First Ladies (50 page)

The petite woman who had, one friend said, the “touch of velvet and the stamina of steel,”
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found few critics except those who disdained her unfailing loyalty to her husband. Even Lady Bird once admitted that her view of her role might be too traditional for some tastes: “I really wanted to serve my husband and serve the country, and if that sounds—geesy, well … “
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This was no easy assignment she set for herself, and reporters marveled at how she managed. Lyndon Johnson could be exceptionally coarse; one journalist reported how Lady Bird had sat through a 1960 press conference, head held high and appearing not to hear a word, while Lyndon announced to the assembled group that his sleep the night before had been interrupted by some “vigorous activity.” He winked to underline his meaning and then suggested that dubious reporters could check with Lady Bird.
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Her silence should not be mistaken for approval or acquiescence, and she later told an interviewer: “I thought his jokes were—his language was too—it did not please me.”
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Lady Bird learned to accept Lyndon's raucousness and his chiding as well as his continuing use of their home as an extension of the office. Marvella Bayh, the spunky wife of the Indiana senator, recalled that Vice President Johnson had taken her and her husband to The Elms, the Johnson home in 1963, soon after the Bayhs arrived in Washington. “He went from room to room, opening doors and calling out,” Bayh wrote in her autobiography, “and then finally he opened a door and there was Luci in her bathrobe with her hair in rollers. “She greeted us with a big smile,” Bayh wrote, “as if she were accustomed to having her bedroom door thrust open to admit strangers.”
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Nan Dickerson remembered that Lyndon once called Lady Bird from an Austin airport saying that he was bringing home nine reporters for the weekend. When they arrived an hour later, everything was prepared for their comfort.
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More than household management was involved in Lady Bird Johnson's political education. After Lyndon accepted second spot on the Democratic ticket in 1960, she took speech lessons and then
traveled 35,000 miles in two months to speak to voters.
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Before 1960, Lady Bird's work for Lyndon had been within the traditional woman's sphere—telephoning, stuffing envelopes, and shaking hands at tea parties—but her new role, as wife of the vice president, imposed other demands. Because Jackie Kennedy frequently refused to appear on ceremonial or political occasions, Lady Bird substituted, and one Democratic party official pronounced her “more than generous” with her time.
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Sometimes this meant preparing in only a few hours to speak to large audiences; when Lady Bird filled in for Jackie on national television, one reporter deemed her “Washington's Number 1 pinch-hitter.”
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In November 1963, when Lyndon became president, Lady Bird's opportunities for action increased, and she proceeded to alter the public's expectations of what a First Lady might do. Much of what she did is detailed in her book,
A White House Diary,
which resulted from the tapes she made during her husband's presidency. It was the most complete record of a First Lady's tenure since Eleanor Roosevelt turned out her daily columns.

Comparisons between the two women came quickly, with many observers noting that both grew along with their husbands' political successes to personalities of their own. The fact that both women began their marriages as shy, supportive helpmates should not obscure, however, important differences between them. Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird did not thrive on the controversies inherent in politics, and she disapproved of First Ladies who involved themselves in issues that might divide the country.
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Lady Bird kept her views on civil rights and Vietnam to herself, and she never sought an individual constituency for herself. Nor did she pursue a political or diplomatic career in her own right. After her husband's death, she withdrew from public life and ventured out only when her son-in-law, Charles Robb, sought help. It had all been fun, she said, and she had learned a lot but “Politics was Lyndon's life, [not mine and] 38 years were enough.”
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While Lyndon lived, his ambitions always came first with Lady Bird, and she put all her energies into helping him. He could have won the 1964 election without carrying states below the Mason-Dixon line, but his wife volunteered to campaign there because she did not want to lose those states “by default.”
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Many southerners had vigorously opposed President Johnson's stand on civil rights and any move by him to change their minds seemed doomed to failure, but his wife's campaigning was something else. On a train dubbed the “Lady Bird Special,” she wound her way out of Washington into the Carolinas and over to New Orleans, giving forty-seven speeches along the way.
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Assisted by daughter Lynda for the first two days and then by Luci, she enticed local politicos to join her (although many of them would have balked at being photographed with the president.) Because they could pass off an appearance at Lady Bird's side as simple chivalry, one after another recalcitrant Democrat climbed aboard. Some of the holdouts sent their wives.

Lady Bird did not meet individuals to bargain on specific matters—her husband's staff had come along to perform that task—but in her deep Texan accent she pleaded with crowds of southerners to understand that her husband was one of them. When hecklers tried to out-shout her, she waited a moment and then said, “Now you've had your say. Will you give me mine?” “There will always be somebody in the audience,” she later pointed out, “who will say, ‘that's fair.'”
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For a woman who had always hated giving speeches, she did remarkably well. When the trip ended, just about everybody agreed that she had helped win votes for Lyndon—the disagreement came over how many. Making the president's wife appear all the more courageous, her Republican counterpart in that election took only a traditional handshaking role.

After Lyndon Johnson achieved his own clear victory in 1964 and held the presidency in his own right, Lady Bird resolved to do more for the success of the administration. The history of presidents' wives taking on causes for themselves went back almost ninety years to Lucy Hayes's temperance stand. Ellen Wilson had lent her name to a housing bill, and Eleanor Roosevelt had assisted artists, women, blacks, and other groups she judged in need of her attention. Most First Ladies had contented themselves, however, with supporting non-controversial charities. Lou Hoover had become publicly associated with the Girl Scouts, and Bess Truman spoke up in behalf of the Cancer Society. Jackie Kennedy's White House restoration had attracted so much favorable publicity that Lady Bird perceived a public expectation that she should do more than sit in the White House, and she set out to find a cause of her own.

Choosing an area in which she held a deep and lifelong interest and one in which her staff believed Lyndon would not interfere, Lady Bird Johnson launched her “beautification” project. The interest went back to childhood and lasted into retirement so it was not contrived for the moment. She frequently said that she enjoyed most those hours of the day just before sunset when she drove around the family ranch. After Lyndon's death, she spent most of her energy on wild-flower preservation. It was a devotion, her daughters noted with some exasperation, that had not been passed on to them—“It did not come with the genes.”
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The early 1960s offered a propitious time for encouraging Americans to care more for their environment. Rachel Carson's book, describing a “silent spring” when birds could not sing and trees could not green because of the effects of harmful chemicals, was published in 1962, the year before Lyndon became president. The First Lady's campaign to capitalize on that concern was named “beautification,” even though she disliked the term and called it “cosmetic and trivial [sounding] … and … prissy, [but] try as we would we couldn't come up with anything better.”
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First Ladies had traditionally concerned themselves with the appearance of the capital, but Lady Bird went further than the others. Unlike Helen Taft, who arranged for the planting of the cherry trees, Lady Bird persisted in linking natural beauty with the quality of life, and she attributed problems of crime and juvenile delinquency, in part, to the ugliness in which people lived. Contests sponsored by her Committee for a More Beautiful Capital rewarded neighborhood participation, and she lauded historic preservation that linked people with their past.
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Her beautification efforts did not stop in Washington—she went national—and in thousands of miles of traveling around the country, she planted trees, shot rapids, and urged people to care more about the world they would pass on to their children. Headstart, an education program for preschool children that Congress initiated in February 1965, stayed on her agenda and she became its Honorary Chairman, but for most Americans she was permanently associated with environmental concerns.

Some issues, perceived by the public as “soft” because they directly touch people's lives—matters such as aging, care of foster children, education, the arts and the environment—are often relegated to insignificant spots on the president's agenda. Deep concern and caring, not commonly associated with strength and power in American politics, tend to fall more within the responsibility of a surrogate of the president, often a wife or daughter. When visiting orphanages and homes for the aged, planting trees, and sitting in on kindergarten classes cannot command high priority on the president's schedule, a spouse can substitute, and each First Lady since 1963 has chosen a project from within these categories. Foreign policy questions, defense strategies, labor reforms, and banking practices are not likely choices for presidents' wives' projects.

To conclude, however, that the “soft” issues are trivial would be wrong. In many cases, they concern people more directly than do international confrontations and bureaucratic regulations. Before writing off Lady Bird Johnson's efforts as a contrived publicity stunt or as innocuous garden-club-lady work, it is important to remember
that she appropriated for herself one of the few areas of the administration in which she would have been permitted a significant role of her own. Her husband gave no evidence of consulting with her on troop buildups, harbor mining, or bombings in Cambodia. But even Lyndon Johnson would have agreed that a successful administration had many parts and that people could not think about Vietnam all the time (although by 1968, it may have seemed to him that they did). Sometimes their minds moved to the polluted streams and the need to improve classrooms for their children—areas in which an additional spokesperson for the administration could be of help.

Lady Bird Johnson was particularly suited for this role because she appeared naturally more concerned about people's feelings than he was. When it came time to defend her friends, she sometimes acted on her own without clearing the matter with Lyndon. Her public announcement in behalf of Walter Jenkins is a case in point, although some accounts of this episode have her seeking the president's approval. Jenkins, who had worked for the Johnsons since the 1940s and whose wife and children were close to the Johnson family, was arrested in a Washington men's room on a morals charge just weeks before the 1964 election. The president, in New York for a speech, remained silent until he could assess his options and the possible consequences, but Lady Bird responded immediately. J. Russell Wiggins, then of the
Washington Post,
recalled her decisiveness: “All other times she would have followed Lyndon to the guillotine if it were necessary [but this time she acted on her own, summoning me to the White House] and in [she] came. My God, she was like a vessel under full sail. She came into that room, and she issued a statement declaring full loyalty to Walter Jenkins. She read it, and she said she wondered if we'd print it.”
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When Lady Bird turned that same decisiveness to environmental issues, she knew she would not find unanimity on a solution. On a factfinding trip with friends outside the capital, she had been appalled by a “tunnel of filling stations, billboards, neon signs and dilapidated little buildings.” Yet she understood they had a purpose and a right to be there: “These enterprises are conveniences for people and this is private enterprise. What is the answer?” she pondered in her diary.
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Although few Americans would stand up to defend large billboards and junkyards that lined the highways, little agreement appeared on who should pay for their removal. What constituted “fair” compensation for billboards erected many years earlier, and what was the role of the federal government in dictating to the states in such matters?

The highway beautification program was promoted on many fronts. Federally sponsored conferences on the subject began in early 1965, and regional meetings were scheduled to involve governors and city officials. The administration prepared drafts of several bills on the subject, and Lady Bird went to work lobbying. She telephoned congressmen and urged her friends to do the same. Guest lists for White House dinners and receptions reflected an interest in enlisting votes, and when Lady Bird spoke to members of the Associated Press, she encouraged editorials on the subject. Reporters who followed her suggestion received a personal thank-you. Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird's chief of staff, recalled that she had put on her “best perfume and [gone] to Capitol Hill to call on members of Congress I knew. We needed every vote we could get, for the billboard lobby was active and well-heeled.”
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The president pressured the House Rules committee to report the measure out (which it did by a seven to six vote) and then he urged the House to act during a night session on October 7. Notwithstanding some grumbling about the measure being a present for Lady Bird, the Highway Beautification Act became law in October 1965. It provided federal money for states that controlled billboards and junkyards along noncommercial highways. States that failed to comply with the new law within two years risked losing 10 percent of their federal allotments. Three-quarters of the compensation to billboard and junkyard owners would come from Washington. Additional money was authorized for landscaping and roadside development, but it would come from the Treasury instead of the Highway Trust Fund so as not to jeopardize new road building. Neither the president nor the First Lady conceded that the law went as far as they would have liked, but it marked a beginning.