The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

Once, Ava says, Lyndon told her and Margaret that he “was working up his nerve” to ask Kitty Clyde for a date anyway—he guessed, he said, that he would ask her to go with him to the annual Johnson City-Fredericksburg baseball game and picnic. Kitty Clyde said she’d have to ask her parents. She came back and said she wouldn’t be able to go. After that, Lyndon never asked her again. (SOME TIME THEREAFTER, Kitty Clyde and Krause broke up. Her father thereupon sent her to the University of Texas, insisting she live in the Masonic Dormitory, whose tenants were not allowed to have dates. She returned to Johnson City after college, but never dated Lyndon again, and eventually married another local boy, who her father thought had good prospects, but who worked in the Ross store until it was sold. When Lyndon became President, he invited Kitty Clyde and her husband to Washington and took them for a flight on Air Force One.)