Kati Marton (28 page)

Laurence Rockefeller, a fellow environmentalist and member of the great New York philanthropic and banking family, often traveled with Lady Bird. Like so many others, Rockefeller sensed that behind her soft-spoken facade was an iron will. “There’s no question that Mrs. Johnson was a real professional person,” Rockefeller recalled. “She worked hard to achieve great results …. I’m always awed by the way she focuses her attention and her conversation and her effort on things that she considered top priority.” Lady Bird, like Eleanor Roosevelt, had a sharp sense of the media’s role in getting her message out. She made good use of the White House as bully pulpit. The reporters who covered her liked her. Lady Bird called them by their first names and, unlike Jacqueline Kennedy, treated them like colleagues, not annoyances.

Away from her looming husband, a different woman emerged. Three decades of public life had altered the insecure girl. In the forests, parks and rivers whose reclamation she made her cause, she was herself. “To see Mrs. Johnson,” wrote a reporter who accompanied her to Redwood National Park, “in the depths of that great, primeval, dripping forest is to understand immediately why she is called Lady Bird. Tiny, always a smaller woman than one had quite remembered, she is slimmer now than ever. She twitters. She is cheery, modest, persistent and alert and her avian qualities are intensified by those looming, green black and ultimately incomprehensible trees. Among them, dedicating the Redwood National Park, Lady Bird in her scarlet coat looked like a jaunty red cardinal.”

Stewart Udall, Johnson’s secretary of the interior, accompanied Lady Bird on trips that mixed politics and conservation through Wyoming, Montana and Utah. “She came back with quite a glow and really determined
… that she wanted to carve out a career and a place of her own and do something in her own right,” he reported. But Lyndon’s needs did not leave enough time for her to achieve the great goals she set for herself. As always, she blamed only herself. “One thing I am sorry about was that I was not more businesslike, cool, determined and self-confident about trying to get what I thought the White House should have …,” she said later, typically underrating herself. “I did not use the leverage—and it is leverage—of publicity.”

The sixties were an edgy time of transition, change and confusion. In 1963 Betty Friedan published her book
The Feminine Mystique,
in which she claimed that “the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife.” The same year, an American woman, the physicist Maria Goepper-Mayer, won a Nobel Prize for the first time. The civil rights and anti-war movements politicized and radicalized a growing number of women bombarded with contradictory expectations and images about work and family. While Lesley Gore’s hit song “You Don’t Own Me” climbed the charts,
Leave It to Beaver
and
Father Knows Best
dominated television. One in five women with children under six and nearly one-fourth of women whose children were over sixteen held paid jobs in the sixties. Their pay, however, was 60 percent of the male rate. Though equal pay legislation passed in 1963, that did not solve the problem of low pay in jobs that were classed as female.

During this muddled decade, the qualities that made Lady Bird essential to her husband also endeared her to the country. Modest, loyal and smart, she stood by her man, but just a little behind him too. “I’m terribly average,” she said, “something like litmus paper.” She saw her role essentially as the president’s mainstay. “The best thing I can do for him is to try to create a pleasant little island where he can work—where you like the food and where you are not constantly bothered with questions about household and family and where you know you’re coming back to somebody
[sic]
who, even if they don’t always agree with what you are doing, are not going to [criticize you].” She provided reassurance not only for her husband but for the country in the throes of social upheaval.

SHE CALLED IT “THE MIASMA,”
the black mood that hung over the White House from 1966 until the end of the Johnson presidency. The man who took hold of the careening state in 1963, who had pulverized opposition to his domestic programs, was lost in a war he didn’t even believe in. “I knew we were going to get into this sort of mess when we went in there,” he told Georgia senator Richard Russell on May 27, 1964. “And I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles …. I just don’t know what to do ….”

Kennedy’s ghost hovered over the Cabinet Room. The Harvards still advised Johnson. The president had been dazzled by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s precision and McGeorge Bundy’s intellect, and they counseled against letting this “damn little pissant country” humiliate the United States of America. “When five of the most patriotic and wise experts come to you and say this is the path …,” Lady Bird noted, “well, ultimately you have to choose. But it was hard to know what was right.” Vietnam brought out the worst in Johnson. He could not detach from it emotionally the way Kennedy had from the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. He wanted to be loved, but instead he was accused of killing kids. The sight of body bags coming home sank him deeper and deeper into depression and paranoia. His aide Eric Goldman remembered Johnson, the domestic reformer turned war chief, as “bitter, truculent, peevish—and suspicious of the fundamental good sense and integrity of anyone who did not endorse the Vietnam War. This Lyndon Johnson was not only depressing; at times he could be downright frightening.”

More and more the president needed his wife beside him, even during news conferences. “At three o’clock I went down with Lyndon to the East Room for his press conference. My role was to sit in the front row and look pleasant and yet these conferences always affect me as though I were going into battle.” Increasingly, the reporters’ questions shifted from Great Society legislation to the war. “And then it was over and [Lyndon] took my arm. I threw him a congratulatory look with my eyes, which I meant to be all balm and velvet.” By the final year of his presidency, many of his closest aides—Jenkins, Moyers, McNamara—had left or were leaving. Lady Bird’s legendary self-control was stretched thin, as she fought to maintain a calm veneer and keep her own anxiety from her husband. “I turned off the TV and went over to the bowling lanes, where I used up my energy in three games, hurling a heavier ball than usual and running up scores in the 150s—all by myself. Not much fun, but exercise, and while I’m doing it I don’t think much about anything else,” she wrote.

May 17, 1966. President Johnson kissing Lady Bird on the forehead after a Rose Garden ceremony.

But in times of national crisis, there is no escape in the White House. The television vans by the West Wing, the army of commentators, microphone in hand, on the front lawn, the endless line of black limousines disgorging congressmen and national security staff in the driveway—all transmit the same message. The distant war had seeped into all aspects of life in the White House. On January 18, Lady Bird assembled a group of “Women Doers” in the upstairs family dining room to talk about crime in the streets. Suddenly, one of the invited guests, the singer Eartha Kitt, rose to her feet. Looking straight at Mrs. Johnson, she said, “Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn’t pay to be a good guy. They figure with a record they don’t have to go off to Vietnam. We send the best of the
country off to be shot and maimed …. They don’t want to go to school because they are going to be snatched from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam …. You are a mother too,” she said, pointing a finger at Lady Bird. “I am a mother and I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my guts. I have a baby and then you send him off to war. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot. And, Mrs. Johnson, in case you don’t understand the lingo, that’s marijuana!”

An ashen Lady Bird fought for composure, feeling “first a wave of mounting disbelief. Can this be true? Is this a nightmare? Then a sort of surge of adrenaline into the blood, knowing that you are going to answer, that you’ve got to answer, that you want to answer …. Somewhere along the way—I think between the words ‘gut’ and ‘pot’—I had a sense that maybe she was undoing her point. Miss Kitt stopped for breath to a stunned silence in the room and for a second I waited to see whether it was a comma or a period.”

Her voice trembling slightly, Lady Bird replied, “Because there is a war on, that doesn’t give us a free ticket not to try to work for better things—against crime in the streets, and for better education and better health for our people. I cannot identify as much as I should. I have not lived the background that you have, nor can I speak as passionately or as well, but we must keep our eyes and our hearts and our energies fixed on constructive areas and try to do something that will make this a happier, better educated land.” With great presence of mind, Lady Bird turned a moment of supreme tension into a personal triumph. Her openness, her modesty and her fearlessness impressed everyone in the room. Only Lady Bird and her beleaguered husband knew the full price the daily stress exacted from them both.

Woodrow Wilson’s portrait in the Red Room became a daily reminder of the presidency’s toll. “I … never looked at it that I didn’t think that it might happen to me,” Johnson said, “that I would end another term in bed with a stroke and that the decisions of government would be taken care of by other people and that was wrong. I didn’t want that to happen.” During a fall 1967 stay at the ranch, Lady Bird finally vented her feelings about her husband’s political future. “I simply did not want to face another campaign, to ask anybody for anything.
Mainly the fear that haunts me is that if Lyndon were back in office for a four-year stretch—beginning when he was sixty years old—bad health might overtake him, an attack, though something not completely incapacitating, and he might find himself straining to be the sort of a president he wanted to be—to put in eighteen hours a day—and unable to draw enough vitality from the once bottomless well of his energy.”

BY 1967, HALF A MILLION AMERICAN TROOPS
were fighting in Vietnam. Sixteen thousand of them were killed in action the same year. Americans were watching their first “living room war,” and resistance was growing. The president talked of the need for peace talks, and of a “light at the end of the tunnel.” But he shared his personal trauma, and his growing doubts about his own political future, with only one person. “Last night,” Lady Bird wrote in her diary,