The ex–first lady’s book quickly hit The New York Times Best Seller list, where it remained for thirteen weeks, while the author appeared with popular TV interviewers, including British celebrity-host David Frost. McCall’s magazine added to the hype by carrying excerpts of A White House Diary in its fall issues. Reviewers criticized the book’s length (806 pages) and its surfeit of details on kinde and kuchen, but they appeared awed by the first lady’s energy. Jean Stafford wrote in The New York Review of Books, “The velocity at which Mrs. Johnson flew makes the hardiest Bird-watcher giddy.”
While his wife became a celebrated author, Lyndon dithered and dallied at writing his book. He had other commitments, including interviews with Walter Cronkite (scheduled to pay him $300,000, which would also go to the presidential library). But the ex-president wasn’t faring well with Cronkite either. After spending days with the veteran newsman, talking about the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam and civil rights, Lyndon had been irked by how his comments were edited. He objected that the seven one-hour segments that the Cronkite team turned out had twisted and distorted his views. Once again, the media had shortchanged him, and he grouched to staff that he wasn’t getting credit for all those good laws he had gotten passed.
It wasn’t that Lyndon worked alone, stricken by writer’s block and cut off from records he needed to tell his story. He had brought with him to Texas a team of aides (Harry Middleton, Robert Hardesty, and William Jorden) and a huge personal archive of memos, scheduling books, and photos to prod his memory. But words did not come. Hardesty suggested he talk into a tape recorder while driving his convertible, top down, across the fields, and pay no mind to documents flying in the wind. But Lyndon remained as tongue-tied with the recorder as with the pen. Harvard grad student Doris Kearns, who first met the president while she was a White House fellow, spent weekends and vacations at the ranch, listening to his reminiscences and trying to get them on paper. Kearns and Hardesty both urged him to use the earthy vocabulary and down-home phrases that amused his friends. But he balked, saying he wanted to sound dignified and “presidential,” not boorish and crude. Still hobbled by the old dichotomy that defined his youth, when he wavered between the models offered by the dignified Baineses on his mother’s side and the rowdy ranch hands on his father’s side, he returned one section to Kearns with instructions: “For Christ’s sake get that vulgar language of mine out of there. What do you think this is, the talk of an uneducated cowboy? It’s a presidential memoir, damn it, and I’ve got to come out looking like a statesman, not some backwoods politician.”
The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969, finally appeared one year after Bird’s Diary, in October 1971, and The New York Times added to the buzz it caused by running a dozen pre-publication installments, each focusing on a different topic. Lyndon had not finished in time for the book party scheduled for him in August, and he had to placate autograph hounds by signing books that others had written about him. But on November 7, he had stacks of The Vantage Point ready when a large crowd assembled at the LBJ Library, eager to shake his hand and consider buying an autographed copy.
Unlike Lady Bird’s book, this one pleased virtually no one. Jewell Malechek, the ranch manager’s wife, captured the gist of the general disappointment when she observed that it “would have been more exciting if he had written it like he talked.” Veteran journalist David Halberstam, reviewing The Vantage Point in The New York Times, mused that one of the most fascinating figures of the time, a complex leader who shifted and changed, a president who “as a study in political psychopathology . . . is probably without peer” had produced a dull and disappointing book. He had “tidied up” his life, made it “antiseptic.” The one quote that stood out in Lyndon’s book as both revealing and authentic was the one from Bird in 1964, when she had counseled him to run because he would become a miserable human being if he didn’t have something to do.
That prediction was right on the money. The initial reports on LBJ’s retirement were fairly rosy. A New York Times article described a contented, exuberant ex-president who looked like “a kid kicking off his shoes at the first sign of spring . . . whooping it up on horseback among his Herefords, chasing deer in his Lincoln Continental convertible, romping with his dogs and grandchildren on the lawn . . . going to supper in leather-trimmed gabardine.” But the reports from those around him were much less jolly. Family, who sat with him at breakfast, and staff, who tried to keep him focused on writing his memoirs, saw sadness and gloom. Jewell Malechek described him as the moodiest man she ever met.
Since she lived nearby and helped out at the ranch, Mrs. Malechek had ample opportunity to observe the ex-president in retirement, and she reported he was restless and dissatisfied, changing his mind endlessly and making life difficult for everyone around him. On a short helicopter ride to San Antonio, she had offered to comb his hair before landing. No matter how hard she worked, with brush and spray, odd strands kept popping out, and he became so distraught he started to cry. It took Bird’s soothing reassurance that everything would be all right as soon as they landed to get him to stop. Wicky Goldschmidt, who had known the Johnsons since the 1930s, reported that in a visit to the ranch she and her husband found Lyndon in a “deep depression.” Staffer Bob Hardesty noted that Lyndon was being his “normal manic depressive self.”
Ranch hands found Lyndon’s volatility exasperating, and the extravagant gifts (including brand-new automobiles) that he gave them did not compensate for his imperious commands and unreasonable requests. He continually updated the workers’ to-do lists, bombarding them with orders to check on a particular heifer or mend a small patch of fence when they were already overloaded with more urgent assignments. Acting like a white-collar executive supervising a team of salesmen, he requested end-of-the-day written reports and memos, which weary ranch hands were loath to deliver. Dale Malechek, on his boss’s explicit orders, spent thousands of dollars on a prized breeding bull, and after the animal died following a single mating, Lyndon complained that he was eating the most expensive sausage in Texas.
When frustrated aides and co-workers sought guidance from Lady Bird on how to tolerate Lyndon’s abusive treatment, she counseled them to look on the mood changes and perverse demands as “one great adventure.” She used her time-tested remedy, inviting guests she thought would lift her husband’s spirits, and in cases where she could, she stepped in to soften her husband’s brusqueness and offensiveness. Sometimes she registered a small victory. Secret Service agent Jim Hardin remembered that while he was driving the retired Johnsons to Austin one day, Lyndon kept issuing instructions from the backseat: to drive faster or slow down, to pass the truck ahead or stay in lane. At first, Bird, seated beside Hardin, tried to rein her husband in with a soft “Lyndon, please,” but when that didn’t work, she raised her volume and in firm tones told him to stop. Hardin noted that Lyndon “quieted right down.”
For five years, Lyndon Johnson had been the most powerful man on earth, and now he couldn’t even control his ranch workers or his drivers. He had been sorely reminded of his diminished status at the launching of Apollo 11 in Florida in July 1969. Relegated to a hot seat in the bleachers, he watched while the assembled crowd’s attention focused on Vice President Spiro Agnew, an upstart on the political scene. He won his first election in 1962, and that had been to the relatively insignificant job of county executive, in Baltimore, Maryland. As LBJ sat by, largely ignored, he had a painful lesson in how quickly celebrity status fades.
Power brokers rarely sought out ex-president Johnson for his counsel, and they showed little gratitude for the advice he offered them. When President Nixon’s adviser on foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger, trooped down to Texas, he found a long-haired, sagging-in-the-face smoker who kept calling him “Dr. Schles-ing-er.” It had been an old tactic of Lyndon’s to demean a person by mangling his name, and close associates maintained he was just employing his craftiness on the unsuspecting Kissinger. But Kissinger went
away from the meeting convinced that Lyndon was “crazy.” Other Nixon associates backed Kissinger up, and chief-of-staff Bob Haldeman concluded after talking with ex-President Johnson that he was “psychopathic.” But he hadn’t lost his bawdy sense of humor. When queried about attending the 1972 Democratic nominating convention, he replied why he would feel foolish there: “The only thing more impotent than a former president is a cut dog at a screwing match.”
Lyndon had not ditched his old habit of harboring old grudges and forming new ones. Aide Tom Johnson first met Lyndon when he came to Washington as a White House fellow in 1965, and he followed him to Texas in 1969. When Bill Moyers published his book Listening to America in 1971, Tom Johnson and his wife, Edwina, wanted to host a celebratory party for Moyers in Austin. Tom phoned Lyndon to say that he and Lady Bird were the very first ones to be invited, but the phone went dead at the first mention of Moyers’s name. To underscore his displeasure with Tom, Lyndon stopped speaking to him, too, put him in the same “freeze out” as Moyers.
If the relationship between the two men had been purely social, the break might have mattered less, but Tom held a high-level job in the Johnson business. He could not continue working for a man who refused to acknowledge his existence. So Tom did what Lyndon’s associates had been doing for years—he went to Bird for help. Soon Lyndon was talking to Tom again, and the younger man learned how the rapprochement had been achieved. Bird had reminded her husband: “The fact that Tom is loyal to Bill Moyers doesn’t mean he isn’t loyal to you.”
Other ruptures were harder to repair. Lyndon’s younger brother, Sam Houston Johnson, erratic and alcoholic, had always depended on his brother and sister-in-law to see him through hospitalizations, scrapes with scandal, and spotty periods of employment. Now, with Lyndon out of the White House, he published a book, revealing what he thought about his super-successful sibling. Sam Houston emphasized Lyndon’s obsession with secrecy and his mood swings to the point that some readers, including Lyndon, thought the former president sounded mentally ill. Another banishment followed, and this one, exiling his own brother, lasted until Lyndon’s death.
The ex-president still relished evidence that his female entourage adored him, and he was still buying intimate attire to flatter them. When Bird inadvertently opened a box delivered to the ranch and found a lavender bikini, definitely not her size, she passed it to him, with the observation, “It must be for one of your lady friends.” He ordered clothes for his wife, too, but he could be imperious and rude in his pronouncements about what he wanted her to wear. One outfit made her look fat, the other too short, so that even his largesse translated into insult. She could still talk back to him if the occasion warranted, as one her friends observed. Late to church one Sunday morning, Lyndon was following Bird through the kitchen when he observed a run in her stocking and told her to go change. She retorted, “Too late now, Lyndon,” and kept walking. But few of his demands were so easily dismissed, and she admitted that he had become “a holy terror.”
Travel on her own, although she had enjoyed precious little of it, had always provided Lady Bird with some escape, and now that her husband was no longer in public office, she could consider trips abroad. Only eight months after leaving the White House, she and Lynda took advantage of their new freedom as private citizens—they left their husbands and little Lucinda behind while they explored the South of France. Charlotte Curtis, society reporter for The New York Times, noted that the Johnson women happily rubbed shoulders with princes, dowagers, and the dashing ballerino Rudolf Nureyev on the Côte d’Azur, although they seemed less thrilled with a performance by nude dancers. Lynda perked up at the idea of buying gambling chips in Monte Carlo, and told Curtis, “My mother never let me do anything like this before.”
But leaving an unhappy Lyndon behind was not something Bird liked to do, and after her splurge in the South of France, she limited herself to trips to Mexico with him. Since their 1934 honeymoon, they had relished short sojourns south of the Rio Grande, and now, in retirement, they could stay longer. They lingered a month in February, relaxing at former president Miguel Alemán’s beachfront villa in Acapulco or at one of the more secluded ranches that he, in partnership with Lyndon, owned in the interior, more rugged parts of Mexico. But old habits don’t suddenly vanish with retirement. Lyndon still needed an audience, and preparation for those trips included rounding up friends to go with him, along with bottled water, groceries, and Cutty Sark. Lyndon’s super-powerful shower heads were always part of the packing, along with the latest movie releases—to re-create the comforts of home. During the day he played golf by his own rules, which permitted him but not others to retrieve balls from the rough, smooth out the grass around a hole, and alter stroke counts. In the evenings, he could still keep guests riveted with stories about what happened or might have happened once upon a time in Texas politics.
At the top of the Johnsons’ plans for retirement was the library that would house their records and document their achievements, and they wanted it to be the biggest, best organized, most visited presidential library of all. Planning had started years earlier, and Lady Bird had broken her vigil by Lyndon’s hospital bed after his 1965 gall bladder surgery to tiptoe out of his room before daylight and join their architect friend Max Brooks on a tour of some of the nation’s most dazzling new buildings. She found little to like in Philip Johnson’s State Theater at New York’s Lincoln Center, but she warmed to Eero Saarinen’s dormitory at Yale, and she loved the Beinecke Library that Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill had designed to house rare manuscripts in New Haven. Bunshaft was known for widely different creations, specifically suited to site and use, and his blueprint for the Hirshhorn Museum, sometimes described as looking like a space ship on legs, did not appeal to Mrs. Johnson. But his view that a presidential library should fit the man reflected her thoughts perfectly. Bunshaft explained: “I thought the President was really a virile man, a strong man with nothing sweet or sentimental or small about him, and he ought to have a vigorous, male building. And we’ve got a vigorous male building [in the LBJ Library]. I don’t know if you’d do a building like that for President Roosevelt.”
Choosing Bunshaft was just the beginning of decision making, and Mrs. Johnson took a hand in virtually every segment of the planning. She visited the Truman and Eisenhower libraries to observe how they worked. All four of the presidential libraries in operation at the time (Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower) were located in the respective presidents’ hometowns, and Lady Bird immediately saw the downside of sending archives to sleepy little places like Independence, Missouri, or West Branch, Iowa. Much better to locate the Johnson library in a sizable city, preferably on university grounds, where it would be easily accessible to scholars doing research and to vacationers tempted to wander through its exhibits of memorabilia.
After eliminating Lyndon’s alma mater in small San Marcos, Lady Bird zeroed in on Austin, home to her cherished University of Texas. As UT officials put together a package of enticements, they worked directly with her because they knew how much confidence her husband placed in her judgment. William W. Heath, who negotiated for the university, credited her as the primary factor in all major decisions and in getting her husband’s approval: “we felt like she could sell [LBJ] on whatever joint idea she and the rest of us came up with better than we could.”
Rather than a single structure, Lady Bird envisioned a complex, with a School of Public Affairs in a separate building alongside the taller, more impressive library. UT’s Austin campus would have to acquire several acres to accommodate what Bunshaft proposed, and that meant dealing with dozens of landowners, including some who were not eager to sell. The National Archives, responsible for staffing and running presidential libraries, had not yet put limits on how big each could be, and Lady Bird was restrained only by how much private donors, footing the costs of building, would ante up. Deep-pocketed Johnson supporters stepped forward, and the result was a
building to dwarf all presidential libraries in operation at that time—ten stories high. After spending a lot of time examining different kinds of stone for it, she settled on travertine, which she described as “sheer beauty” compared to “cold” granite.
In meeting after meeting, Lady Bird participated in discussions about lighting, placement of exhibits at eye level, and how to hang documents without damaging the library’s polished walls. She ruminated over the number of entrances the building should have and how to display the shelved boxes of documents. She had herself raised in a crane to check out the view she would have from her office on the top floor, and she contacted relatives, both hers and Lyndon’s, to urge them to contribute photos, family Bibles, and other memorabilia to document the couple’s story. To file the thousands of letters and memos, she wanted attractive red buckram boxes. The color turned out to be a bad choice, as archivists learned later when a water main break in one area flooded a few shelves and the red dye discolored precious documents. But the bright boxes did enliven what would otherwise have looked like the boring, neutral tones of most scholars’ shelves.
Lyndon spent far less time on such details—his interventions centered less on practical matters than on being sure his side of the story came out. In the replica of the Oval Office, he wanted visitors to hear a recording he made, explaining how very hard he had struggled with decision making in the White House. He was still looking for understanding and approval—what he had described as “just a little love.” He had another office, for his post-presidential use, with bulletproof windows, down the hall from the Oval Office replica, and a helicopter landing pad on the building’s roof to provide quick access. But he preferred working at the ranch in the big wood-paneled room with comfortable, worn chairs and a mishmash of desks and books.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 39