First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  In November 1963, when Lyndon became president, Lady Bird’s opportunities for action increased, and she proceeded to alter the public’s expectations of what a First Lady might do. Much of what she did is detailed in her book, A White House Diary, which resulted from the tapes she made during her husband’s presidency. It was the most complete record of a First Lady’s tenure since Eleanor Roosevelt turned out her daily columns.

  Comparisons between the two women came quickly, with many observers noting that both grew along with their husbands’ political successes to personalities of their own. The fact that both women began their marriages as shy, supportive helpmates should not obscure, however, important differences between them. Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird did not thrive on the controversies inherent in politics, and she disapproved of First Ladies who involved themselves in issues that might divide the country.72 Lady Bird kept her views on civil rights and Vietnam to herself, and she never sought an individual constituency for herself. Nor did she pursue a political or diplomatic career in her own right. After her husband’s death, she withdrew from public life and ventured out only when her son-in-law, Charles Robb, sought help. It had all been fun, she said, and she had learned a lot but “Politics was Lyndon’s life, [not mine and] 38 years were enough.”73

  While Lyndon lived, his ambitions always came first with Lady Bird, and she put all her energies into helping him. He could have won the 1964 election without carrying states below the Mason-Dixon line, but his wife volunteered to campaign there because she did not want to lose those states “by default.”74 Many southerners had vigorously opposed President Johnson’s stand on civil rights and any move by him to change their minds seemed doomed to failure, but his wife’s campaigning was something else. On a train dubbed the “Lady Bird Special,” she wound her way out of Washington into the Carolinas and over to New Orleans, giving forty-seven speeches along the way.75 Assisted by daughter Lynda for the first two days and then by Luci, she enticed local politicos to join her (although many of them would have balked at being photographed with the president.) Because they could pass off an appearance at Lady Bird’s side as simple chivalry, one after another recalcitrant Democrat climbed aboard. Some of the holdouts sent their wives.

  Lady Bird did not meet individuals to bargain on specific matters—her husband’s staff had come along to perform that task—but in her deep Texan accent she pleaded with crowds of southerners to understand that her husband was one of them. When hecklers tried to out-shout her, she waited a moment and then said, “Now you’ve had your say. Will you give me mine?” “There will always be somebody in the audience,” she later pointed out, “who will say, ‘that’s fair.’”76 For a woman who had always hated giving speeches, she did remarkably well. When the trip ended, just about everybody agreed that she had helped win votes for Lyndon—the disagreement came over how many. Making the president’s wife appear all the more courageous, her Republican counterpart in that election took only a traditional handshaking role.

  After Lyndon Johnson achieved his own clear victory in 1964 and held the presidency in his own right, Lady Bird resolved to do more for the success of the administration. The history of presidents’ wives taking on causes for themselves went back almost ninety years to Lucy Hayes’s temperance stand. Ellen Wilson had lent her name to a housing bill, and Eleanor Roosevelt had assisted artists, women, blacks, and other groups she judged in need of her attention. Most First Ladies had contented themselves, however, with supporting non-controversial charities. Lou Hoover had become publicly associated with the Girl Scouts, and Bess Truman spoke up in behalf of the Cancer Society. Jackie Kennedy’s White House restoration had attracted so much favorable publicity that Lady Bird perceived a public expectation that she should do more than sit in the White House, and she set out to find a cause of her own.

  Choosing an area in which she held a deep and lifelong interest and one in which her staff believed Lyndon would not interfere, Lady Bird Johnson launched her “beautification” project. The interest went back to childhood and lasted into retirement so it was not contrived for the moment. She frequently said that she enjoyed most those hours of the day just before sunset when she drove around the family ranch. After Lyndon’s death, she spent most of her energy on wild-flower preservation. It was a devotion, her daughters noted with some exasperation, that had not been passed on to them—“It did not come with the genes.”77

  The early 1960s offered a propitious time for encouraging Americans to care more for their environment. Rachel Carson’s book, describing a “silent spring” when birds could not sing and trees could not green because of the effects of harmful chemicals, was published in 1962, the year before Lyndon became president. The First Lady’s campaign to capitalize on that concern was named “beautification,” even though she disliked the term and called it “cosmetic and trivial [sounding] … and … prissy, [but] try as we would we couldn’t come up with anything better.”78 First Ladies had traditionally concerned themselves with the appearance of the capital, but Lady Bird went further than the others. Unlike Helen Taft, who arranged for the planting of the cherry trees, Lady Bird persisted in linking natural beauty with the quality of life, and she attributed problems of crime and juvenile delinquency, in part, to the ugliness in which people lived. Contests sponsored by her Committee for a More Beautiful Capital rewarded neighborhood participation, and she lauded historic preservation that linked people with their past.79 Her beautification efforts did not stop in Washington—she went national—and in thousands of miles of traveling around the country, she planted trees, shot rapids, and urged people to care more about the world they would pass on to their children. Headstart, an education program for preschool children that Congress initiated in February 1965, stayed on her agenda and she became its Honorary Chairman, but for most Americans she was permanently associated with environmental concerns.

  Some issues, perceived by the public as “soft” because they directly touch people’s lives—matters such as aging, care of foster children, education, the arts and the environment—are often relegated to insignificant spots on the president’s agenda. Deep concern and caring, not commonly associated with strength and power in American politics, tend to fall more within the responsibility of a surrogate of the president, often a wife or daughter. When visiting orphanages and homes for the aged, planting trees, and sitting in on kindergarten classes cannot command high priority on the president’s schedule, a spouse can substitute, and each First Lady since 1963 has chosen a project from within these categories. Foreign policy questions, defense strategies, labor reforms, and banking practices are not likely choices for presidents’ wives’ projects.

  To conclude, however, that the “soft” issues are trivial would be wrong. In many cases, they concern people more directly than do international confrontations and bureaucratic regulations. Before writing off Lady Bird Johnson’s efforts as a contrived publicity stunt or as innocuous garden-club-lady work, it is important to remember that she appropriated for herself one of the few areas of the administration in which she would have been permitted a significant role of her own. Her husband gave no evidence of consulting with her on troop buildups, harbor mining, or bombings in Cambodia. But even Lyndon Johnson would have agreed that a successful administration had many parts and that people could not think about Vietnam all the time (although by 1968, it may have seemed to him that they did). Sometimes their minds moved to the polluted streams and the need to improve classrooms for their children—areas in which an additional spokesperson for the administration could be of help.

  Lady Bird Johnson was particularly suited for this role because she appeared naturally more concerned about people’s feelings than he was. When it came time to defend her friends, she sometimes acted on her own without clearing the matter with Lyndon. Her public announcement in behalf of Walter Jenkins is a case in point, although some accounts of this episode have her seeking the president’s approval. Jenkins, who had worked for t
he Johnsons since the 1940s and whose wife and children were close to the Johnson family, was arrested in a Washington men’s room on a morals charge just weeks before the 1964 election. The president, in New York for a speech, remained silent until he could assess his options and the possible consequences, but Lady Bird responded immediately. J. Russell Wiggins, then of the Washington Post, recalled her decisiveness: “All other times she would have followed Lyndon to the guillotine if it were necessary [but this time she acted on her own, summoning me to the White House] and in [she] came. My God, she was like a vessel under full sail. She came into that room, and she issued a statement declaring full loyalty to Walter Jenkins. She read it, and she said she wondered if we’d print it.”80

  When Lady Bird turned that same decisiveness to environmental issues, she knew she would not find unanimity on a solution. On a factfinding trip with friends outside the capital, she had been appalled by a “tunnel of filling stations, billboards, neon signs and dilapidated little buildings.” Yet she understood they had a purpose and a right to be there: “These enterprises are conveniences for people and this is private enterprise. What is the answer?” she pondered in her diary.81 Although few Americans would stand up to defend large billboards and junkyards that lined the highways, little agreement appeared on who should pay for their removal. What constituted “fair” compensation for billboards erected many years earlier, and what was the role of the federal government in dictating to the states in such matters?

  The highway beautification program was promoted on many fronts. Federally sponsored conferences on the subject began in early 1965, and regional meetings were scheduled to involve governors and city officials. The administration prepared drafts of several bills on the subject, and Lady Bird went to work lobbying. She telephoned congressmen and urged her friends to do the same. Guest lists for White House dinners and receptions reflected an interest in enlisting votes, and when Lady Bird spoke to members of the Associated Press, she encouraged editorials on the subject. Reporters who followed her suggestion received a personal thank-you. Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s chief of staff, recalled that she had put on her “best perfume and [gone] to Capitol Hill to call on members of Congress I knew. We needed every vote we could get, for the billboard lobby was active and well-heeled.”82

  The president pressured the House Rules committee to report the measure out (which it did by a seven to six vote) and then he urged the House to act during a night session on October 7. Notwithstanding some grumbling about the measure being a present for Lady Bird, the Highway Beautification Act became law in October 1965. It provided federal money for states that controlled billboards and junkyards along noncommercial highways. States that failed to comply with the new law within two years risked losing 10 percent of their federal allotments. Three-quarters of the compensation to billboard and junkyard owners would come from Washington. Additional money was authorized for landscaping and roadside development, but it would come from the Treasury instead of the Highway Trust Fund so as not to jeopardize new road building. Neither the president nor the First Lady conceded that the law went as far as they would have liked, but it marked a beginning.

  Lady Bird’s association with the Highway Beautification Act was not unprecedented—and the reaction was predictable. Cartoons featured her as they had once pointed to Eleanor Roosevelt’s activities—one picture showing a maze of highways running through a forest, with the caption, “Impeach Lady Bird.” Criticism remained light-hearted, however, and she wrote in her diary, “Imagine me keeping company with Chief Justice Warren! [whose impeachment had been sought by some right wing groups.]”83

  The busy First Lady was everywhere. In addition to the more than 700 various appearances, she gave 164 speeches while her husband was president.84 Nineteen “women-doer” luncheons recognized other achievers, and it was during one of these luncheons that the singer Eartha Kitt made her much publicized attack on Lady Bird because of the president’s failure to wind down the war in Vietnam. Kitt waited until Lyndon had made a brief appearance and then left before she lashed out at Lady Bird. Young Americans understandably turned to crime, according to Kitt, because they felt hopeless about their future in a country that offered few jobs but drafted young men for war. Only Kitt knows whether her attack on the president’s wife resulted from her perception that power was shared in the White House or from an entirely different conclusion that Lady Bird was weaker and more vulnerable than the president. Regardless of the motivation, Kitt’s outburst put the president’s wife on the spot, requiring her to reply in a situation that was widely reported. Thus she was drawn into a controversial area whether she wanted to be there or not.85

  Lady Bird underlined her prominence by appointing a larger and better-trained staff than any previously seen in the East Wing of the White House. Liz Carpenter, a Texas newspaperwoman who had arrived in Washington about the same time as Lady Bird, served as press secretary and head of the first Lady’s staff. The social secretary, Bess Abell, daughter of Kentucky senator and wife of the assistant postmaster general, could hardly be expected to run her operation without directing a seasoned eye to the political implications. The First Lady’s press section of six full-time employees, under the direction of an experienced Washington reporter, represented quite a change from the preceding administration. A team of four handled details of the social secretary’s office, and another four answered correspondence. Two staff members dealt only with beautification issues, and even this entourage did not complete the team since others came from the president’s wing to work on temporary assignments.86

  Expertise became as much a mark of the East Wing as of the West. Unlike Jackie Kennedy who liked to scrawl long memos on legal pads, Lady Bird was a remarkably well-organized businesswoman and ran her side of the White House in the manner of a chairman of a large corporation. One aide, who worked for both her and Lyndon, judged her wing more efficient than the president’s.87 Leaving details of flower arrangements and menus to assistants, she was tutored on the issues by the best advisers available, including McGeorge Bundy and members of the Council of Economic Advisers.88

  The successful combination of energy, organization, and experience won Lady Bird many admirers. Within two years of moving into the White House, observers pointed out that she had altered the job. “What Lady Bird Johnson has done,” Meg Greenfield wrote in the Reporter, “is to integrate the traditionally frivolous and routine aspects of the East Wing life into the overall purposes of the administration and to enlist the peculiar assets of First Ladyhood itself in the administration’s behalf. They are assets no one fully understood until Mrs. Johnson moved into the White House—or at least no one fully understood their potential political clout.”89

  By the time Lady Bird prepared to leave Washington in early 1969, James Reston, the syndicated columnist, pronounced her “probably the most remarkable woman who has presided over the White House in this century.”90 Shana Alexander called Lady Bird “quite possibly the best First Lady we have ever had.”91 The same historians who rated Jackie Kennedy eighth among all First Ladies placed Lady Bird Johnson third—right behind the formidable Eleanor Roosevelt and Abigail Adams.92 Lady Bird may well have found her predecessor’s example daunting but it never paralyzed her.

  Presidents’ wives traditionally refuse to admit they have models, and they give little credit to their predecessors. Perhaps a fear of being judged inferior to the ideal explains this ahistorical approach, or maybe it results from a lack of information. Lady Bird Johnson insisted that she never patterned herself on anyone else—she engineered her own ways to help Lyndon, but she did see some parallels beteween herself and her predecessors. They had all concentrated on their husbands’ well-being first, she noted, and tried to provide a setting in which the men could do a good job. “But from then on,” she wrote, “it’s just whatever makes your heart sing. What do you know about? What do you care about? What can you do to make this a better administration?”93

  By 196
8, Lyndon Johnson had to face up to his own questions about his administration because he encountered problems on several sides. The country’s monetary system appeared in trouble, and several of the nation’s cities had suffered outbreaks of violence and destruction. In the summer of 1967, National Guardsmen had been called out to restore order when rioting erupted in New York City, Rochester, Birmingham, Alabama, and New Britain, Connecticut.

  The president from Texas had not ignored the fact that black and white Americans still faced very different opportunities a century after the Civil War ended. In July, 1964, he signed a Civil Rights Act, often deemed the most significant legislation of that kind since Reconstruction. It outlawed discrimination in public places, including restaurants, theaters, and hotels, and it attempted to provide for Negroes to take jobs alongside white workers regardless of the prejudices of employers and union officials. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, placed the registration of voters under federal scrutiny so that the right to cast a ballot would not depend on race. But for all these words on paper, equal opportunity was not yet a reality, and several inner cities seemed poised to explode with anger and frustration.

  The subject that eventually dominated the 1968 presidential election, however, was the war in Vietnam. The United States’ involvement there in the 1950s had attracted little notice, and even at the end of the Kennedy administration when 15,000 American “advisers” served in Southeast Asia, the men and women at home paid little attention. But by the middle of Lyndon Johnson’s full term as president, the Vietnam War represented a major drain on the country’s public purse and morale. Eventually, nearly nine million Americans would serve in the conflict, and more than 47,000 would die. Televised reports of the fighting brought it very close, and in 1968, talk of a new draft system, based on a kind of lottery, threatened to involve many American homes where enlistment had not been considered. Young people redefined their career plans or left the country to avoid participating in or supporting a war they could neither understand nor justify. The president’s own advisers split over whether or not to continue support of South Vietnam against its northern neighbor and over what level that support should reach.