Lady Bird
She was a shy, quiet girl from Karnack, Texas. Then she married Lyndon Johnson.
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Back in Washington after the 1941 campaign, she had a new apartment in the Woodley Park Towers off Connecticut Avenue, much more spacious than the Kalorama Road apartment and with a living room that, she recalls, “just hung over Rock Creek Park, and was just filled with green.” But an apartment wasn’t what she wanted. “I had been yearning and talking about having a home,” she recalls. The Johnsons had been spending about six months of the year in Austin, and every year they seemed to be living in a different apartment there—small and temporary. And in Washington, more and more of their friends were buying homes. “The central theme of my heart’s desire was a house,” she recalls, but there was no money to buy one. She and Lyndon had wanted children, but after seven years of marriage there were no children. “This was a sadness,” she remembers, and changes the subject. But sometimes, despite herself, her sorrow slipped out; an old friend was to remember chatting with Lady Bird at this time about other topics; every so often Lady Bird would pause, and a wistful look would cross her face, and she would say, “If I had a son…” or “If I had a daughter…” During the fall of 1941, she was still taking constituents to Mount Vernon—she was to say she stopped counting after her 200th trip—and she was very tired of those trips. Nellie Connally says, “She was like a sight-seeing bus. That’s what congressional wives did: They hauled the constituents around.” During that fall, she still entertained constituents at dinners—dinners at which her guests paid little attention to her. Anxious for something else to do, she enrolled, with Nellie, in a business school in Arlington, taking courses in shorthand and typing; years later, Mrs. Johnson, almost always careful not to say a derogatory word about anything, would say of the business school: “That was a dull, drab little place.” And all during that fall the Texas parties continued at which her husband ridiculed her or shouted orders at her. “The women liked her,” Nellie Connally says. “Every woman sympathized with her. If they didn’t like her for herself—and they did—they liked her because they saw what she had to put up with. It made what they had to put up with not so bad.”
Then came Pearl Harbor. Although Lyndon Johnson had promised Texas voters that if war began he would immediately enlist and be “in the trenches, in the mud and blood with your boys,” he would in fact spend the first five months of the war on the West Coast. When he was about to leave on his first trip to the coast, on which he would be accompanied by John Connally and Willard Deason, he said that Lady Bird might as well get some use out of her typing classes and took her along to type his letters. Telephoning his congressional office every evening, he was told about problems in the district: about federal installations for which he had obtained preliminary approval before his departure—a big Air Force base for Austin, an Army camp in Bastrop County, a new rural electrification line—but that were now stalled in the federal bureaucracy; about scores of businessmen whose plans for construction or expansion of factories were stalled by lack of necessary approvals from federal agencies such as the new War Production board and the Office of Strategic Materials; about letters and telephone calls—hundreds of letters and telephone calls—from constituents about routine pre-war matters and about new war-related problems. There was no one to handle these problems. In Connally, Walter Jenkins, and the brilliant speechwriter Herbert Henderson, Johnson had possessed an exceptional staff, but Jenkins had enlisted in September, Henderson had suddenly, unexpectedly died in October, and Connally’s departure left no one in Suite 1320 of the House Office Building except apple-cheeked Mary Rather—charming, efficient, but only a secretary—and O. J. Weber, bright and aggressive, but only 21 years old and with just a few months’ experience. And the problems had to be handled quickly. If final authorization for the new military bases in the 10th Congressional District was not pushed through, some other congressman would snap up the bases for his district. If constituents didn’t get the necessary assistance in Washington, the feeling would spread that there was no one in the district’s congressional office except secretaries, that the district was without adequate representation in Washington—at a time when a congressman was needed with particular urgency. If Johnson’s absence from Washington was to be prolonged, voters might begin asking why he didn’t resign his seat and let the district elect a new congressman. The political danger was real—and imminent. Let dissatisfaction mount and, with an election scheduled for July 25, 1942, he might, if he didn’t resign, be replaced. Someone had to take over the office, to be in effect, in all but name, the congressman from the 10th District until the real congressman returned. Someone had to handle a congressman’s multifaceted chores: to persuade Cabinet officers and high-level bureaucrats to cut through red tape and get the big projects moving again, to negotiate with the new wartime agencies on behalf of businessmen, to serve as the necessary link between constituents and federal agencies. Discussing the situation out on the coast, Johnson, Connally, and Deason agreed that choosing an ambitious young politician or lawyer from Austin, who might become a possible rival, was too risky. Moreover, the choice had to be someone who was not only totally loyal but who would provide a sense of continuity, someone who would make the district feel that the office was being run as if Lyndon Johnson were still there running it; someone, therefore, who was identified with Lyndon Johnson. It is unclear which of the men first suggested that the best choice—perhaps the only choice—was Mrs. Lyndon Johnson; she thinks it was Deason whom, to her astonishment, she first heard mention her name. Her husband at first dismissed the idea, but the more it was discussed, the clearer it became that it was the only solution. Johnson and his entourage returned to Washington after only two weeks, but learned that he and Connally would soon be leaving again, on a trip whose duration was indefinite. He told Lady Bird she would have to do the job. And when, on January 29, 1942, he and Connally left for the coast again, Lady Bird went to Suite 1320.
On this trip, Johnson and Connally would be gone for ten weeks. The two tall, handsome young Texans traveled up and down the West Cost, visiting shipyards, meeting with Navy training officers and contractors’ representatives to discuss new training programs, going to filmings and Hollywood parties, and having what Connally describes as “a lot of fun” while Johnson was lobbying for a powerful wartime position in Washington. (Connally was only temporarily deferring to Johnson’s wishes in accompanying him. Later, he would push for active service, and would serve with distinction on the aircraft carrier Essex.) The alacrity with which Johnson had leapt into the 1941 Senate race had made Alice Glass realize that her lover’s political ambitions would always take priority and that divorce was not a realistic hope. After the 1941 campaign, she had finally agreed to marry Charles Marsh, but now, when Johnson asked her to visit him in California, she went. An idealist herself who had first been attracted to Johnson because she felt he was an idealist, she still believed in his idealism and felt he was a young man on his way to fight a war or at least to participate in the war effort. (She would become disillusioned by the contract between Johnson’s activities and the grim battles on Bataan peninsula in the Philippines and a great naval battle raging in the Macassar Strait being reported daily in the newspapers, however. Years later, jokingly suggesting in a letter to a mutual friend, Brown and Root lobbyist Frank C. “Posh” Oltorf, that they collaborate on a book on Johnson, she said, “I can write a very illuminating chapter on his military career in Los Angeles, with photographs, letters from voice teachers, and photographers who tried to teach him which was the best side of his face.”) Despite the reality of his West Cost activities, however, Johnson had managed to leave the impression with his wife and staff that active service in a combat zone was imminent, and Lady Bird believed this. And she ran his office.
Her husband didn’t make it easy for her. He did not, in fact, give her much of a vote of confidence before the staff; he appears to have been unable to bring himself to tell Miss Rather and Weber that she was to be in charge of the office. He told her to write him daily letters listing the project she was working on and to leave wide margins so that he could put instructions next to each item, but he told Weber and Miss Rather to write letters, too, and left the impression with them that he wanted them to report to him on how Lady Bird was doing.
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