Liz Carpenter, Journalist, Author and LBJ staffer 
Profile
Luci in the Sky
Now firmly in control of her famous family’s holding company, Luci Baines Johnson is flying high.
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Her first night in the White House, she and a friend lit a fire in the fireplace that quickly got out of control—an incident that made headlines around the country. She spent the rest of her first week there cleaning smoke stains off the walls. From then on, she regarded the White House, she said, as “the Great White Zoo.” At nineteen she married a National Guardsman, Patrick Nugent, hoping it would allow her to lead a less public life. But it really didn’t: Even if she never lived in the White House again—not even when Patrick went off to Vietnam—she still had to endure unpleasant visits there. Some nights she would hear the protesters out in front of the gates yelling, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?”—a memory that continues to haunt her. “There aren’t enough walls to isolate you from that,” she said. (Of course, being tethered to LBJ wasn’t always so bad; sometimes you were part of history. In the summer of 1967, a few days after the birth of her son, Lyndon, who is now a lawyer in San Antonio, his grandfather went to Glassboro, New Jersey, to meet with Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin. Kosygin had a message from the North Vietnamese: If the Americans would stop bombing, they would start peace talks. “I understand you have grandchildren,” LBJ told Kosygin. “My first grandchild was just born. . . . Let’s get to work.”)
Then there was the issue of Luci’s relationship with her sister—and the natural sibling rivalry between them. Not surprisingly, LBJ himself was partly responsible for fanning the flames. In the mid-sixties an Associated Press reporter, Frank Cormier, asked the president if he was at all concerned that his daughters, who had grown up in public, would be able to make private lives for themselves. Lyndon, trying to compliment both girls, replied, “Lynda Bird is so smart that she’ll be able to make a living for herself. And Luci Baines is so appealing and feminine that there will always be some man around waiting to make a living for her.”
Such comparisons intensified the tensions between the girls, though Lady Bird did her best to tamp them down. In 1966 a newspaper carried a positive story about Luci’s bridesmaids and a negative one about Lynda’s eluding the press on a trip to Washington. In her memoir, A White House Diary, Lady Bird wrote about how she felt seeing such stories side by side: “And now in a way, it’s daughter against daughter. Luci has certain qualities that make her wonderful with the press and Lynda has characteristics that give her a bad time with them. The moral is, we must be careful—no rifts within our inner forces.” All these years, Lynda and Luci have followed their mother’s line—no public rifts—while working, as many daughters do, to define themselves against their father’s type. For example, when Luci, long divorced from Nugent, married Ian Turpin in 1983, she decided not to take his name. It was a break from the traditional role her father had envisioned. “I took my maiden name back once very reluctantly,” she explained, “and I just never wanted to go through anything like that again.”
Three years ago, she took another step at redefining herself as someone smart enough to earn her own way—by going back to college. She had been forced to drop out of Georgetown University’s School of Nursing in 1966 because of a prohibition against married students, and instead of enrolling elsewhere, she had a baby. “Every single day for three decades, it gnawed at me,” Luci said. She was the first Johnson woman in three generations not to graduate from college: Lyndon’s mother had a master’s degree, Lady Bird graduated from the University of Texas with not one but two degrees, and Lynda also graduated from UT—with honors, no less. In 1995, finally accepting that reality and the accomplishments of her own daughters (28-year-old Nicole and 23-year-old Rebekah are alums of UT and Montreal’s Concordia University, respectively, and 22-year-old Claudia is a senior at Boston University), Luci enrolled at St. Edward’s. She graduated with a 4.0 grade point average and a degree in communications; her diploma hangs on a wall in her office. “I didn’t need a university degree to be chairman of the board of the LBJ Holding Company,” she said, lifting and lowering both of her hands in the dramatic way her father used to. “I didn’t need to do it to earn a nickel more. I did it so I could put a lifetime of feeling inferior behind me. I did it for myself.”
Now her attention is focused on the family business. During the drop in real estate and oil prices in the eighties, two Texas banks owned by the Johnsons—Bank of the Hills in Austin and First National in Yorktown—were closed and sold by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The family lost an estimated $14 million. At the time, Luci was living in Toronto, where her husband’s business was located, and Lynda was in Virginia. Everyone in the family realized that by being out of Texas, they had violated one of LBJ’s cardinal rules: “The best fertilizer for any man’s ranch is the footsteps of its owner.” The family restructured the company and sold a television cable company it owned, and Lynda sold her share back to the LBJ Holding Company. “Since then,” Luci said, “we’ve been in the rekindling business.” These days the Johnsons’ business profile in Texas is a fraction of what it was when LBJ was alive and Lady Bird was involved on a day-to-day basis. The LBJ Holding Company employs about 150 people and owns five radio stations. Ian is the president of the company and runs the business. Luci goes into the office most days and functions as much more than a figurehead: She was the one, for instance, who pushed for the creation of the company’s HQ Business Centers, which rent office space to start-up businesses.
She is also buying real estate, primarily in Austin. She and Ian are part owners of the Towers of Town Lake, a 180-unit luxury condominium on the shores of Town Lake, and they have recently begun turning the art deco—style Brown Building in downtown Austin, which housed the first offices of KTBC—the first radio station bought by Lady Bird back in 1943—into loft apartments. The Brown Building was also once the Austin office of Brown and Root, the Houston-based construction company owned by brothers Herman and George Brown, who helped finance LBJ’s rise to power. And the LBJ Holding Company also bought another downtown office building, the Norwood Tower, a Gothic Revival—style structure around the corner from the Brown Building. “My mother calls it ‘frozen music,’ because of its architecture and memories,” Luci said. “When we bought it, I felt like we were saving a Texas treasure. I checked it off both of our lists.”
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