Wrangling about the book’s content continued as the Kennedys worried that its negative treatment of LBJ might backfire, and he would take out his anger on Robert Kennedy and squelch his chances for the presidential nomination in 1968. Finally, as what some of Lyndon’s critics gloated would be a Christmas present to him, the book came out, and Look magazine, one of the nation’s largest, started publishing the juiciest segments in four installments, beginning January 1967.
Finding herself included in so many of the attacks against her husband, Mrs. Johnson obviously felt justified in talking about our presidency and wanting to end it. In the radical fringes of antiwar protest, she was garnering blame, entirely baseless, for the continuing war in Southeast Asia. As one American serving in Vietnam later explained: “I believed, as did many other soldiers, that dear ole Lady Bird had some, probably substantial interest in our TV/radio stations in Vietnam. So it was no surprise that this horrible war was prolonged by one Lyndon Baines Johnson.” While she may not have heard that kind of unsubstantiated gossip, she undoubtedly knew about the satirical play running at the Village Gate in New York’s Greenwich Village. Titled MacBird!, it compared Lyndon’s assumption of power to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In this version, Duncan (now O’Dunc, speaking with a Boston accent) is brutally murdered by power-thirsty MacBird (Texas accent), egged on by his ambitious wife, Lady MacBird. The play ran for nearly a year, from February 1967 until January 1968, and Mrs. Johnson’s picture appeared on publicity posters as the infamous harridan.
The closing date of MacBird! coincided with more reports of the first lady under fire. She had been scheduling Women Doers’ lunches every three months or so since the vice presidency days, and the topic for this one, on January 18, 1968, was crime, a subject she had been “itching” to consider for a while. The routine for these meetings was fairly simple. A couple dozen women, selected because of their achievement in the area of concern, were invited to lunch in the second-floor dining room, where they were recognized for their work and given a chance to discuss it with the other guests. With crime as the topic, Bird had no reason to expect this lunch would be any different from the polite and pleasant Women Doers’ lunches that preceded it.
As he often did, the president dropped by to greet the first lady’s guests and say a few words to each one, including on this day African American cabaret star Eartha Kitt, who cordially shook his hand. After he left, the three honorees made their remarks and Bird opened the floor for questions, as she always did. But the amiable, polite mood in the room suddenly shifted. Eartha Kitt stood up, and with her eyes flashing and her voice shrill, she accused her hostess of being completely clueless about the real causes of crime and ignorant of the culture of violence and drugs that appealed to so many young Americans. It was the disaffection with the Vietnam War, Kitt argued, that caused people to turn to drugs and crime. Her angry outburst so alarmed staffer Sharon Francis that she prepared to move in and protect Mrs. Johnson in case Kitt physically attacked her.
The other guests froze in their places, trying to figure out what had ignited this vehement eruption. Liz Carpenter wondered if Kitt had lost control because she was ill. Then Elizabeth Hughes, wife of the New Jersey governor and the mother of sons fighting in Vietnam, spoke up, drawing a distinction between war and crime in the streets. African American Bennetta Washington, wife of Walter Washington, assured Kitt that she “knew a little bit [about anger] too,” but the women were not gathered that day to vent anger: “We are here to release these energies in constructive rather than destructive channels.” Then Lady Bird, in measured tones, tried to defend herself. She admitted she lacked Kitt’s experiences but she, nonetheless, hoped the country was moving toward solutions.
Mrs. Johnson’s calm response received little comment in newspaper accounts—virtually all attention focused on Kitt’s attack. Her outburst resonated with those who believed that inner-city black youths were being used as cannon fodder in a war that middle- and upper-class youths found ways to avoid, and this Woman Doers’ event became the most publicized of all those that Lady Bird hosted. The “Kitt lunch” was a painful reminder that a first lady collects blame for her husband’s unpopular policies, and she will be the target for frustration coming from unpredictable quarters.
In the ever darker Valley of the Black Pig, Lady Bird’s determination to leave Washington hardened and the president’s frustrations showed in his belligerent bad-boy behavior. Much as she loved him, she continued to be shocked by some of his acting out, and she was not alone in failing to see how a grown man could throw such childish tantrums. When a drink was not to his liking, he threw it against a wall, and he registered his objection to a dish of food by spitting out a mouthful onto an aide’s plate. He hectored employees to do his bidding, oblivious to whether or not the task lay within that employee’s control.
Bill Fisher, one of the Navy photographers who often accompanied the president, realized, as others did, that it was useless to protest these commands, no matter how unreasonable. The best response was simply “I’ll take care of it” and then pass the request on to someone else. Fisher found that tactic useful one day aboard the president’s plane, as he walked down the aisle and was intercepted by LBJ, who was eating his lunch. “This chili’s too hot,” he groused at Fisher, who replied, “I’ll take care of it” and walked to the back of the plane to relay the message to the chef. When asked if the president meant “too warm” or “too spicy,” Fisher replied, “How the hell should I know? I’m just the photographer.” As he walked away, he heard the chef murmur, “I’ll take care of it.” Bird, who was often the one who had to “take care” of things, never claimed to understand her husband’s bizarre behavior, and she once confided to Bill Moyers: “I’m more bewildered by Lyndon than he is bewildered by himself.”
While Lyndon weighed running again in 1968, Lady Bird continued to put long hours on the job. On June 9, 1967, she set off on a four-day visit to New England where she stopped at the John Adams house in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the Calvin Coolidge birthplace in Vermont. She collected an honorary doctorate at Middlebury College and visited the home of Laurance Rockefeller, where she enjoyed after-dinner recreation in her host’s private bowling alley. With those obligations behind her she headed for Texas to await the birth of her first grandchild. It was one of two bright spots in that dismal year. Luci and Pat Nugent had settled in Austin, and Lady Bird arranged her schedule so she could be with them well in advance of her daughter’s June 17 due date. It was not until early morning on June 21 that the young couple set out for the hospital, with the excited grandmother-to-be in another car right behind them. By 7 a.m. when nurses informed her that Luci had delivered a healthy baby boy, twenty-one inches long with gray eyes, Lady Bird, who had suffered through multiple miscarriages herself, could hardly believe the news. She was thrilled that her daughter had such an easy time and equally pleased to learn that the baby would be named Patrick Lyndon.
The new grandfather, scheduled to start meetings a day later with Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, seized on the baby’s birth to form a bond with his Soviet counterpart. He had not known how to greet Kosygin, then remembered he had a grandchild, and so Lyndon’s first words to Kosygin were, “My daughter just made me a grandfather.” It was a cordial opener to what became an amicable, if unproductive, meeting between the two leaders. When Lyndon received word that Kosygin’s daughter would accompany her father, he immediately summoned Lady Bird to join the Glassboro party, and she reluctantly left her newborn grandson to do so. Within hours of the president’s call, she was on her way, accompanied by Lynda, with gifts in hand for the Soviet leader and his daughter. By Sunday afternoon, all four women were strolling amicably along a New Jersey beach.
After doing her part to contribute to what became known as “the Spirit of Glassboro,” the first lady retreated to Texas, where she resumed visits with Luci and the baby and worked with architect Roy White on an addition to the ranch house. Whe
n Lyndon phoned from Washington, she heard the “loneliness in his voice and the desire just to talk to me.” Although he did not say it, she knew he wanted her beside him, and she felt guilty, “torn between doing what I was doing, which must be done, and being with him.” But she did not budge. She still had nearly eighteen months in the White House and, although the two of them had talked the subject over, she did not know if he would call it quits even then. But she was proceeding with her preferred scenario, preparing for full-time retirement to her “forever home” in Texas. She was making lists of which of her own furniture she wanted taken from the White House and what she would have to buy. Wherever she was, the requirements for her bedroom remained the same: a canopied bed, plenty of bookshelves, a fireplace, and a beautiful view.
The second family milestone to break the misery of those last two White House years was the marriage of Lynda Bird. After her period of dating George Hamilton and other high-profile men, she began seeing Chuck Robb in the summer of 1967. An “all-American boy” who, except in looks, bore no resemblance to Hamilton and his café society friends, Robb received an instant seal of approval from her parents, especially from Bird, who knew Robb as an affable military aide at the White House and an excellent bridge player.
As Mrs. Johnson prepared for the December 9 wedding, Vietnam hung, like a nasty veil, over everything the family did. Even with nearly half a million American troops in the war zone and rising casualty figures every day, stalemate prevailed, victory nowhere in sight. General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, underscored the tense atmosphere by his presence at the White House—he slept several nights in a bedroom above the president’s. Bird could see her husband was exhausted, and she had to fit parties in both Washington and Texas into his already packed schedule. As she struggled to combine the duties of first lady and mother of the bride, combining sittings for the portraitist Elizabeth Shoumatoff with fittings for the big day, she could see her husband was wrestling with uncertainty and despair.
Lynda’s wedding day started gloomy, with skies overcast in Washington, but inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue there was such a buzz of activity that the grayness outside was easily forgotten. Under the direction of social secretary Bess Abell, the family quarters of the White House had been converted into what looked like a busy hotel, with Bird’s regular hairdresser, Jean Louis, and two assistants busily shaping bridesmaids’ tresses into bouffant swirls. Bird started the day early, with a last-minute consultation with Lyndon on the day’s schedule. Then the happy parents summoned the bridal couple to the Queens’ Suite to receive their wedding gift. As Lyndon handed over a U.S. Savings Bond, Bird thought him full of “tenderness and understanding.”
The bride’s long-sleeved dress of white silk-satin was chosen to stand the test of time, and Bird hoped to see it one day on a granddaughter. A little bow-knot pin, from the 1820s, was sewn inside it, providing the “something old”; a handmade handkerchief from a great-grandmother was the “something borrowed,” and at the hem, embroidered in blue, was a marking that only a handful of wedding gowns have the right to use: after the bride’s name and the date, “The White House.”
Canon Gerald McAllister had come from Mrs. Johnson’s St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, Texas, to perform the ceremony. Four generations of the Robb family, including Chuck’s grandmother and her great-grandchildren, attended the event, and after the ceremony they assembled in the Oval Room for a group picture. Nash Castro, who had worked closely with Bird on beautification and was about Chuck Robb’s height, stood in for him as a marker, and it was, Castro later recalled, the only time he ever saw Bird lose her temper. When the president walked in, holding his favorite dog, Yuki, wearing a red blanket with “Congratulations” sewn in sequins, the first lady lost no time in setting her husband straight. She stepped out of her place in the first row and pointing her finger in his face announced, “That dog is not going to be in this picture.” Without a word, the president passed off the dog to someone else, and took his designated place.
As it turned out, that wasn’t the only time Bird and Lyndon differed that day. At 8:45, he abruptly left the party, taking Luci, Pat, their little boy (who was being called Lyn), and a couple dozen others with him on his flight to Texas. The remaining guests were still dancing and drinking, but he had had enough, and he was not about to curb his restlessness even for his daughter’s wedding. Bird had gotten a whiff of his plan that morning, and while she knew he needed a rest, she had to admit it would be a “disappointment” to see him go, leaving her to face only “supper upstairs after Lynda and Chuck have gone.” She managed to join him at the ranch two days later, but only briefly because he soon took off on a whirlwind of speaking engagements. In spite of the warning issued by Dr. Hurst in October, that Bird ought to spend more time with her husband, this was a couple seeing less and less of each other.
When the president was alone at the White House, he tried to line up his favorite people to keep him company at mealtime. He so dreaded loneliness that he asked Vicky McCammon, who had quit as his secretary when she married, and her husband, Simon McHugh, to sleep over in Bird’s bedroom one night. Bird made it back to Washington in time to see him light the national Christmas tree on December 15, but seventy-two hours later he was gone again without her. He had put together a group of congenial friends and advisers (wealthy industrialist and philanthropist Charles Englehard and his wife Jane; Jack Valenti; and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow) to accompany him to Australia for the funeral of Prime Minister Harold Holt and then to a round of talks on Vietnam. Funerals always depressed him, and he announced as soon as he entered the plane that he was very tired—he had not slept for three nights and planned to go straight to bed. That proved an empty threat as he signed documents, conferred with advisers, and chatted with his guests.
By trip’s end, he made headlines as the first U.S. president to circle the world while in office. But he came back exhausted, as Lady Bird and both daughters noted when they got out of bed before daylight and went down to the South Lawn to welcome him home on Sunday, December 24. He had done his Christmas shopping—toys for his baby grandson and an array of brass trays and silver bracelets for others—on a refueling stop in the Azores, where a local military post opened in the middle of the night to accommodate him.
The president had missed his wife’s fifty-fifth birthday, and it would be tempting to think that while he was circling the globe with friends, she was pining away, feeling neglected back in Washington. In fact, she kept herself merrily occupied the entire time he was gone, doing what she couldn’t fit in when he was there. She went Christmas shopping with Lynda, wrote captions for the photo album she was preparing as her special gift to him, and entertained people she really wanted to see at dinner. Liz and Les Carpenter joined her, along with Bess and Tyler Abell, for a viewing of the not-yet-released-to-the-public movie The Odd Couple, and both daughters sat with her for the film The President’s Analyst and for recorded segments of Gunsmoke. The exuberance with which she and her daughters welcomed the president at his predawn arrival, taking turns “hugging and kissing him,” suggests that, much as Bird had relished some R & R of her own, she was now ready to resume her role as nurturer-in-chief.
Lyndon’s State of the Union address was set for January 17, 1968, and that was one of the occasions Bird had suggested for him to announce whether or not he would run in November. In an early draft of his speech, she saw that a sentence promising to retire was included, but she doubted he would use it because “his mind was lashed [to the job], as though to a Siamese twin.” On the night of the speech, as she sat in the first row of the Visitors Gallery in the House of Representatives, listening to him summarize for the umpteenth time his views on Vietnam, she still did not know how he would conclude. Would he promise to retire, as she hoped? Or wait? After speaking defiantly about not cutting back—neither in Vietnam nor on his poverty and environmental programs—he closed with the standard “God bles
s . . .” Then she knew he was not yet ready to leave all this behind him.
Sunday, March 31, 1968, marked the beginning of the end. The day started early at the White House, when the president and first lady went down to the South Lawn in their bathrobes at seven to greet Lynda. She had taken the overnight flight, the red-eye, from California after seeing her husband off to Vietnam. Looking like a wraith, she seemed tired and full of complaints about how people had pushed and shoved her around at the site of the troop departure. Finally, she blurted out the question that was being asked all across the country: “Why do we have to be in Vietnam?” She showed her father a letter she had received from a woman whose husband had been killed in Vietnam, just hours before he was due to come home. “If that happens to Chuck,” Lynda warned, “I will never forgive you.” Bird admitted she had not seen such pain in her husband’s eyes “since his mother died.”
By 9:30 that morning, Lyndon was working with speechwriter Horace Busby in the Treaty Room, and secretary Marie Fehmer was typing up a fresh copy each time the wording changed. The president’s speech, to be delivered on television at nine that evening, had been scheduled to announce a bombing halt in Vietnam, but now it was being revised to include a final sentence promising not to run again. The volume of vitriol against his current Vietnam policy, the prospect of antiwar Democrats wresting the nomination from him, and pressures from within his own family and staff had heaped together on the no-run side of the scales. It was time to quit.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 37