Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

by Julia Sweig

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.