Kati Marton (24 page)

But Lady Bird held her ground. As was often the case, she wanted to save Lyndon from himself. She knew her man, knew how to play him. “My poor darling,” she cooed over the long-distance line, “my heart breaks for you, too.” But at the same time she tried to lock in a small concession. “I’m going to say [to the media] that I cannot believe this picture put before me of this man I’ve known all these years.”

But Johnson tried to forbid Lady Bird from calling on Jenkins’s wife. The first lady, he warned, should not be making such a call. But she ignored him. “My love, my love, I pray for you along with Walter,” she soothed, deflecting his rising temper. “You’re a brave, good guy.” She was determined. “If you read what I’ve said in Walter’s support they’ll [sic] be along the lines I’ve just said to you.” Finally, she began to get through to him. “You think
I
ought to call her?” he asked. “I do. I think we ought to offer support in any way we can,” she responded. Anxious to end the conversation, LBJ agreed to call Mrs. Jenkins, but still opposed giving her husband a job. “You won’t have your [broadcast] license for five minutes,” he warned his wife. “I’d almost rather offer it to them and let the license go down the drain,” Lady Bird coolly
replied. “Offer them something else,” he suggested, “like running the [Johnsons’] ranch.” All right, she agreed, quickly pocketing her small victory. “Good-bye, my beloved,” she signed off. Lyndon never again saw or spoke in public of Jenkins, but Lady Bird issued a brave statement of personal support. “My heart is aching today for someone who had reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country. I know our family and all of his friends—and I hope all others—pray for recovery.”

Neither Lady Bird’s public show of compassion for Jenkins nor the event itself cost Johnson electoral support. In November 1964 Johnson swept Barry Goldwater in a historic landslide, elected by the largest majority in modern history. Finally, the man who thought of himself as an accidental president had the overwhelming electoral mandate he hungered for. Not for the first time, the public surprised the politicians in its display of good sense. As Clark Clifford later noted, “The voters understood that [the Jenkins case] was a personal tragedy, not a public matter.” Lady Bird had understood this when her husband had not.

The exchange shows how well Lady Bird understood LBJ’s insecurities and his narcissism. It also demonstrates her ability to maneuver within the boundaries imposed by her overbearing husband. It illuminates her ability, limited but real, to manipulate her husband while simultaneously feeding his ego and soothing his rage. The contrast between her generous humanity and his single-minded focus on his political survival is clear. Both qualities were essential for the rise of the Johnsons.

With the exception of Andrew Johnson, no president ever started out under a darker shadow than Lyndon Johnson did on November 22, 1963. Lady Bird’s sharpest memory of the nightmare flight from Dallas to Washington the day John Kennedy was assassinated was of “that immaculate woman, [Jackie] exquisitely dressed and caked in blood.” At the same moment that Lady Bird became first lady, her predecessor, already the most famous woman in the world, became an iconographic figure. Lady Bird’s husband wanted desperately to be president, but not this way. “I always felt sorry for Harry Truman and the way he got the presidency,” Johnson told an aide, “but at least his man wasn’t murdered.”

JOHNSON, LIKE HIS HERO
Franklin Roosevelt and his rival John Kennedy, followed more than his heart when he proposed marriage to Claudia Alta Taylor on their first date in the late summer of 1934. He was twenty-six years old and knew what he wanted. Politics were Lyndon’s life—eighteen hours a day is all, he told the woman who would become known as Lady Bird. Given his boundless need for affirmation, his manic energy and his boredom with anything other than politics, his political ambition seemed preordained. Johnson instinctively grasped that Lady Bird would help get him there. Proposing to this intelligent and resilient woman revealed LBJ’s early self-awareness.

As in many other presidential unions, she possessed what he lacked. Physical beauty was not his primary concern in his life partner. He needed her discipline and composure to moderate his excesses. He could also see she was capable of the total devotion he required. He did not want a wife who would draw attention from himself. He was looking for strength of character and loyalty. Lady Bird had both in extraordinary measure. To his credit, Johnson respected his wife and more often than not paid attention to her counsel. Given the confines of her role, Lady Bird’s accomplishments are remarkable. Though married to one of history’s most reviled presidents (despite notable achievements), she became one of the nation’s best-loved first ladies and has remained so more than thirty years after the Johnsons left the White House.

Lady Bird did more than indulge this driven, egocentric man. She came as close to taming him as was humanly possible. She provided a loving, stable base and enabled him to channel his energies. “The best day’s work you ever did,” Johnson’s law school classmate Russell Morton Brown told him in the late fifties, “was the day you persuaded her to marry you.” Johnson knew it.

His six feet three inches overpowered her five feet two inches with what was later called the Johnson Treatment. With his rapid-fire salesmanship, he enveloped her with his long arms, big hands, his face not an inch from hers. “He was thin, but very good-looking,” she later remembered, “with lots of black wavy hair, and the most straightforward, determined manner I had ever encountered.” The force of his pursuit left her
little time to breathe. “This morning I’m ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you,” he wrote her on October 24, 1934.

“Lyndon, please tell me as soon as you can what the deal is …. I am afraid it’s politics,” she wrote him back, trying to restrain the onrushing train. “I would hate for you to go into politics.” It was politics, all right, but she signed on anyway. Lady Bird, a shy girl whose mother died when she was five, and who had spent much of her life in rural solitude, was drawn to the voluble man. She had a taste for adventure. She had chosen to go to journalism school because journalists “lead less humdrum lives.” Johnson promised an escape from sheltered Karnack, Texas. The gamble paid off for both of them.

It is hard to imagine that many women would have put up with Johnson’s volatile, demanding and sometimes demeaning personality. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, Johnson was a mama’s boy who had been coddled, spoiled and adored. In the eyes of his mother, Rebekah Johnson, he could do no wrong. But Rebekah placed an extra burden on her son: to redeem his family’s thwarted ambitions. Her life, her father’s and her husband’s had not turned out the way she had hoped. Rebekah’s letters to Lyndon and Lady Bird are reminiscent of Sara Delano Roosevelt’s to her son and daughter-in-law. “My darling boy,” she wrote him on November 30, 1934, “I rejoice in the happiness you so richly deserve, the fruition of the hopes of early manhood, the foundation of a completely rounded life. I have always desired the best in life for you. Now that you have the love and companionship of the one and only girl, I am sure you will go far.” Congratulating Lyndon on his election to Congress in April 1937, his mother transferred two generations of failed hopes onto her son’s shoulders. “To me your election … compensates for the heartache and disappointment I experienced as a child when my dear father lost the race you have just won …. You have always justified my expectations, my hopes, my dreams.”

Lyndon took Lady Bird from Austin to Washington in 1934. While she worked as secretary to Texas congressman Richard M. Kleberg, Johnson began to groom Lady Bird for political life. Early on he asked her to memorize the names of the county seats Kleberg represented and three or four of the men who could get things done in each. Early in her political education, Lady Bird discovered that her husband considered
sex a prerogative of power. She showed remarkable intelligence and almost superhuman self-control in dealing with her husband’s philandering. She was rarely confrontational. It helped that she was also used to strong, domineering, womanizing men. Her father, like Jackie Kennedy’s, was also “that sort of man.” Thomas Jefferson Taylor, known as “Mr. Boss,” was a big man in Karnack, where he owned the biggest store and lived in the biggest house. Decades later, a longtime Johnson aide, Horace Busby, saw Lady Bird’s father as the key to understanding her. “He was her role model. That’s why she put up with Johnson’s womanizing. She grew up with a father who had a wife and girlfriends. That was just the way men were in her mind.”

Busby, who served as a sort of house intellectual, speechwriter and confidant, remembered Johnson, early in his marriage, courting a plain-looking secretary who had a reputation for running the best office in Congress. “Johnson bought her flowers, was real sweet with this woman. Nobody had ever done something like that before in her life. And he got with her one night and made love to her. And as soon as he finished, he turned over and said, ‘Now about your files ….’ That was on his mind the whole time. Lady Bird just didn’t attach much importance to it.”

She was a thirties wife, unembarrassed to assert her husband was “my lover, my friend, my identity.” Later, she told her daughter Lynda Johnson Robb, “The need for women to have their individual identity belongs to your generation, not mine.” She saw her role as “balm, sustainer and sometime critic” for her husband. Lady Bird learned to avert her gaze, in part to preserve her dignity. His long affair with Alice Glass, a tall Texas beauty who was at the same time the mistress of newspaper publisher Charles E. Marsh, was serious and painful for both Johnsons. During the many weekends they spent with Glass and Marsh at their Virginia estate, Longleat, Lady Bird hung back and listened to the political sophisticates, the bright and beautiful people of Alice’s salon, and learned. Get the most from it, she later counseled her daughters, learn from your father’s position and respect it. She did not apparently articulate the corollary to the admonishment: Don’t expect much emotional support. Lady Bird was as fit for the grueling climb to the political mountaintop as Lyndon himself.

Lady Bird, familiar with loneliness from early childhood, had the
capacity to take “psychic leave,” to tune out things she did not wish to acknowledge, and it served her well. She was also a very shrewd woman. When she could, she befriended the women Lyndon was “courting.” Busby recalled a long, warm letter of welcome Lady Bird left on the kitchen table for another woman frequently linked to her husband, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She even credited her husband’s “ladies” with improving
her.
“I learned how to dress better from this one, to always wear lipstick from another, about art or music from another.” She reacted to the “other women” by making herself even more indispensable to her husband. She was confident that in time the infatuations would pass, while she endured. When told that former Texas governor John Connally’s memoirs included a passage about Lyndon’s affair with Alice Glass, she coolly commented, “I would’ve thought Alice was too plump for Lyndon.” Her comment regarding Eleanor Roosevelt’s lifelong emotional estrangement from her husband as a result of his affair with Lucy Mercer sums up the philosophy that sustained Lady Bird. “What a shame,” she said of the Roosevelts, when Lucy was only a “fly on the wedding cake.”

Temperament is destiny not only for politicians but for their spouses as well. Lady Bird in some ways possessed the ideal temperament for her role. A natural optimist with a well-centered ego, she was also tough. “If I had wanted him to do without the stimulation, knowledge or assistance other women offered him,” she recalled years later, “it would have after a period diminished me.” She did not let them impede her life, she said.

As saintly as this stoicism may seem, there is another reason Lady Bird may have at times actually welcomed Johnson’s temporary diversions. Lyndon was the world’s most exhausting man, and he could not stand to be alone. “Bird!” he would boom upon entering the house. “Where are you, Bird?” And from then on she was his, serving his insatiable needs. Ultimately she was confident of his deep love and need of her, and understood what she called the “help and support” of other women. In 1998, she expressed profound discomfort with the media’s scrutiny of President Clinton’s private life. “We are narrowing the field of those who will run for office,” she noted, “when we allow them so little privacy. We elect a man president for his devotion to every one of us. Not because of his private life.”

In her eighties, she still recalled a rare moment when her iron self-control slipped because it so shocked both husband and wife. After seven years of marriage and ten different moves, the Johnsons, trekking back and forth between Austin and Washington, did not have a real home of their own. One day, Congressman Johnson was talking politics with John Connally in the living room of the Johnsons’ tiny rented apartment in Washington. “I had been wanting a home after a few years of marriage,” Lady Bird recalled. “My idea of being rich was to have enough sheets not to have to carry them back and forth from Washington to Texas. So that day, I burst out that I never had anything to look forward to but one more damned election! And Lyndon was just so absolutely startled that he went back the next day to the house we’d looked at and told the owner we had to have it right way. I was embarrassed for having said all that and gave myself very poor marks for it. But then I heard lots of times Lyndon talking to a new congressional member, telling him, ‘Sure be a good idea if you bought a house, make your wife happier.’ I held my laughter to myself.”