Liz Carpenter, Journalist, Author and LBJ staffer 
Alone Together
Serial infidelity. Public misbehavior. Private slights. And, strangely, love. The inside story of Lady Bird Johnson’s marriage to LBJ. And you thought Hillary Clinton had it rough.
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However, her actions—as opposed to her words—during the time that the affair was in progress indicate that Lady Bird was neither unaware nor passive about her situation. After all, her whole mission in life—to be a good wife and eventually a good mother—was under threat. In response she did what women have done throughout the ages. First, she retreated. Her visits to Longlea became more infrequent, as she withdrew into a stubborn silence that seemed incomprehensible to those around her.
Next, she blamed herself—at least in part—for her husband’s infidelity. After the initial withdrawal, Lady Bird embarked on a frenzied self-improvement campaign, using Alice as an unconscious model for what she needed to become. She lost weight, getting down to about 115 pounds, a weight she maintained throughout Johnson’s presidency. She started wearing the sexier clothes Johnson liked. She checked book after book—including War and >Peace—out of the library, steeping herself in history and the classics. She applied makeup and wore jewelry, as Alice did.
And she worked harder than ever. When constituents came by Johnson’s office, Lady Bird was often there and gave tours of the Capitol, Mount Vernon, and the White House. She also worked hard at learning the rules of social protocol. Like other congressional wives, every year Lady Bird purchased the Green Book, an updated social guide to official Washington written by Carolyn Hagner Shaw. “In those days the wives of congressmen made official calls on other wives,” recalled Lady Bird. “I had my calling cards printed up and every day I got dressed up in a hat, gloves, and a nice dress and went out to make my calls. It was like a business.”
Though the affair cooled off after World War II, Johnson and Glass continued to communicate with each other for the rest of their lives. Alice and Marsh divorced in the 1940’s. She continued to live in Longlea but fell on hard times financially. On May 26, 1971, she sent Johnson an antique brass eagle mounted on a glass base, about nine inches high with a four-and-three-quarter-inch wingspan. The eagle had reportedly been made for Thomas Jefferson as a gift from the French when Jefferson was ambassador to France. Alice had owned it for thirty years and wanted Johnson to have it in his post-presidential years. On the card that accompanied the eagle, she wrote, “For Lyndon, From Alice. Feed him properly.” She also warned him not to use his initials but to sign his name. “I never did call you LBJ; it’s too late to start now,” she wrote.
In a response two days later, Johnson wrote, “The elegant eagle on the beautiful crystal has arrived and it is all you said and more. I am prouder than you will ever know that you wanted me to have it, after its long and illustrious history which, of course, includes its thirty years with you. And I will cherish it as I do your faith and friendship. Thank you so very much and do come to see us.” He signed it “affectionately” but then closed the letter with his initials, as if trying to distance himself from her.
After Johnson died, Alice wrote a letter to Lady Bird and asked her to return the eagle. Lady Bird responded in a letter dated October 16, 1973, in which she explained how the eagle was used at the library. “Lyndon kept it on his desk at first and then we placed it in a glass and bronze cabinet in the corner of our living room,” she wrote, taking claim of her husband’s former lover’s possession.
Elsewhere in the letter, she wrote, “I know how much you must treasure the eagle, because it has given us such pleasure.” Lady Bird’s aides say that this was consistent with the way she dealt with the other women in Johnson’s life. Johnson tried to win over his political enemies by going overboard to be nice to them. Lady Bird in turn adopted the same approach with her most intimate enemies: She wooed them, bringing them into her tent.
“I would love to have you come by the ranch and/or Austin and visit,” she told Alice, but then ended the letter in an icy way that left no doubt that Alice really was not welcome. “Let me know ahead of time as I do travel a lot.” She did not even bother signing her initials. The closing of the letter reads “Lady Bird (Dictated, but not signed).”
Alice fired one last salvo. She let a member of Lady Bird’s staff know that the eagle had been a personal gift to Johnson, not Lady Bird. She wanted it back. On November 16, 1973, Lady Bird dictated another letter, telling Alice, “It will be on its way to you shortly,” and sent it back.
Three years later, at the age of 65, Alice died in Marlin, where she had moved to be near her sister and her close friend Frank Oltorf. She left the eagle to Oltorf.
Lady Bird has maintained a lifetime of official silence about Alice Glass, although she has told friends that she never really believed the rumors about Alice and Lyndon. “She was too plump for him,” she told one friend. Still, Lady Bird never forgot that eagle and the betrayal that it represented.
Some years after Alice died, Oltorf was invited to the LBJ Ranch for a small dinner party. After dinner, Lady Bird pulled him aside. She had a question for him that she wanted to ask in private.
“How did Alice spend her last days?” Lady Bird asked. Oltorf replied that Alice had died peacefully. “Good,” said Lady Bird. “That’s good.”
“Tell me,” she added, as an afterthought. “Whatever happened to that brass eagle of hers?”
Oltorf looked at her and smiled. “Don’t worry, Bird,” he told her. “The eagle landed safely on a tall bookshelf in my living room.”
BY 1942 LADY BIRD HAD BEEN pregnant three times—each time she suffered a miscarriage. As she endured the painful cycles of pregnancy, turmoil, and miscarriage, her maternal instinct grew stronger. “I felt a peculiar sense of failure, of not being a complete woman,” she said of her inability to have children. “After each miscarriage, I felt the loss of a little being . . . of the potential for new life. It was a big psychological put-down as a woman.”
At the time, she owned a house in Washington, a two-story, brick colonial at 4921 Thirtieth Place, a few blocks off Connecticut Avenue in the northwest part of the city. The house had an attic, a basement, and a large porch in the back that overlooked a modest garden, which Lady Bird eventually filled with zinnias and peonies. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, lived directly across the street.
She had looked for a house for five years, but Johnson had always refused to allow her to buy one—even though she had her own money. Their ideas about creating the proper setting for a Texan in Washington were in conflict. Johnson believed buying a home in Washington would make him appear less of a Texan to his Austin constituents. During her eight years of marriage, Lady Bird had moved ten times. Politics, not business, was her husband’s real life, and one way or another, Lady Bird knew she needed to buy a permanent home in Washington.
One afternoon she and her real estate agent had confronted Johnson during a meeting with John Connally in the living room of the apartment on Kalorama Road. The owners of the house at Thirtieth Place were threatening to sell it to someone else. As Connally remembered the scene, Lady Bird was furious. She told Johnson that she was “sick of living out of a suitcase” and was in despair over her inability to have children. She told Johnson she had “nothing to look forward to but another election.”
Johnson looked at her as though she were invisible. He simply turned and resumed his conversation with Connally. Lady Bird fled from the room in tears. Johnson was surprised by her outburst of emotion. “What do you think I should do?” he asked Connally.
“Buy the damned house,” Connally said.
My Library
