First Ladies (51 page)

Lady Bird's association with the Highway Beautification Act was not unprecedented—and the reaction was predictable. Cartoons featured her as they had once pointed to Eleanor Roosevelt's activities—one picture showing a maze of highways running through a forest, with the caption, “Impeach Lady Bird.” Criticism remained light-hearted, however, and she wrote in her diary, “Imagine me keeping company with Chief Justice Warren! [whose impeachment had been sought by some right wing groups.]”
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The busy First Lady was everywhere. In addition to the more than 700 various appearances, she gave 164 speeches while her husband was president.
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Nineteen “women-doer” luncheons recognized other achievers, and it was during one of these luncheons that the singer Eartha Kitt made her much publicized attack on Lady Bird because of
the president's failure to wind down the war in Vietnam. Kitt waited until Lyndon had made a brief appearance and then left before she lashed out at Lady Bird. Young Americans understandably turned to crime, according to Kitt, because they felt hopeless about their future in a country that offered few jobs but drafted young men for war. Only Kitt knows whether her attack on the president's wife resulted from her perception that power was shared in the White House or from an entirely different conclusion that Lady Bird was weaker and more vulnerable than the president. Regardless of the motivation, Kitt's outburst put the president's wife on the spot, requiring her to reply in a situation that was widely reported. Thus she was drawn into a controversial area whether she wanted to be there or not.
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Lady Bird underlined her prominence by appointing a larger and better-trained staff than any previously seen in the East Wing of the White House. Liz Carpenter, a Texas newspaperwoman who had arrived in Washington about the same time as Lady Bird, served as press secretary and head of the first Lady's staff. The social secretary, Bess Abell, daughter of Kentucky senator and wife of the assistant postmaster general, could hardly be expected to run her operation without directing a seasoned eye to the political implications. The First Lady's press section of six full-time employees, under the direction of an experienced Washington reporter, represented quite a change from the preceding administration. A team of four handled details of the social secretary's office, and another four answered correspondence. Two staff members dealt only with beautification issues, and even this entourage did not complete the team since others came from the president's wing to work on temporary assignments.
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Expertise became as much a mark of the East Wing as of the West. Unlike Jackie Kennedy who liked to scrawl long memos on legal pads, Lady Bird was a remarkably well-organized businesswoman and ran her side of the White House in the manner of a chairman of a large corporation. One aide, who worked for both her and Lyndon, judged her wing more efficient than the president's.
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Leaving details of flower arrangements and menus to assistants, she was tutored on the issues by the best advisers available, including McGeorge Bundy and members of the Council of Economic Advisers.
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The successful combination of energy, organization, and experience won Lady Bird many admirers. Within two years of moving into the White House, observers pointed out that she had altered the job. “What Lady Bird Johnson has done,” Meg Greenfield wrote in the
Reporter
, “is to integrate the traditionally frivolous and routine aspects of the East Wing life into the overall purposes of the administration
and to enlist the peculiar assets of First Ladyhood itself in the administration's behalf. They are assets no one fully understood until Mrs. Johnson moved into the White House—or at least no one fully understood their potential political clout.”
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By the time Lady Bird prepared to leave Washington in early 1969, James Reston, the syndicated columnist, pronounced her “probably the most remarkable woman who has presided over the White House in this century.”
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Shana Alexander called Lady Bird “quite possibly the best First Lady we have ever had.”
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The same historians who rated Jackie Kennedy eighth among all First Ladies placed Lady Bird Johnson third—right behind the formidable Eleanor Roosevelt and Abigail Adams.
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Lady Bird may well have found her predecessor's example daunting but it never paralyzed her.

Presidents' wives traditionally refuse to admit they have models, and they give little credit to their predecessors. Perhaps a fear of being judged inferior to the ideal explains this ahistorical approach, or maybe it results from a lack of information. Lady Bird Johnson insisted that she never patterned herself on anyone else—she engineered her own ways to help Lyndon, but she did see some parallels beteween herself and her predecessors. They had all concentrated on their husbands' well-being first, she noted, and tried to provide a setting in which the men could do a good job. “But from then on,” she wrote, “it's just whatever makes your heart sing. What do you know about? What do you care about? What can you do to make this a better administration?”
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By 1968, Lyndon Johnson had to face up to his own questions about his administration because he encountered problems on several sides. The country's monetary system appeared in trouble, and several of the nation's cities had suffered outbreaks of violence and destruction. In the summer of 1967, National Guardsmen had been called out to restore order when rioting erupted in New York City, Rochester, Birmingham, Alabama, and New Britain, Connecticut.

The president from Texas had not ignored the fact that black and white Americans still faced very different opportunities a century after the Civil War ended. In July, 1964, he signed a Civil Rights Act, often deemed the most significant legislation of that kind since Reconstruction. It outlawed discrimination in public places, including restaurants, theaters, and hotels, and it attempted to provide for Negroes to take jobs alongside white workers regardless of the prejudices of employers and union officials. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, placed the registration of voters under federal scrutiny so that the
right to cast a ballot would not depend on race. But for all these words on paper, equal opportunity was not yet a reality, and several inner cities seemed poised to explode with anger and frustration.

The subject that eventually dominated the 1968 presidential election, however, was the war in Vietnam. The United States' involvement there in the 1950s had attracted little notice, and even at the end of the Kennedy administration when 15,000 American “advisers” served in Southeast Asia, the men and women at home paid little attention. But by the middle of Lyndon Johnson's full term as president, the Vietnam War represented a major drain on the country's public purse and morale. Eventually, nearly nine million Americans would serve in the conflict, and more than 47,000 would die. Televised reports of the fighting brought it very close, and in 1968, talk of a new draft system, based on a kind of lottery, threatened to involve many American homes where enlistment had not been considered. Young people redefined their career plans or left the country to avoid participating in or supporting a war they could neither understand nor justify. The president's own advisers split over whether or not to continue support of South Vietnam against its northern neighbor and over what level that support should reach.

Still, most Americans expected Lyndon Johnson to seek a second term of his own, and he surprised them by announcing in March 1968, that he would not. The Minnesota senator, Eugene McCarthy, outspoken critic of the American policy in Southeast Asia, had already demonstrated the potency of anti-war sentiment; and Robert Kennedy, seen by many as his brother's rightful political heir, threatened to erode Lyndon Johnson's support in other quarters. Neither of these challengers managed to capture the party's nomination, one being stopped by an assassin and the other beaten at the party's convention by the incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey. In November, when the Democrat proved unable to put enough distance between himself and the less popular aspects of the Johnson record, the Republicans took thirty-two of the fifty states. Richard Nixon, who had appeared to renounce politics after his 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California, reemerged as a national leader.

Pat Nixon, who had thrived on those few years of private life, dutifully returned to full-time volunteer work for the administration, but she had to reconcile her old ideas about the job with the new models popularized by her immediate predecessors. Her entire Washington apprenticeship had been served under First Ladies Truman and Eisenhower, neither of whom moved beyond ceremonial appearances and social leadership. But styles had changed by 1969, and many Americans expected a more
activist White House consort, one who employed a large staff of her own and involved herself in issues and causes.

Showing that she understood the shift, Pat Nixon tried to attach herself to a cause that would complement her husband's agenda for social welfare measures. Before the election, she had announced that she would concentrate on adult education and job training.
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After the inauguration, she turned to volunteerism but except for one short trip to the West Coast in the summer of 1969, her efforts received little public notice. She then announced, through the Education Office, that she would spearhead a “Right to Read” program,
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and when that project produced little, she spoke of becoming “more active in the environment field.”
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The next year she widened her horizons to “improve the quality of life.”
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Some of Pat's critics blamed her husband for her failure to identify with any one project,
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but other observers pointed out that she brought her own disabilities to the job. To ignite the country's enthusiasm, any one of these projects needed a crowd pleaser—someone who spoke easily to large groups. Yet Pat Nixon, who could charm individuals, stiffened in front of large audiences. It was her misfortune to come into the White House at a time when leaders faced the nation through television, a medium that made her uncomfortable and one that never flattered her.

Her two immediate predecessors had often been described as distant (Lady Bird) or uncaring (Jackie) in personal encounters, but both blossomed in public appearances. Jackie Kennedy, in particular, was singled out for her icy treatment of reporters and political visitors, and Bess Truman remarked after a visit to the Kennedy White House that it was as though a “veil came down” over Jackie's face during conversations. Yet she dazzled millions of television viewers as she conducted them on a White House tour. Pat Nixon's veil was of a different weave—and she lowered it on public, rather than private, occasions, causing observers to characterize her as cold and unfeeling. White House aides reported that Lady Bird Johnson, even in posing with a muscular dystrophy poster child, questioned her staff on the disease, its causes and treatment, while Pat Nixon stuck to light conversation and contented herself with hugging the child and complimenting her on her dress or her smile.
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Pat Nixon's youth, truncated like that of several First Ladies by the death of a parent, may explain some of the restraint in her personal style. For most Americans, she was quintessential Irish, because so much had been made of her name and her birth just hours before the dawn of St. Patrick's Day in 1912. Few people realized that her mother
had immigrated from Germany and was a miner's widow with two young children when she met and married William Ryan. Later she bore him two sons and a daughter, Pat. Like many of the Europeans who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century, Kate Halberstadt Bender Ryan never lived to see her adopted country deliver on its promises. But before she died of cancer in her early forties, she had convinced her second husband to give up the dangers of mining for a more healthful, but never prosperous, small farm outside Los Angeles.

Even with the housekeeping chores that Pat assumed after her mother's death, she continued to excel in school. She caught up, in grade level, with her two older brothers and, at the same time, took part in many extracurricular activities. When she won election to vice president of her class and secretary of the entire student body, she impressed those she worked with as masking a “strong personality” behind a “very quiet” exterior.
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“It was only after I worked with her for a while that I understood what she was doing,” the student body president later explained. “You wouldn't know what was hitting you because it hit so suddenly. I know we'd be conducting meetings [of the student body] and I was supposed to be conducting them but it wound up that she was taking over.”
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Pat's father died (of tuberculosis) about the time she graduated from high school. Orphaned and with little money, she earned her way by sweeping floors and working as a teller in a local bank. When the chance came to drive an elderly couple to New York, she took it, although superhighways had not yet, in 1932, smoothed the hills or straightened the curves across the continent. The couple's old Packard performed imperfectly and she was, at twenty, she later told an interviewer, “driver, nurse, mechanic and scared.”
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For two years Pat Ryan worked in New York as an X-ray technician, and by the time she returned to Los Angeles, she had saved enough money to enroll at the University of Southern California. Before she was graduated in 1937 she had prepared herself for several careers, having earned a merchandising degree and two traditional back-ups—a teacher's certificate and secretarial skills. She had even found work as a movie extra, but full-time jobs were scarce in the Depression years, and in the end she accepted an offer to teach commercial subjects at Whittier High School.