Bird Johnson made few excuses for the inconsistencies in her husband’s choices, and she set no limits on her devotion to him. She knew she owed him: “Lyndon pushed me, he drove me, at times he humiliated me, but he made me become someone bigger and better than I would have been.” She had far more than that with him—the love of her life beside her and the realization that he relied on her as on no one else. Their daughter Lynda underscored that dependence when she observed, “The Lord knew what he was doing when he took Daddy first because I don’t think Daddy could’ve gotten along without Mother.” Bob Hardesty, who worked with Lyndon right up to the end, wrote of Bird: “She tempered his rashness with a sense of calm, penetrating judgment that he had long since come to depend on. It would be too much to say that without Lady Bird Johnson there would have been no Lyndon Johnson—but it would have been a far different Lyndon Johnson than the one we came to know.”
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FLYING SOLO
LONG AFTER Lyndon’s death, Barbara Walters went to Austin for another interview with Lady Bird Johnson. Decades had passed since the Today show encounter when Walters popped her question about Lyndon’s womanizing, and she had taken some flak for it. Mrs. Johnson had not objected but some of her friends told Walters they found the question “impertinent” and “rude.”
Now, with two more decades of widowhood behind her, Lady Bird was going to get another question from Walters that related to Lyndon, and it didn’t come in the form of a compliment. How did she feel, Walters wanted to know, about her long marriage to a man who expected her to wait on him “hand and foot.” Why didn’t she object when “he bellowed, ‘Bird, get in here.’ ” The thoughtful answer came back as sage and smoothly as the one about his wandering eye: “It was a different world then,” Bird explained. “That was your husband. You lived his life.” A woman had her “own life, yes,” but her most personal interests and deepest pleasures had to wait. They were “put on the shelf” for later. To guarantee that her explanation did not register as regret, she added, “and many things I have done since his departure were on that shelf.”
Lady Bird Johnson had thirty-four years after Lyndon’s death, slightly more than a third of her long life, to explore those postponed pleasures. Her friends observed that she seemed more easygoing, having shed the worry about what her unpredictable husband might do next. Although she maintained that she loved every minute of her time with Lyndon, it is impossible to ignore the fact that she drastically altered her life after he was gone. She became much more her own person, showing enormous zest for travel to faraway places, forming tighter connections with her daughters and their families, enjoying friends who were hers but had never been (or had ceased to be) his.
“Politics was Lyndon’s life,” Bird liked to say, and “38 years were enough.” But having shared that life so long, she could not immediately wean herself from the intrigue and maneuvering in the nation’s power center. Her Virginia-based daughter reported that Bird would phone to check up on the latest gossip from Capitol Hill. When Lynda’s husband, Charles Robb, ran for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1977, Bird pitched in to help in one more campaign. “When it gets as close as your son-in-law, you can’t say no,” she explained.
It was to Lyndon that Bird owed her only national title—first lady—and, as Betty Ford once observed, that was a job that diminishes but never ends. When subsequent presidents invited Mrs. Johnson back to Washington, to receive an award or participate in an event, she eagerly accepted. By the time the Clintons invited her to join other VIPs and help celebrate the two hundredth birthday of the White House in 2000, her hair had grayed and height had shrunk from the five foot four she registered as first lady. But she put on the brown fur-cuffed Victor Costa gown she had already worn to her eighty-seventh birthday party and went.
Her celebrity status still tickled Lady Bird, and she perked up at the sight of fans. Her friends tried to head them off, fearing they would become a burden, but she was always gracious. When busloads of curious tourists drove past the LBJ Ranch, she interrupted whatever she was doing to go outside and give them a big smile and friendly wave. In Austin restaurants, when a stranger approached her to exchange a few words, she cordially took time to chat.
Beneath the gray hair and ladylike composure, signs of the spunky young Bird Taylor still sparked, as a University of Texas professor observed. Seated next to her at a small dinner party, he listened as another guest at the table described in graphic detail a new X-rated movie. Bird listened intently, and then leaned over and asked the professor, “What was the name of that film?” On a trip to New York City, she happened to eat breakfast in the same hotel restaurant as a motley group of young men, wearing assorted costumes reminiscent of bygone centuries. The group recognized her immediately and asked her to pose with them for a photograph. Ever affable, she consented, then inquired who they were. Told that they were a popular disco group performing as “The Village People,” she smiled and, turning to the friend who accompanied her, said, “Well, I wonder if we just made the cover of their next album.”
• • •
A first lady reveals a lot about herself by how she chooses to spend her “ex” years. Does she continue her leadership role on a national stage, or even enlarge upon it as Betty Ford did with her eponymous treatment centers? Or does she jettison her first lady project, as Nancy Reagan did with “Just Say No to Drugs”? If she survives her husband long enough to compile a record of her own, does she change course, as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did with a new husband and a career in publishing? Much depends on how much time a first lady has on her own: Eleanor Roosevelt survived Franklin by seventeen years, and quickly achieved “First Woman of the World” status.
Bird had double that time to polish her legacy, and besides her highway beautification agenda, she had another project up there on that shelf that she wanted to tackle. In what she called her “last hurrah,” a birthday gift to herself, to celebrate her seventieth in 1982, she started a National Wildflower Research Center in Austin. Out of her own pocket, she donated $125,000 and sixty acres of land, as “rent for the space I have taken up in this highly interesting world” and then appealed to others to contribute to an endowment, which eventually totaled $700,000. Friends encouraged her to think on a grander scale, with more ambitious goals and aggressive fund-raising, but T. J. Taylor’s daughter, even at seventy, liked to cap her risks.
The Wildflower Center, renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on her eighty-fifth birthday, had the acres and resources to conduct research and answer questions from all over the world about which plants thrived under what conditions. It created model backyard gardens and instructive exhibits for school groups, demonstrating that some wildflowers thrive in even the harshest climates and the poorest soils. Up until a few weeks before she died, Mrs. Johnson continued to visit the center, joining the 100,000 tourists who showed up there each year. She communicated, if only with a smile or a wave, with employees and sightseers, even when she required a wheelchair to move, an oxygen tank to breathe, and a companion to compensate for her failing eyesight.
Before she started the Wildflower Center, the ex–first lady signed on to another project to spruce up Austin. Its Town Lake had long provided a waterway for Texans to boat and swim, and its banks had been a favorite path for bikers and hikers. Beginning in the spring of 1972, she joined the effort to make the area around the lake more attractive and user-friendly, with a variety of blooming trees that she could reel off by name (“redbud, crepe myrtle . . .”) lining its hike and bike trail. When Austinites tried to show their gratitude by renaming Town Lake for her, she objected, and only after she died did it become “Lady Bird Lake.” No statues or big plaques are there to mark her involvement. Apparently, none is needed.
Wherever she went, Secret Service agents accompanied her, 365 days a year, whether she stayed at the ranch, visited one of her daughters, or traveled abroad. Because she rarely received serious threats after Lyndon’s death,
economy-minded critics suggested that Secret Service protection was an unnecessary public expenditure. But the woman notoriously frugal with her own money was not inclined to cut costs here. She registered her objection to giving up her guards, many of whom had been with her for decades and had become almost like family. By the time she died, she had received more years of Secret Service coverage than any figure in U.S. political history.
Secret Service agents who accompanied her on world travels sometimes took their spouses along (at Mrs. Johnson’s suggestion but not at her expense or that of the government) and they had an eye-opener time. Stay-at-home Lyndon never wanted to go anywhere, but as soon as Lady Bird had the opportunity, she set out to explore the world, places she had been whisked through as an official visitor: Europe, Asia, and Africa. The first summer after Lyndon’s death, she started with London, and in subsequent years managed to crowd several European capitals into one trip. She always took a few family members or old friends along, and sometimes living conditions were chaotic. Lynda Robb revealed that her mother rented a house in France’s Dordogne, oblivious to the fact that seventeen people might find it inconvenient to share a single bathroom. But could Lynda even imagine her father in the Dordogne?
Lyndon’s deep disdain for East Coast liberals had not rubbed off on his wife, and in 1981 she started spending part of every summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where she rekindled her relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Forever linked in history by an assassin’s bullets, the two women had seen little of each other since Mrs. Kennedy left Washington, but on the Vineyard they arranged to get together. The following summer Bird wrote Jackie to say that her previous stay on the Vineyard had provided such pleasure, she was coming back and had rented a “grandchildren proof” house for the month of July so Luci could bring her children, now numbering four. Would Jackie like to come to the birthday party Bird was throwing for Luci’s forty-fifth on July 2? Although Jackie couldn’t make it, she replied that it was “sweet of you to ask me” and in other circumstances, “I’d love to.” The two ex–first ladies continued to remember each other at Christmas with boxes of pecan pralines (from Bird) and books (from Jackie).
Their final meeting was in the summer of 1993, when Bird accepted Jackie’s invitation to a boat outing. The weather turned stormy, and they had to switch to lunch at Jackie’s new house. Afterward, Lady Bird wrote that everything about the visit pleased—the “delicious meal, your guests, particularly Maurice Tempelsman [Jackie’s longtime companion], the good conversation.” Bird “loved the house. It sits on the Island so ‘at home’ with its surroundings, almost as if it grew out of the land.” Nine months later, Bird made the effort—assisted by walking cane and the arm of a Secret Service agent—to attend Jackie’s funeral at St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church on New York’s Park Avenue.
As Mrs. Johnson’s frailties became ever more apparent, she scaled back her role in the family businesses. She had already brought in an outsider, Dallas lawyer Richard Hull, to restructure her financial empire in 1990, and after the LBJ Holding Company was formed, Claudia T. Johnson sat on the board, attending meetings until she turned eighty-nine.
With a substantial portfolio throughout her widowed years, Lady Bird Johnson could have afforded about any Austin house she fancied, but she continued using the modest apartment she had shared with Lyndon atop the Texas Broadcasting offices. Finally, in 1987, after recognizing that she needed more space to entertain her brood of grandchildren and their friends, she started house hunting. She took an immediate liking to an unpretentious ranch-style home on a quiet, untraveled street in the hills to the west of the city, and she summoned daughter Luci, who had remarried and moved to Toronto, to help assess it. Luci immediately nixed the idea of purchase, pronouncing the house too small. Her mother’s Secret Service detail required more space than 2505 Camino Alto provided, and the 1960s structure had no outstanding architectural detail to recommend it. Although mother and daughter had remarked on the property’s Madrone tree, one of Bird’s favorites, Luci advised her to keep looking.
A few days later, the daughter received a follow-up call from her mother, announcing that she had found the perfect house. When Luci heard it was the same little ranch-style that she had already vetoed, she objected: “But I thought we agreed that all it offered was a view of Austin and a Madrone tree.” Lady Bird replied, “I decided that was all I need,” and she bought it.
In fact, 2505 Camino Alto, nestled into a hill on a one-and-one-quarter-acre lot, accommodated all her needs and far more vegetation than a single Madrone tree. The hollowed out space beneath the main floor had enough footage for Secret Service agents and a large family room. On the entry-level floor, Bird had her essentials: a small office for herself, living and dining rooms for entertaining, and a bedroom with a fireplace and lots of bookshelves. Through the wall of windows on one side of the house she could look down on her alma mater, and watch its tower light up in signature orange after every football victory.
At the ranch, where Lady Bird spent her weekends, she had restored the house to the cozy, user-friendly dwelling of the pre-presidential years. Out went the desks from Lyndon’s huge office, and in came comfortable sofas to turn it into a family room. She had a Jacuzzi installed just outside her bedroom so that on warm nights she could sit with her guests in the gushing water, stare at the stars in the sky, and talk about what was currently playing on the Broadway stages of New York.
With more time of her own, Lady Bird became a devoted, doting grandmother. The Johnson daughters produced a total of seven children between 1967 and 1978 and to them all, Bird was simply “Nini.” She often said the best gift one can give is the gift of memory, and she made a point of lavishing extravagant trips on her “grands,” the kind of travel that left precious memories but had not been on her calendar when her own daughters were young. Not a big spender before, she was now booking her grandchildren into the luxury hotels of Europe, setting a standard, Lynda Robb noted, that the children’s parents would have trouble matching.
By the time she neared eighty, Lady Bird Johnson found it increasingly harder to reach her widow’s shelf of deferred pleasures. Decreased energy, failing eyesight, and a succession of minor illnesses slowed her step. After leaving Washington, she had resumed driving herself, at least on local roads around the ranch. But that stopped one Sunday morning when her Secret Service detail observed her driving more erratically than they thought prudent. They insisted she leave the driving to them. For a woman who had owned her first car at thirteen and considered driving as natural as walking, it was a painful reminder of diminishing options.
In 1993, Bird had a small stroke, and it was obvious by that time she was losing her eyesight. When macular degeneration made reading difficult, she turned to audio books, including the Harry Potter series, so she could keep up with what young people were reading. But she still kept her bedroom bookshelves stocked with the printed versions—books on travel and gardening, autographed gifts from authors, biographies, and more than one first lady’s story, including Eleanor’s On My Own, and Joseph Lash’s book about ER, The Years Alone.
More physical failings followed that first stroke and she received a pacemaker in 1998, underwent cataract surgery in 2001, and was hospitalized for repeated falls and various maladies. In 2002, the year that should have seen her jubilantly celebrate a ninetieth birthday, she suffered a devastating stroke that left her unable to walk and form intelligible words. It was, one of her trusted friends explained, a “mild stroke in a bad place.” While Lady Bird retained full comprehension and delighted in hearing one of her great-grandchildren read from Little House on the Prairie, she could only smile and nod to signal her response. Full-time caretakers got better at deciphering her requests, and daughter Luci tried to translate her garbled phrases. But Bird found the loss of words extremely frustrating. At first she attempted speech therapy but then, her friends noted, she seemed to give up. She could still smother her great-grandchildren with h
ugs and kisses and beam proudly as one of them played a guitar for her, but the woman famous for saying “I love words” now had none left.
At the dinner table, where Bird still insisted on a single conversation at any one time, she was the first to laugh at jokes. Although she had to depend on others to order her food for her, she continued to frequent Austin restaurants, where bearded truck drivers, looking much like those who had once shouted Lyndon down, came up to thank her for what she had done for Texas. Across the nation, those who remembered her only as the wife of an unpopular president may still have disparaged her Southern drawl, but closer to home she qualified for sainthood, widely loved for her civility and for her environmental work.
Bird hoped to live until 2010, when her estate would no longer incur federal taxes, but she didn’t make it. She died on July 11, 2007, at 2505 Camino Alto, and the Madrone tree in her yard expired soon after.
Her funeral service at Austin’s mammoth Riverbend Centre (capacity five thousand) was an outpouring of love and admiration. Representatives of eight presidential families besides her own (Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43) filled the front rows, but the eulogies came, not from the notables, but from her female descendants and closest male friends.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 41