The modest private suite that the Johnsons set aside for themselves at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum looked like what an unpretentious CEO might use for his business entertaining. It didn’t even have a bedroom for sleeping over. Guests entered via a small anteroom lined with photos, gifts, and other reminders of the Johnsons’ long political partnership. In the suite’s one large room, which served both for sitting and dining, a wall of windows provided an expansive view of Austin’s skyline. The bathroom did have one quirky Lyndonesque touch—its five powerful shower heads were strong enough to knock a frail person over.
The library’s gala opening in May 1971 attracted an all-star lineup, including President Nixon. During the festivities, Lyndon, whose reputation for paranoia and secrecy remained intact, provided the day’s shocker when he announced that he wanted the library to be a model of transparency, to show him “with the bark off.” That blustery promise would later be contradicted (by those who insisted he instructed them differently) and countermanded by those bent on protecting him. But it provided the justification in the early 1990s for a crucial decision to open the revealing recordings he had made during the presidency. That cache of thousands of conversations, in the president’s own inimitable language, produced invaluable documentation to anyone studying the Johnson years.
Both Lady Bird and Lyndon made other decisions, besides location, to maximize the library’s use. Unlike other presidential archives, the LBJ Library did not charge admission—at least as long as its endowment could fund the extensive exhibits and events offered. She did not live to see that policy changed, on what would have been her one hundredth birthday, but nothing about her life suggests she would have objected. She had always been a stickler for seeing that income balanced outgo. Visitors continued to find ample, free parking nearby. As if he and Bird had not already provided sufficient enticement to visit the library, Lyndon once proposed making loudspeaker announcements to football fans who packed the stadium nearby: if anyone needed a drink of cold water or a toilet, the library was there for them to use.
By the end of 1971, with the library open and both their books published, the Johnsons had to decide what to do with the rest of their lives. Their White House successors would engage in a variety of post-presidential ventures, including extremely profitable speech making, managing international relief efforts, and monitoring human rights abroad. But the Johnsons opted to follow the example of the Trumans, continuing to do what they had liked doing before: spending leisure hours in the company of old friends, trying to find enjoyment in the people and places they already knew.
When Mrs. Johnson was offered a seat on the Board of Regents of her alma mater, she refused at first, not wanting to make any commitments beyond those she already had. But Lyndon upbraided her, reminding her how often he had been turned down by busy people, especially women. So she relented and agreed to serve a six-year term, beginning in 1971. Her co-regents noted that she came well prepared for every session, and she spoke her mind on subjects that mattered to her. As chair of the Academic Committee, she championed extending courses in the health sciences, and later described her service on the board as the pinnacle of her public service life. It was, notably, the only significant achievement that she could claim as strictly hers.
Bird still gave the occasional speech on conservation, and she funded a contest on highway beautification in Texas. The $1,000 prize went to the highway employee who had done the most to upgrade the state’s roadsides. The annual award ceremony, held at the ranch, was a festive affair with food and drink, and Lyndon joked that he made a point of attending because it was one of the few chances he had to see his wife give away any of her own money.
On the private side, Bird began devoting more time to her daughters, who had merited only the bottom of the page on her White House daily diary. By January 1969, each had produced one child. Rambunctious Lyn Nugent, at two and a half, was a household favorite, since Lynda Robb’s Lucinda, at three months, was still too young to play. In 1970, the Johnson daughters added two more baby girls: Nicole Marie Nugent and Catherine Robb. The Nugents had settled in Austin, but the Robbs remained in the East, moving from rented quarters in Arlington, Virginia, where they started married life, to a ten-room house in Charlottesville when Chuck Robb enrolled in law school at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1970.
Bird doted on her grandchildren, showering them with the attention she had not had time to give her daughters in their early years. But LBJ, with more empty hours than ever, was only a “sometimes” grandfather. Visitors to the ranch watched him relax by horseplaying on the lawn with Lyn, but his granddaughters did not inspire the attention he had lavished on Courtenay Valenti. He was chronically tired, disgruntled by inactivity, and it would take more than an amusing child to lift him from his melancholic lethargy. He had spots of exuberance, when he went with Luci to root for UT at football games, but his predominant mood was low. He would sit for hours and “just stare at the ceiling.” He let his hair grow long, gained thirty-five pounds, and resumed chain-smoking, a habit ditched after his 1955 heart attack.
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Well aware that he was approaching the age at which his father died, Lyndon started thinking more about how he would be remembered. His birthplace, down the road from the ranch house, and his boyhood home in Johnson City, twelve miles east, had already been designated as national historic sites, and Bird had spent a lot of time selecting the exhibits and working with the guides. He liked to drop in unannounced at both places, disarming tourists with a personal anecdote or two. He sometimes lingered at the family cemetery down the road from the ranch to mull over the names on the tombstones and look at the spot waiting for him.
Morbid or exuberant as he might turn on any of these excursions, they were playtime compared with the dollar decisions he made, tidying up money matters. Mrs. Johnson evidently let him take charge on this, probably glad to have him occupied. During his presidency, when neighbor A. W. Moursund acted as a trustee of the Johnson investments, the broadcasting business had yielded about $1 million each year, and Moursund had invested those earnings in land, buildings, and banks, which he bought in his own name or that of someone else in order not to implicate the president. Moursund made complicated trades, so that he ended up the owner of record on deeds and shareholder lists, when the property actually belonged, in whole or in part, to one of the Johnsons. In a curious deal in 1965, Moursund acquired 1,600 acres of California land for what appeared to be the amazing price of $10. After 1969, when Moursund was no longer a trustee, the Johnsons’ holdings mushroomed, and one historian estimated that their net worth doubled in the four years after they left Washington. That included stock and ranchlands and businesses across several states, from Oklahoma and Kansas to the West Coast, but Moursund’s fair share of it all would be very difficult to figure out.
As Lyndon converted real estate and equity into cash, he and Moursund, one of his oldest, most trusted friends, had a falling-out. The neighbor Bird once described as “hard to imagine life without” became persona non grata with Lyndon. Neither man revealed the details of their disagreement, and Lyndon offered only the cryptic: “We decided to split the blanket,” to explain the break. The two men did not speak for the remainder of Lyndon’s life, although Bird’s friendship with A.W. and his wife continued.
Lyndon’s health took a bad turn in April 1972 while he and Bird were visiting the Robbs in Charlottesville. He had been treated earlier that month in San Antonio after suffering chest pains, and the Charlottesville doctors deemed it wise to put him in an intensive care unit at the University of Virginia Hospital and keep him under careful watch. But Lyndon, never an easy patient, quickly became edgy, and that led, as it usually did, to action. Fearful he would die far from home, he engineered his own escape from the hospital. Three days after he had been checked in, startled nurses in Charlottesville noticed unusual activity in his suite one night, and they called the hospital director, who was off
the premises. He arrived to find an empty wheelchair in the parking lot, a stark reminder that Lyndon Johnson still liked to take charge.
Two more weeks in San Antonio’s Brooke Medical Center followed for Lyndon, and during that time he suffered a brief burst of extra heartbeats that prompted calling Dr. Hurst to come from Atlanta. This episode initiated a period of painful angina, and for the remaining months of his life, Lyndon suffered severe chest pains that kept him close to the Texas ranch.
The Robb family visited over Labor Day weekend, but what should have been a low-keyed reunion turned into near tragedy when two-year-old Catherine almost drowned. She had crawled under a rope around the pool and was floating faceup when her mother spotted her and summoned help. After a Secret Service agent administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the child was taken to a hospital where she was kept overnight before being released.
At the same time the Johnsons’ young granddaughter came shockingly close to death, Lyndon was showing signs of reckoning with his own mortality. On September 20, when he returned to Brooke Medical Center to give a speech, he titled it, “As the Days Dwindle Down.” As he spoke of the “green leaves of summer” turning to “brown” and the “chill winds of winter . . . [starting] to blow,” it was clear he was talking about more than seasonal changes. “Before we are ready for the end to come, the year will be gone.” Friends observed he moved more slowly now, relied on others to drive him around, and popped nitroglycerin pills for pain.
Within days of that speech, LBJ arranged for a portion of the broadcasting empire to be sold to the Los Angeles Times-Mirror for $9 million. His wife and daughters received the bulk of the money ($4.9 million to Bird and $1.3 million to each of the daughters) and they continued to own a string of radio stations. The LBJ Ranch, restored to the acreage it boasted when Lyndon’s father was forced to give it up in the 1930s, was not sold. Bird, who singled it out as the place “where the best years of my life were spent. I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” would have hated to leave it. She often boasted she and Lyndon could ride for hours across that land and feel “at utter peace.” By transferring the ranch to the National Park Service, with a provision that Bird could live there until her death, the Johnsons enjoyed tax advantages while guaranteeing Bird’s continued enjoyment.
Jan Jarboe Russell, the Texas reporter who interviewed several people who worked for or socialized with the Johnsons during the post–White House years, concluded that Lyndon was utterly dependent on Bird. She was “so clearly in charge of the day-to-day management of his life that some former staff members got to the point that they did not want to be alone with Johnson unless Lady Bird was with him.” Without her, he was “impossible: depressed one minute, raging the next.” As his wife had predicted, he drank too much and seemed frustrated by his diminished powers and physical infirmities. George Christian, who returned to live in Austin after serving as the president’s press secretary, underscored Lyndon’s reliance on Bird: “I don’t know what he would have done without her. She held him together. She held all of us together.”
By November 1972, when Richard Nixon won reelection, Lyndon’s increasing frailty was apparent to all. He slept with an oxygen tent beside him and downed the ever-present nitroglycerin pills. Doctors advised him to skip a civil rights symposium at the LBJ Library on December 11–12, but he insisted on going, even though Central Texas was suffering through a record-breaking cold spell. Temperatures descended to a frigid 20 below zero, a record that stood forty years later, and ice and snow added to the hazard of travel. While other conferees were delayed (and even those living only a few minutes from the library had trouble making the trip), Lyndon moved by snowmobile and car over the seventy miles to arrive in time to give the keynote address. It was a glorious last stand, requiring enormous effort. Hubert Humphrey, who was in the audience, thought Lyndon looked ashen gray and seemed to lack the stamina to finish his remarks. But he persisted, and after apologizing for what remained undone, he delivered a soaring call to action: “I’m kind of ashamed of myself that I . . . couldn’t do more. . . . We know there’s injustice . . . intolerance . . . discrimination and hate and suspicion. But . . . we have proved that great progress is possible . . . and if our efforts continue . . . we shall overcome.”
That exertion cost him—he needed two days in bed to recover, but then he sparked on good days and starting talking about ambitious plans for the coming year. He told aides he wanted to invite world leaders to the ranch. The first name on his list was Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who had already agreed to add Texas to her itinerary after a visit to the Nixon White House in February.
On December 22, Bird celebrated her sixtieth birthday, and Lyndon went out of his way to make it a festive occasion. His August birthday had always required big-time preparation, with a long list of guests and considerable feasting, drinking, and gifting. But her birthday, coming so close to Christmas, often got swallowed up in holiday entertaining and was observed on the run. This time Lyndon invited a dozen special friends and arranged a luxurious buffet. Privately, he asked one of the guests to see that all her future birthdays were as special as this one. His deep and genuine affection for her is often overlooked in the many accounts that emphasize the verbal abuse he handed out. Those outbursts make shocking reading, but they should be balanced alongside the many examples of his caring and genuine appreciation. “He very much loved her, turned on, and enjoyed her,” one of the staff observed. Helen Thomas, the veteran capital reporter, added that he had conveyed those feelings to Bird, who knew “he loved her . . . knew he couldn’t exist without her.” When a friend reminded him that the best decision he ever made was to marry Bird, Lyndon emphatically agreed, “Don’t think a day doesn’t pass that I don’t know that.”
Exactly a month after Bird celebrated her sixtieth birthday Lyndon died. She thought him unusually quiet that morning, but it was Monday and she had work waiting for her in Austin. Leaving Jewell Malechek to look after him, Bird left. Lyndon, who had never conquered his fear of being alone, lunched by himself and then went to his bedroom to nap. A short time later he called for help, but by the time a Secret Service agent arrived, he was lying on the floor, his face deadly gray.
When the call reached Bird, telling her that Lyndon was being taken to the Brooke Medical Center, she immediately boarded a helicopter to meet him there. By the time she landed in San Antonio, at the site where he had given his “Days Dwindle Down” speech four months earlier, it was too late. He had already been pronounced dead. She had weathered many of Lyndon’s hospitalizations, seen him through major heart attacks, gall bladder surgery, and more minor illnesses than she could count. This time she had not been there to try to pull him through, and she regretted that “very much.” To the security agent who told her “This time we didn’t make it,” she replied stoically, “Well, we expected it.”
Mrs. Johnson oversaw the funeral arrangements with a decisiveness that suggested she had only to pull outlined instructions out of her desk drawer. Mindful of how much he loathed being alone, she asked friends to stay by his coffin overnight. By 1 p.m. the next day, the doors of the LBJ Library opened and mourners who had waited in line for hours started filing up the wide marble steps and past the body, which was flanked by a full honor guard. By late afternoon, nearly eight thousand had moved past the flag-draped coffin, and others continued the show of respect throughout the night.
Much of the nation’s attention that evening focused not on ex-President Johnson’s death but on a televised speech of President Nixon. In a coincidence so fraught with irony it challenges credibility, he announced that an agreement had finally been reached to “end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam.” And that announcement came at the very same time that the man who tried time and again to achieve the same settlement was being prepared for burial in Texas.
By the morning after Nixon’s speech, when the coffin of Lyndon Johnson was flown to Washington for a ceremony in the Rotunda at the Capito
l, seventeen thousand people had paid their respects. These attendance figures came from library director Harry Middleton, who explained he felt obliged to keep a count because “I know that somewhere, sometime, President Johnson’s going to ask me how many showed up.”
After a funeral service at the National City Christian Church in Washington, the body was returned to the ranch. A thunderstorm delayed the flight and snarled news feeds from the burial scene, jumbling delivery of the details. But by nightfall on January 25, 1973, as the rest of the nation mulled over the peace agreement that had eluded him, Lyndon Baines Johnson was interred in the family cemetery within sight of where he was born.
Less than a month earlier, on December 26, the nation had lost its only other living ex-president when Harry Truman died, and now two widows, who between them had wrestled with first lady obligations for a total of a dozen years, struggled with grief. A generation younger than eighty-seven-year-old Bess, Bird lost her husband when she was only sixty. The two women shared fierce loyalties to their respective mates and a dogged affection for their native regions; they had entered the White House in extraordinary circumstances, resulting from a president’s sudden death, and each found herself compared to the iconic first lady who preceded her.
Bess had an advantage over Bird. Both their husbands had faced outsized ranks of detractors during their White House years, but “Give ’em hell, Harry” had two decades of retirement to dispel the critics’ sting while chants deriding “LBJ, LBJ . . .” still rang in people’s ears. Bess’s Harry had become almost lovable, his gaffes far enough in the past to be excused or forgotten. But the transgressions of Bird’s Lyndon were still fresh in people’s minds, and showed up in the eulogies to him. Syndicated columnist James Reston noted the man’s many contradictions: “Both the glory and the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson was that he believed utterly in the romantic tradition of America in the Congress and the church, in that order; in Main Street and Wall Street, in the competitive state and in the welfare state—in all of it part of the time and some of it all the time.” For decades after Lyndon died, historians would continue to marvel at the complexity of the man. Columnist Russell Baker concluded he was a “human puzzle,” too complicated for anyone to understand. Bill Moyers described him as “thirteen of the most exasperating men I ever met.” Bird preferred to highlight the joy in his life, and at the time of his death, she reminded journalist Norma Milligan of Newsweek, “Ah, but didn’t he live well.”
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 40