Lyndon’s nomination at the 1964 convention) but Rusk hated to lose her on the home front, and he told the president she would be more valuable as deputy legal adviser in Washington. Not until LBJ persisted, saying an ambassadorial post conferred exceptional international recognition, did Rusk name her and she accepted.

  Who can decipher LBJ’s real motivation for advancing women’s careers? Esther Peterson, the shrewd labor specialist who became his special assistant for consumer affairs in January 1964, credited Lady Bird’s influence. But the president’s long-standing comfort with striving women like his mother may well have played a part, too, as did his desire to win women’s votes.

  • • •

  Some of those jobs for women in the Johnson White House came with a sexual component included, as journalist Grace Halsell learned. Hardly an ingenue Texan when first spotted by the president, Halsell was forty-two years old and had been supporting herself her entire adult life by writing. An alumna of Columbia University and the Sorbonne, she moved easily between journalism and freelance editing, and she blithely left a job with the “best [boss] I ever had,” oilman Earl Baldridge, because she wanted to travel in Asia. After returning to the United States and joining the Washington bureau of The Houston Post, she was part of a pack of reporters covering an event on the White House South Lawn on the afternoon of October 3, 1964. The president singled her out, shouting, “Come over here! You are the prettiest little thing I ever saw.”

  He soon dismissed the other reporters and escorted Halsell to the Oval Office where he plied her with trinkets—a bracelet, key chain, and paperweight, all with the LBJ monogram. When she stood up to leave, he, too, was suddenly “on his feet, propelling me to a sofa,” Halsell wrote; she had already realized he “did not want to engage my mind.” This was part of a power play, to feel he was a “bigger man” because he had a “small creature, a pretty little thing” at his side.

  The scene that followed bordered on the ludicrous—and Halsell described it as “Gary Cooper without a script.” The most powerful man on earth suddenly went shy, tongue-tied. Then he blurted out one of the “oldest, most hackneyed” come-ons that worldly-wise Halsell had ever heard: “Tell me all about yourself.” Aware of his interest in livestock, she began talking about her deceased father, a Fort Worth cattleman who had written several books about cowboys and the Chisholm Trail.

  But Lyndon was not into books right then. According to Halsell, he took her hand in his and with great solemnity declared, “I wish I could have been your father.” The fifteen-year-difference in their ages hardly suggested a parent-child relationship, but Halsell realized he wanted “to see himself as older, wiser, a mentor.” That was part of his need to protect and dominate lesser, female figures. The meeting lasted less than fifteen minutes, and the president’s official diary listed it as a discussion of Oveta Culp Hobby, owner of the Houston Post, for which Halsell worked at the time.

  When Halsell showed up for a job interview weeks later, she expected the same grilling on competence and experience as a male interviewee faced. But the questions the president posed convinced her that he wanted a personal relationship with his female employees; he viewed their after-work lives as relevant to their employment, part of their curriculum vitae. He inquired about Halsell’s love life, her personal problems, and why she had “never had children.”

  Horace Busby had warned Halsell that the president, although fully informed about her writing credentials, would try to add her to his secretarial pool. She was pretty, and the president surrounded himself with pretty secretaries, “more for display than passion.” He liked to tutor them on makeup and wardrobe, and in the process he sought to create the perfect female specimen, his “Aphrodite or Galatea” to make him feel good about himself.

  After learning that Halsell did not take dictation, the president hired her as an aide, responsible for churning out pithy, short speeches on his achievements and scanning newspapers for favorable editorials. The resulting press packets, which she sent over to Capitol Hill for inclusion in the Congressional Record, struck her as sad evidence of a pathetic man. Here he was, a world leader, but he still required constant reassurance of his worth.

  Although Halsell remained on his staff until 1968, she deplored his treatment of women and judged him a terrible boss. He instructed his aides to hire women with “good behinds” so he could “enjoy” their rears as they left, in case he had not fully registered their precise measurements when they walked in. He commented on Halsell’s clothes and warned her one day: “If you wear a tight dress like that, you are going to get your bottom pinched.” He inserted sexual innuendo into the most innocent relationships, and when Halsell went to lunch at a Washington restaurant with a male colleague, the president tracked them down and called three times, implying they were having lunchtime sex or what he called “a matinee.” He even implied he wanted a matinee of his own, phoning Halsell days later with instructions to get “rested up . . . hair fixed real pretty . . . get perfumed up.”

  As for why he carried on with other women in front of his wife, Halsell had a theory: “The more he belittled [Lady Bird], the more ‘man’ he perhaps imagined himself to be.” Sometimes floundering in the face of big decisions, he could feel upstaged by a self-controlled, disciplined wife. That Bird loved him dearly made her the perfect target for his darts. And he certainly knew how to launch them. Halsell noted that whenever she and the president walked into the first lady’s line of vision, he would take one of Halsell’s hands firmly in his, implying an intimacy that never existed.

  • • •

  The list of women reporting Lyndon’s sexual advances and propositions is so long as to suggest he might have thought a woman would feel offended if he did not try. Nora Ephron, the sassy dramatist, noted after reading the many accounts of JFK’s trysts that she must have been the only White House intern he did not hit on. Lyndon had a similar reputation. His seasoned secretaries (such as Mildred Stegall and Juanita Roberts) were not on his playmate list, but most of the younger ones reported how he hinted at wanting—or outright invited them into—a sexual relationship. The very proper, religiously observant Marie Fehmer, his secretary from 1962 to 1969, revealed that he offered to set her up in a New York apartment if she would agree to bear him a son. Doris Kearns (later Goodwin), the White House fellow who worked with him on his memoir and later wrote a book about him, acknowledged that he had broached the subject of marriage with her, too.

  Lyndon Johnson’s presidential diary is full of names of beautiful women who passed through the Oval Office, swam in the White House pool, slept in the executive mansion’s guest quarters, sometimes night after night, and spent weekends at Camp David. But, with one exception, none has published a tell-all account of a sexual relationship.

  The exception is Madeleine Duncan Brown, an advertising salesperson, whose 1997 book, Texas in the Morning, details a twenty-year-long affair with Lyndon that she said began in 1948 and produced a son two years later. Only twenty-three when she met him, she was so awed by the “fierce, dynamic energy . . . [of the] handsome . . . six feet, five [sic] inches tall” senator that she could hardly talk. But she regained enough composure to accept every invit
ation she received to spend time with him, invitations usually delivered via Jesse Kellam, who as head of KTBC had business dealings with her employer, Glenn Advertising.

  When Brown told Lyndon she was pregnant, he was furious, and called her a “goddamn dumb Dora.” But after the baby was born (and named Steven Brown, taking the surname of Madeleine’s husband, from whom she was separated), Lyndon generously provided funds, she claimed, with largess funneled through Dallas attorney Jerome T. Ragsdale. Although shocked by Lyndon’s threats that she should keep quiet about their relationship or “your ass will be in a hell of a lot of trouble,” Brown accepted his terms, which she listed as including a six-room house, live-in maid, sheaf of credit cards, and a monthly stipend.

  In Brown’s very last meeting with Lyndon, an entirely platonic encounter in August 1969, she tried to persuade him to recognize Steven as his son, but she reported that the “crumpled, overweight, haggard-looking” ex-president balked: “I’m sorry. I just can’t go public with this. I’ve got the girls to consider and Bird. I have hurt them enough.”

  Although Brown first spoke publicly about the affair in a 1982 interview, she did not mention the paternity issue until five years later, when she was diagnosed with a serious illness and wanted to set the record straight with her son before she died. Steven Brown subsequently sued for a $10.5 million share of Lyndon’s estate, causing People magazine to publish an article on the Lyndon-Madeleine relationship in 1987. But Steven died (of lymphatic cancer) in 1990 without collecting.

  Even after Madeleine Duncan Brown published her book, full of tantalizing details about steamy couplings and pet names (he was her “Sandow,” a currently famous bodybuilder), Lady Bird maintained there was no credible evidence for an affair between the two. But historians took special note of one letter Brown reproduced in her book, a letter from attorney Jerome Ragsdale, written soon after Lyndon’s death and promising to “continue with the financial arrangements that Lyndon provided for you and Steve . . . [with additional funds] if you need.” Biographer Randall Woods is among those who tend to credit Madeleine Brown’s account.