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Even after Lyndon ridiculed them or treated them unkindly, his secretarial pool and female staffers supplied him with loving attention and admiring support beyond what any one woman could offer. Tallish Vicky McCammon, who began working for him in 1962, said he told her she looked like an ox when she wore big prints, but she still named her first son for him. Other female employees agreed that an insult from Lyndon felt like a compliment. One new hire from Texas reported that she had been excited about going along with the president and his female entourage on a night out. She dressed carefully in what was then her Sunday best, and only years later, as a chic Washington matron, did she realize she probably looked “tacky . . . [as if she came from] Walmart.” At evening’s end, as his limousine stopped to let her out, she overheard him say, “Can’t somebody teach that girl how to dress?” Rather than feeling offended or hurt, she was elated that he had noticed her and that he cared.
Lyndon needed a bevy of beauties around him, and Bird made room for all of them, including Mathilde Krim, the blond scientist with beauty to match her brains. Born in 1926 in Como, Italy, she had earned an Italian science degree and a Swiss doctorate before moving to Israel to conduct medical research at the Weizmann Institute. In 1957 she met and married a Weizmann board member, American Arthur Krim, a forty-seven-year-old entertainment lawyer who had not yet produced the Hollywood blockbusters that would earn Oscars in the 1970s, but was already extremely wealthy. After briefly trying a bicontinental partnership, the couple settled on New York’s Upper East Side.
As Arthur Krim became an increasingly important contributor to the Democratic Party, he grew friendly with top-rung politicos, and after a Madison Square Garden birthday bash in 1962, President Kennedy spent time at the Krim apartment on East 69th Street. Vice President Johnson accompanied Kennedy and met the diminutive Mathilde, whose long reddish blond hair and round face made her look younger than her thirty-five years. By 1966, the Krims had entered the top tier of Johnson guests. Arthur, who chaired the Finance Committee of the Democratic Party, and Mathilde spent so much time at the White House that one source reported they kept a room there. They had also purchased land near the LBJ Ranch and built a home of their own, convenient for spontaneous visits with the Johnsons. Arthur occasionally stayed on the third floor of the White House but more often his wife was there alone. Even when Bird was back in Texas, Mathilde Krim, whose only official title was member of the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation, stayed at the White House, and the first lady appeared not to mind. She wrote in her diary on one occasion “the fact that [Mathilde’s] so pretty is a pleasure for [Lyndon].” A year later, Bird wrote: Lyndon “likes to have the prettiest woman beside him. Today it is Mathilde Krim.”
Bird’s home movies show a high-spirited, athletic Mathilde Krim cavorting near the pool at the ranch, scaling a windmill, and attempting upside-down balancing acts—in full view of a smiling, appreciative Lyndon. On Saturday afternoon May 21, 1966, when the president was taking a beating from the press on Vietnam, Mathilde spent time alone with him and then joined his party at Camp David. Bird cooperated in lining up other people who could make her husband forget his problems that weekend, a group that included Bill and June White, Jack and Mary Margaret Valenti, Marianne Means, and Vicky McCammon. On Sunday, the president moped in his pajamas all day, but by 6:30 that evening he had a circle of doting females (including Mathilde Krim) around him in the Aspen Cabin living room, while Lady Bird took the male guests bowling. It was another example of what one of those women later cited as an example of Mrs. Johnson taking “time off.”
Speculation about Lyndon’s sexual conquests included humorous word play and some denials. After NBC’s Nancy Dickerson, one of the first female correspondents on network news, accompanied Lyndon on an overnight trip, Walter Cronkite (of CBS) quipped that the president had “gone to bed and Dickerson is covering him.” To set the record straight, Dickerson later wrote in her memoir, Among Those Present, that there had been talk about her and Lyndon but she wanted the truth known: “sex had nothing to do with it.” Though Lyndon “might talk about sex, it was mostly just that—talk.” She admitted he had propositioned her, but not very convincingly, as he paced around a Chicago hotel room in his pajamas and she sat there listening, with curlers in her hair. To add to the incongruity of it all, she knew Bill Moyers was just outside the door, waiting for Lyndon.
Rumors of Lyndon’s relationships with a long list of other women, from secretaries to socialites, would shape public opinion of Lady Bird until the day she died. Because of her apparent complaisance in his outlandish behavior, whether real or feigned, she looked more like an accomplice than a victim. She refused to play the part of wronged wife, and others agreed she did not deserve that tag. Nancy Dickerson, who as a reporter covering the White House and a close friend of Mrs. Johnson was in a position to know, insisted that in Lyndon’s female lineup, Lady Bird “had no peer; she knew it, he knew it and so did everybody else.” That was evidently Bird’s view, too. She liked to say, “I had a great love affair. No matter what, I knew he loved me best.”
Bird had plenty of signs that Lyndon loved and respected her. Associates noted how often he would place a guiding hand at her back and how his eyes lit up when she entered the room. He bought her thoughtful gifts and inscribed new books with the pet name he had used for her during their courtship. Although she cut corners on the rest of her wardrobe, she spent freely on party dresses and would sometimes interrupt a meeting her husband was conducting to seek his approval of her latest purchase. As she preened in a ball gown and he registered his delight, she basked in it, Liz Carpenter observed, “like a magic wand passed over her.”
18
WRAPPING UP “OUR” PRESIDENCY
IT MIGHT have looked to outsiders like a long, relaxed weekend at the ranch for the president and first lady, but it was anything but. Within hours of arriving there on September 7, 1967, they had summoned two of their time-tested advisers, John Connally and Jake Pickle, for what was going to be some very heavy decision making. For much of Friday afternoon, Lyndon rode around the ranch with the two men, going over his thoughts and theirs on the subject top on his mind: to run or not to run again in 1968 and when he should make that decision public. Pickle, who was facing his own reelection for Congress the following year, was dismayed that Lyndon might drop out, thus affecting Pickle’s chances. Connally, who favored retirement, suggested an early announcement, possibly within the month, to allow the Democratic Party plenty of time to groom a successor.
About seven that evening Lyndon called for Bird, saying he had been “waiting” for her all afternoon, and she put on a robe, sausage curlers still in her hair, and joined the trio. Having discussed the matter with her all summer, Lyndon already knew she was hell bent on wrapping up what she called “our presidency” and retiring to Texas. Back in May she had told him that the idea of another campaign struck her as unthinkable as an “open-ended stay in a concentration camp.” Now she restated that objection just as emphatically to Connally and Pickle, explaining that she “simply did not want to face another campaign, to ask anybody for anything.”
In addition to her dread of another energy-draining campaign, she had a nagging fear that Lyndon’s health would not hold up for four more years. He would be sixty years old at the start of a new term, and the men in his family had a record of dying early. An even more frightening prospect than death was the possibility that this man of “roaring energy” would find himself physically or mentally incapacitated, unable to fulfill the demands of the job. This would be, she admitted, “unbearably painful” for him to recognize and for her to watch.
In the tense atmosphere surrounding her argument for not running, she delivered one line that got a laugh out of all three men: “If we ever get sick, I want to be sick on our own time.” Then, with her sausage curlers still in place, she ordered supper trays for the four of them, and they sat down to eat, knowing that the final deci
sion would be Lyndon’s. All they could do was wait.
Nine months earlier, the year had gotten off to a very gloomy start. Bird had developed the habit of scanning a room during Lyndon’s speeches, “picking out friend and foe and question mark,” and at the annual State of the Union address on January 10 the “foes” were very evident. She observed the “stoney” face of Senator Robert Kennedy and noted that he had applauded only once, with “two or three light claps like a seal in a circus.” After the speech, she invited a few from the friends list to the White House, but their presence failed to cheer her up. Only days earlier, she had confessed to her diary: “Now is indeed the ‘Valley of the Black Pig.’. . . A miasma of trouble hangs over everything.”
That was the same day—January 5, 1967—that The Washington Post published an article about a nasty encounter between the president and the painter Peter Hurd that had occurred more than a year earlier. Now, just when everything else seemed to be going wrong, the Hurd story was out there for everyone to read.
Both Lady Bird and Lyndon had liked Hurd when he came to sketch the president for a Time magazine cover in late 1964, and they chose him to do Lyndon’s official portrait for the White House collection. After Hurd accepted the commission, he and his wife joined the Johnsons several times for overnight stays at Camp David and the Texas ranch, so that the artist could work from a life model. The president tended to fall asleep during the sessions, which he likened to taking “castor oil,” but afterward he and Bird would invite the Hurds to join them for congenial dinners and long walks.
It was the delivery of the completed portrait in October 1965 that soured the relationship. Eager to get the subject’s reaction, the Hurds flew to Texas to present it to him in person. Lady Bird sat them down first for a pleasant lunch with Lyndon, and then the four of them went into the office wing of the ranch house for the unveiling. Lyndon took one look and blurted out that it was “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” Taken aback, Hurd asked what kind of picture the president preferred, and Lyndon, with icy politeness, reached into a drawer and took out a Norman Rockwell drawing. Hurd thought it “damn rude” of the president not to acknowledge the many hours of hard work he had put in, and Bird, seeing the artist’s disappointment, tried to soothe his feelings and placate him. She “could not have been kinder,” Hurd later told The New York Times, but she found the episode so grim she hoped never to face a similar exchange if she “lived to be 1000.” The Hurds did not stay for dinner.
The portrait went home with its creator, and nothing more was heard of it—until Maxine Cheshire published a full account in the society pages of The Washington Post in January 1967. Newspapers across the country picked up the story, and some of them put the “ugliest thing I ever saw” quote in large headlines, making Lyndon look exceptionally vain (since others judged the portrait favorably) and buffoonish (confusing a tempera portrait of Hurd’s quality with a Rockwell magazine illustration). Cartoonists lampooned the president on both counts. In February, Chicago’s Richard Gray Gallery opened an exhibit of paintings, sculptures, and drawings of the president that made Hurd’s rendering look flattering. An article in The New York Times, “Chicago’s Art World Takes Aim at Johnson,” explained how the Richard Gray collection mocked LBJ’s competence and his appearance. One showed a potbellied Indian on a tired horse at the brink of a canyon, with the title: “End of the Trail.” Another pictured a fat centaur, with the tag line, “Ladybird’s Johnson.”
Up against that kind of ridicule, the Johnsons each responded in characteristic mode. Lyndon sank into a swamp of self-pity, lambasting reporters for treating him unfairly; she, recognizing that a childish “I don’t want it, I don’t like it” did not play well, especially out of the mouth of an unpopular president, came up with two specific objections to Hurd’s work. It was too big (four feet wide) to fit well with other portraits in the White House gallery of presidents, and the composition was off, she argued: Hurd had upset the balance of the painting by making the background of the Capitol building too “brilliantly illuminated.” After dictating an announcement that included those two points, she vowed to keep quiet and let the story play itself out.
If the president had enjoyed a more amiable relation with the press, he might have engineered some sympathetic coverage for himself. But just at the time the “ugliest thing I ever saw” headlines appeared, he was initiating yet another press secretary, the fourth since taking office. After Pierre Salinger, a holdover from the Kennedy administration, resigned in early 1964, George Reedy, who had been a newspaperman before he started working for Senator Johnson in 1952, took the job. Bird liked Salinger but never warmed to Reedy, whom she described as “sloppy fat and drank too much.” But the fairness in her admitted that he did have a “splendid mind and wrote well” and that the advice he gave Lyndon was always on the mark. By the summer of 1965, Reedy felt overwhelmed by the struggle to keep the voracious press happy. As media reports on Vietnam grew increasingly critical of the president, Lyndon decided to ease Reedy out, and his need for extended medical leave, to recover from treatment for his hammertoed feet, provided the opportunity.
Reedy’s departure opened the press slot for the much younger, more enthusiastic Bill Moyers, who had known both Johnsons for a decade and had developed an almost son-parent intimacy with them. While sleeping in their basement on 30th Place, he had overheard much of what went on between husband and wife, and one night was wakened by Lyndon’s angry shouts on the floor above. After the decibels dropped a bit, Bird came tiptoeing down the basement stairs, and Moyers, thinking she was coming to check on him, called out, “I’m all right.” “Oh,” she replied, “I was just coming to tell you that I am, too.”
Bird had been enthusiastic about Moyers taking the press secretary slot, but he fared no better than Reedy in a job that was becoming a practice in cover-ups. When reporters pressed him for facts—about the president’s travel plans or Vietnam casualties—Moyers found it impossible to satisfy both the journalists and his secrecy-obsessed boss. When he revealed just a bit more than the president wished, he gained points with reporters but received a stiff reprimand from Lyndon, who accused him of excessive self-promotion. Bird, who liked Moyers, admitted that word of a rift between the two men fell “like a stone on my heart.” After little more than a year on the job, the exhausted Moyers announced he was taking his ulcer-ridden body to Long Island, New York, where he would become publisher of Newsday. His defection infuriated the president, who put Moyers on his not-to-be-recognized list, unworthy of further notice. The name that dotted the White House daily diary hundreds of times before 1967 now never appeared. Anyone who dared refer to Moyers received an icy stare—or a broken phone connection as the receiver slammed down. Like his mother, Lyndon punished people by freezing them out.
Although Moyers left Lyndon’s employ, he did not lose Bird’s friendship. She continued to see him until her death, and he was one of those who eulogized her at her funeral. She had recognized the complicated relationship between him and Lyndon as just what it was: a back-and-forth of “I love you” one day, and “No, I don’t” the next, a relationship “more needful” on Lyndon’s part than on Moyers’s. For herself, no such games were necessary.
Moyers’s replacement, George Christian, another Texan, began handling the president’s press relations in February 1967. A more seasoned newsman than his predecessors, Christian was more like Lady Bird. He understood that he could not always please everyone and that his boss could be maddening at times—with his constantly changing plans and fixation on secrecy. When Christian had to tell reporters that a trip was on—only hours after telling them it was off—he expected to be lambasted—and he was. But he had a thick skin, and he treated reporters as colleagues rather than trying desperately to gain their friendship, as Lyndon did.
With that more laid-back attitude, Christian retained the press secretary job longer than any of his predecessors, and he was still there, alongside Liz Carpenter, who masterminded Lady Bir
d’s press, when the Johnsons left Washington. Christian stood up for Carpenter when the president tried to rein her in. Although she might be too folksy or brash for some people and she had a corny penchant for heavy Texas touches, Christian saw her as savvy and inventive at getting excellent coverage for the first lady. That’s the way Bird saw her, too.
Christian and Carpenter came up against a big challenge in 1967 when William Manchester’s book about the assassination of JFK finally came out. It made both Johnsons look pushy and unsophisticated. Lady Bird had cooperated with the author, sitting with him for two arduous hours in 1964, to talk about how she remembered that tragic day in Dallas. In a race against other authors hoping to turn out quick books on the same topic, Manchester worked hard, and in spite of hospitalization for “nervous exhaustion,” he had a draft of The Death of a President ready by February 1965. It would be much longer, however, before Lady Bird learned exactly what he had written.
After his editor at Harper & Row circulated the manuscript to readers in the Kennedy camp (including Richard Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Ethel Kennedy), word got back to the Johnsons in mid-1966 that they were not going to be happy with what Manchester had written about them. Even Lyndon’s admirers described him as sometimes suspicious, devious, and domineering, but Manchester, in the draft that was circulating, went further, depicting an indecipherable human being, for whom the “shortest distance between two points was a tunnel.” Rather than call Lyndon a low-class liar, which is what he meant, Manchester described him as looking like he came out of a Grade D movie and being a “practitioner of political tergiversation.” Prodded by his editors to be kinder, the author excised his most damning judgments but left enough examples of Lyndonesque behavior to make him sound like a backwoods oaf. Bird did not fare much better. Manchester described her as weak and spineless, wholly subjugated to a loutish husband. After the JFK assassination, she had said to her regret that she was sorry it happened in Texas, and now that inept remark appeared in Manchester’s book for everyone to read. To her, it seemed the book was part of “a planned wave of attacks” aimed to undercut her and Lyndon.
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