First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  As the daughter of a President who was also lucky—far luckier than Ronald Reagan, who was struck by his would-be killer’s bullet—I think I understand the impact of this experience on her. I too have felt the inexpressible shock and numbness that an assassination attempt creates in the mind and heart of a President’s wife and children. When I first learned members of the Puerto Rican Independence Party had tried to kill my father on November 1,1950, by rushing the front door of Blair House, where my parents were living while the White House was being rebuilt, I simply could not believe it. My mother, who looked out the window and saw the bodies of the assassins and White House guards bleeding in the street, was far more shaken.

  Ronald Reagan’s brush with death took place on a downtown Washington street, outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where he had just given a speech. Nancy was at a luncheon with Barbara Bush a few blocks away. Almost confirming the mystic links that bind the Reagans, she had an intuition that something was wrong and hurried back to the White House early. There she was told that the President had been shot. She rushed to George Washington University Hospital to be at his side, and it may not be an exaggeration to say her appearance helped save his life. With a collapsed lung and a bullet an inch from his heart, he was barely alive when she got there. “Seeing Nancy gave me an enormous lift,” he said later.

  In my talk with her, Nancy displayed her only flash of bitterness, recalling the anguish of the assassination attempt. “Everyone remembered the funny things Ronnie said after he was hit. No one seemed to want to remember how close he came to dying.”

  I have always been impressed that Nancy supported her husband’s decision to run for a second term, in spite of the assassination experience. The thought that someone—in fact, quite a few someones—out there wants to kill your husband can cast a permanent pall over the power, the glamour, of the presidency. It took real courage on Nancy Reagan’s part to back her partner’s decision to run in 1984.

  But the psychological impact of the assassination attempt on someone as sensitive as Nancy remained profound. Coupled with Ronald Reagan’s illnesses in his second term—his colon cancer surgery in 1985, his prostate surgery in 1987—the experience reinforced her instinct to protect him from the stresses and pressures of the job to a degree that caused her and the President serious problems. Nancy clashed head on with Reagan’s chief of staff, Donald Regan, who had come to Washington after a successful career as a Wall Street businessman with an autocratic style that was much too indifferent to political nuances—and to the reality of the Reagan partnership.

  Instead of understanding and sympathizing with Nancy’s role as protector, Regan adopted a confrontational “this is my turf” approach to her requests and suggestions. He ignored her recommendation to keep the President’s schedule as light as possible after his surgeries. Worse, from her point of view, he badly underestimated the impact of the Iran-Contra scandal, which revealed a White House-run plan to sell weapons to Iran to rescue American hostages in Lebanon, and to use some of the proceeds to fund the anti-Communist Nicaraguan rebels. Regan exposed an unprepared President to a humiliating press conference about the uproar and then sneered that he would need a shovel to clean up after the mess. Finally, he hung up on Nancy in the middle of a sentence, not once but several times.

  The situation swiftly slewed out of control. An enraged Nancy insisted Regan had to go. A dismayed President resisted—then finally consented—giving the Washington press corps irresistible targets. The New York Times said Nancy had expanded the role of First Lady into Associate President. The Times’s resident conservative columnist and every President’s gadfly, William Safire, said she was making Reagan look “wimpish.” The President called reports that Nancy was running the government “a despicable fiction.” Yet a poll reported sixty-two percent of the people thought Nancy had more influence in the White House than any First Lady in American history. Anyone who has read what I have written about Sarah Polk, Helen Taft, and Edith Wilson will thank God history is not written by pollsters—or the polled.

  There was worse to come. An infuriated Don Regan did the unforgivable: he wrote a tell-all book that described Nancy Reagan as a ten-foot-tall dragon lady pushing around a President with the brainpower of a Forrest Gump. As I have said already, I do not share many of the Reagans’ political views, but I felt sorry for them as this fiasco escalated. I can remember my father saying more than once in his old age that one of the things that pleased him most about his days in the White House was that none of his staff “ever wrote a book on me.” In spite of all I have said about the inevitability and pitilessness of the public’s demand for information, I believe there is such a thing as White House privacy, and the Reagans, the Bushes, the Clintons, all First Families, are entitled to it.

  Donald Regan revealed the existence of a White House astrologer, whom Nancy Reagan had hired to advise her on days or weeks when the President was likely to be unlucky. Regan made this sound as silly as possible, of course. When I interviewed Nancy for this book, she talked candidly about the astrologer. “I consulted her because I was looking for ways to find some comfort, to control my anxiety, every time Ronnie appeared in public,” she said. “It made me feel better to be told that certain days were safer than others.”

  As someone who was in show business, I am amazed by all the speculation about where Nancy got such ideas. Actors are among the most superstitious people in the world, closely followed by politicians and generals. They are all firm believers in Murphy’s famous law, if anything can go wrong, it will. The Reagans’ final two years in the White House, harried by the Regan revelations and the Iran-Contra scandal, amply demonstrated that Murphy was still very much on the scene. It is more than a little ironic that Nancy’s fear of dark forces seemed to produce them in spades.

  The Donald Regan debacle was a runaway outgrowth of Nancy Reagan’s attempt to protect the man she loved, the husband she almost lost on that terrible March day in 1981. If we view it from that perspective, we can be a little more understanding—and forgiving—toward a First Lady who had one of the roughest rides through Washington since Mary Lincoln.

  * For those who may have forgotten, Meese was Reagan’s attorney general.

  Chapter 13

  —

  THE ALMOST

  PERFECT

  FIRST LADY

  HAS THERE BEEN A FIRST LADY WHO DID IT ALL—WHO WAS A FLAWLESS White House hostess, a loving and protective wife, an astute political partner, and an admired public person in her own right? Such a paragon probably never will be seen at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But a remarkable consensus of historians, reporters, and average Americans seem to agree that there has been one First Lady who came close: Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson, better known to the world as Lady Bird.

  Her tenure as First Lady began under the worst imaginable circumstances. She was hurled from pleasant obscurity as the wife of the vice president into a White House riven by the shock of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I have discussed the trauma that an attempted assassination can inflict on those close to a President. I shudder to think of what the actual murder of a President would do to ordinary mortals like me. Lady Bird was totally exposed to the horror of Kennedy’s death, from the nightmarish gunshots in that Dallas plaza to the grisly aftermath on the plane back to Washington. In her diary she recalled her visit to Jackie Kennedy’s compartment on that funereal plane: “Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood, her husband’s blood.”

  In those terrible days, these two very different women established a friendship which endured for three decades. It began with Lady Bird’s words on the plane: “Oh Mrs. Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be Vice President and now, dear God, it’s come to this.” The friendship deepened as Lady Bird watched Jackie take charge of JFK’s funeral, indeed become its presiding spirit. During the procession that escorted the slain President’s coff
in to the Capitol, Lady Bird looked out at the sea of faces on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue and thought Jackie was achieving something she had never quite attained in the Kennedy years in the White House, “a state of love, a state of rapport between herself and the people of this country.”

  Two days later Lady Bird had tea with Jackie in the White House. Still in deep shock, her eyes haunted, her face taut with tension, Jackie at first tried to talk to Lady Bird as if this was a normal transition between an outgoing and an incoming First Lady. She dispensed basic lore, such as “Never tell a waiter that you don’t like this particular type of cookie because you will never see that particular butler again for two weeks.”

  Abruptly, Jackie went from household minutiae to the deeply personal: “Don’t be frightened of this house. Some of the happiest years of my marriage were spent here—you will be happy here.” She repeated this a half dozen times, as if she were trying to exorcise the nightmare of the assassination for Lady Bird.

  After a tour of the private quarters on the second floor, Jackie and Lady Bird went down to the East Room to hear Lyndon Johnson give a speech to South American diplomats who had participated in the Kennedy Alliance for Progress—an attempt to export U.S. economic know-how to our Spanish neighbors. Lady Bird realized everyone’s eyes were on Jackie. “But all the more my heart went out to the bravery of Lyndon,” she told her diary at the end of the day. “[He] marches into this circumstance with so much determination and not all the preparation that one would have sought, if one could have foreseen one’s destiny at sixteen.”

  These are remarkable words. They reveal Lady Bird Johnson’s ability to look at her larger-than-life-size husband with an extraordinary combination of affection and objectivity. They also reveal her calm acceptance of Jackie Kennedy’s star quality—without a trace of the envy or anxiety that such a predecessor might have stirred in a lesser woman. Lady Bird had no grandiose illusions about her career as First Lady. On the contrary, her dominant note was caution. She told her friend Nellie Connally, wife of John Connally, the Texas governor who was badly wounded by JFK’s assassin in Dallas, “I feel like I am suddenly onstage for a part I never rehearsed.”

  But for Lady Bird, caution did not mean hesitation, or a retreat to timid seclusion. She tackled the First Lady’s job with a calm determination that was rooted in the self-confidence she had acquired from almost twenty years in Washington, D.C., as a wife who watched—and frequently helped—her husband rise from obscure Texas congressman to Senate majority leader. It was no accident when she told Jackie Kennedy, “We never even wanted to be Vice President.” That we testified to her profound sense of partnership with Lyndon Johnson.

  By the time the Johnsons moved into the White House on December 7, 1963, Lady Bird had put together the nucleus of the best staff any First Lady has yet recruited. For her social secretary, she chose Bess Abell, daughter of a Kentucky senator and wife of the assistant postmaster general—an ultimate Washington insider. Her press secretary and de facto chief of staff was an even more inspired choice: Liz Carpenter, a shrewd, spunky newspaperwoman who had been reporting on Washington’s ways and means for decades. Of her Lyndon Johnson once remarked: “She’d charge hell with a bucket of water.” Liz was one of the few people in the White House, besides Lady Bird, who had the courage to tell LBJ he was occasionally wrong.

  Eventually six full-time assistants worked under Liz in the press section, and Bess Abell had four assistants to handle the social side of the White House. Jackie Kennedy’s decision to hire a press secretary has been hailed by some historians as a great leap forward. But Jackie still largely operated on her own, scrawling long memos on legal pads in her campaign to rehabilitate the White House. Lady Bird converted the leap into a quantum vault from the realm of gifted amateur to the domain of the orderly professional. Among her several talents, Lady Bird was a successful businesswoman; she had run the Johnsons’ radio and television properties ever since they acquired these valuable assets early in Lyndon’s congressional career. She brought something really new to the East Wing: expertise.

  Lady Bird Johnson was a many-sided First Lady. Here she works in her White House Office. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)

  Lady Bird had a long talk with Liz Carpenter about the press. She told Liz she wanted “a workable formula that will allow us to live happily together.” Liz conferred with the White House reporters, most of whom she knew personally, and boiled the process down to two basic principles: “Be Available” and “Never Lie. Tell us you can’t tell us but never lie.” My father’s old friend and press secretary, Charlie Ross, who died at his desk in the White House living up to similar principles, would have given Liz Carpenter’s version of them his heartfelt approval.

  Meanwhile, Lady Bird was engulfed by the thousand and one details of moving into the White House and simultaneously dismantling and selling The Elms, the gracious Washington home where she and Lyndon Johnson had lived for so long. She had to cope with two supercharged daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci, each a very distinct personality, and worry about how life in the White House would affect them. She somehow found time to meet and shake hands with every single member of the White House staff—and managed to begin one of the most important sides of her partnership with Lyndon Johnson—entertaining key members of Congress.

  On December 14, 1963, only a week after she moved in, the new First Lady presided at a dinner for a half dozen panjandrums of the House of Representatives and gave their wives a tour of the second-floor quarters. As she watched the guests depart, Lady Bird, with that objectivity that is one of her most remarkable characteristics, thought it was a good evening but “what feelings of warmth it created remains to be seen.”

  As a vice president filling out the last fourteen months of John F. Kennedy’s term, Lyndon Johnson was anxious about getting elected President in his own right. But he courageously pressed ahead with some very controversial legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act, which infuriated southern conservatives. When the Republicans nominated the conservatives’ hero, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, as their standard-bearer in 1964, a classic confrontation seemed in the making, with the South one of the principal battlegrounds. Friends told the President he would face pickets and violent demonstrations if he ventured into the land of cotton. “We’ll send Lady Bird instead,” LBJ said.

  This was not nearly as off the wall as it sounds. During the 1960 campaign, Lady Bird had traveled thirty-five thousand miles, mostly in the Deep South and Texas, speaking for the ticket. After the razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, the manager of JFK’s campaign, paid her a rare tribute: “Lady Bird carried Texas for us.” It was an amazing achievement for a woman who in 1954 was too shy to make a speech. When LBJ became Senate majority leader in 1955, considerably upping their public exposure, Lady Bird said she “got really annoyed with myself for being so shy and quiet”—and took speech lessons. She was soon calling the course “one of the most delightful expanding experiences I ever had.”

  Expanding is a key word here. Growth was at the heart of Lady Bird’s very special relationship with her husband. Not a few people have wondered how she managed to stay in love with this driven, abrasive man, who often publicly criticized her taste in clothes, sometimes ordered her around like a servant, and was not always faithful. Liz Carpenter says part of the explanation is genetic. Lady Bird’s father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, was another tall Texan who always expected to get his own way about everything. But I prefer Lady Bird’s explanation: “Lyndon stretches you,” she said once. “He always expects more of you than you’re really mentally or physically capable of putting out.”

  There is more to any love story than a single idea, of course. Although Lyndon may have wandered to other women more than once, Lady Bird knew she was the center of his life. She found that out the day in July 1955 that Senator Johnson collapsed with a massive heart attack. “Take my hand and stay with me,” he said as she rushed him to the hospital. “
I want to know you’re here while I’m trying to fight this thing.” For six weeks, she lived in the room next to his; she was with him literally day and night.

  That experience—and a large dose of southern womanhood and the Tall Texan explanation—underlies an extraordinary scene Liz Carpenter recalls from the 1960 campaign. Texas was in the grip of a September heat wave, which means temperatures in the hundreds. Several times Lady Bird was assailed by hecklers who accused her of treason and worse for trying to put John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, in the White House. Early in the day she sprained her ankle, but she kept going until she reached her hotel room late that afternoon and collapsed on the bed with the ankle swollen to three times its normal size.

  The phone rang. It was LBJ calling from Washington, to find out how the day had gone. “Just perfectly, dear,” Lady Bird said, omitting all mention of the murderous heat, the vicious hecklers, the swollen ankle. Pacing beside the bed, an exhausted, sweat-drenched Liz Carpenter told herself to stay calm and learn something about the arcane art of dealing with a man. But she kept seeing LBJ in his air-conditioned Senate office, blissfully unaware of what his “wimmen,” as he probably called them, had gone through for him in the previous ten beastly hours.

  “And how are you, dear?” Lady Bird said, almost causing Liz to keel over with apoplexy. She decided then and there (and I heartily agree with her) that Lady Bird was unique, and there was no point—or hope—in trying to imitate her.

  Four years later, in his own campaign for president, LBJ’s respect for Lady Bird increased exponentially with her 1964 invasion of the South aboard “the Lady Bird Special”—an eighteen-car train on which she loaded some 250 reporters and a handpicked staff under Liz Carpenter’s unerring eye. “Don’t give me the easy towns, Liz,” she said, as they planned the trip. “Anyone can get into Atlanta. Let me take the tough ones.”