9
WHEN LYNDON JOHNSON called Lady Bird to tell her he would be bringing Dick Russell home for dinner in a few minutes, she always had something ready for them to eat. She had something ready every evening, no matter how late the hour, for she never knew when Lyndon would call to say, “I’ll be home in twenty minutes. We’ve got four guests for dinner,” and when he got home, he didn’t want to be kept waiting. As he walked through the door, he would say without preamble, “We’re hungry, Bird. Let’s get dinner on the table.” He had been doing this for years, often calling just as he was leaving his office, four guests—or six or eight—in tow.
Having something ready was easier now, for with the money rolling in from the Austin radio station they had bought in 1943, they had hired a cook, a young African-American woman from Texas, Zephyr Wright. But Johnson had begun bringing guests home before 1943—before they had even owned a house, in fact: while they were still living, without any domestic help, in an apartment on Connecticut Avenue—and Lady Bird had always had something ready then, too, along with her warm, welcoming smile. And often her husband didn’t want a simple dinner. “I’m bringing four guests home tonight,” he would say. “Let’s have something special.” And if he didn’t consider it special enough, his temper would boil over. One year, he had announced in advance that he would be bringing Sam Rayburn home on the Speaker’s birthday. “The dinner was turkey hash,” recalls the journalist Margaret Mayer, who was temporarily working for Johnson and living at Thirtieth Place at the time, “and Lyndon flew into a rage—a rage! ‘What do you mean serving turkey hash for Mr. Sam’s birthday?’” (Mr. Sam said, “‘If I had my choice of anything I could have, there is nothing I’d rather have for my birthday than Zephyr’s turkey hash,’” Ms. Mayer recalls. “That stopped that explosion.”) And there were the meals with staff members—his own staff, or lower-ranking officials in government agencies whom Johnson needed for something at the moment; “Lady Bird makes me feel as important as Chief Justice [Frederick] Vinson when she introduces me to him,” one lower-level bureaucrat commented. On Sundays, of course, Russell would come for brunch, and Rayburn for dinner—along with the group of Rayburn’s friends—and if the men stayed up in the study after Drew Pearson’s broadcast talking politics into the evening, Lyndon would come to the top of the stairs and shout down, “Bring us up some sandwiches, Bird.” (“By God, he’s gonna kill her!” Rayburn once muttered to his nephew Robert Bartley but, holding the husband-wife bond sacrosanct, he almost never interfered between the Johnsons.)
The relationship of Lady Bird (that nickname had been given Claudia Alta Taylor at the age of two by a black nurse because “She’s purty as a lady bird”) and her husband was, in 1949, the same as it had been since their marriage in 1934—although there were reasons why it might have changed. Readers of the earlier volumes of this work will perhaps remember her painful shyness and loneliness as a young girl. (Her mother had died when she was five; her father, a tall, coarse, ham-handed cotton gin owner, the richest man in his East Texas town, had little interest in his daughter.*) In high school, she was to remember, “I hoped no one would speak to me”; she dreaded so deeply the prospect of standing up in front of an audience that she prayed she would finish no higher than third in her graduating class since the first two students had to give speeches—she prayed that if she did finish first or second, she would get smallpox so that she wouldn’t have to speak. (She finished third.) At college, she was a lonely young woman—plain and almost dowdy in dress—who, a friend says, was “so quiet she never seemed to speak at all,” and as the wife of Congressman Lyndon Johnson her shyness had kept her from giving even the brief talks expected from a congressman’s wife; at the mere suggestion that she give one, friends recall, there was real panic in her face; when she could not avoid standing in a receiving line, her friends winced at the effort it cost her to shake hands with strangers, so rigid was the bright smile she kept on her face. She played almost no part in her husband’s political life; he didn’t even tell her he was going to ran for the Senate in 1941 until after he had announced the fact to the rest of the world in a press conference. And readers may remember the contempt, indeed cruelty, with which her husband treated her, humiliating her in public, this woman who had an almost visible terror of having attention called to herself—how at parties he shouted at her across crowded rooms (“Bird, go get me another piece of pie.” “I will, in just a minute, Lyndon.” “Get me another piece of pie!”), how he publicly mocked her appearance, often comparing her to her friend, John Connally’s beautiful wife Nellie (“That’s a pretty dress, Nellie. Why can’t you ever wear a dress like that, Bird?” “You look so muley, Bird. Why can’t you look more like Nellie?” “Get out of those funny-looking shoes, Bird. Why can’t you wear pretty shoes like Nellie?”).
And for years there had been that extramarital affair that was so special in Lyndon Johnson’s life. The fact that Alice Glass was the lover (and later the wife) of a man as important to Johnson’s career as Charles Marsh was one reason that the few men and women aware of the affair between Lyndon and Alice felt, as did John Connally, that it was “unlike any other” in which he engaged. They agree that it juts out of the landscape of his life as one of the few episodes that ran counter to his personal ambition. “Knowing Lyndon, I could hardly believe he was taking a chance like that,” says Harold H. Young, a member of the Longlea “circle,” who was later to marry Alice’s sister, Mary Louise Glass. “It just didn’t fit in with the Lyndon Johnson I knew.” And then there was the fact that, as John Connally was to recall, “He guarded the secrecy of that relationship. He never talked about her, never revealed his feelings—that alone set it apart. It was the most intense and longest-lasting of any affair he engaged in.” Noticing that Lyndon came to Longlea weekend after weekend, sometimes with Lady Bird and sometimes with Lady Bird remaining in Washington, and seeing the young congressman, normally so restless, sitting quietly staring at Alice as she read poetry, the members of the Longlea circle speculated that Alice’s feelings were reciprocated and that she had reason for her belief that Lyndon would divorce Lady Bird and marry her.
In 1941, the alacrity with which Johnson jumped into the Senate race made Alice feel that her lover’s political ambitions would always be put ahead of his feelings. In 1942, Johnson, a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, went to the West Coast, leaving with his staff and constituents—and with Alice—the impression that he was en route to active service in a Pacific combat zone. He invited Alice out for a visit, however, and she realized that in fact combat service was not in his plans. In a letter years later, she told a friend, “I can write a very illuminating chapter on his military career in Los Angeles, with photographs, letters from voice teachers, and photographers who tried to teach him which was the best side of his face.” An idealist who had believed that Johnson was an idealist (“She thought he was a young man who was going to save the world,” her sister says), Alice “was disgusted, just disgusted with him after that trip.” The intense, “sexual side” of their relationship ended, Mary Louise says, although all during the 1950s he would from time to time make the hour-and-a-half drive to Longlea. And it was in 1945, of course, that Lyndon met Helen Douglas. Lady Bird was, in the opinion of the Longlea circle, a drab little woman whom no one listened to.
Readers may also recall, however, that throughout Lady Bird Johnson’s life, there had been hints of something more—of ambition, of determination, and of dignity: when her husband would bellow orders at her across a room or insult her, she would say simply, “Yes, Lyndon,” or, “I’ll be glad to, Lyndon,” and would carry out his request as calmly as if it had been polite and reasonable, doing so with a poise that was rather remarkable in the circumstances. And there were hints of courage as well: suddenly thrust into her husband’s political world when, after Pearl Harbor, he went into the service and she was forced, on one day’s notice, to take over his congressional office, she not only did so, but did so very well, nerving herself to deal with constituents and Cabinet officers, pestering them when necessary (“The squeaking wheel gets the grease, I learned”) to get things done for the district that Lyndon would have gotten done. Sometimes when Lady Bird had to call someone like “that formidable man, Mr. Ickes,” Mary Rather, glancing into Lyndon’s office, would see her staring at the telephone on Lyndon’s desk, “looking as if she would rather have done anything in the world than pick up that phone and dial,” but she always picked it up and did what had to be done, and did it with an unexpected graciousness and poise—and efficiency—that led constituents to joke that maybe she should be the congressman, and that led Nellie Connally to say, “She changed, but I think it was always there. I just don’t think it was allowed out.”
After Johnson returned to Congress, it was again not allowed out. Notably unamused by the jokes—obviously jealous—he not only relegated her to her old housewife’s role, but took pains to put to rest the notion that her role in his office had been significant. Asked once if he discussed political problems with her, he said that “of course” he did. “I talk my problems over with a lot of people,” he added. “I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her, too.” After the purchase of radio station KTBC, while for public consumption Lady Bird was listed as the station’s president and was said to be in charge of its operations and responsible for its success, in reality the success was due to Johnson’s political influence, and to the fact that he sold that influence to individuals and corporations in return for their purchase of advertising time on the station. In truth, he oversaw, in detail, every aspect of KTBC’s operations, often during these years without consulting more than cursorily with his wife. At the same time that he was telling the public that she was running the station, he was telling their friends—often in her presence, as she sat silently, not contradicting—that he was running it, making clear that her role in it was a minor one.
Now, in 1949, with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, Lady Bird’s duties hadn’t changed. She no longer brought him breakfast in bead every morning, but she still laid out his clothes, unbuttoning his shirts so that he wouldn’t have to perform that chore himself, put in the collar stays and cuff links, filled his fountain pens and put them in the proper pocket, filled his cigarette lighter and put it in its pocket, and put his handkerchief and money in their pockets. While he was shaving, she took dictation. Her other duties, too, remained the same as ever. As soon as he left for Capitol Hill, she would call his office to ask “Who’s in town from Texas today?” If any of the visitors merited a tour, she would take them on it; she was to say that she had stopped counting her trips to Mount Vernon when the number passed two hundred. Or she might invite other visitors to lunch.
Nor had there been any change in Lyndon’s treatment of her, which was still so abusive that people who witnessed it say, “You couldn’t believe it.” Orders were as brusque as ever. “Bird, go in and fix us something to eat,” or, if he wanted her out of the room when a delicate political matter was being discussed, a dismissive “See you later, Bird.” If, on a day on which he had told her in the morning that they were having guests to dinner, she ventured to call his office in the evening to ask when he might arrive, the reaction was swift. “Goddammit, tell her that I’ll be leaving when I’m done here,” he would snarl to Jenkins or Rather. “Tell her to quit calling every fucking five minutes. Now go phone her and tell her that.” When, at Thirtieth Place, he wanted something from her and she wasn’t in the room, he would shout for her—“Birrrrdd!”—in a voice one guest likened to a hog call. He told stories about her to amuse his friends, some the kind that many husbands tell about their wives, except that Johnson told them with a cutting scorn in his voice. Once when she got home from a shopping expedition after he was already there and talking with some friends, he said, “Well, Bird, did you wear out another four dollars’ worth of shoe leather shoppin’ around to save a dime?” He still mocked her appearance in front of friends, comparing it unfavorably to theirs. “Look at your hair, Bird,” he said once, in a tone of disgust. “You look like a tumbleweed. Why can’t you look nice, like Mary Louise here?” “He said it right in front of everyone,” Mary Louise said. “I couldn’t even look at her.” “His attitude towards her was utter contempt,” says his fellow congressman, the West Texan O. C. Fisher. In comments that are typical of many made by social friends of the Johnsons, Wingate Lucas of Fort Worth, who was elected to Congress in 1948 and saw them frequently, says, “Lady Bird was charming, but she was the most beaten-down woman I ever saw. You immediately felt sorry for her. Her husband was so mean to her, so publicly humiliating. He would dismiss what she said with a disgusted wave of his arm: ‘What do you mean, Bird? That’s ridiculous.’ He’d shout across the room at her at parties of Texas people—friends of hers—and just order her to do something.” Says her friend Mary Elliott: “He’d just click his fingers. ‘Bird!’ She’d have to stop whatever she was doing, and just come running. I never saw anything like it.” The tone he used with his wife was, in short, the same as he used with the staff in his office on Capitol Hill; he treated her as if she had been just another member of that staff—and not a particularly valuable one at that. “The women liked her,” Nellie Connally says. “Every woman sympathized with her. If they didn’t like her for herself—and they did—they liked her because they saw what she had to put up with. It made what they had to put up with not so bad.” A researcher trying to get a picture of the Johnsons hears, over and over, the same phrase: “I don’t know how she stood it.”
But she did stand it, and in fact her devotion to him—her love for him—seemed only to grow stronger. He had only to put his arm around her for her face to grow noticeably happier. There was obviously a strong physical tie between them. Stuart Symington was struck by two incidents that occurred in 1951 while he and the Johnsons and Mary Rather were having dinner in the little back yard behind the Thirtieth Place house. “Lady Bird said, ‘Stu, have another little piece of chicken,’ and I said, ‘Thanks but I’ve had all I can eat,’ and she said, ‘Oh, please, have just one more piece’—and Johnson blew. ‘Goddammit, Bird, leave the man alone! Didn’t you hear what he said? Goddammit, the man doesn’t want any more chicken! Goddammit!’ And I never forgot it, he was so brutal with her.” But that same year, Symington visited the Johnsons in Texas, and they drove out to the Hill Country for a picnic and while they were sitting on a blanket, Lyndon “said to her, putting his arm around her, ‘Let’s jest do a little ‘spoonin’ ’—and the light in her face was something to see.” Whatever the reasons, her adoration for her husband was visible to everyone. Once her biographer, Jan Jarboe Russell, asked her if she resented doing menial chores for him—bringing him breakfast in bed, etc. “Heavens, no,” Lady Bird replied. “I was delighted to do it. I adored him.”
THE MODEST HOUSE on Thirtieth Place seemed too small for its furniture. Not long after the Johnsons had purchased it, Lyndon, annoyed by the amount of time Lady Bird was taking to pick out furniture, went to an auction one day and purchased an entire houseful. But the furniture—large, heavy Victorian pieces—was evidently from a much larger house. Lady Bird had thereafter decorated “every inch of that house,” as Elizabeth Rowe would recall; in the rather small dining room, for example, not only the windows but a wall mirror were hung with heavy red draperies. And the house seemed too small for all the people who lived in it—not only the Johnsons and their two girls but also Zephyr Wright and a changing cast of staff members and visitors from Texas who slept up on the third floor; “Texas friends descend on them all hours of every day, and stay for a drink, a meal, or a week,” a journalist wrote. “Lady Bird takes it in stride.” And it seemed too small for the man around whom life in it revolved.
The clock radio beside Lyndon Johnson’s bed was set for seven-thirty, but on most days the bedside buzzer with which he called for breakfast rang down in the kitchen well before that time; it wasn’t an alarm that jerked Lyndon Johnson out of sleep. He would often have made several calls to his assistants during the night when he thought of things that needed doing, and he would wake up thinking of more; as he lay in bed eating the breakfast that Ms. Wright had brought up on a tray—usually a Texas grapefruit, toast, and a big plate of spicy Hill Country sausage—drinking innumerable cups of coffee, and lighting the first of the day’s cigarettes, he would be telephoning assistants at their homes and, at about eight, telephoning SOB 231 to see what the morning’s mailbag had brought. And he would be reading: not only the Washington Post and Times-Herald, and the New York Times, but the Congressional Record. (Each day’s Record, covering the previous day’s activities, was printed at about six o’clock in the morning, and he had asked for it to be delivered to his home; five days a week a green truck from the Government Printing Office pulled up on the quiet street at about seven o’clock and a gray-uniformed GPO employee would lay a copy at the Johnson front door; sometimes the ink would still be wet and would smear Lyndon Johnson’s fingers as he read it, turning the pages very fast but focusing on them very intently.) He would tear out articles as he read. As he shaved in the bathroom—with an electric razor because he considered it easier than a straight blade on his tender skin, and because he considered an electric razor faster, and he didn’t want to waste time—and combed his hair, concentrating on covering a growing thin spot on the back of his head, he would be dictating letters, memos, and reminders to himself to Lady Bird, who was sitting on the bed with her stenographer’s notebook. By eight-thirty or so, Walter Jenkins or Mary Rather would have arrived to take more dictation, and tension and haste would sharpen in Lyndon Johnson’s voice as he put on the clothes his wife had laid out for him. The upstairs doorknobs were decorated with knotted neckties; believing that tying a tie each day wrinkled it—and also took too much time—he simply loosened his ties to take them off at night, and hung them, knots intact, on doorknobs, ready to be slipped on again. By nine, he would be out the door, and driving down Connecticut; sometimes, if he wasn’t picking up Congresswoman Douglas, he would pick up Mary Rather and drive her to work, weaving in and out of cars, shouting at their drivers, mingling dictation and diatribes, gearing up for the day ahead. He wouldn’t return home until after the Senate had adjourned for the day at five or six o’clock, and after he had attended Rayburn’s Board of Education and had done several hours’ work in his office, and then he would often bring last-minute guests.
Sometimes, he wouldn’t have finished all his office chores when he had to get home to greet guests. The huge stack of letters that his staff had churned out that day might not all be reviewed and signed, for instance. Then that work would be done at home. While his guests were talking and having a cocktail in the living room, he would sit in a corner, a tall stack of papers in front of him, talking along with them but reading and signing as he talked.
THERE WERE, of course, two individuals at 4921 Thirtieth Place who did not fit into that routine: Lynda Bird Johnson, age five in 1949, and Lucy Baines Johnson, age two.
During the first nine years of their marriage, Lady Bird Johnson had become pregnant three times, but had suffered three miscarriages. In 1943, she had conceived again. Lyndon Johnson badly wanted a son—and apparently had no doubts that his wishes would be answered. Writing on November 22, 1943, to congratulate L. E. Jones on the birth of Jones’ baby, he said, “You may be interested to know that I am expecting a boy in March.” Talking to friends in Washington, with Lady Bird present, he seemed so convinced of this that Jim Rowe had felt called upon to inject a note of caution, writing him on March 4, 1944, “I do assure you, as a gentleman who desperately wanted a son and never told his wife about it either before or after the event, that if your fate is the same as mine you will in three months’ time no more think of having a son instead of a daughter than of voting with Pappy O’Daniel.” This caution was reinforced by Rayburn, and it apparently had some effect, for when Jones wrote Johnson the next week, “Here’s hoping it’s a boy,” Johnson wrote back, “I hope I’ll be as lucky as you, but at this point I’m not as particular about a boy as I was at first.” Lynda Bird Johnson was born, on March 19, 1944, only after twelve torturous hours of labor, and doctors, as readers may remember, strongly advised Mrs. Johnson not to become pregnant again; and when, in 1946, this advice was disregarded, its wisdom was almost tragically proven—as was Lady Bird’s courage. She knew she was miscarrying again, yet she insisted that Lyndon go to the office although she was in intense pain and running a high fever. She called the doctor as soon as he had driven away, but before an ambulance arrived she began to hemorrhage badly. As she was being carried out of the house on a stretcher, she asked a visiting friend from Austin to mail an important letter to Texas, told her how much postage to put on it, and insisted that a dinner party the following evening, to which she had invited Rayburn and two guests, not be canceled, saying, “Lyndon has to eat anyway, and they’re already invited,” and requesting that her friend act as hostess in her place. Her condition was listed as critical for more than a week, but she recovered—and became pregnant again. “We’re waiting for baby brother,” Lyndon told friends. On July 2, 1947, Lucy Baines Johnson was born, in a delivery so difficult that when the doctor held her up for the first time, he said, “I never thought I’d see you.” Johnson never stopped expressing his desire for a son; “You know I always wanted a boy,” he would tell his secretary Ashton Gonella. In an interview with Stewart Alsop published in 1959, he said, “I’ve always wished Lady Bird and I had a son. If we had [had] a boy, I’d want him to be a politician or a teacher or a preacher…. Someone who … has an influence on events.”
On the days Johnson went to his Senate office, he was telephoning, giving dictation, and reading the newspapers and the Record from the moment he awoke, so he had little time in the mornings to spend with his two daughters. Since he rarely returned before they were asleep, they seldom saw him during the evenings of the days on which he went to his office. And since those days were six of the seven in the week, their time with him was necessarily somewhat limited. There remained Sundays, of course, but as Lynda Bird was to say during an interview in 1989, “Daddy was the kind of man who believed it was more important to invite Richard Russell… over for Sunday breakfast than to spend the time alone with his family.”
It might have been expected that this gap in the lives of the two little girls would be filled by their mother, who had taken such risks to bear them—particularly since she was a woman with such seemingly boundless warmth and patience for her husband’s colleagues and constituents. But this was not the case. Men and women who lived for a time at Thirtieth Place during 1949 and the early 1950s couldn’t believe Lady Bird’s attitude toward her children. “I never saw a mother-daughter relationship like it,” recalls Margaret Mayer. “Lady Bird let everyone know that, no matter what, Lyndon came first.” She spent her days with his constituents, her evenings accompanying him to Washington social events. When she was gone, the girls’ baby-sitter was one of Johnson’s secretaries, Willie Day Taylor, a gentle woman who Lady Bird says “became almost a second mother.” Sometimes, Mary Rather, or Ollie Reed, the Johnsons’ next-door neighbor, would act as baby-sitter. “The little Johnson girls are being raised by committee,” another neighbor said. “I felt deprived,” Lucy would admit years later. “I wanted a normal life. I wanted a father who came home at a reasonable hour, and a mother who made cookies. That wasn’t what we had.” “Why are you always going out, Mama?” Lynda Bird would ask. Their mother was going out because she had made her choice. “You either have to cut the pattern to suit your husband or cut it to suit your children,” she was to say. “Lyndon is the leader,” she was to explain to a journalist. “Lyndon sets the pattern. I execute what he wants. Lyndon’s wishes dominate our household.” Her friends could hardly credit the faithfulness with which that pattern was followed. “Lady Bird was so subservient and so under the spell of Lyndon Johnson that it made it difficult for the kids,” one says. Another, B. A. Bentsen, wife of Congressman (and later Senator) Lloyd Bentsen, talking about Lynda, says, “It was just so sad. She wouldn’t cry, but you could just tell she wished things were different.”
*Johnson’s previous serious romances had been with two young women whose fathers had each been the richest men in their respective towns. At college he had boasted so openly about his determination to marry money that that desire was recorded in print in the college yearbook. While a congressional assistant, he proposed to Lady Bird on their first date.