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 next day, Lady Bird made a down payment on the $18,000 house, every penny of which belonged to her. Johnson insisted that their telephone number be listed in the telephone book, so that he would appear accessible to the general public. His number stayed listed in the Washington telephone directory until he was vice president.
Once he moved in, Johnson liked the house so much “you would have thought it was his idea from the beginning,” Lady Bird said. Years later, he always advised young congressmen to buy a home in Washington as soon as possible. “He told them it was a good investment and would make their life in Washington so much happier,” said Lady Bird. “Every time it happened, I had a good laugh.”
The acquisition of the house on Thirtieth Place gave Lady Bird an increased sense of security. “I had desperately wanted a nest,” she said. “Psychologically, I think it prepared me to have a family.”
In August of 1943 she went to her doctor and discovered that she was pregnant. The following March 19 she went into labor. “I woke up on a Sunday morning and I told Lyndon I needed to go to the hospital,” Lady Bird recalled. “He got on the telephone. I went on and got in the car, and still he didn’t come. I was tapping my foot and beginning to get mad. Finally, he came out of the house in a lope and we went to the hospital.”
He took her to Garfield Hospital in Washington, D.C., then left and went riding around in his car for hours with a political friend. Twelve hours later, Lady Bird gave birth to their first daughter, Lynda. “The Lord helped me through it,” Lady Bird recalled. She was not angry with Johnson for leaving her alone at the hospital. She saw it as an example of the difference in their personalities. LBJ could not stand to be alone—he wanted people around all the time, especially in a crisis—while Lady Bird was the opposite. She preferred to manage her pain in solitude.
Partly in an attempt to give Johnson a son, Lady Bird became pregnant again in 1945. At some point after the first trimester, she had another miscarriage—her fourth—this one due to a tubal pregnancy, the same condition suspected to have contributed to her mother’s death. Johnson was not at home when the pain began, so Lady Bird telephoned her doctor, who sent an ambulance to take her to the hospital.
“I knew that I was in a life-threatening situation,” she said of the miscarriage. “When they were putting me in the ambulance, I remember that I was glad that Lyndon and I were well-off, that we had enough money, and wondered what it would be like to be that sick without any money at all.”
At the hospital, when she was placed on the operating table, she felt as though she were falling through space and realized she might be dying. Before losing consciousness, she again returned to her financial security. She thought about a dress that she had just purchased for $90, a sum she considered extravagant. Again the thought came to her, “I’m glad I have enough.”
Johnson was telephoned and came to the hospital. Horace Busby, who had begun working for him the year before as a speechwriter, was in contact with him. The doctor who treated Lady Bird came out and said that she was losing a lot of blood and he had given her a series of transfusions. After the fact, Busby heard that the doctor had explained that he could save Lady Bird or he could attempt to save the baby. The choice was up to Johnson. “That day his true colors came out: He was utterly devoted to Lady Bird,” Busby recalled. “He told them to do whatever was necessary to save her.”
Lady Bird got pregnant a final time in late 1946. On July 2, 1947, she gave birth to her second daughter, Luci. Moments after the birth, Lady Bird remembered that the doctor lifted the baby into his arms and said, “I never thought I’d see you.”
Motherhood did not come naturally to Lady Bird. She felt guilty for not spending more time with her daughters. However, she let both daughters know that Johnson’s career was a privilege, something for them to take advantage of and learn from, not disparage. As she told Marie Smith, a reporter for the Washington Post and an early biographer, Lady Bird saw her role as a “balm, sustainer, and sometime critic for my husband” and wanted to help her children “look at his job with all the reverence it is due.” Lyndon Johnson was not the only member of the family that had power confused with love, since the message Lady Bird gave her daughters was not to expect much emotional support from their father, but to revere his job.
Russell Morton Brown, an old friend and classmate of Johnson’s during his brief stint in law school, recalled a party given by Lady Bird at Thirtieth Place at the end of the 1950’s, well after her fortune had been made. During the course of the party, Brown and LBJ stood on the sidelines and had a conversation about what Brown described as all the “self-seeking women” who threw themselves at LBJ. From the edge of the party, Brown complimented what he called Lady Bird’s “poise” and “beauty” as well as her “business sense.” He told Johnson how much she had grown as his wife, how outgoing, even glowing, she seemed that particular night. “The best day’s work you ever did was the day you persuaded her to marry you,” Brown told him.
“Russ,” Johnson told him, “I know it every day.”
Lady Bird relinquished the residue of her shyness in July 1960 at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, when Johnson was selected as the vice-presidential running mate of John F. Kennedy. At the close of the convention, Lady Bird, then 47, emerged as a public matron who understood that her place in society, one that had been assigned to her by childhood and marriage, was significant. The dominance of the men around her—her father, the boss of Harrison County; her husband, the second most powerful Democrat in America; and the young would-be president, John F. Kennedy—was absolute.
At the same time, Lady Bird understood the possibilities of her own power. By now, after 25 years of marriage to LBJ, Lady Bird knew the full mixture of his private insecurities: his rage, his stunted ego, the deep valleys of his depressions, his hypersexuality—all of which threatened his future rise to power. In the aftermath of Los Angeles, Lady Bird no longer doubted that LBJ wanted to be president. She knew as well that she could cope with the recurrences of Johnson’s inevitable moments of bad temper. One aspect of marriage is coming to grips with the insidious wreckage of another human being’s flaws. By now, Lady Bird had done that.
Besides, Johnson’s political desire gave Lady Bird power and time to learn the more difficult lessons of love and marriage, how to discover her own peace within his storms. Johnson could not afford to leave her. It would be another twenty years before America would elect a divorced man, Ronald Reagan, as president. The hard reality was that Johnson needed to remain married to Lady Bird to be president. He would continue to “collect women”—as George Reedy, a longtime staff member, put it—but he would not leave her for any of them, and he would not quit politics.
Years later, in a televised interview with her daughter Lynda Johnson Robb, Lady Bird said she regarded LBJ as “my lover, my friend, my identity.” From a chaise longue at the ranch, Lady Bird told her daughter, “The need for women to have their individual identity belongs to your generation, not mine.” Even in hindsight, she could not acknowledge her need for a true identity. She was a married woman of the 1950’s, a member of the “silent generation.” To oppose her husband in the era of conformity would have been the equivalent of spitting at herself in the mirror.
For that reason, Lady Bird was as well suited for the pursuit of the presidency as LBJ. Then, as now, the American presidency required a husband and wife to engage in a theatrical, courtly ritual. To be every inch the national king, the president must extol, even venerate, his first lady. Unless a president gives the appearance of bowing to his wife, of demonstrating great affection, of paying her lavish public respect, he endangers his own power. The rules of the American court require that the more trouble the president gets into, the more respect he must pay his wife.
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