Lady Bird
She was a shy, quiet girl from Karnack, Texas. Then she married Lyndon Johnson.
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Every day brought some new problem to be solved. A relative of a constituent had died in Palestine, and a lawyer from Palestine was needed to handle the estate. When Lady Bird went to the State Department, she was told arrangements would have to be made through the British Embassy. (“I didn’t see the ambassador—I wasn’t that size of an applicant,” Mrs. Johnson says, “but I did get to see” an official, “a very nice gentleman, with courtly manners. He said, ‘Won’t you join me for a bit tea?’ and he reached into the drawer with an almost conspiratorial wink and took out two lumps of sugar and dropped one in my cup and one in his.”)
“There were always mothers who said they hadn’t heard from Johnny in months and months,” she recalls. “Would I please find out where Johnny was.” There were “a whole lot of folks who wanted to get into officer candidate school, knowing they were going to be drafted sooner or later.” There were the businessman with half-completed plants “so you had to plead their cause before the War Production board or whatever… ‘Strategic materials’ and ‘OCS’ and lots of things became just a part of your vocabulary.”
And she learned she could solve the problems. “You know,” she recalls, “the squeaking wheel gets the grease. And if you keep after the Army Department or the Navy Department or the Red Cross long enough and pester them enough, we could help them. For one thing, it was down the street from us, and it was sixteen hundred miles from them, so you could help them.” The constituent got his lawyer from Palestine, and Austin got its Air Force base, and a lot of Johnnys were located, and Lady Bird Johnson heard mothers sobbing with relief on the telephone when she told them that their son was alive, he just hadn’t bothered to write, you know how young men are.
She learned, moreover, that she could solve problems in her own way. She could never use her husband’s methods, but she could use her own. If she was a squeaking wheel, it was a wheel that squeaked very politely. Recalling forty years later the lessons she learned during the summer of 1942 about helping constituents, she said: “If you’ll just be real nice about it, and real, real earnest, courteous, and persistent, you could help them.” She never let her smile slip or raised her voice or said a harsh word, but she never stopped trying to solve a problem—and a lot of them were solved. Edward A. Clark, an Austin attorney who needed a great deal of help, both for himself and for his clients, with the War Production board and other government agencies, and who had not looked forward at all to having to rely on a woman, says: “When she took over that office, she was wonderful. She gave wonderful service… And she did it without ever raising her voice or fussing—she never shouted even at a secretary. She thanked anyone who brought her a pencil. She was just as sweet and kind to them. She was grateful to everyone.” And as she got the lawyer and the Air Force base and the other things the constituents wanted, Lady Bird Johnson got something for herself, too—something she had never had before: confidence.
“The real brains of he office were O.J. and Mary,” she is careful to say, in recalling 1942. “And yet I played a useful role.”
When, years later, she would be asked how the summer of ’42 had changed her, she would always, as was invariable with her, put the changes in the context of her husband. “The very best part of it,” she would say, “was that it gave me a lot more understanding of Lyndon. By the time the end of the day came, when I had shifted the gears in my mind innumerable times, I could know what Lyndon had been through… I was more prepared after that to understand what sometimes had seemed to be Lyndon’s unnecessary irritations.” When, at the end of the day, Nellie or someone else wanted her to make still another decision—where to eat dinner, for example—she would “get almost mad at them.”
But she also saw some changes that were not in the context of her husband.
“After a few months,” she says, “I really felt that if it was ever necessary, I could make my own living—and that’s a good feeling to have. That’s very good for you, for your self-esteem and for your place in the world—because, well, I didn’t have a home, and I didn’t have any children, and although I had a tremendously exciting, vital life, I didn’t have any home base, so to speak, except for Lyndon, and it’s good to know that you yourself, aside from a man, have some capabilities, and I found that out, er, er, er, to my amazement, rather.” During my interviews with her, Mrs. Johnson was invariably helpful, cooperative, pleasant, but she seldom showed the depths of her emotions. When the interviews reached 1942, however, Lady Bird Johnson suddenly blurted out: “1942 was really quite a great year!”
Speaking of the qualities that Lady Bird Johnson revealed for the first time while her husband was away at war, Nellie Connally says: “I think she changed. But I think it was always there. I just don’t think it was allowed out.”
After Johnson returned from the war (“I was shaken when I saw him,” Lady Bird remembers. “He had been through a lot. He had lost weight…. My feeling was at once protective, and I just wanted to get him a lot of milkshakes.”), it was again not allowed out. Mrs. Johnson says that after her husband’s return, “I did not go into the office regularly.” Nothing could elicit from Mrs. Johnson’s lips one word that could possibly be construed as a criticism of her husband. Oh, no, she says with emphasis, she was not at all disappointed to stop working and return to her previous life. “I was glad to turn over the responsibility.” The turnover was complete. Any illusions Mrs. Johnson may have held about now being included in her husband’s political discussions were shattered at one of the first of those discussions, when she ventured to stay in the room after it began. “We’ll see you later, Bird,” her husband said, dismissing her. He treated her as he had before.
So impressed had Austin political and business leaders been with her that one day, Ed Clark recalls, when a group of them were at lunch, someone said—“kidding, you know”—“Maybe she’s going to decide that she likes that office, and then he’s going to wish he hadn’t gone off to war.” This joking became so widespread that it reached print in district newspapers; a letter to the Goldthwaite Eagle, for example, said that instead of reelecting Johnson to Congress in absentia, “I’d call a convention… and nominate Mrs. Lyndon Johnson for Congress to take her husband’s place while he is fighting for his country, and she would make a good congresswoman, too.” The joking reached Johnson’s ears—and after he returned, he took pains to put it to rest, to make clear that his wife’s role as caretaker of his office while he was in the Pacific, and indeed her role in his overall political life, had never been significant.
Lady Bird’s Aunt Effie knew how much her niece wanted a house, and now she told the young wife that she would pay most of the purchase price if Lady Bird found one that she wanted to buy. Moreover, there would be money from the estate of Uncle Claude Patillo of Alabama, who had recently died. By the fall of 1942 his estate was being settled, and Mrs. Johnson was informed that she would eventually be receiving about $21,000. “Now we can go and get that house,” she told her husband.
The two-story brick colonial at 4921 Thirtieth Place, a quiet street in the northwest section of Washington, was a modest eight-room house with a screened verandah at the rear, but she loved it. Her husband liked it too, but he insisted on bargaining and issuing ultimata to the owners. When they refused to accept his “take-it-or-leave-it” figure, the deal seemed dead. Coming home to their apartment one day, Lady Bird found her husband talking politics with Connally and asked if she could discuss the house with him Her husband listened to her arguments and then, without a word of reply, resumed his conversation with Connally as if she had never spoken. For once in her life—the only time in her married life that any of her friends can recall—Lady Bird Johnson lashed back at her husband.
“I want that house!” she screamed. “Every woman wants a home of her own. I’ve lived out of a suitcase ever since we’ve been married. I have no home to look forward to. I have no children to look forward to, and I have nothing to look forward to but another election.” In the retelling of this story, the denouement has a patina of cuteness. Johnson was reported to have asked Connally, “What should I do?” to which Connally is said to have replied, “I’d buy the house.”.This may not have been the actual dialogue, but by the end of 1942 the house was bought—for $18,000, about $10,000 of which Aunt Effie put up—and Lady Bird had her home. “You see,” Mrs. Johnson carefully explains, “I didn’t feel unhappy. I was happy about the house.”
From the book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, by Robert A. Caro. Copyright 1990 by Roberta A. Carro, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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