Lady Bird: A Life in Pictures 
A Lady First: Podcast 
A Lady First
She was a small-town girl, a wife and mother, an environmentalist, a civil rights activist, a media mogul, and the only person who could tell the president of the United States to go jump in a lake. But more than any of those things, Lady Bird Johnson was, to her dying day, exactly what we always imagined her to be.
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But Lady Bird didn’t like this line of questioning. She could not abide anything remotely unflattering to Lyndon. Finally, after I published an essay in Slate about the public release of his private telephone calls in which I referred to him as “the last of the really big hicks,” she withdrew her cooperation entirely. In December 1997 she sent me a letter stating her position. “I enjoyed my association with you—I liked you—and it is with sadness that I bring my participation in the book to an end,” she wrote.
By then, I’d interviewed enough people in her life to know exactly what had happened. Lady Bird had taken what those around her called her “psychic leave,” part of her heritage as a Southern woman. Confronted with certain unpleasant topics, she simply drew a veil between herself and the world. She always carried within herself a place of distant remove, a refuge not unlike the woods around the Brick House, and could retreat there in times of distress.
I had seen her do this once before, at a small dinner party for Katharine Graham, the former publisher of the Washington Post. The two women had been talking easily about their famous lives when the conversation shifted in a direction that made Lady Bird uncomfortable. Someone mentioned that Mrs. Graham had gotten on Lyndon’s bad side over the Post’s coverage of the Vietnam War. Mrs. Graham seemed eager to talk about the turmoil, but Lady Bird’s expression had suddenly turned dark. She withdrew her hands from the table and placed them in her lap. She focused her gaze downward on her plate. The small talk and yammering around the table instantly stopped. Her silence contained extraordinary power. Mesmerized, I watched as the conversation quickly shifted to something to Lady Bird’s liking.
But it was more than just a disinclination to discuss private matters that led Lady Bird to stop talking to me. My project depended on my being able to see her as an individual, apart from her husband, and this was something she resisted. “Your conclusions about me may well come at Lyndon’s expense,” her letter explained. “There is no way to separate us and our roles in each other’s lives.” As old-fashioned as it may now seem, Lady Bird saw herself as an extension of her husband and recoiled from any attempt to view her life apart from his. Her marriage was what defined her. “He was the catalyst; I was the amalgam,” she said, over and over. In other words, she poured herself into the mold of his life.
Their interaction was seamless, mutual. They perfectly counterbalanced each other. Lyndon brought her out of her shyness and exposed her to new and different ideas, and Lady Bird gave him what he most needed—loyalty. Neither could have succeeded without each other. Even Lyndon often said that he couldn’t have been president without her. She took care of his personal needs, having his size 17 shirts extended so they would stay tucked in his trousers, soothing his temper. But she did more than that. She helped draft his speeches and was one of the few people close to Lyndon who could offer criticism without fear of reprisal. My need to see her on her own terms—independent of her husband—was not just unacceptable to her. It was unthinkable.
As for infidelity, she had what may be a more realistic view of marriage than many. When former president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s affair with Lucy Mercer became public, Lady Bird dismissed it as nothing more than “a fly on the wedding cake.” Today, this view of marriage seems out-of-date, antediluvian, but there remains about it something that is undeniably real. After all, marriage is not a fairy tale. Laura Bush has had to endure far fewer troubles in her marriage than Lady Bird did, and yet somehow the carefully scripted way that the Bushes interact makes them seem much less authentic.
Though some observers have seen Lady Bird’s role in the Johnsons’ 38-year partnership as unfulfilling, or even demeaning, for her it was empowering. She acted through the marriage, never outside of it. Love was a part of what bound her and Lyndon together, but loyalty, ambition, and self-interest played a part as well, from both sides. Despite her image as Our Lady of the Wildflowers, Lady Bird was tough (we may find out just how tough in coming years, when more of her private correspondence and telephone transcripts are released). She had an agenda of her own, one that seems strangely current. As during her husband’s presidency, the country is once again in an unpopular war, and the attention to the environment that she fought for has grown into one of the dominant issues of our day.
Looking back, what impresses me most about Lady Bird is how engaged she was. She never shrank from the tumultuousness of her times.
Looking back, what impresses me most about Lady Bird is how engaged she was. She never shrank from the tumultuousness of her times. Like her husband, she believed in the power of government to change things for the better. She used her role to effect change—fighting for the Highway Beautification Act, riding through the South for civil rights, visiting the poor in Appalachia. The small sign on her White House desk said it all. The sign read “Can Do!”
I asked her if she believed in heaven. “Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “Heaven, to me, is a mystery, a place where I’ll know what all this—the events of my life—meant.”
The first time I interviewed Lady Bird, I asked her about her faith. This is the kind of thing women from East Texas naturally talk about, and it somehow seemed rude not to bring it up. She was baptized in the Methodist church in Karnack, where her mother’s funeral was held, but when she was in junior college at St. Mary’s Episcopal School for Girls, she was confirmed as an Episcopalian. I asked her if she believed in heaven. “Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “I do know that there is something hereafter, because all this has been too significant, too magnificent, for there not to be something after. Heaven, to me, is a mystery, a place where I’ll know what all this—the events of my life—meant.”
The last time I interviewed her was in July 1997, at the LBJ Ranch. She gave a tour of the house, pointing out her husband’s bedroom, which she’d ordered left exactly as it was on the day he died, in 1973. We sat on the porch, and she talked about what a good year it had been for wildflowers, particularly the five-star Texas phlox. Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a bus full of tourists. In 1972 the Johnsons bequeathed their home and the two hundred acres of ranchland that surround it to the National Park Service, and since then tour buses regularly pass through the gates to stop by Lyndon’s birthplace and the family cemetery where he is buried (and where she too is now buried).
She stood up from her chair, waved at the tourists, and said, “How are y’all? Are you having a nice day?” Some people might have resented the intrusion, but Lady Bird didn’t mind in the least. In fact, she enjoyed it, a reminder of her days as first lady, when she met what she called the “GP,” or the general public. After the bus was gone, she settled back into her rocker, gazed into the front yard that slopes down to the Pedernales River, and resumed the conversation about wildflowers. To the end, nature absorbed everything.
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