Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

by Julia Sweig

Between the image of a deeply flawed and corrupt ally in South Vietnam barely clinging to power and the pressure from his political adversaries to step up the heat, Lyndon could already see Vietnam threatening to eclipse his ambitions for a presidency focused on repairing the cleavages of racial and economic inequality in his own country.

She especially wanted to preempt Lyndon’s likely attempt to elicit some sort of cautionary doctor’s note, using his health as an excuse not to run.

by which she meant that however miserable the president felt at the moment, “inaction, idleness, lack of command, would be a harder role for him than the long hours and heavy responsibility he now shoulders.”

Alien to Jackie and mistaken as a sign of Lady Bird’s subordination to Lyndon—not even a paid secretary, but a captive dog—the spiral notebooks, Jackie failed to see, represented the meticulously gathered and assembled brick and mortar of the political network the Johnsons had built together over almost three decades.

By Liz’s rough estimate, Bird shook one hundred thousand hands in a span of just three months.

Indeed, Lady Bird used her platform to talk about the “staggering” costs of healthcare

“It’s a terrible thing to say,” Liz acknowledged, “but the salvation of Texas is that the governor was hit.” “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,” the new First Lady replied. “I only wish it could have been me.”7

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy solidified the exquisite balance between democracy and monarchy that she and Jack had cultivated so expertly during their one thousand days in office.

All these truisms do what they always do: simplify and obscure, but also suggest some core truth.

Jackie conducted the first nationally televised tour of “the people’s home” and won an Emmy for the gesture.17 (Lady Bird was deployed to Hollywood to accept the award on Mrs. Kennedy’s behalf.)

making him just one of two presidents—the other was William Howard Taft—to be buried at Arlington.

Him=JFK

At the time, a middle-class girl was expected to go to college, but as a 1959 study showed, 37 percent dropped out before graduating.8 In fact, the number of women enrolled in higher education had been dropping since the 1920s, when women earned approximately half of all bachelor’s degrees and approximately 17 percent of doctorates. By the 1950s, those numbers had plummeted to 24 percent and 10 percent, respectively. By 1960, women made up a mere 6 percent of doctors, 3 percent of lawyers, and less than 1 percent of engineers. As a Newsweek article from 1946 pointedly stated, “For the American girl, books and babies don’t mix.”9

She is your sister, your roommate, and if you look closely enough, probably, yourself. She might be called the natural woman, the complete woman. She has taken from the past what is vital and discarded the irrelevant or misleading. She has taken over the right to participate fully—whether in jobs, professions, or the political life of the community. She has rejected a number of overtones of the emancipation movement as clearly unworkable….She wants to be—while being equally involved—pre-eminently a woman, a wife, a mother, a thinking citizen.15

Beyond that, her claim that young women graduates could become “the complete woman,” “the natural woman,” while rejecting the impossibility of the superwoman, placed her at the center of debates not just in the 1960s but in every decade in American history since.19

But there are a few brilliant men in Washington who apparently had as much taste and discernment in their twenties as they do in their fifties. They fell in love with pretty girls who grew up to be women of character and intelligence, of dignity, culture, humor and good sense. One of these lucky men is President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

“This is the other side of America. Look! And act!”

Re poverty at home and abroad

she paraphrased Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and good women to do nothing.”

When she reflected on her trip a few days later, Bird’s authority as a savvy American politician and policy wonk permeated her diary recording: “The bet we are making, the government—and it is a large bet, because the federal government is pouring about 200 million a year into Kentucky since 1961 to improve health, housing, for job retraining, for school lunch, public works, and similar pubic service programs—is that you can do this without destroying the character, the self-reliance of American citizens.”49 The First Lady was a creature of the New Deal’s emphasis on the human, moral, and practical value of government programs for Americans at the margins of society. Yet she grasped that the programs her husband’s administration would later implement also encroached upon the psychological and mythological resonance of individualism, especially in a rural America suspicious of but desperate for government help. Some twenty-six years earlier, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had inspired Lady Bird with her emphasis on how government could ease the burden of impoverished Americans, inaugurated the high school gymnasium where Lady Bird spoke that day, a facility built with federal New Deal public works and local funds.

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century, urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must rebuild the entire urban United States. Aristotle said: “Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.” It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today. The catalog of ills is long: [T]here is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference. —Lyndon Baines Johnson, Ann Arbor, “Remarks at the University of Michigan,” May 22, 1964

And quoting Ward, he read, “[T]he mission of our times is to eradicate the three enemies of mankind—poverty, disease, and ignorance.”4

Jacobs did advocate for jobs and job training for city residents to take care of their parks and gardens. But she warned that a “great unbalance has developed in cities between money for building things and money for running things,” meaning too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Despite the intense focus on Vietnam among their audience that summer evening, Peter, Paul and Mary did not intend for their playlist four years later to make a political point about the war. “We were not troubled by the surrounding events of the Gulf of Tonkin.” Vietnam had yet to “penetrate our consciousness as the debacle it was to become,” Peter Yarrow explained.40 The group performed “Puff, the Magic Dragon” before the song became a popular reference for both marijuana and napalm.

“Mrs. Johnson was extremely effective,” Udall wrote the president, “in her appearances on her ‘land and people’ tour in the West….I am confident Mrs. Johnson could win the West all by herself if we gave her the opportunity.”21 “If we gave her the opportunity”—a turn of phrase that spoke volumes about the times, when a woman had to be given, rather than simply take for herself, the opportunity to shine on the national stage.

In Alabama, he did not even appear on the ballot.

for Bird, the performance that left the greatest impression came from a “forlorn, undernourished little comedian” who “looks like you want to give him a blood transfusion”: Woody Allen.14 The premise of Allen’s five-minute bit “The Moose,” delivered to a National Guard Armory stuffed with the country’s top political, financial, and media brass, implied that the only way a Jew could gain entrance to gentile culture was by dressing up as a moose, getting shot, and then being mounted as a trophy on the wall of a private club. For the First Lady, who knew something about outsiders breaking into exclusive clubs, the humor of a Jewish comic carried the evening, despite the too-tepid reaction to the star-studded entertainment she observed from the crowd.15

Though he would later recant some of his own less-humanizing designs around the country (among them, the first commercial malls), Gruen insisted on a holistic approach to environmental urban design—flowers, yes, but people, too, a conviction that would gradually dominate the First Lady’s thinking.

“Nobody is invited except the immediate country,” quipped comedienne Edie Adams. And no piece of coverage better captured the flavor of the Johnson wedding spectacle than Time magazine.

That's a great line

Ronald Reagan, campaigning against free speech

On the surface, Lady Bird and Larry seemed an unlikely pair—she the southern Episcopalian, he the New Yorker/Californian and Jewish socialist Zionist. The experience of traveling through the great capitals of Europe and living in Jerusalem of the 1920s and ’30s—before cars had disrupted city life and where community and commerce were both accessible to people’s homes—had left indelible marks on the younger Halprin’s design imagination. But as a comfortable country girl, Lady Bird saw the car as part of her coming-of-age in Texas: she began driving her first at age thirteen, without a driver’s license, to travel the fifteen miles back and forth to school each day. Driving vast distances (from Karnack to Marshall, from Karnack to Austin, and back and forth between Washington and Austin) gave her a sense of freedom and also of the country, the scale of its distances and the scale of the segregation that defined it. By contrast, Halprin, like many New Yorkers, didn’t own a car until graduate school. Instead, he hitchhiked when he needed to travel farther than he could cover on foot or by bus or subway.

It was one thing for her husband’s deeds to go unrecognized in the heat of the moment. “But will the doing be recorded in history? That is one of today’s puzzles that I hope to live to see tomorrow give an answer to. Or does it matter if you get the job done, whether you get the recognition?” She answered her own question, and it was an answer that would animate her escalating focus, her near fixation, on how to get out of Washington without running for a second term, where she could not see a clear prospect of greater achievement for her husband. “I think it does, because you don’t have the fuel to continue getting the job done without the momentum of success.”4

We are a racist nation, and no way in the world could it be otherwise given the history of our country. Being a racist doesn’t mean one wants to go out and join a lynch mob or send somebody off to Africa or engage in crude, vulgar expressions of prejudice. Racism is a basic assumption of superiority on the part of one group over another, and in America it had to happen because as a society we enslaved people for 250 years, and up until 1964 it was written into our laws.

In the arid Hill Country of Texas, two Americans who had made their fortune from the media, and for whom the media had become a reliable foil, much like so many in the nation now, sat at home in their pajamas with their kids close by, glued to their television set, watching as their country left them behind.