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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The Johnsons made comic use of this courtly ritual. At public dinners he would sometimes pat Lady Bird on her bottom or give her a big public kiss. Once, a member of the press inquired about these displays of affection, and Lady Bird sent back word that not only did the pat on the fanny not embarrass her but that she wanted more of them. “I rather like it,” she told the press.
Stanley Marcus, the chairman emeritus of Neiman Marcus, remembered that whenever Lady Bird shopped at his store, she came in with a specific amount of money to spend for herself or Lynda and Luci, and she didn’t go over it—not even as much as ten cents. If a saleslady brought in a dress that was over her budget, Lady Bird would look at it, admire it, but then say, “It’s more than I can pay. Take it out of the room.” The truth was that there were few dresses that she could not afford to buy by 1960. The company she had founded in 1942 had public assets of more than $3 million, and she controlled 52 percent of the stock. Her thriftiness was a quirk of her personality, a leftover from a childhood spent without a mother to dress her or counsel her about clothes. (Lady Bird was five when her mother, Minnie, died on September 14, 1918.)
On the other hand, she did not object to LBJ’s excesses. He often did her shopping for her and did it to suit himself. “Rather than her choose her own clothes, he chose them for her,” recalled Les Carpenter, Liz’s husband, in his oral history. “I remember once he came back from a trip to New York with about six hats for her. Now, imagine a man going in and buying a hat for his wife that she hasn’t even tried on. But he did.”
Whether she liked the hats and dresses or not, Lady Bird wore them and pretended to like them. “Mrs. Johnson would do anything, and she always acted like they were the prettiest things she ever saw, whether she thought so or not,” said Carpenter. “She’s that kind of wife—the completely loyal wife.” This was part of the accepted presumption in 1960 about what it meant to be a “loyal wife”—feigning appreciation to your husband to serve his ideals.
“The key to understanding Lady Bird,” said Busby, an old and trusted LBJ aide, “is to understand that in her mind her father was the role model for how all men are and should be. It explains why she put up with LBJ’s womanizing and why she idealized him for being a public servant. She grew up with her father and assumed all men had a wife but also had girlfriends. She didn’t attach much importance to it.”
Even though her father would soon be dead, she was still mentally trapped in his house, stuck with his way of life. By the 1960 campaign, most of the people on LBJ’s staff understood that Lady Bird and Lyndon had an informal arrangement: He did whatever he liked, and in return for being his wife, Lady Bird pretended not to notice. All unhappy wives are forced to find some ways to adapt. Lady Bird’s mother had fled to Chicago to listen to the opera, briefly back to her childhood home, and then to mental flights of fantasy. Her stepmother had turned to prescription drugs. Lady Bird was stronger and saner than both of those women. She found a more productive way to cope: She hid behind her public duties.
There was another crucial difference; Johnson did not withdraw his affection for Lady Bird. On car rides through the ranch, Lady Bird and LBJ would often kiss and hug and flirt in ways that made passengers feel like voyeurs. Especially after his heart attack, Johnson bragged about their vigorous sex life to male aides, and except for the large blocks of time that they spent physically apart, they shared the same bedroom and the same bed until they lived in the White House. In fact, Lady Bird made a ceremony out of going to bed. Every night they spent together, either she or a maid laid out LBJ’s pajamas and her dressing gown, side by side, on top of the bed. These small gestures announced in deeds—not words—that LBJ did, in fact, love her best.
At times the arrangement was a strain on everyone. At one point when LBJ was in the Senate, Busby remembers an afternoon when he, Lady Bird, a female friend, and several male staff members went for a ride around the ranch. Busby and the staff members were in the back seat of Johnson’s Lincoln, while Johnson was at the wheel, the female friend was seated in the middle, and Lady Bird occupied the passenger seat. “Johnson made a point of placing one of his hands under the woman’s skirt and was having a big time, right there in front of Lady Bird,” recalled Busby, who added that the woman slapped his hand, though Lady Bird never said a word.
This incident is a window into the darkest corner of their marriage. Johnson apparently not only had a need for other women but he also had a need to flaunt his behavior in front of Lady Bird. He could be the ultimate bad boy. In these moments, Lady Bird mentally disassociated herself from LBJ. She developed the habit of staying above it all; the more he misbehaved, the more prim and proper she appeared. “He would sometimes say cruel things to me,” Lady Bird later acknowledged. “I had more calmness and justice than he did at times.” This was how she got even with LBJ. She took the moral high ground and always stayed calm, no matter how trying the circumstance. Yet the cost of being superior was high. It kept her locked in the primary condition of her childhood: isolation.
Immediately after the 1960 election NATO parliamentarians asked Johnson and Lady Bird to fly to Paris for a NATO meeting. It was a goodwill trip, and Johnson did not want to go. A creature of legislative action, he couldn’t believe that such a trip could have any real value. However, he accepted the invitation and made a speech at the meeting’s opening session. Still he was in a volatile mood, and Busby and others who accompanied him were braced for trouble.
It came the second night of the trip. Johnson went with a large entourage, including Lady Bird, to Maxim’s for dinner. Lady Bird was seated at one end of the table and Lyndon was at the other. As the evening wore on, he started paying noticeable and inappropriate attention to the wife of a State Department official. “After a few drinks, the woman moved down and sat down on LBJ’s lap. The two of them started horsing around, groping each other. It was pretty obvious and everyone was embarrassed,” Busby recalled.
After a while a Secret Service agent told Busby to tell Johnson that it was time to go. He walked over to Johnson and told him firmly, “Mr. Vice President, we have to leave. The Secret Service will have the cars out front in five minutes.” Johnson nodded, then he and Busby went to the other end of the table. LBJ took Lady Bird by the arm and escorted her out of the restaurant. Once in the car, the Johnsons made small talk but did not mention what had just transpired.
By then the pattern was predictable: Johnson misbehaved and Lady Bird retreated behind her wall. Everyone else followed her lead. This was also part of her power as his wife. If she ignored his misdeed, everyone else was expected to do the same. Her silence had the effect of magic; it made LBJ’s indiscretions seem to disappear.
Once when Lady Bird was first lady, Helen Gahagan Douglas, the former congresswoman and onetime mistress of LBJ’s, hosted a gathering of liberal Democratic women in New York. It was a hostile crowd. Most of the women didn’t like Lady Bird simply because of the Southern way she spoke and carried herself—and because she was not Jackie Kennedy.
“I would say that more than half of them were prejudiced against her before she rose to speak,” Douglas said in an oral history. One of the women at Douglas’ table voiced the prevailing sentiment. “I just can’t bear now to hear that Southern accent,” the woman told Douglas. Douglas asked the women to ignore Lady Bird’s accent and listen to what she had to say.
The speech was a strong, intelligent defense of her husband’s civil rights policies. “Those at my table were captivated,” said Douglas. “I knew we could rely on Bird’s decency and common sense.” This decency that Douglas and others relied upon cut two ways. Decency and common sense were Lady Bird’s tickets to power, as well as her private trap.
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