Kati Marton (25 page)

In December 1941 things began to shift in the dynamic between Lyndon and Lady Bird when he became the first member of Congress to go on active duty in World War II. He asked her to run his congressional office while he was away. Lady Bird was not the only congressman’s wife who ran her husband’s office during the war. However, most people agree that she was the only one who considered it a full-time job. She did not get paid for her work, but her personal compensation was substantial. “It gave me a … sort of reassurance about myself,” she later said. “I finally emerged thinking that—well, I could make a living for myself.” It was more than a question of self-esteem. Lyndon was startled by the originality and intelligence of her correspondence with key members of his constituency. “Your letters are splendid …” he wrote her. “I don’t think I have ever sent any better letters out of my office.”

Seeing how effective she was, he wanted her to do more. If she reached more people, he wrote her, “we would be invincible. Think of the effect it would have if 2,000 of our best friends in the District had personal notes from you written at the rate of 25 a day for 60 days. I don’t know how you are going to find time to do all this and still take the people to lunch that I want you to take, and see the people in the evening
that you must see, but I guess with your methodical planning you can work it out.” This was the Johnson formula: the more she gave, the more he expected. But she was up to it. “He could load you up with more jobs,” Lady Bird remembered with a laugh. “He thought you could do more than you could do and he kept teasing or ridiculing you until you did. ‘You mean to say you got two degrees from the University of Texas and you don’t know how to do such and such?’”

Johnson returned from naval service in late 1942 and reclaimed his office. He was still a needy narcissist who patronized and occasionally humiliated her in public. But now he saw that she could play a bigger role in his political ascent. Henceforth she would be his political partner. She had demonstrated subtlety, intelligence and humanity that could advance his larger ambition.

Together they became a Washington institution, she beloved, he feared. In the fifties Lyndon became the most powerful Senate majority leader in history—and Lady Bird was always beside him, his balance. Not everyone in the Washington political establishment approved of her stoicism. Her fellow Senate wife Jacqueline Kennedy observed with characteristic bite, “Lady Bird would crawl down Pennsylvania Avenue over splintered glass for Lyndon.” In fact, Lady Bird and Jackie had more in common than was obvious, including the fact that both were married to husbands who assumed sex as a prerogative of power—and both wives pretended not to notice.

IN JULY 1955,
just shy of his forty-seventh birthday, Johnson suffered a massive heart attack. It should hardly have been a surprise. A three-pack-a-day smoker and a legendary boozer, Senator Johnson had virtually no life outside the ornate chambers and smoky back rooms of Congress. He had no hobbies, no sports, no real friends outside Congress. Lady Bird moved into a room next to his at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. When he was discharged in August he told reporter (later Lady Bird’s White House press officer) Liz Carpenter, “Everybody’s disappointed me except Lady Bird. My close friends have disappointed me. But Lady Bird never has. I never turned over in bed that I didn’t hear her feet on the floor.”

Johnson quit smoking but returned to the only life he considered worth living, at the only pace he could keep: overdrive. When Jack Kennedy chose him as his running mate in 1960, the Johnsons embarked on their political life’s least joyful chapter up to that point. Johnson’s persona was simply too big for him to be vice president. He needed to be at the center of attention. To serve under a senator as undistinguished as Kennedy rankled. Nobody ever made Johnson more self-conscious of his rough beginnings than the Kennedys. They brought out the worst in him. “He would often say he wished that just once one of those ‘Harvards’ would run for sheriff,” Lady Bird recalled.

Johnson turned to drink for solace. As always, his wife stayed steady. She could see that others might judge them by the sound of their vowels or the cut of their clothes, but she did not want to be anybody except who she was. Nor did the worldly and stylish new first lady shake Lady Bird’s sense of herself. “It would’ve been out of the question for any jealousy there,” she noted, “because Jackie was close to twenty years younger.”

In truth, Jackie admired Lady Bird. “I remember … she and my sister and I were sitting in one part of the room [at the Kennedys’ summer house in Hyannis Port],” Jackie recalled many years later, “and Jack and Vice President-elect Johnson and some men were in the other part of the room. Mrs. Johnson had a little spiral pad and when she’d hear a name mentioned, she’d jot it down. Sometimes if Mr. Johnson wanted her, he’d say, ‘Bird, do you know so-and-so’s number?’ And she’d always have it down. Yet she would sit talking with us, looking so calm. I was very impressed by that.”

The Johnsons never seemed more Texan than after Kennedy died. Lyndon had a big voice, a big physique, big hands, big appetites. Gold jewelry flashed from his wrists and fingers. His initials were emblazoned on almost everything he owned, pets included. His critics winced every time he reached for a microphone, for it brought back memories of the murdered man’s dry wit. At first, Lady Bird suffered as well. She was petite, but no match for the world’s most famous widow. Her twang was unmistakable and her style nondescript. Austin and the Texas hill country suddenly supplanted Boston, Newport and Hyannis as the presidency’s cultural axis. To make matters worse, the bullet that ripped
through Camelot had been fired in Texas. The country was in shock. The nation’s loss was personal, familial.

But the thirty-sixth president of the United States had something the thirty-fifth did not. Lyndon Johnson had a partner whose mission in life was to serve her husband’s ambition, who was as committed to the Johnson presidency as he himself. For Lady Bird, the presidency was always a matter of “we.” “We were knocked flat by the assassination,” she recalled, “but we performed.” Better than anyone, she understood her husband’s need for every light to shine on him. Not for a minute did she have her own agenda. It was always about Lyndon, how best to serve Lyndon. He could not have tolerated a free-spirited, independent-minded spouse. “I did not have Eleanor Roosevelt’s courage,” Lady Bird admitted. “Her energy, her determination …. Mrs. Roosevelt just didn’t pay any attention to all the snide things that were said about her. I respect that. But I could not be like that.” For her devotion, she was rewarded in a way Eleanor was not. She knew that without her steady presence Johnson was quite rudderless.

As with almost all presidential couples, the White House worked its subtle alterations on the Johnsons’ relationship and their roles. Her marriage remained the center of Lady Bird’s universe, but her power inside the marriage was considerably enhanced. Lyndon may have moderated his overt philandering once in the White House, but monogamy was not in his nature. Texas reporter Hal Wingo remembered a conversation with the new president one month after he assumed office. “About five of us reporters who covered Johnson were sitting around the bar of the old Driskill Hotel in Austin on New Year’s Eve, 1963. Suddenly the President appeared and pulled up a chair. Johnson leaned in toward us and in his folksiest style said, ‘Now, boys, let me tell you something. Sometimes you may see me coming out of a room in the White House with a woman. You just remember,’ he said, wagging a long index finger at “the boys,” ‘that is none of your business.’ So he was pretty up front about it. He wanted the same rules for himself that Kennedy had. We just said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and stuck to it pretty much. That’s just the way things were then.”

Though as president Johnson could no longer afford to maintain the “nooky room” he kept for his affairs in Congress, he still wanted to be
surrounded by beautiful women. He ordered director of White House personnel John Macy to find “the five smartest, best educated, fastest, prettiest secretaries in Washington. And don’t send me any broken-down old maids. I want them twenty-five to forty.”

It wasn’t just LBJ who loved women, women loved him, too. “One thing you’ve got to remember about LBJ,” his consumer affairs adviser Betty Furness recalled, “is that he looked like a president. He had enormous presence. In the first place he was an enormous man. I think he was larger physically than most people think. It took my breath away to walk through the door of the office to meet this man.”

In the White House, Lady Bird exercised firm but loving control over her husband’s appetites. She could assert herself more because he needed her more. She could even remove some of his “women friends.” Sometime in early 1964, Lady Bird told her husband that now that they were in the national spotlight, he must do something about his “friendship” with Eloise Thornberry, the wife of Texas congressman Homer Thornberry. Thornberry held the seat vacated by Johnson and was a long-standing political ally of the president. His tall, blond wife was known to be something more. Johnson appointed Congressman Thornberry to a federal judgeship in Texas.

Barbara Howar, an attractive blond writer and fellow southerner, was in and out of the White House during the Johnson years. Lady Bird always kept an eye out for her. “She was very vigilant. But I always felt there was a kindness to it,” said Howar. Lady Bird stepped in just when the young Howar most needed her. “She knew how to interfere in his flirtations. When the president and I were too long in another room, she would call, ‘Lyndon, don’t be a hog, we all want to talk to you and Barbara.’” Even on the dance floor, Lady Bird knew how to minimize a potentially embarrassing situation. After her husband danced for fifteen minutes with Howar, for instance, Lady Bird took him firmly by the arm. “Now Lyndon,” she told him, “I know a young girl who is very tired and a president who has a mighty big day tomorrow.”

Lady Bird would even enlist the help of presidential aides to keep her husband in line. Television reporter Nancy Dickerson recalled staying in a Chicago airport motel along with the presidential party. A pajama-clad President Johnson knocked on her door. “It wasn’t very
romantic,” Dickerson remembered. “He kept pacing back and forth in his bare feet, waving his arms, and I had curlers in my hair.” Within minutes, Bill Moyers, the president’s press secretary, arrived at her door, dispatched by Lady Bird. Moyers suggested that everyone get some sleep—alone. “LBJ was astonished to see Bill but not really angry. He just muttered something like ‘What the hell is he doing here?’”

Lady Bird knew that she was among the few people in the world from whom Lyndon would—grudgingly—accept criticism. “You want to listen for about one minute to my critique?” she asked the president following his March 7, 1964, news conference. “Or would you rather wait until tonight?” “Yes, ma’am,” the president replied without enthusiasm, “I’m willing now.” As always, Lady Bird packaged her review in a thick coat of praise. “You looked strong, firm and like a reliable guy. Your looks were splendid,” she told her husband. “During the [opening] statement you were a little breathless and there was too much looking down and I think it was a little too fast. Not enough change of pace. Dropping [your] voice at the end of sentence[s]. There was a considerable pickup in drama and interest when the questioning began. Your voice was noticeably better and your facial expressions noticeably better …. I really didn’t like the answer on de Gaulle …. I believe you actually have said out loud that you don’t believe you ought to go out of the country this year. So I don’t think you can very well say that you will meet him any time that is convenient for both people.”

There was no one else in the White House who would have given the president this bold an appraisal. Yet even with her he was defensive. “I didn’t say where I’d go. I didn’t say I’d go out of the country at all, did I?” Lady Bird pressed on undeterred. “When you’re going to have a prepared text, you need to have the opportunity to study it a little bit more and to read it with a little more conviction and interest and change of pace,” she told him. “The trouble is,” he interjected, “they criticize you for taking so much time. They want to use it all for questions. Then their questions don’t produce any news. And if you don’t give them news, you catch hell.” His wife was not so easily put off. “In general, I’d say it was a good B plus.”

Johnson attacked the presidency like a starving man attacks a square meal. All his manic energy, banked during three frustrating years as vice
president, rushed out now in an unstoppable torrent. “I would stand back and watch Lyndon Johnson,” his defense secretary, Clark Clifford, recalled. “He reminded me of those great massive steam locomotives that at one time was the major source of transportation power in this country and you’d see this great locomotive coming. It would be big and noisy and would go by with a tremendous rush that was truly awe-inspiring and, to a great extent, that would describe Lyndon Johnson. He was accustomed to getting his way, and as a result of that, people would give him his way.”