Lady Bird Looks Back
In her own words, a Texas icon reflects on the lessons of a lifetime.
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Perhaps the fondest relationship I’ve had is with Betty Ford. She and I knew each other when our husbands were leaders in Congress. Both of us were members of the 81st Club [an organization for congressional wives], and we shared a lot of memories.
But all the first ladies have been nice to me. I’ve also had a warm, admiring relationship with Barbara Bush. I am closer to her than I am to Hillary Clinton because Barbara and I both come from Texas, we’re closer to the same age, and we’ve shared so much of history.
My relationship with the Clintons is totally from a distance. I think that Hillary Clinton is proving that the role of first lady has marched with the times. I saw my role as giving Lyndon a little island of peace, a comfortable setting in which to work. It’s a big, important role, and I don’t think that role should be denigrated. On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton is a product of the cultural and social change of the last good many decades. I listen to her public speeches and I think she is a strong, intelligent woman who handles herself well. I tip my hat to both of the Clintons. As I used to say when things were at their worst in Lyndon’s presidency, the greatest courage is just to get out of bed in the morning and get back to work.
You defined yourself as a helpmate and extension of Johnson. Is that right?
Yes, absolutely, and I don’t think I was limited by that. I was able to continue to learn new things.
Personally, I regret that women these days don’t stay home with their children until the children are at least in school. I realize I have no right to express myself on this point because I’m not raising children in this day and age and I’m not undergoing the same economic pressures that young people today have to face. However, I think young mothers today are missing one of life’s greatest opportunities: to help babies grow up and train them well. I had a lot of help rearing my two daughters, and goodness knows I’m glad for every bit that I had. But these days people live so much longer than they used to, and women can have a career after their children are in school or even after they are in high school.
Do you have any advice for the first woman president?
Someday I think we will have a woman president, but since I’m almost 82, it’s not going to be in my time. She will have to overcome a natural, inborn cultural prejudice that the man is the leader of the family and therefore should be the leader of the nation. I hope for her sake that she is healthy, both spiritually and physically, and that she has a husband who is very understanding and supportive. I also hope she has a lot of smart daughters to help her out. A president needs somebody to help carry the emotional load that wives and families have traditionally carried.
Many times in our conversation, Lady Bird talked about how time has passed her by. She sounded cheerful but also resigned. Once I asked her about Johnson’s Great Society programs and whether a new kind of approach to social welfare was in order for the upcoming millenium, an approach based on something other than a handout. “Oh, my,” she said. “I’m going to leave such problems to another generation.”
Lady Bird is from a different time and place. I wanted to know what she remembered about her own upbringing. She was born Claudia Alta Taylor in Karnack on December 22, 1912, and nicknamed at age two by a black nurse who pronounced the child “purty as a lady bird.” Both of her parents—Thomas Jefferson Taylor and Minnie Lee Patillo—came from Alabama. Her father, called Cap’n or Boss by his mostly black workers, was the richest man in Harrison County. Her mother died when Lady Bird was only five, and in her solitude, she made a connection with nature. In most of the early photographs of Lady Bird, she is standing among trees or near rivers. Her love of nature gave her a life of her own, which is probably how she survived the turbulence of the sixties and private hard times as well.
What was your life like after your mother died?
When I was six, my Aunt Effie came from Alabama to help Daddy raise us. She was my mother’s sister. As we said in those days, she was a maiden sister, a spinster. She was the sweetest person generally, but she had no idea of discipline, no idea of how to choose the right clothes or how to put a girl in the right society. She did, however, love beauty and nature, and she spent hours explaining how lovely the fields and meadows could be. She taught me how to listen to the wind in the pine trees and to the way birds sing.
My life consisted of roaming the hills, creeks, and woods, and playing with two little black girls who were my own age. Occasionally, in an effort to do what she presumed she ought to do, Aunt Effie would import the daughters of some friends for me to play with. The girls and I would sit around looking at each other. I can’t say it was a great success.
I was a child of nature. I went wherever I wanted to go, and if I got lost, I’d come across some black person, most likely, and they would recognize me. “Which way is it back to the Brick House?” I’d ask. And they’d show me the way home.
I’ve heard it said that you took as much pride in the passage of the Civil Rights Act as Lyndon did, because you grew up in such a segregated society. How were your attitudes about race formed?
I came from a part of Texas—deep East Texas—that was heavily populated by blacks, and it was the hardest place in Texas for civil rights changes to be made. The part of the world I grew up in was just like the Old South transplanted. It was cotton culture—plain, simple, hard country, just like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
I remember once when I was a little girl that a group of white men cornered a black man in the middle of the night and accused him of some crime. The poor man was so terrified that he just took off running. When he did, the white men shot him in the back. It happened near Karnack. I heard about it the next morning, and I was just a little girl, but I remember thinking to myself, “This isn’t right. Somebody ought to change this.” Lyndon did.
In The Path to Power, Robert Caro describes you as a wallflower. Were you a wallflower?
I never thought of myself that way, but I did wear saddle shoes when the other girls were wearing silk stockings and lipstick. I was always scared to death when some boy sat down by me and began to talk.
But this was the period when I was eleven to thirteen and going to school in Karnack, and thirteen to fifteen when I went to high school in Marshall. I did not have any beaus then, but when I got to Austin in the spring after my seventeenth birthday, I just blossomed. From the time I was seventeen until I left the university, I had all the beaus I could handle. I had a lot of fun. Crazy, wild, city fun. I think I fell in love every April.
Like most people, Lady Bird has built her life in retirement around memories. If her house caught on fire, she told me, there are only two items that she would grab before running outside. Both are black and white photographs that hang on the wall beside her bed: one of their daughter Lynda, after the birth of her daughter, Lucinda; and one of LBJ and their daughter, Luci, after the birth of Luci’s daughter, Lynn. Lady Bird’s bedroom is painted in soothing shades of pink and green. “I love all kinds of pink!” she told me as she walked through the room. A TV tray, with breakfast dishes still on it, stood near her bed. In the middle of the floor was a white towel on which she had done her morning exercises. Walking into a solarium dominated by an enormous hot tub, she exclaimed, “Here is my bow to total self-indulgence!”
Were you prepared for LBJ’s death?
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