Lady Bird Looks Back
In her own words, a Texas icon reflects on the lessons of a lifetime.
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Lyndon always told me, “You know, I’m not going to live to be an old man.” That would make me mad, but I knew it was true.
Lyndon had his first massive heart attack in July 1955. He had a second massive one in April 1972, when we were visiting Lynda and Chuck [Robb, Lynda’s husband] on our way up to see Mrs. Eisenhower. At the time, Dr. Willis Hurst, one of our marvelous friends and Lyndon’s doctor, took me aside and told me, “I want you to know that with as many blocked-up arteries as he has, he will die suddenly, and it won’t matter if the five best cardiologists in the United States are in the room. It just won’t matter.” For the next six months, there were repeated angina attacks. Lyndon described them as hurting almost as much as kidney stones.
So we lived the last bit to the fullest. On the last Christmas of his life he sat at his desk at the ranch and signed book after book [of his memoirs]. I said, “Lyndon, that’s more books than you can possibly give away this Christmas.” And he looked up at me and sort of smiled slowly and sadly and said, “The library can use them sometime.”
We had a happy Christmas together. He got to know four of his seven grandchildren. I have some funny pictures of him riding with some of the grandchildren on the lawn mower around the airplane terminal at the ranch. All the grandkids called him Boppa. I remember Lyndon dressed up like Santa Claus and one of the grandchildren climbed on his lap and looked at him and said, “This isn’t Santa Claus. It’s Boppa!”
What did you do when you were on your own, without LBJ?
The biggest thing that ever happened to me on my own was being a regent at UT for six years. I remember when Governor Preston Smith called in late 1970 and asked me to be on the board. I felt greatly honored, but I told him I couldn’t accept. Lyndon was pretty sick at the time, and I told Governor Smith that I did not want to be away from him a lot.
Lyndon was lying in bed resting. When I hung up the telephone, he said, “Come in here. I think I know what you were talking about, but tell me.” So I told him.
He said, “How did you feel when I would try to convince some really capable citizen to take a government job, a Cabinet post, or head an agency, anything in the service of his country, and he said no because his family didn’t want to move to Washington or because he was climbing the ladder in his company?”
I had strong feelings about that. Lyndon knew that. I always wanted him to get the best people.
So Lyndon told me to get back on the telephone and tell Preston Smith I’d be glad to do it, if he hadn’t already appointed someone else. So, after my usual protestations, I did.
You had a fundraiser for Chuck Robb at the ranch and went to Virginia to campaign for him in his Senate race. What do you think of his opponent, Oliver North?
Chuck’s race in Virginia was about as bad a campaign as I’ve ever seen. We’re in an ugly, contentious mood in America. I hope it will pass. These days I just turn my TV dial looking for something that’s not about O.J. Simpson. Maybe I look at politics through the veil of time, but when Lyndon and I were in it, there was a basic feeling of camaraderie. You traded philosophies. You talked about your part of the country. You talked about what you had to have. But you didn’t hate people who had different philosophies, and you didn’t oppose just to oppose.
I don’t think Lynda will wind up being marred by all this, in the sense of becoming bitter or angry. Lynda is one of the smartest people I know, and she has strong spiritual roots that she doesn’t wear on her sleeve. In politics, you see the best of people and sometimes you see the worst. Sometimes people that were your dearest friends may not be able to support you because of business considerations. It’s easy to be bitter or angry, but I don’t believe Lynda will fall victim.
I’ve never met Oliver North, and I’m not in the judgment business, but let me just say that I want to be represented by someone solid, stable, someone I believe to be looking out for the best interests of the country. I think what he had to say during the campaign [about President Clinton not being his commander in chief] was a wild and loose thing to say. Clinton is his commander in chief. He may not be his choice, but he is his commander in chief for another two years and two months. He may not like it, but that’s the way it is.
As we drove from her house to the wildflower research center, Lady Bird pointed out the hike and bike trail along Town Lake in Austin, one of the projects she helped raise money for when she returned to Texas in 1969. “What you want out of these kinds of places is use—joyous use,” she said. “We have to get more and more places where people can get exercise and fresh air.” These days, Lady Bird spends her days relaxing at the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, attending events at the presidential library in Austin, and supervising construction and fundraising for the wildflower center.
Why have you devoted so much time to wildflowers?
I don’t like homogenized country. When Lyndon and I came back to Texas in 1969, I was dismayed that every place was starting to look like everyplace else. The meadows and hillsides were all being replaced by highway grids and shopping malls. I wanted to try to restore some of our native habitat. We in Texas are blessed with what we have. I just want Texas to keep on looking like Texas. It’s a modest ambition, but it’s mine.
What do you think your legacy will be?
I’m not interested in any legacy. The wildflower center is my love. I can’t control the purity of the air or solve the problem of acid rain, but the wildflower center is an effort to fill a little niche in the whole environmental picture. If we can get people to see the beauty of the native flora of their own corner of the world with caring eyes, then I’ll be real happy.
Do you believe in heaven?
Oh, yes, I do, but I don’t presume to know what heaven will be like. But I do know that there is something hereafter, because all this has been too significant, too magnificent for there not to be something after. I have some friends who believe that the pearly gates are really gates and really pearly. Not for me. I prefer to leave it as a great mystery.
I like adventure. I’ve gone through my life liking adventure, and that’s the way I like to think of heaven. It will be a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated, wonderful adventure.
Near the end of our day together, we were walking on the grounds of the wildflower research center. Lady Bird tapped her way across a field, using her cane to find two particular yaupon bushes she had planted earlier. She knew exactly where the bushes should be, but she couldn’t see them.
“My eyesight is deteriorating badly,” she said. “I’m legally blind in one eye and see very little in the other. I’ve got a condition called macular degeneration, something that ten million of us in the country have. Even nature dwindles now.”
The timbre of her voice was matter-of-fact, resolute. “Do you see any bushes in there that have any red berries on them?” Lady Bird asked me. I scanned the area, looking for the missing yaupons. “If they look gray to you, I’m going to slide in and butt my head against one of these rocks,” she said. “If they’re gray, they’re defoliated, and that’s a bad sign.”
At that moment I spotted the yaupons. “I see the red berries,” I told her.
She looked as relieved and contented as a farmer who had just been told her crops had been spared and she wouldn’t have to sell the family farm.
“Oh, good,” she said, staring at a patch of ground in the direction of the bushes. “Tell me what they look like.”
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