First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (19 page)

Tens of thousands of people lined the tracks at railroad stations in small towns across the rural South. There were death threats and angry hecklers who held up signs that read “Black Bird. Go Home.” Aides noticed that her southern accent got more and more pronounced as they traveled farther and farther south. Her message to those who considered the Civil Rights Act a betrayal: “There is, in this Southland, more love than hate.” She spoke from the platform of the caboose and would sometimes calmly raise a white-gloved hand to try to calm the protesters. At one stop she told the angry crowd shouting racial epithets that their words were “not from the good people of South Carolina but from the state of confusion.” Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers remembers hearing from an advance man who called from the road almost in tears. “As long as I live,” he said, trying not to cry, “I will thank God I
was here today, so that I can tell my children that courage makes a difference.” In Columbia, South Carolina, a group of young men shouted, “We want Barry [LBJ’s Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater]! We want Barry!” Without losing her composure, the First Lady turned to them and said: “My friends, in this country we are entitled to many viewpoints. You are entitled to yours. But right now, I’m entitled to mine.” The crowd roared with approval. When Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs grew so angry with the hecklers that he told the First Lady that he wanted to make a statement on her behalf, she called him into her private train car. “I can handle any ugly moment,” she told him. Lady Bird refused to call off the trip even when Secret Service agents told her that it would be necessary to sweep the railroad tracks for bombs. (An extra engine traveled fifteen minutes ahead of her train for this very reason.)

The Carters of Georgia shared the Johnsons’ southern roots, and Lillian Carter, President Carter’s mother, was a county chairman for Lyndon Johnson in Americus, Georgia, during the 1964 campaign. “Nobody else would take [the job],” said Rosalynn Carter, who was the only other first lady who could truly understand what Lady Bird went through during that southern swing. People wrote racial slurs with soap on Lillian’s car parked outside campaign headquarters and tied her radio antenna in a knot. “Our boys would go to school with Democratic buttons on, Lyndon Johnson buttons on, and literally get beat up,” President Carter recalled. “Their clothes would be torn.”

Even amid all the hate, Lady Bird had fun traveling through the South and the train was full of laughter. On board were pretty, young hostesses wearing blue uniforms and handing out “All the Way with LBJ” buttons. For the 225 members of the traveling press who rode in the nineteen-car caravan there was a daily
happy hour from 4 to 5 p.m. complete with food from the region: ham and biscuits in Virginia, shrimp and avocado dip in Florida. The two dining cars were open at all hours and offered dishes like “LBJ steak platter—Please specify: raring to go, middle of the road, or all-the-way.” Johnson carried most of the South in November and won the election. “All those women that were on that train trip, if they weren’t feminists before the train trip I’m sure they were afterwards,” Bess Abell said with a smile. Lady Bird called the trip “the most dramatic four days in my life, the most exhausting, the most fulfilling.”

Lady Bird had evolved from a woman who was totally removed from politics to an indispensable adviser to her husband in the White House. Over the years LBJ described her as “the brains and money of this family.” When President Johnson was mired in self-doubt before the 1964 election, she did more than win votes for him: she boosted him up. “Beloved—You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. You can go on to find some peace, some achievement amidst all the pain,” she wrote to him in a letter, adding that she wasn’t afraid of “losing money or defeat.” This kind of unflinching strength is typical of all the modern first ladies, who view the support of their husbands as part of their job descriptions. “I know you are brave as any of the thirty-five [Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president],” she wrote.

She was used to LBJ’s eccentric demands, including his insistence on an impossibly forceful shower in every house they ever lived in, and a telephone always within reach. When President Nixon was elected, he had fifty telephone lines removed from the presidential bedroom. When Betty Ford was giving a tour of the second floor to her new press secretary, she pointed to about ten electrical outlets over the sink in the President’s bathroom.
“I understand Johnson ordered these one day in a moment of frenzy when the one existing outlet did not work.” Well before he became president, LBJ was on the phone so often that he demanded that one be permanently placed underneath a shaded tree in the backyard of the family’s Austin home. When Lady Bird went into labor with their first daughter, Lynda, LBJ had to be yanked off the phone during one of his interminable calls.

One phone call between Lady Bird and the President on October 14, 1964, shows that she was truly her husband’s moral compass. Weeks before the presidential election, their longtime friend and political adviser since 1939, Walter Jenkins, was arrested on what was then called a homosexual morals charge in a YMCA men’s room a few blocks from the White House. Because of the scandal, Lady Bird knew that Jenkins could not continue to work for her husband’s administration, but she did not want to set him and his family adrift.

In a call to her husband she suggested that they offer Jenkins the number-two job at the Austin television station they owned. “I wouldn’t do anything along that line now,” the President said, urging her to let Jenkins and his wife, who was a dear friend of theirs, know, through an aide, that Jenkins would not have any trouble finding work. After a long pause Lady Bird said firmly, “I don’t think that’s right. . . . When questioned, and I will be questioned, I’m going to say that this is incredible for a man that I’ve known all these years, a devout Catholic, the father of six children, a happily married husband. It can only be a period of nervous breakdown.” Johnson cut her off and begged her not to say anything publicly. “If we don’t express some support to him I think that we will lose the entire love and devotion of all the people who have been with us,” she told him. It’s only then that the President told her to meet with his advisers about issuing a
statement, but when she told him that she already had (she was often one step ahead of him) he still resisted. She kept pushing for a public statement of support, but Johnson said, “The average farmer just can’t understand your knowing it and approving it or condoning it.”

The call ends with Lady Bird stroking her husband’s ego in a sweet lyrical voice and then telling him that she is going to put out a statement, whether he likes it or not. “My poor darling, my heart breaks for you, too.”

“I know it, honey,” he says.

“You’re a brave good guy and if you read where I’ve said some things in Walter’s support they’ll be along the lines that I’ve just said to you.” Her statement came out before the President’s.

Larry Temple, who served as special counsel to President Johnson, says “there was nobody closer during my time to LBJ than Lady Bird Johnson. Absolutely no one whose advice, whose counsel, whose judgment he sought and took more than Lady Bird Johnson.” Temple was as close to their relationship as one could get; among his responsibilities was briefing the President in their bedroom at seven thirty every morning. LBJ and Lady Bird would both still be in their pajamas in bed, but the President would have been on the phone for a long time by then. Temple knew when Lady Bird was out of town to be extra careful with the President. “If she were gone, and occasionally she’d go to New York to see a play with a friend, he’d be like a caged animal.”

She was his trusted adviser. The two of them would have breakfast together in his bedroom and he would listen to her intently. She even graded his speeches. “She graded him and he expected to sit there and listen to it because he felt that she had no alternative agenda except his best interest and she would tell him what he needed to hear whether he wanted to
hear it or not,” the Johnsons’ daughter Luci says. “Did he like it? No.” She laughs and says that her mother was “that one person who’s going to tell him if there’s spinach in his teeth so he has a chance to get to a mirror and get it out.” Lady Bird was her husband’s best friend. “I think he thought he was a better man because he had someone who loved him that much,” Luci says.

In a phone call on March 7, 1964, after he gave a news conference, Lady Bird asked her husband, “You want to listen for about one minute to my critique, or would you rather wait until tonight?” “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “I’m willing now.” Her takeaway: he spoke too fast and looked down too often. He needed to study the text before he got onstage and read with more passion, “I’d say it was a good B-plus.” Moments before the shocking 1968 nationally televised address in which President Johnson announced he would not seek another term, the First Lady rushed to his desk in the Oval Office and handed him a note: “Remember—pacing and drama.”

For many years, long after his death, Lady Bird was a constant presence at her husband’s presidential library. There are audio speakers in the re-creation of President Johnson’s Oval Office, and she could hear his voice echo up and down the halls. “I often wondered how hard that must be on her to hear his voice,” her friend and former assistant Betty Tilson said. “I think she was comforted by it. She used to talk about him quite a bit. . . . She used to say how she wished he could have seen the fine young women Luci and Lynda had become.” In a January 13, 1999, letter Lady Bird told her friend Betty Ford how much she had missed her husband over the holidays, when their grandchildren and “great-grands” came to visit. “Lyndon would have loved it, and no doubt, would have stirred it up some more!”

M
ODERN FIRST LADIES
set their own dreams aside to support their husbands’ ambitions. But in the case of Hillary Clinton, she took a temporary detour to help her husband, but she never abandoned her own plans. She would not be content playing the role of supporting actor her entire life.

How Bill and Hillary met says so much about their relationship and Hillary’s undeniable self-confidence. They were both studying one night in the Yale Law School library, and Bill spent much of the time staring at Hillary. She was sitting at the opposite end of the library, wearing oversize glasses and no makeup. He was stunned as he watched her walk toward him. “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me, then I’m going to keep looking back,” Hillary said, “and I think we ought to know each other’s names. I’m Hillary Rodham.” Bill recalls being “dumbstruck” and unable to remember his own name.

Hillary knew from the moment they met that Bill wanted to be president. He was quick to tell friends of his aspiration, and she fell in love with him and his ambition. She stayed an extra year at Yale to be with him, rather than graduate with her own class (she was one of twenty-seven women in her class). After a whirlwind courtship, Bill proposed three times before Hillary said yes. In an interview, Hillary said she was “terrified” about marrying Bill because she worried that her identity would get “lost in the wake of Bill’s force-of-nature personality.”

Hillary grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois, a middle-class suburb of Chicago, and she seemed destined to move to a big city and join a law firm or run for office herself. But she knew that, to be with Bill, she would have to move with him to his home state of Arkansas, where he was planning to run for Congress. And unlike Bill, who grew up with an eccentric mother and an abusive
stepfather, Hillary was from a stable home. Her friends told her that she would be squandering her own astounding potential—they wanted her to delve into politics herself instead of playing the traditional role of the supportive wife. “I was disappointed when they married,” says Betsey Wright, a longtime friend of the Clintons who was Bill’s chief of staff when he was governor and later worked on his 1992 presidential campaign. But in the struggle between her head and her heart, Hillary’s heart won out. Once Hillary decided to move to Arkansas there was no turning back. “I think I knew at some level that I would be very cowardly and foolish to walk away from that relationship,” she said. In 1974, after working on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of President Nixon, Hillary moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas. They married in 1975 in the living room of their first house.

Hillary became the second woman to join the University of Arkansas Law School faculty. Bill also taught classes at the university while he ran for Congress and, according to students who took classes with each of them, Hillary was the better teacher. She was rigorous and disciplined while Bill earned a reputation for being the easier grader.

Bill ran for Congress in 1974 and lost, but he was elected attorney general in 1976 and the Clintons moved to Little Rock. Hillary kept her maiden name and joined the prestigious Rose Law Firm, where she specialized in children’s rights cases, and Bill geared up to run for governor. Hillary’s refusal to change her last name became a growing liability after Clinton was elected governor in 1978. After the election, he was asked by an Associated Press reporter about Hillary’s decision to keep “Rodham.” “She decided to do that when she was nine, long before women’s lib came along,” Bill answered defensively. “People wouldn’t mind if
they knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way.” Bill’s Little Rock friend Guy Campbell could not understand why Hillary would not take her husband’s last name. Finally, at dinner with the Clintons one night, Guy leaned into Hillary and said, “All right, Hillary, I just want to know, why didn’t you take your husband’s name?”