First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Of course she was snipping a leaf out of the Truman campaign notebook with this whistle-stop tour. Both Johnsons were Truman aficionados; LBJ thought Dad was a great President, and Lady Bird just thought he was great. Early in her First Lady days, she had taken a trip to Greece with him to attend the funeral of King Paul. After the ceremony they met a Greek prince who told them his great-great-grandfather had been an aide to General Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War. Ex-President Truman, perhaps influenced by several days of listening to Lady Bird’s southern accent, decided he no longer had to conceal his true sympathies in that ancient conflict. “Young man,” he said, giving Lady Bird a conspiratorial wink, “as far as this lady and I are concerned, your great-great-grandpa was on the wrong side.”

  Lest this tale upset the uninitiated, perhaps I should add that Dad’s mother was an unreconstructed Missouri Confederate until the day she died. When he joined the Army reserve and came home one day in a blue uniform, she told him never to wear it again in her house. She also told him why she felt that way. More than once during the Civil War, her life had been threatened by bushwhacking, barn-burning Yankee guerrillas from Kansas. I can practically guarantee Dad told this story to Lady Bird at some point in their twenty or so hours in the air going to and coming from Greece. To a very small, carefully selected circle, he revealed his southern roots.

  Lady Bird did a lot of the crucial advance work for the 1964 tour of the South herself. She personally called most of the congressmen and senators and the governor in each state and asked for their help. “Guv-nuh,” she would purr, “I’m thinkin’ about comin’ down to your state—” She also enlisted a cadre of wives of southern politicians, such as Lindy Boggs of Louisiana and Betty Talmadge of Georgia. Liz Carpenter remarked that they all had the exquisite manners of Melanie in Gone with the Wind—and the steel-trap mind of Scarlett O’Hara.

  The initial response of the old-boy politicians to this female onslaught was panic and flight. Lady Bird was handed the worst collection of lame excuses in history. One senator said he was still mourning his wife, who had died two years before. A congressman claimed he had a date to go antelope hunting that he could not possibly break. In the early days of our 1948 whistle-stop hegira, the Trumans, written off as losers by every Democrat from Maine to New Mexico, got the same sort of baloney by the carload.

  Excuses be damned, the Lady Bird Special rolled out of Washington on October 5, 1964—and began making history. It was, I need hardly add, the first time a First Lady ever went after votes on her own in this totally professional fashion, with advance men—and women—out in front of the scheduled stops rounding up the crowds and lining up the local officials to do the greeting. It was a presidential-style campaign with a First Lady instead of the candidate as the centerpiece.

  For four days the Lady Bird Special snaked through the South, making forty-seven stops in eight states from Alexandria, Virginia, to New Orleans, covering an amazing 1,682 miles. Everywhere Lady Bird delivered a message that was perfectly designed to win southern hearts and even a few minds. She did not spend a lot of time defending the Civil Rights Act of 1964; she simply said she thought it was “right,” and in time she was sure most southerners would agree with her. She was really there to tell people that “for this President and his wife the South is a respected and valued and beloved part of the country.” She wanted to defend the South against the rest of the nation, against snide jokes about rednecks and cornpone. She wanted to let everyone know she was a southerner and proud of it. “For me,” she often said in summary, “this is a journey of the heart.”

  The first time Lady Bird said that, speaking off the cuff to her advance people, she got a standing ovation from a bunch of mostly cynical pols. From Norfolk to Mobile, she got the same reaction from average southerners—times ten. Day after day, the crowds coming out to wave and listen grew larger. Pretty soon—and once more the memory of a similar experience aboard the Truman train in 1948 made me smile—the skittery governors and congressmen who had been hiding out in the tall timber were fighting to board the Lady Bird Special and get their pictures taken beside the First Lady.

  Back in Washington, D.C., an ecstatic LBJ greeted his wife with Texas-size accolades. He called her “one of the greatest campaigners in America” and perhaps surprised himself by exclaiming: “I’m proud to be her husband.” I need hardly add that he rolled to a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. Half of those contested southern states voted for him, thanks to Lady Bird.

  Before LBJ reached that happy climax, however, his campaign was shaken to its foundations by one of those White House tragedies that seem to strike Presidents with the random ferocity of a lightning bolt. Without Lady Bird, the Johnson presidency might not have survived the blow. A few weeks before the election, one of LBJ’s closest personal aides, Walter Jenkins, who had worked for him since the 1940s, was arrested in a public men’s room performing a homosexual act.

  Lyndon Johnson was in New York to give a speech. Reporters besieged him for a comment. He went into hiding and put through a call to Lady Bird. She had already decided what they should do. She would make a statement for both of them. Liz Carpenter was with her when she took LBJ’s call. She read him her statement and talked to him in a low, reassuring voice for a long time. Finally she said: “I’ve never loved you so much as I do this minute.”

  Lady Bird summoned reporters to the White House and read her statement, which proclaimed the Johnsons’ total loyalty to Walter Jenkins and his tormented family. It was a deeply sympathetic, profoundly moving document, which lifted the scandal from vicious gossip to a spiritual plane. Best of all, Lady Bird meant every word of it.

  This, I submit, is what a White House partnership is really about—being there for each other when need is paramount. There is a lot more to being First Lady than giving advice on policy. Lady Bird repeatedly proved that matters of the heart are at least as vital.

  Along with the campaigning and rescue operations such as the Jenkins affair, Lady Bird concentrated a lot of effort on structuring the White House to give her husband an island of peace on the second floor. When it came to working, Lyndon Johnson made James K. Polk, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry S Truman look like layabouts. The man never stopped long enough to look at a clock; he was immune to orders and exhortations. Only Lady Bird knew how to lure him out of the Oval Office to a quiet dinner with a few friends on the second floor. Without her expert intervention, LBJ might have become a burnout case in his first White House year.

  Once Lyndon was President in his own right, Lady Bird felt free to give some thought to other aspects of her job. She was very conscious of the symbolic power of the First Lady, and she wanted to put it to good use. She made a start with “Women Doers” luncheons, which brought together women from Washington and the rest of the country to hear one of their number tell what women were accomplishing in, say, the United Nations. But these luncheons lacked a thematic focus, something that the public at large could respond to and participate in on a national scale.

  Typically, Lady Bird found her inspiration in her husband’s vision of a greater America, in which not only would poverty be conquered but the natural beauty of the land would be restored and preserved. In his 1964 inaugural address, Lyndon Johnson had called for programs to preserve and enhance America’s natural beauty. In that speech and another speech in May of 1964, in which he called on Americans to establish a “Great Society,” Lady Bird found what she described as “interests that made my heart sing, the ones I knew most about and cared most about. These were the environment and beautification.”

  Liz Carpenter once compared Lady Bird Johnson and Eleanor Roosevelt. She noted that Eleanor was an “instigator.” She frequently tackled causes on her own, without her husband’s endorsement. Lady Bird, on the other hand, was always an implementer, an embellisher and translator of her husband’s ideas. “She was a WIFE in capital letters,” Liz says.

  Cautious as always not to overcommit herself, Lady B
ird decided to start her beautification program in Washington, D.C., which was badly in need of a face-lift. Everyone from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to The Washington Post had been condemning the capital for its mangy lawns, its crime-ridden parks, its hideous, rat-infested vacant lots. Worst of all was the condition of the 761 miniparks the capital’s original planner, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, had inserted into his heroic vision of magnificent avenues and splendid circles. They were mostly, in Lady Bird’s words, “gray and dismal, with a little scabrous grass and a couple of leaning benches.”

  Once more the First Lady demonstrated what a professional approach could accomplish. To her Committee for a More Beautiful National Capital she lured the great names—and great wealth—of Laurance Rockefeller, Mary Lasker, and Brooke Astor. She backed them with Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, plus Stewart Udall and various other government honchos, such as Nash Castro of the National Park Service. Finally she brought aboard leaders of Washington’s African-American community, notably Walter Washington, who with Lady Bird’s backing eventually became the city’s first mayor.

  This shrewd mix not only guaranteed top-of-the-line effectiveness but also prevented the committee from turning into an elitist operation that planted flowers and trees in downtown Washington for the tourists and congressmen and ignored the city’s eight hundred thousand segregated, often impoverished black residents. This committee planted downtown and in the neighborhoods.

  Without Lady Bird, the committee might have split into quarreling factions: the neighborhood wing sometimes referred to the downtowners as “the daffodil and dogwood set.” The downtowners sometimes opined it was a waste of money to plant flowers and trees for people who did not seem to appreciate them—and occasionally destroyed them. Lady Bird supported both programs with equal enthusiasm.

  She also breathed new life into related programs, such as the revival of Pennsylvania Avenue, which had been kicking around Washington since Helen Taft’s days. (I exaggerate only slightly.) The architect in charge, Nathaniel Owings, had been supposed to make a report on the project to John E Kennedy on November 23, 1963. Owings was sure he had been born under an unlucky star, until he met Lady Bird. She not only adopted his plan but also adopted him onto her capital committee. Soon, whenever Owings had a problem getting congressional approval for something tricky, like building a reflecting pool in front of the Capitol, he would procure an endorsement from Lady Bird. “It was like a contract in your file,” he said.

  Then he would head for the Hill. In the reflecting pool imbroglio (almost everything in Washington is an imbroglio), he approached the austere Speaker of the House, John McCormack, with a roll of plans and sketches a foot thick. “Does Mrs. Johnson like it?” McCormack asked.

  “I’m authorized to tell you she approves it completely.”

  “Never mind the sketches,” the Speaker said. “Where do I sign?”

  McCormack also found Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate and got them to sign up. In thirty minutes Owings had six signatures it would have taken him a month to obtain on his own. “I was in a dream,” he said.

  Led by her wealthy members, Lady Bird’s Committee for the Capital raised two million dollars and in the next two years landscaped eighty parks, plus nine schools and eight playgrounds, planted 83,000 spring flowering plants, 50,000 shrubs, 25,000 trees, and 137,000 annuals. Mary Lasker, whose generosity had already spread beautiful flowers around New York, was so enthusiastic, she told Lady Bird her only worry now was whether the nation’s nurseries would have enough stock to plant “the whole United States.”

  The neighborhood program evolved into something really worthwhile—Project Pride, which enlisted local residents to “clean up,” “fix up,” “paint up,” and “plant up” some of the most deprived sections of the city. Walter Washington became as enthusiastic about Lady Bird as Nathaniel Owings. “When this program started, there were some who regarded it as Marie Antoinette’s piece of cake,” Washington said. “After all, how many rats can you kill with a tulip? But it hasn’t been that way at all.”

  With Washington, D.C., on its way to a new look, Lady Bird went national with beautification. She flew around the country, urging all Americans to join her campaign. A tidal wave of speaking invitations poured into the White House. Lady Bird organized cabinet and Senate wives, many of them old friends, to form a speakers’ bureau to handle the appearances she could not make without cloning herself. Meanwhile, she began leading “See America” tours to national parks and other scenic sights. These expeditions included several hundred reporters, federal officials, and local folk—the sort of thing that only a pro like Liz Carpenter could orchestrate.

  Perhaps the most memorable tour was the trek into the spare, stark Big Bend region of Texas, climaxed by rafting down the Rio Grande. Liz summed up one opinion of this particular outing (with which a comfort lover like me concurs) when she said she preferred the parks where all the concessions were run by the Rockefellers. But Lady Bird loved every minute of the Big Bend adventure. She filled her diary with descriptions of “the awesome spires of the canyon walls pierced by centuries of wind.”

  Next this tireless woman tackled the legislative side of beautification. She and her staff sponsored and partly wrote a law that LBJ submitted to Congress, to eliminate the proliferation of junkyards and billboards along our nation’s highways. Both these industries had powerful lobbyists who battled the bill in every imaginable way—especially in the West. Some of the more outspoken billboard owners printed IMPEACH LADY BIRD on their endangered assets.

  Here Lady Bird relaxes in a field of bluebonnets, reminding us she was the First Lady who revitalized America’s love of natural beauty. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)

  Lady Bird personally oversaw the White House lobbying for the bill, making numerous calls herself. LBJ put on the pressure in his own hell for leather way. The bill was being considered by the House on the day of a scheduled “Salute to Congress” reception at the White House. The President sent the solons a message: there would be no salute if they didn’t pass the bill first. It was quite late in the evening by the time they stopped wrangling and showed up at the White House with a voted bill. One Republican congressman, a certain Robert Dole of Kansas, was so annoyed he moved to insert Lady Bird’s name in the language of the bill, as if he wanted to identify her as the culprit not only behind the controversial measure but also behind the deflated White House party.

  While she was raising the national consciousness about America’s natural beauty, Lady Bird somehow found time to be one of the mostest hostesses the White House has ever seen. At everything from formal state dinners to back lawn hoedowns, she and LBJ entertained a staggering two hundred thousand people in their five years in residence. Unlike most White House denizens, Lady Bird never seemed to grow weary of these handshaking marathons. She studied briefing books and consulted aides so she had something friendly and personal to say to almost everyone on the guest list. She topped this hospitality extravaganza by overseeing both her daughters’ weddings in the White House, an exercise in press relations and guest list juggling that can safely be compared to restaging D day twice.

  Lady Bird’s achievements are all the more remarkable for another reason. She played her vibrant, creative role in an administration that was sideswiped by history, almost from the day Lyndon Johnson took office. The Kennedy assassination was only one factor in the creation of a torn country. Northern big city black ghettos seethed with anger, the rural South boiled with racial antagonism, as Martin Luther King and other leaders strove to win basic civil rights for their people. Multiplying the turbulence was the war in Vietnam, which LBJ reluctantly expanded in 1965, when it looked as if our small ally, South Vietnam, was on the brink of defeat by Communist North Vietnam.

  As more and more Americans turned against the war, Lady Bird found herself drawn into the controversy. By 1967 protesters gathered whenever
she visited a college campus to talk about beautification or the environment. Finally, they invaded the White House. First, the singer Eartha Kitt rose at one of the Women Doers luncheons and ranted against the Johnson administration. According to some reports, she even spat at the First Lady. Then a salute to the nation’s writers and artists in the Rose Garden turned into a boycott by some and diatribes by others who showed up only to denounce the President to his face. Day and night, through the windows drifted the chant of protesters in Lafayette Park, across from the White House: “Hey hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

  Lady Bird watched this nightmare take a fearful toll on her husband. As old Senate friends, such as William Fulbright of Arkansas, turned against him, depression ravaged LBJ’s sleep. In her diary, Lady Bird would note with relief that his bedroom light was out at 11:00 and then discover he had awakened at 2:00 A.M. and worked for the rest of the night. She told me how she fought a losing battle with “the night box,” in which aides put urgent documents to be signed or reports to be read. No doubt thinking of these latter days, Lady Bird said she really only deserved a B-minus as a First Lady who protected her husband from overwork.

  Some mornings, according to an aide, LBJ would lie in bed with the covers pulled up almost to his chin, and the window shades pulled down, reluctant to get up. “I can’t read The Washington Post this morning,” he would groan. As his political partner, Lady Bird felt the vicious accusations, the anguish and frustration and deaths of the endless war, as acutely as her husband. By 1968, she noted ruefully in her diary, when they appeared in public, they moved in what she called “riding in the tumbrel” attitudes, shoulders just a bit squarer, head just a bit higher. One Sunday in March, she wrote: “I have a growing feeling of Prometheus Bound, just as though we were lying there on the rock, exposed to the vultures and restrained from fighting back.”