Lady Bird
She was a shy, quiet girl from Karnack, Texas. Then she married Lyndon Johnson.
(Page 3 of 6)
Handed the task, customary for congressmen’s wives, of escorting constituents visiting Washington, she carried out the assignment with unusual thoroughness, not only arranging the standard 8:30 a.m. tours of the Capitol but taking the visitors farther afield: to Mount Vernon and even Monticello. Realizing that her husband, despite his prenuptial avowals of fervent interest in culture and history, would never visit the Smithsonian Institution or the Civil War battlefields, she made these tours with his constituents instead. And after a while, when a visitor had a question about a building they were visiting, the answer would be readily available. A friend came to see that “she must have read everything about the city of Washington and its history, and the Capitol, and Mount Vernon and Monticello; I don’t mean just guidebooks but biographies of Jefferson and Washington. She knew everything—and I mean everything—about the gardens at Monticello and how Jefferson had planned them. She even knew about the Civil War battlefields. She had done a tremendous about of work, without telling anyone.” Asked a question, she would reply in a voice so soft as to be almost inaudible. “She would never say one word unless you asked,” one Texan says, “but if you asked, she always knew the answer.” Not only did she grant, eagerly, graciously, any favors that the visitors requested, she suggested other favors—hotel reservations, train schedules for a side trip to New York. “I early learned,” she says today, that CONSTITUENTS was spelled with capital letters,” and she didn’t forget their requests. Her husband had told her to get a stenographer’s notebook and carry it in her purse everywhere, jotting down anything she had to do. She never forgot the notebook; it—and her diligence in crossing off the items written in it—would be remarked upon by her friends for the next forty years.
Even at Longlea, there were hints—although the scintillating Longlea regulars didn’t notice them. She seemed always to be reading. One summer was to become enshrined in Longlea lore as “the summer that Lady Bird read War and Peace”; the regulars snickered because the quiet little woman carried the big book with her everywhere—even though, by the end of summer, she had finished it. When, during the loud arguments to which she sat silently listening, a book would be cited, Lady Bird would, on her return to Washington, check it out of the public library. One was Mein Kampf, which Charles Marsh had read and to which he was continually referring. She read it, and while she never talked about the book at Longlea, when Hitler’s theories were discussed thereafter, she was aware that, while Marsh knew what he was talking about, no one else in the room did—except her.
And there were other qualities, which were noticed even though their significance was not. To the regulars’ condescension, Lady Bird Johnson responded with an unshakable graciousness. While Alice Hopkins says that Lady Bird “was just out of place,” Mrs. Hopkins adds that “if everyone was just trying to be nice to her,” she would be nice right back, calm and gracious—“self-contained.” Even Alice Glass’ sister has to admit that there was something “quite remarkable in her self-discipline—the things she made herself do. She was forever working,” not only on her reading but on her figure—she had always been “dumpy,” but in 1940 or 1941 the extra weight came off, and stayed off.
And as for her husband’s affair with the salon’s mistress, “oh, of course,” Lady Bird must have known, the regulars say. Wasn’t her husband often going—without her—to Longlea when, as she could easily have determined, Charles Marsh was not at home? But although Mary Louise says, “I could never understand how she stood it,” stand it she did. “We were all together a lot—Lyndon and Lady Bird and Charles and Alice,” Mary Louise says. “And Lady Bird never said a word. She showed nothing, nothing at all.”
When, at Texas State Society parties or other Washington social functions, her husband bellowed orders at her across the room, or insulted her, she never showed anything, either. She would sit silently or say simply, “Yes, Lyndon,” or “I’ll be glad to, Lyndon,” and she would do so as calmly as if the request had been polite and reasonable. People might say to one another, “I don’t know how she stands it,” but she stood it—and she stood it with a dignity that his shouts and sarcasms could not rattle, a dignity that was rather remarkable. But most acquaintances didn’t really notice this. Their attitude toward Lady Bird Johnson was influenced by her husband’s attitude toward her. She never tried to talk very much, of course, and when she did, she wasn’t listened to very much. She was just a drab little woman whom nobody noticed.
As for politics, apart from entertaining her husband’s guests and his constituents, she had no connection at all with this major activity of his life.
During her husband’s campaign for Congress in 1937—he would be unopposed in 1938 and 1940—she had, as always, a welcoming smile and a warm meal for him and his aides at all hours of the night. But when, occasionally, someone—someone who didn’t know her well—raised the possibility that she herself might campaign, the very suggestion that she might have to face an audience and speak brought such panic to her face that the suggestion was always quickly dropped. Sometimes she could not avoid standing in a receiving line at a reception for the congressman—and although she would shake hands and chat with strangers filing by, she would perform this chore with so obvious an effort that her friends felt sorry for her as they watched; the bright smile on her face would be as rigid as if it had been set in stone.
In 1941 Johnson unsuccessfully ran for the Senate. That campaign was little different. She learned of her husband’s decision to run only after the decision had been made; he didn’t bother to tell her until after the press conference at which he told the public. Then he flew down to Texas to begin the campaign; Mrs. Johnson followed by car, so unessential was her participation considered. Having purchased a movie camera, she took pictures of Lyndon as he gave speeches, but they were for showing at home, not for use in the campaign. “I went around with my little camera, cranking,” she was to say during one of our interviews many years later. As she said this, she held up an imaginary camera in an amateurish way and pantomimed turning the crank, and as she did so, she hunched over a little, portraying—vividly—a timid little woman hanging back at the edge of a crowd, pointing a camera at her husband. Whatever she looked like to others, that was what Lady Bird Johnson looked like to herself. Did she have any other role in the campaign? “I packed suitcases and got clothes washed, and tried to see that Lyndon always had clothes; every day Lyndon went through three or four or five shirts….Traveling with him,…trying to get him to eat a regular meal, or taking his messages. Just being on hand in his hotel to answer the phone so he can take a shower. And sitting on the platform at all the big rallies.” And the few words she had to say on the rare—very rare—occasions when she represented her husband at a minor event (“Thank you very much for inviting me to this barbecue. Lyndon is very sorry he couldn’t be here”) were such an ordeal that they made her friends cringe.
Her single attempt to contribute something more ended in embarrassment. She had been making big pitchers of lemonade and baking batches of cookies and lugging them to the campaign volunteers working in various offices around Austin, and she decided that on these visits, in order to thank the volunteers for their efforts and to spur them on to more, “I would give this little speech to them: ‘Every single vote counts.’” She wrote and rewrote the few paragraphs of that brief talk, memorized it and nerved herself up to give it. But she evidently repeated it too many times. Meeting her on the street one day, a friend smilingly began to quote her speech back to her, and since the friend was not a campaign worker, Lady Bird felt that her speech had become a joke quoted around Austin. That was the end of her speechmaking in that campaign. Forty years later, she was to tell me that when the friend quoted her speech back to her, she realized, “Maybe it had made the rounds. I guess I gave the speech too often.” Hearing a change in her voice as she spoke, I glanced up from my notepad. Mrs. Johnson was at that time 68 years old. Her face was lowered, and she was blushing—a definite, dark red blush—at the memory of that humiliation so many years earlier.
As for the less public side of the campaign—the planning of strategy and tactics—the planners say that the candidate’s wife was almost never present. “Well,” she says, “I elected to be out a lot.” Asked why, she replies: “I wasn’t confident in that field.” Was there also another reason? “I didn’t want to be a party to absolutely everything,” Lady Bird Johnson says.
My Library
