Means of Ascent (17 page)

H
ER HUSBAND
didn’t make it easy for her. He did not, in fact, give her much of a vote of confidence before the staff; he appears, in fact, to have been unable to bring himself to tell Miss Rather and Weber that she was to be in charge of the office. He told her to write him daily letters listing the projects she was working on, and to leave wide margins, so that he could put instructions next to each item, but he
told Weber and Miss Rather to write letters, too, and left the impression with them that he wanted them to report to him on how Lady Bird was doing.

At first, she didn’t behave as though she was in charge. Confidence was a scarce commodity for Lady Bird Johnson. Asked years later about her early days in the office, she replies: “I was determined, and I wanted to learn. And I was scared.” She went on attending business school in the mornings, and in the office she downplayed her role, to make it appear to the two secretaries that she was on a level with them: although she sat at her
husband’s desk as he had instructed her to do, she moved a typing table and a typewriter in beside his chair, and began to share the typing with the two secretaries—who at first treated her as a sort of apprentice secretary; there is a faintly patronizing note to Weber’s report, in a letter he wrote to Johnson a week after she began working, that “
Lady Bird is very industrious about her shorthand and typing at school.” She let
Mary Rather, who had experience doing it, make most of the calls to the departments and agencies.

But that changed.

Things weren’t being done the way Lyndon would have wanted, she felt. She was signing all the letters from the office, and, reading them, she was finding misspellings. When she asked Mary and O.J. to correct them, they would correct them in handwriting, and the letters looked, she felt, rather sloppy. Lyndon had never let letters go out like that: one mistake, no matter how minor, and the whole letter had to be retyped, no matter how many times it had been
retyped before. And she could not blind
herself to the fact that insufficient progress was being made on the projects Lyndon would normally be pushing through the bureaucracy, and that complaints were already beginning to be heard from constituents; Weber himself was to report that “
some people were already hollering that Lyndon Johnson had gone off of the job and his work wasn’t being taken care of.” She knew how important
the efficient operation of his office was for the man she loved so deeply. And for her, too. Both of their lives were wholly bound up in his career. In her mind, he was at war—at any moment he might be facing the enemy; if he was actually having “an interesting time up and down the West Coast,” some of it with
Alice Glass, Lady Bird appears not to have been aware of that—and he should be spared worries about the office. That was the
least she could do for him.

She knew, for she had heard their complaints over the years, how bitterly Lyndon’s various secretaries resented being made to retype letters over and over again for minor mistakes. It was very hard for her to insist that Weber and Miss Rather retype letters over and over again. But she felt that it was necessary that she do so. And she did. Once, after she had handed a number of letters back to Weber for what she recalls as “small misspellings,” she
emerged unexpectedly from her office to find him smacking his fist on his desk in anger. But when he submitted another letter with a mistake, she handed it back to him.

She did things much more difficult—for there were people in Washington more formidable than Weber and Miss Rather.

“There was no doubt about it: O.J. and Mary knew more than I ever would,” she recalls, “but I had one advantage. I had Lyndon’s name, and he had a network of friends in the departments … and I could get my feet in the door when sometimes a secretary couldn’t.” “I had a complete picture of my complete lack of experience,” she adds, “but I also had a feeling that nobody cares quite as much
as you do about your business, and next to you, your wife.… They knew more, but perhaps I
cared
a bit more.” She told O.J. and Mary that she would not be doing any more typing; from now on, she said, she would sign the letters they typed, and handle as many of the calls from the constituents as possible—and she would be dealing with the departments and agencies herself. And, she said, she would be getting in earlier in the mornings; she wouldn’t
be going to business school any longer.

Dealing with the departments and agencies
. Corcoran and Rowe, and Lyndon’s other friends in Washington, could make sure that agency heads and other high administrative officials accepted her telephone calls and, if a visit in person was necessary, could get her in to see them. But Corcoran and Rowe couldn’t help her once she was in. For the previous twenty-nine years of her life, Lady Bird Johnson had never been able to make people listen to her,
much less persuade them to do things for her.

She had to make them listen now.

Sometimes, when Lady Bird had an important call to make, Mary Rather, glancing into her office, would see her sitting at her husband’s big desk, in her husband’s big chair, “
looking as if she would rather have done anything in the world rather than pick up that phone and dial.”

But she always picked it up.

And if a phone call wasn’t enough, if she had to go to see an official in person, she went to see him—even if the official was a Cabinet officer, even if the official was the most feared of Cabinet officers, Harold Ickes, the tart-tongued, terrible-tempered Old Curmudgeon himself. “There were some real scary moments,” Lady Bird Johnson would recall forty years later. “One time I had to go and see that formidable man, Mr. Ickes.”
At parties, she had dreaded exchanging even a few words of social chatter with him; now she had to ask him to revoke an order relocating a CCC camp, and explain why, for political reasons, it should be revoked. But Ickes’ secretary didn’t keep her waiting too long under the giant moosehead that hung over visitors in his anteroom at the Department of the Interior, and when she was ushered in, “he really couldn’t have been nicer.” Peering at her over
the top of his rimless spectacles, he listened to her story, and then said simply that he would look into the matter. But hardly had she returned to the office when there was a telephone call from one of Ickes’ assistants. The matter had been worked out as Mrs. Johnson had requested, the assistant said.

D
URING THE TEN WEEKS
he and Connally were touring the West Coast, Johnson would sometimes telephone, and there was a constant stream of mail—her letters returned with Lyndon’s orders in the wide margins, and letters he wrote with more detailed instructions—and the instructions at first were those that would be given to a political novice. At one point, he even complained to Weber about his wife:
“
Since she doesn’t get pay she is irregular in writing, and I can’t fire her—Can’t you and Mary help me by persuasive reminders to write daily.” Only a few paragraphs from his letters are known—Mrs. Johnson has not released the rest—but from this handful, the tone appears to have changed. When, as he had been leaving for the Coast, he had told her to write personal notes to key supporters in the district,
he had done so with misgivings, but after copies of the first batch arrived, he wrote her, “Your letters are
splendid.… I don’t think I have ever sent any better letters out of my office.” And when she began making occasional suggestions, he could hardly help starting to notice that they usually contained considerable insight, if not into politics, then into human beings; for example, they had decided jointly that she should include in
her letters to constituents a reference to the
fact that she was working without salary, but now she said she thought that was wrong—too self-serving. “I agree with you,” he wrote. He wanted her to do more work, and more, and more—because, he wrote her, if she could do enough, “we would be
invincible. Think of the effect it would have if 2,000 of our best friends in the District had personal notes from you
written at the rate of 25 a day for sixty days. I don’t know how you are going to find time to do all this and still take the people to lunch that I want you to take, and see the people in the evening that you must see, but I guess with your methodical planning you can work it out.” There may have been some resistance in the office to taking orders from her, but on March 1 he sent a letter of
“instruction about the staff’s future responsibilities,”
and had her read it to the staff, and after that there was no question about who was in charge. Then, after ten weeks, he returned and learned almost immediately that he was going to the South Pacific; sitting at his desk, he wrote out his will leaving everything to her, had O.J. and Mary witness it, and left. “I remember how handsome he looked in his Navy overcoat,” Lady Bird says.

The next weeks were a bad time for her. There were few telephone calls, and they were from Hawaii and then from New Zealand, and then there was one from Australia in which her husband said he was about to go into the combat zone; the weather in Washington was warm, and the windows in the Johnson apartment would be open, so that
Gladys Montgomery, who lived in the apartment below, was awakened when the phone would ring “around three or four in
the morning,” and Mrs. Montgomery could not help overhearing the words with which Lady Bird ended each call: “Good night, my beloved.” Then, for some time, there were no calls at all; the next word was a report that her husband was in a naval hospital in the Fiji Islands, dangerously ill. There were weeks of worry.

During these weeks, she ran his office. There were no longer any instructions in the margin of a letter to help her, although with a particularly thorny question she could call John Connally or Alvin Wirtz in Austin. She was on her own.

Every day brought some new problem to be solved. A relative of a constituent had died in Palestine, and a lawyer from Palestine was needed to handle the estate. When Lady Bird went to the State Department, she was told arrangements would have to be made through the British Embassy (“I didn’t see the Ambassador—I wasn’t that size of an applicant,” Mrs. Johnson says—“but I did get to see” an official, “a very
nice
gentleman, with courtly manners. He said, ‘Won’t you join me for a bit of tea?,’ and he reached into the drawer with an almost conspiratorial wink, and took out two lumps of sugar and dropped one in my cup and one in his”).

“There were always mothers who said they hadn’t heard from Johnny in months and months,” she recalls. “Would I please find out where
Johnny was.” There were “a whole lot of folks who wanted to get into Officers Candidate School, knowing they were going to be drafted sooner or later.” There were the businessmen with half-completed plants “so you had to plead their cause before the
War Production Board or whatever.… ‘Strategic materials’ and ‘OCS’ and lots of things became just a part of your vocabulary.…”

And she learned she could solve the problems. “You know,” she would recall, “the squeaking wheel gets the grease. And if you keep after the Army Department or the Navy Department or the Red Cross long enough, and pester them enough, we could help them. For one thing, it was down the street from us, and it was sixteen hundred miles from them, so you could help them.” The constituent got his lawyer from Palestine, and Austin got its
Air Force base, and a lot of Johnnys were located, and Lady Bird Johnson heard mothers sobbing with relief on the telephone when she told them that their son was alive, he just hadn’t bothered to write, you know how young men are.

She learned, moreover, that she could solve problems in her own way. She could never use her husband’s methods, but she could use her own. If she was a squeaking wheel, it was a wheel that squeaked very politely. Recalling forty years later the lessons she learned during the summer of 1942 about helping constituents, she says: “If you’ll just be real nice about it, and real, real earnest, courteous and persistent, you could help them.” She
never let her smile slip, or raised her voice, or said a harsh word, but she never stopped trying to solve a problem—and a lot of them were solved. Edward A. Clark, an Austin attorney who needed a great deal of help, both for himself and for his clients, with the War Production Board and other government agencies, and who had not looked forward at all to having to rely on a woman, says: “When she took over that office,
she was wonderful. She gave wonderful service. And she did it without ever raising her voice or fussing—she never shouted even at a secretary. She thanked anyone who brought her a pencil. She was just as sweet and kind to them. She was grateful to everyone.” And as she got the lawyer, and the Air Force base, and the other things the constituents wanted, Lady Bird Johnson got something for herself, too—something she had never had before: confidence.

“The real brains of the office were O.J. and Mary,” she is careful to say, in recalling 1942. “And yet I played a useful role.”

When, years later, she would be asked how the summer of ’42 had changed her, she would always, as was invariable with her, put the changes in the context of her husband. “The very best part of it,” she would say, “was that it gave me a lot more understanding of Lyndon. By the time the end of the day came, when I had shifted the gears in my mind innumerable times, I could know what Lyndon had been through.…
I was
more
prepared after that to understand what sometimes had seemed to be Lyndon’s unnecessary irritations.…” When, at the end of the day, Nellie or someone else wanted her to make still another decision—where to eat dinner, for example—she would “get almost mad at them.”

But she also saw some changes that were not in the context of her husband.

“After a few months,” she says, “I really felt that if it was ever necessary, I could make my own living—and that’s a good feeling to have. That’s very good for you, for your self-esteem and for your place in the world—because, well, I didn’t have a home. I didn’t have any children, and although I had a tremendously exciting, vital life, I didn’t have any home base, so to speak, except for Lyndon, and
it’s good to know that you yourself, aside from a man, have some capabilities, and I found that out, er, er, er, to my amazement, rather.”