After church that Sunday morning, the president stopped by the Humphreys’ apartment to update the vice president, who was about to leave on an official visit to Mexico. Back at the White House, Lyndon read an early version of his line about not running again to house guests Arthur and Mathilde Krim, who urged him not to use it. When Lynda and Luci heard about their father’s decision, they became “emotional, crying and distraught.” They had wanted an end to the war, not to his presidency, and felt his retirement announcement would look like desertion of the men and women who were fighting. Bird passed her daughters’ objection on to Lyndon, but he had already checked with General Westmoreland, who had assured him his withdrawal would not “affect the morale” of the troops. Bird thought Lyndon looked at her “rather distantly” as he said, “I think General Westmoreland knows more about it than [Luci and Lynda] do.”
A parade of visitors moved through the second floor of the White House that Sunday afternoon: Walt Rostow, looking “gray and weary,” Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin; old friends Clark and Marny Clifford. Bird kept busy, ordering more sandwiches and drinks as the numbers grew, but she was counting the minutes until she could go to the Oval Office at nine that evening and hear what Lyndon said. Just before the camera lights went on, she walked up to his desk and delivered the advice she reserved for his most important addresses: “Remember—pacing and drama.” Taking her seat, she still could not be sure what Lyndon would say. Not until he looked directly into the camera with the red light and announced, “Accordingly, I shall not seek . . .” then uttered the phrase she had penciled in after the final typing, “and I will not accept . . .” did she finally know.
During the rest of the chaotic evening, disbelieving staff and friends poured into the White House from around the city. The switchboard lit up with calls from across the nation, including one from Bill Moyers on Long Island. Mary Lasker appeared to be crying, and others looked stunned. Only the president seemed really upbeat. When aide Tom Johnson, no relation, arrived at 11 p.m. with thirty-five reporters in tow, Lyndon was warning friends to brush up on their dominoes and telling his former secretary Vicky McCammon (now pregnant) that his real motivation for retiring was to have more time for baby-sitting. Lynda, who had curtailed her foreign travel while her father was in the White House, inquired in jest if she could finally go to London. She suggested her mother consider a trip to the Greek islands.
If Bird hoped the announcement would give her permanent solace and Lyndon a respite, she was disappointed. The following Thursday evening, while Lyndon prepared to leave for Hawaii and yet another conference on Vietnam, and as Bird donned her red chiffon evening gown for a Democratic leaders’ dinner, Lynda rushed into her mother’s room to say “Dr. King’s been shot.” For Bird, the evening immediately took on a “nightmare quality.” Lyndon, still in the Oval Office, began shaping a speech to the nation, pleading for calm and deploring the tragedy of a violent death for a man who had been the strongest voice of nonviolence. Bird changed to at-home clothes and, hearing televised predictions of rioting and unrest in the big cities, started canceling plans for the upcoming trip she had dubbed “Texas Trails.” She had wanted to show foreign journalists, who saw a lot of big urban centers but missed the gems of small towns, the out-of-the-way places she loved best. Now the idea of celebrating nature while cities were burning seemed very inappropriate.
Within forty-eight hours, several of the nation’s major cities exploded, with the most devastating damage in Chicago, Washington, and Baltimore. As Chicago’s West Side smoldered in fires along a twenty-eight-block stretch of Madison Street, insurance companies estimated that property damage claims would run into millions of dollars. To limit the mayhem, the Army readied fifteen thousand troops to go wherever they were needed most. Another 5,500 Army and National Guardsmen were assigned to patrol Washington, D.C., making this deployment the largest number of troops ever called out up to that time to deal with civil disturbances in the United States.
While Lyndon grappled with how to curtail the rioting, he used its fallout to obtain legislation he wanted—a Fair Housing bill. Often called the Civil Rights Act of 1968, it prohibited discrimination (in race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or physical disability) in the sale or rental of housing. Two years earlier the president had proposed a similar measure but Congress refused to act. Now the political climate had changed, and only one week after the assassination of Dr. King, the Fair Housing Act passed.
Bird was not in Washington to see her husband announce victory this time. She had decided to go ahead with her Texas Trails venture, leading more than three dozen journalists from thirteen countries, along with some of their American colleagues, through “historic towns and blooming fields of wildflowers.” Spring was her favorite time of year—she said she came alive then—and she wanted to show “foreign writers that there are places in this country which are not aflame with hatred and riots.”
By the time she returned to Washington, the rioting had abated, and she could drive around the capital to assess the damage. She and her beautification colleagues noted with satisfaction that the areas where they had worked with local residents remained surprisingly unscathed. Bird had marked one big Giant supermarket in a low-income area with a plaque designating it part of her “Beautification Project” after store officials planted flowers and trees in the area and then hired local teenagers to care for them. Now, in contrast with other parts of Washington that had been charred, the Giant stood unharmed. Her aide Sharon Francis had defended using funds in ghetto areas when others argued that money should not be wasted on “black people [who] were unreliable and . . . didn’t care for things . . . [and would just] tear it up.” Now Francis felt vindicated, as she noted that “no parks, no trees [in areas where the beautification committee invested] were damaged whatsoever.” The first lady’s work paid off “when Armageddon came.”
As her last day in the White House approached, Mrs. Johnson bade affectionate good-byes to her staff. It would be their faces she missed, she assured them, not the material perks of the 134-room mansion or the convoy of cars and planes that ferried her around. She penned a poignant letter to White House Curator James Ketchum, telling him that she hoped other families would enjoy the stately old mansion as much as she had. Ketchum, who had worked with her on cataloguing paintings, knew that she sometimes tuned out of mundane housekeeping conversations that bored her and started whistling to herself. Now both she and Ketchum understood she wanted more time for whistling.
At 11 a.m. on an icy, gray January 20, 1969, Lady Bird Johnson took her seat beside Pat Nixon for a ride that both had eagerly anticipated, but for different reasons. As they were chauffeured from the White House, where they had coffee, to Capitol Hill, where Richard Nixon would be inaugurated the nation’s thirty-seventh president, the two women, both born the same year, could look back over decades spent in the shadow of their ambitious husbands, who now rode ahead of them in a flagged limo. Bird and Pat had met countless times, at the Senate Wives’ Club and various Washington receptions. Both knew how to mouth pleasantries without saying much. When their car stopped, reporters aimed their flashbulbs at Pat as she and Bird headed to the office of Margaret Chase Smith. As the sole female senator, Smith could provide a place for the women to do a last-minute check of hair and lipstick. In the VIP parade to the east side of the Capitol, where the inauguration would take place, Pat walked alone, taking her featured spot in the front row, while Lady Bird accompanied Muriel Humphrey, whose husband would also be out of a job at noon, to an inconspicuous seat off center. But the outgoing first lady could not fail to note that Pat Nixon, in her bright red coat and fur hat, followed the example set four years earlier—and held the Bible for the presidential oath taking. How quickly that role had become an accepted part of the ritual.
After the ceremony, the Johnsons went to the home of Clark and Marny Clifford, where they were honored at a lunch, and then they boarded Air Force One, with daugh
ter Lynda and her three-month-old baby, Lucinda, to return to Texas. By the time they landed in Austin, where the air felt much kinder than Washington’s near freezing temperatures, it was nearly dark. Lyndon said a few words to well-wishers who had gathered, and then, as the Johnsons boarded the smaller JetStar for the final short leg of the trip, Bird spotted a tiny slice of new moon, which anointed this homecoming as a real renewal.
By 9:10 that evening Bird would be in bed at the ranch. As she thought back over her time in the White House, she drew on a favorite poem to describe her feelings. The lines she selected came from “The End,” by the British author Adela Florence Nicolson, writing under the pen name Laurence Hope. Rather than dwell on the morbid, opening lines about disappointment and despair that Nicolson published not long before she committed suicide at age thirty-nine, Bird singled out two soothing lines in a middle stanza:
I seek, to celebrate my glad release,
The Tents of Silence and the Camp of Peace.
Having wrapped up “our” presidency, Bird was ready to celebrate, but whether she would find a “camp of peace” remained to be seen.
19
CALMING ANCHOR FOR A “HOLY TERROR”
THE HOUSE the Johnsons retreated to on January 20, 1969, looked pretty much as it would decades later when it operated as a national historic site, available for any tourist to walk through. Not nearly sleek or fancy enough to merit a spread in Architectural Digest, it reflected the unmistakably different tastes of its two occupants. The well-worn slipcovers and jumble of furnishings suggested a practical resident, more tuned to personal comfort than to decorating trends. Stitching on one sofa pillow proclaimed defiance: “This is my ranch and I can do as I damn please.” To the right of the fireplace, the only portrait in the living room featured an unsmiling Sam Rayburn, who had been dead for seven years. Only a home with a high political index would display the likeness of a man known chiefly for presiding over the House of Representatives. Large copper pots from France on the hearth and naïf Mexican paintings on the wall contrasted sharply with the triplet of TV monitors along one wall, making very clear that two very different personalities inhabited this space—one firmly rooted in the United States, the other looking outward.
Lady Bird had meticulously, and with some trepidation, prepared for the day when her workaholic husband no longer had a job. Again and again, through their years together, most notably after his heart attack in 1955, she had recognized how he thrived on work—it kept him going. Vacations made him testy, impatient, and she could count on the fingers of one hand the times she and their daughters had enjoyed a trip with him that did not revolve around business. That’s why she had insisted he run again in 1964—she dreaded the prospect of an unemployed, bored husband who drank too much and then looked around for someone to blame for his sorry state. Who made a better scapegoat than a wife? She dreamed of a time when the two of them could put political cares aside and enjoy leisurely walks along the lanes and drives across the fields, maybe even some travel abroad. But the gnaw of those other fears gave her pause. It would take more than his beloved ranch to keep him happy, and if the two of them were going to have any pleasure out of these so-called golden years, she would have to augment her soothing nurturing and find ways to keep him busy. She would also need to find new projects for herself, including, above all, a way to burnish his legacy.
On the Johnsons’ first night out of office, dozens of local residents gathered in the hangar behind the ranch house to applaud their return, and after greeting many of them by name, Lyndon and Lady Bird disappeared into the house. With temperatures hovering near 70, she did not need to light the fireplaces, but she had lined up friendly, smiling faces to add a dose of cheer. In addition to daughter Lynda, dinner guests included movie mogul Arthur Krim and his wife, Mathilde; ranch manager Dale Malechek; and three secretaries whose long, committed service made them virtually family: Mary Rather, Yolanda Boozer, and Juanita Roberts. Not much chance of a lull in conversation at that table.
Before leaving Washington, the Johnsons had made enough commitments to keep them both busy for a while. They had signed with Holt, Rinehart & Winston to write “his and her” White House memoirs, the first presidential couple to do so. The combined book advances for the two of them exceeded $1 million, and all of it would go to the building and operation of the new LBJ Library.
Although she had virtually no precedent to guide her, Lady Bird immediately set to work on her volume. Eleanor Roosevelt had chronicled her White House time in “My Day” newspaper columns, and she had written several books about various periods of her life. But Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower did not follow her lead—they preferred to let others recount their lives. Even Jacqueline Kennedy, who once worked for a newspaper and eventually took a day job helping other celebrities write their stories, never wrote her own. Helen Taft, the first presidential wife to publish a book about herself, might have served as Mrs. Johnson’s model, but more than half of Taft’s 1914 memoir, Recollections of Full Years, dealt with the time before her husband became president, when the couple lived in the Philippines.
The success of Lady Bird Johnson’s A White House Diary, with its careful use of language and revealing anecdotes, made hers an example subsequent presidents’ wives would follow. Of the next seven first ladies, only Pat Nixon relied on a family member to write her life; the others all had their memoirs ready for printing soon after their respective terms ended: Betty Ford, The Times of My Life (1978); Rosalynn Carter, First Lady from Plains (1984); Nancy Reagan, My Turn (1989); Barbara Bush, A Memoir (1994); Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (2003); and Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart (2010).
Within hours of the JFK assassination, Lady Bird started making notes for her book, and although she later explained she had intended to write just for her children and grandchildren, that seems unlikely, considering the time and effort expended. Her English teacher back at St. Mary’s had fueled her interest in writing, and now she was in a position to produce a book that people would want to read. One of the first pieces of equipment she bought after becoming first lady was a small tape recorder, which she tried to use each day for describing the people she met and what happened around her. She evidently kept the project secret from all but her closest staff, and depended on her personal secretary, Ashton Gonella, to clip articles from newspapers and magazines to flesh out her accounts. In July 1965, when President Johnson ordered a cutback in the number of periodicals that his office paid for, Gonella registered an objection. She needed those publications for the “private and confidential” project that the first lady had undertaken, and if the president wouldn’t pay for them, then the first lady would have to. Those articles, along with scraps of notes, names of guests, menus, and other reminders, went into big brown envelopes, each marked by date, to be used for what would become Lady Bird’s A White House Diary.
When in Washington, the first lady’s favorite spot for dictating to her “talking machine” was the little sitting room on the southwest corner of the second floor, where she still had furniture from The Elms. She felt comfortable with those familiar pieces—the blue velvet sofa, the French armchairs flanking the fireplace, the mahogany desk. Depending on where she sat, she could gaze south toward the Washington Monument or into the Rose Garden, with the windows of her husband’s Oval Office just behind it. Her preferred time for dictating was early evening, after staff had all left, before Lyndon came back for dinner—a treasured interlude she designated “my time.” At the ranch or on the road, when a succession of days remained jam-packed, she had to rely on those big brown envelopes to jog her memory a week or more later.
Turning those hours of taped observations into a printed book required discipline, but she found the task appealing. “I like writing,” she wrote, “fearful labor though I sometimes find it—I like words.” Never much of a typist, she relied on secretaries to transcribe the tapes she had made, and then used her trusty Gregg shorthand to add details in the mar
gins and correct transcription errors. (Unfortunately, the shorthand she learned in the 1930s was not always decipherable to archivists and biographers who later struggled to figure out what she wrote.) She prided herself on finding the perfect phrase and on learning new words (such as “ineluctable”) to convey exactly what she wanted to say.
By the time she left Washington she had a suitcase full of tapes, some of them not yet transcribed. Eventually they would yield 1,750,000 words, enough to fill a shelf of fourteen volumes if printed out verbatim. The many typists who struggled with transcribing did not always understand her accent, and they made some atrocious errors. LBJ archivist Claudia Anderson, who worked closely with Mrs. Johnson in the last years of her life and was familiar with her style of speech and writing, was so surprised at what she read in one transcript that she went back to check the recording. A careful listening showed that Mrs. Johnson had not described a woman as looking like a “bowl of jelly” but as a “Botticelli.”
As Lady Bird faced the prospect of sifting through those hundreds of thousands of words to pick what she wanted included in A White House Diary, she found herself reminded of William Faulkner’s reaction to his editor’s slashings: “You are killing my darlings.” But she plowed ahead, and with the help of experienced editor Margaret “Maggie” Cousins, she finished the job in eighteen months. Cousins, also a Texan, was seven years Bird’s senior and superbly qualified to collaborate on the project, having made a name for herself in New York as editor at Doubleday and as the author of The Life of Lucy Gallant, the basis for a movie starring Jane Wyman. Cousins spent months in Austin to get the manuscript ready for the printer by August 15, 1970, in time for Christmas sales.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 38