Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

by Julia Sweig

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.