First Ladies (49 page)

The nickname had been conferred many years earlier, soon after she was born in a small town in east Texas in 1912. A nursemaid had pronounced the baby “pretty as a ladybird,” and the name had stuck. Later, when she met and married Lyndon Baines Johnson, he seized on the coincidence of their initials and proceeded to extend it to every possession or offspring—daughters, dogs, and ranches. Lady
Bird confessed she had come to live with her name (friends and family called her “Bird”) although she had suffered some embarrassment when, traveling through Europe with her husband, she heard the nobility-conscious ask, “Lady Who?”

When Lady Bird Taylor was five, her mother died. Although she later insisted that her childhood was never lonely, many students of the Johnson record have concluded otherwise. A sickly, unmarried aunt assumed responsibility for much of Lady Bird's upbringing, and although she initiated her niece into the pleasures of literature and nature, she left other areas untouched. “She never taught me how to dress or dance,” Lady Bird later remembered, and her weakness and frailty presented a model of what to avoid, rather than what to attempt. Although the aunt had genuinely poor health, Lady Bird suspected “that some of it must have been psychosomatic. She was completely mild and unaggressive, and … because I saw how inhibiting it was to her life to be so weak and full of illnesses. … I set my sights on being more like my father, who was one of the most physically strong people I have ever known.”
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Bright and quick, Lady Bird finished high school at fifteen but arranged to rank third in her class, one-half percentage point behind second place, because she feared giving the graduation speech required of the top two students. Still too young to enter college, she enrolled for an additional year at St. Mary's Episcopal School in Dallas, a choice that was hers rather than her father's. He had not been impressed with the school but bowed to her wishes, showing a faith in a fifteen-year-old's judgment, she later said, that she hoped she extended to her own daughters.
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Later, when she enrolled in the University of Texas, Lady Bird had more than the average student. She drove her own car, had an unlimited expense account at Neiman-Marcus, and a checkbook that required only that she fill in the numbers. Yet hers was neither a glamorous nor luxurious life. She wore her aunt's cast-off coats and never emerged as a belle at parties, showing early evidence of both the shyness and spending habits that she retained through adulthood. She continued to shop for “seconds” in linens long after she became a multimillionaire. For John Kennedy's funeral, she reportedly borrowed rather than bought the requisite black attire.
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Although she liked to characterize herself as “careful [with money] only to the point of not liking to see waste,”
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even her kindest supporters used stronger terms. Nan Dickerson, the news correspondent, described her friend Lady Bird as “both very rich and very frugal.”
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This carefulness extended beyond money to other areas of young Lady Bird's life. Having completed requirements for her liberal arts
degree at the University of Texas, she remained another year to earn a journalism degree as well, and just to make sure that she had prepared for all contingencies, she perfected her typing and stenographic skills. It would be difficult to contrive an education for an American woman in the 1930s that prepared for more eventualities than the one that she worked out for herself. She had hoped to become a newspaper reporter but carefully enrolled in courses that would qualify her for a teaching certificate, not because she ever wanted to teach but because she hoped to go to some faraway place “like Alaska or Hawaii.”
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A woman as careful as that might be expected to proceed very cautiously in choosing a husband, but after years of plotting to get herself out of small-town Texas, Lady Bird Taylor made the most important decision of her life in uncharacteristic haste. Following a two-month courtship, carried on mostly by mail and telephone between her home and Washington where Lyndon Johnson worked, she married the tall, overpowering Texan who, she later admitted, resembled her father in many ways.
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Twenty-six-year-old Lyndon, then employed as Congressman Kleberg's secretary, had been visiting his home state when a friend introduced him to Lady Bird and he immediately engaged in a courtship which she herself described as “whirlwind.”
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He arranged a date with her at the earliest possible moment, which happened to be breakfast the next day, and then regaled her with every detail of his life story: how he had come from a poor family, worked his way through Southwest State Teachers College, taught briefly, and then taken a job in Washington. He even told her how much life insurance he carried. Lady Bird admitted she was impressed. “I knew I had met something remarkable,” she later said, “but I didn't know quite what.”
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Two months after that first encounter, Lyndon returned from Washington to marry her and, even though she remained unconvinced, he loaded her in his car, told her “now or never” and started off towards San Antonio. Her Aunt Effie had counseled caution, but Lady Bird's father had warmed immediately, telling his daughter: “This time you brought home a man.”
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In spite of the fact that her aunt “was scared to death” for Lady Bird, the marriage took place on November 17, 1934. Even the bride conceded it was “kind of whacky. You know some man comes in and wants to marry you, and you've only known him two months.”
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After a short honeymoon, the Johnsons settled in Washington and Lady Bird, at twenty-two, began what she later described as her education in politics. She had not previously shown any interest in
the subject but Lyndon proved a persuasive teacher. He brought home a list and told his bride: “I want you to learn the names of all these counties—. . . [the ones] my boss, Congressman Kleberg, represents. These are the county seats. These are the principal communities in each county and one or two leaders in each. Whenever you travel around with me; when we get to this town, you want to know … .”
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At home, Lady Bird learned that a political wife had other responsibilities as well. Their small Washington apartment became “open house” for any of Lyndon's political friends—and for those he hoped to bring into that category. For a woman who had never cooked a meal, she learned fast, not only to prepare food for her husband but also for whatever number he brought with him unannounced. And she did it all on a minuscule budget. When Lyndon's salary totaled only $265 a month, he took $100 for his car, insurance, and other personal expenses, leaving her $165 to pay for everything else, including an $18.75 savings bond every month.
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When a Texas congressman died in 1937, leaving his seat vacant, Lyndon decided to try for it. Lady Bird borrowed against her inheritance, still under her father's control, to stake him to the race. Although Robert Caro, one of Lyndon's biographers, later concluded that the campaign cost many times the $10,000 that Lady Bird put up for it,
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she took much of the credit for financing it, and she admitted that she carried with her the relevant bank withdrawal slip until it became too faded to decipher. Lyndon's campaign manager later recalled how Lady Bird had attempted to use her financial support as leverage to influence how that first political race was run: “She came and told me that she was helping pay for this campaign and she wanted her husband to be a gentleman. She didn't want him to [speak out against the other candidates.]”
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In the end it was more than Lyndon's victory in 1937 that drew Lady Bird to politics. She found her husband more vibrant and exciting during that first difficult race for Congress than ever before or after, and she loved being part of it all, if only from a back seat. She lacked both the confidence and the inclination to campaign openly and such participation would have been highly unorthodox in Texas at that time. Although the state had elected a woman governor in 1924, she had been a stand-in for her husband, who had been impeached, convicted, and removed from the same office.
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Candidates' wives still stayed in the background in the 1930s and 1940s, and one senator's wife pretty much set the standard. When asked if she campaigned for her husband, she replied: “No, indeed. … I just
go along with Mr. George and sit on the platform to show them I don't have a cleft foot.”
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Lady Bird Johnson might never have moved beyond such a definition of her role had not the war intervened. Lyndon Johnson had represented Texas's 10th Congressional District a little more than four years when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Within hours, he asked to be assigned to active duty, at an officer's pay which was one-third what a congressman earned. Lady Bird took charge of his office and managed it without compensation until he was called back, along with other congressmen, a few months later. She frequently singled out this period as a turning point in her life, because it helped her understand her husband better, but more importantly, it gave her confidence that she could do things on her own. She attended to the needs of Lyndon's constituents (a word written with a capital “C,” she sometimes said) as though they were her own, providing detailed answers to their inquiries and escorting those who came to the capital to see the tourist sites. Although she never showed an interest in holding office herself, one aide judged that she could have defeated Lyndon in an election for his job.
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Rather than setting out on her own, Lady Bird played the supportive wife—a designation that in this case involved financial support. Her own modest inheritance would never have financed Lyndon to the top of the political ladder, and elective office itself paid little. The Johnsons then set out to make the money that would support them during his career in government. When an almost bankrupt Austin radio station went up for sale in late 1942, Lady Bird took more of her inheritance, borrowed an additional $10,000 from the bank and bought the station. The former journalism student explained that she and her husband had always wanted to own a newspaper but could never afford to buy one so they settled for a radio station instead. She moved to Austin for half a year to oversee staff changes and help select programming, and by the time she returned to Washington, the station showed a small profit. When time came to license a television station in Austin, her KTBC was the only applicant, a situation later students of the subject found intriguing. Hard evidence that federal agencies favored the Johnsons over competitors is difficult to assemble, but David Susskind later voiced the objections that many people shared with him when he queried Jack Valenti on the matter, “If you wanted a station in Austin and you knew that a Senator's wife wanted one too, wouldn't that be enough to kind of scare you off?”
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As television gained popularity and technical sophistication, the revenues of Lady Bird's Texas Broadcasting Corporation skyrocketed
and the market reached beyond Austin. When asked about her phenomenal success, Lady Bird attributed it to timing and a good staff, saying her family had entered the field just as the industry underwent great expansion and they had profited from the work of an exceptionally astute group of employees. She suggested that her own role in management of the stations had been exaggerated,
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and evidence suggests that Lyndon maintained a close, protective eye on what happened to the corporation, even after he became Senate Majority Leader.
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It would be wrong, however, to conclude that she functioned merely as a figurehead for the empire-building of her husband, whose political aspirations made too close identification with the company unwise. She continued to review weekly packets of information on the corporation all her Washington years (until the presidential period when the holdings were placed in trust),
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and after Lyndon's death, she resumed an active role in the corporation. The family ranch was turned over to the National Park Service before Lyndon's death, because he apparently decided that his wife would not want to manage it, but the considerably more valuable broadcasting empire remained under family control. After 1977, when her business manager died, Lady Bird increased her role, and when an interviewer asked how it felt to be “back as a business-woman,” Lady Bird answered that it had happened in a way that she had not anticipated, but that she was “enjoying it.”
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Her daughter Luci remarked in 1984 that she had never appreciated her mother's business acumen until she sat with her on corporation boards and understood how hard she had worked “to build up a family business for us all.”
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While marriage to Lyndon may have pushed Lady Bird to meet new challenges, such as buying a radio station, it had its trying side as well. He frequently berated his wife in front of others, criticizing her clothes or her makeup, but when he chided her, “You don't sell for what you're worth,” she chose to hear the compliment in the remark rather than the censure.
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Robert Caro, in his book on Lyndon, reported that the criticism started as soon as the marriage ceremony had ended. On the first day of their honeymoon, the Johnsons stopped to visit old friends, and as soon as they sat down to talk, Lyndon noticed a run in Lady Bird's stocking and told her to go change. When she hesitated, evidently embarrassed, he insisted that she leave the room immediately.
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Later Lyndon's list of “Don'ts” included full skirts and T-strap shoes because he thought they made her look fat. She dieted and exercised because he made no secret of his preference for svelte women, and she wore the reds and yellows he liked and struggled with high heels
even though she admitted she “hated them [and] always felt I was going to fall down and that … people weren't really meant to wear high heels, the Lord didn't fix the foot that way.”
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Rather than complaining, she insisted, in the manner of a diligent student defending the excesses of an overzealous teacher, that his likes were her likes: “What pleases Lyndon pleases me.”
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She pointed out that she grew because of his demands, and she later told an interviewer: “I think we were a whole lot better together than we were separate.”
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