Lady Bird and Lyndon Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Bird Learns to Fly

  2 Mama’s Boy

  3 Getting Out of Karnack, with the Right Man

  4 More Than “Electric Going”

  5 Becoming a Priceless Political Partner

  6 Network Builder

  7 CEO and Finance Manager

  8 Crucial Campaigner and Marketer

  9 “A Wonderful, Wonderful Wife”

  10 Struggling with Balance and Momentum

  11 Outshining Her Husband

  12 Presidential Partnering

  13 Teaming Up for the Big Win

  14 Linchpin in the Launch of the Great Society

  15 Beautification: A Legacy of Bird’s Own

  16 War Clouds

  17 Outlandish LBJ

  18 Wrapping Up “Our” Presidency

  19 Calming Anchor for a “Holy Terror”

  20 Flying Solo

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  To Livio

  PROLOGUE

  AT EXACTLY 4 p.m. on December 9, 1967, Lady Bird Johnson started a slow, dignified descent down the wide stairway from the residential quarters of the White House to the State Floor, where more than six hundred guests were waiting. All of them were dressed for an evening gala, and while some lingered around the foyer at the foot of the stairs, chatting in small groups, others had already taken their places in the huge East Room, where Lady Bird was headed. In the four years of her husband’s presidency, she had walked this route dozens of times to greet heads of state and delegations of various sizes from all over the United States. But today was different. And very special. Today her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Lynda, was marrying the military aide she had begun dating that summer.

  The press had avidly reported on all the prenuptial festivities leading up to this, the first White House wedding of a president’s daughter in more than fifty years, and Lady Bird was determined to deliver an event perfect down to the smallest detail. Since the August morning when she first learned of her daughter’s decision to wed Charles “Chuck” Robb, she had devoted more hours than she could count to mulling over white silks for the gown that Geoffrey Beene would design for the bride. She had composed and then revised guest lists and she had considered multiple cake recipes before deciding on the pound cake, flavored with rum and white raisins. She had even taken time to insure that the cameras recording the ceremony would be hidden, their presence indicated only by tiny slits in the white fabric backdrop behind the improvised altar.

  Dedicating this much attention to her daughter was uncharacteristic of Lady Bird Johnson, who knew she did not deserve high marks for her mothering. Both her daughters had told her so, sometimes in teary-eyed sorrow or in accusatory tones. In her household, Lyndon always came first, and she had often left Lynda and the younger Luci for weeks at a time so she could appear at his side in political campaigns and cater to his every command. Even when she resolved to stay behind with her daughters, she would change her mind and go to him, unable to resist his plea that he needed her. Rather than offer some excuse for falling short, she admitted to her diary that she had “neglected” her daughters but not “enough for me to get a guilt complex.”

  On the wintry afternoon of Lynda’s wedding, Lady Bird’s arrival in the East Room was the signal for the ceremony to begin. As soon as she took her place behind the velvet rope setting off a space around the altar for the wedding party, the groomsmen began filing in, followed by the bridesmaids in their Christmasy red gowns. As the Marine Band struck up “Here Comes the Bride,” it was as if a drum roll had suddenly hushed the crowd, and Lady Bird could see all eyes turn toward the door to watch Lynda enter on her daddy’s arm. Beautiful as Lynda looked in her “regal” high-necked gown, embroidered with silk flowers and seed pearls, Lady Bird’s gaze fastened not on her daughter but on Lyndon. In her account of that day, she described how she watched him “all the way” to the altar, her heart “full of tenderness” for the man whose hair suddenly looked much whiter than before.

  The East Room was so packed that everyone had to remain standing, except for a handful of elderly guests who had been provided with benches. How different this glittering crowd was from the motley small gathering that witnessed Lady Bird’s wedding thirty-three years earlier in Texas. Surrounding her today were U.S. senators alongside Supreme Court justices and American ambassadors who had journeyed from posts in Europe and Asia to attend. She knew most of the six-hundred-plus by name, while at her own wedding, an impromptu event put together by a friend of Lyndon’s, the only familiar face was that of her college roommate.

  Although clad for Lynda’s wedding in a costly designer outfit, Lady Bird knew there would be odious comparisons made between her and her glamorous predecessor, Jacqueline Kennedy. In the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, flustered Americans meeting Lady Bird for the first time occasionally blurted out Mrs. Kennedy’s name instead of hers. Even after that stopped and Lady Bird became a household name, she understood she would never match Jackie’s “magic,” her ability to draw people to her like a “Pied Piper.” But the comparisons failed to sting. Lady Bird blithely brushed off derogatory references to her looks and provincial tastes, and when once faced with a portrait emphasizing her prominent nose, she quipped that it “looked just like my nose looks.”

  When the time came for Chuck and Lynda to repeat their vows, Lady Bird warmed to the way the bridegroom answered in “firm and clear” tones. But it was Lyndon’s response to the minister’s question, “Who gives this woman in marriage?” that she thought sent a “ripple of emotion” through the crowd. Lyndon had said, “Her mother and I.”

  It was a remarkable affirmation of a partnership that had caused more than a little comment during their years in public life. Lady Bird knew very well what people were saying, that Lyndon had married a plain Jane for her money after courting more beautiful women. She had registered the descriptions of her as a dish rag, subject to his bellowed orders and demeaning remarks. But it was her reaction to his womanizing that seemed to baffle everyone. Not only did she put up with it and with his talking about it—she was unfailingly polite to every woman with whom he had or was rumored to have had an affair. She invited them to the ranch and complimented them on their looks and accomplishments. Several of them were in the East Room that day. A lot of people were asking each other why.

  Lady Bird knew what few others did—that Lyndon trusted her—and only her—with his most important secret—his own frailty. This big strong man, a genius at politics, could be suddenly undone and once undone had trouble getting himself back on track. When faced with a huge problem or disappointment, he would go to bed and pull the covers over his head, and that’s when she stepped in, to get him on his feet and moving again. Only she could do that. She had done it time and again, and while she realized that some of his closest staff during these last two years, years she would describe as “pure hell,” sensed that something like this was going on, only she knew, and she would never tell. It was their secret.

  The fact that he had admitted his problem to her and relied on her to help him deal with it gave her the strength to take the hit. She would rather look weak herself than bring him down. She could blow off what others said about her. Those humiliating descriptions, the compariso
ns with Jackie, her daughters’ complaints about her lack of nurturing—they counted for nothing. She was as sure now, as when she married him, that she was the most important person in Lyndon’s life.

  In just twenty minutes, the Robb ceremony was finished. As soon as the Marine Band struck up Mendelssohn’s special march and the wedding party exited, Bird took Lyndon’s arm and moved quickly through the throng of guests and back upstairs for photos. She had not permitted the press pool to witness the taking of vows, but here in the Yellow Oval Room, from which all the furniture had been removed, were dozens of reporters, armed with a “vast array of cameras.” After pictures were taken of the wedding party, the bride and groom and their parents went back downstairs to greet every single guest, in a reception line so slowed by all the hugging and kissing that it took two hours to get through it.

  By that time the East Room had been converted to a dance hall, and as soon as Peter Duchin’s orchestra struck its first notes, everything became such “a swirl” that Bird could not remember who danced with whom first. What she remembered very clearly was how quickly Lyndon had cut in on her, and with one of his broadest smiles quipped how far she had come since that “purple dress” she had worn as a bride thirty-three years earlier. He didn’t leave it at that, but, in the very dearest “touches” of the day, he referred three more times to their own wedding ceremony and that “awful purple dress.” His jesting words, for her ears only, conjured up so many memories—of the day she married Lyndon and of all that had happened since.

  At times like this, when Lady Bird was thinking about marriage in general and her own in particular, her thoughts went to a little metal box she had carried with her through a dozen house moves. It contained the letters she had written to Lyndon and he had written to her, when she was still “Bird” to him and all her friends. Those letters laid out the quid pro quo of their relationship, and that box, now carefully stowed in her sitting room on the second floor of the White House, contained the key to understanding what held this marriage together.

  The morning after Lynda’s wedding, she took out that box and spent several hours going over the precious letters. Even in the exhilaration of her daughter’s big day, an opulent White House wedding, it was her own marriage that Bird wanted to revisit. It had been her husband, not her daughter, who captured and held her gaze in their walk down the aisle, and it had been his teasing remarks about the purple dress that had provided the strongest emotional pull. It would be those letter-reading hours that she would single out as among the very “most satisfying” hours of her time in the White House.

  This is the story of that marriage.

  1

  BIRD LEARNS TO FLY

  A YEAR AFTER her husband died, Lady Bird Johnson sat down for an interview on the Today show. With millions of Americans watching, she expected anchorwoman Barbara Walters to ask her about the beautification project she had started as first lady and had continued in the five years since leaving Washington. It was a topic Lady Bird felt comfortable with. She had given countless interviews and speeches on the subject. But Walters quickly veered away from wildflowers and national parks to ask a question that had nothing to do with beautification. It zeroed in on Lady Bird’s marriage: “How did you handle your flirt and ladies’ man husband?”

  After only an instant’s hesitation, Lady Bird replied evenly, “Lyndon was a people lover and that certainly did not exclude half the people of the world, women.” The unflappable Lady Bird had faced down one of the most renowned interviewers in the world and answered a potentially embarrassing question with honesty and grace.

  If Walters had researched Lady Bird’s early years, she could have anticipated the sort of response her query would elicit. It was all there, in the first years of Lady Bird’s life, how she virtually raised herself in a household where humiliation and adultery were part of the picture. It was also a home where the exercise of raw power was taken for granted, and managing it became vital to survival. Rather than strike back against an attack such as Walters’s, Lady Bird relied on the protective carapace she had begun developing as a child—it equipped her to spar, disarm, and vanquish while maintaining what looked like gentle, ladylike composure.

  Mrs. Johnson rarely talked about her early years. Perhaps she preferred to forget. More likely, she never knew the whole story—part Gothic novel, part comic opera—of how her aristocratic mother wound up giving birth on a December day in 1912 to her only daughter in a hardscrabble part of Texas that she loathed, among people she wished she had never met.

  Lady Bird’s father, the big, dynamic Thomas Jefferson Taylor (known as T.J.) was one of those men who had to feel he was the most important man in the room. At six foot three, he towered over most people, craved attention, and expected his behavior to be tolerated, no matter how outlandish. The deference he commanded frequently involved money, and he had ingenious methods to keep people owing him. One oft-repeated story had him manipulating an impoverished neighbor back into debt after the man had struggled hard to pay off the last cent owed. The story goes that T. J. Taylor knew the man’s weakness for cats and he offered to give him one, but the man, being scrupulously fair, insisted on paying a little something. The two settled on a minuscule amount, but that was enough to put him back on T.J.’s debtor list. While he wheedled to get what he wanted, T.J. also contributed generously to both churches in town, an effective way to keep the entire community in his debt. The local saying was: “T. J. Taylor owns everything.”

  T.J. so firmly ruled that part of Harrison County, lending at exorbitant fees and collecting on his own timetable, that virtually everyone called him “Mr. Boss.” But not his wife, the pampered Minnie, whom he had lured to Texas from more cultured surroundings in Alabama. Miss Minnie called no one “Boss.” When the adult Lady Bird offered one of her rare descriptions of her parents, she called theirs a “stressful” union, and those words, though true, did not begin to capture the truth.

  Minnie Pattillo and T. J. Taylor grew up in the same Alabama county, but on different planets. Her father, Luther Pattillo (whose Scots ancestors spelled it Patiloch), had begun acquiring land after the Civil War, and by his shrewd (some would say exploitative) management, he had become one of the largest landowners in the state. While most sharecroppers in the region split 50/50 with their landlord whatever the crops brought, Luther Pattillo demanded 60 percent for himself, and because he owned so much land and the general store where many sharecroppers traded, he could get away with it.

  Luther and his wife, Sarah, liked to enjoy their wealth by moving around, from one of the homes they owned to another, depending on the social season and the school year. Wherever they lived, they maintained a large library and kept a piano in the drawing room so Minnie and her younger sister Effie could perform for guests. Effie got so proficient she set her sights on attending the Juilliard School in New York City, while Minnie remained the bookworm of the family, content to sit alone reading for hours at a time.

  Behind that genteel facade, of piano music and shelves of old books, the Pattillo household reeked of jealousy and malice. Sarah had been a Confederate widow with three young children when Luther married her, and she never let him forget that she came from a background superior to his. While he used his cunning to accumulate wealth, she had been born to it. It would have been appropriate for Luther to treat his stepchildren as his own, but he neglected them in favor of the two boys and two girls—including Minnie—he fathered by Sarah. As a result of his ruthless business practices, he became known as “the meanest man in Autauga County,” but his offspring, proud of their self-made father, liked to lord it over their half-siblings and play up to him. Luther called himself a “general merchant,” and passed along the label (with the business) to his own son Claude, leaving his stepchildren to fend for themselves.

  If Autauga County, Alabama, had been more urbanized, the Pattillos would have looked at T. J. Taylor as coming from the wrong side of the tracks. In rural Alabama, the common phras
e for people like the Taylors, who never managed to own much land of their own but had to eke out a living as tenant farmers, was “dirt poor.” Polished pianos and store-bought books were foreign to them, and they worried not about the winter social calendar but about winter shoes. Yet Autauga County was small enough that Minnie Pattillo and T. J. Taylor, born within months of each other in 1874, were bound to cross paths. Whether it was the romantic setting of his rescuing her after she had been thrown from a horse, as family lore had it, or some other, less dramatic meeting, the mutual attraction was strong. Standing alongside the much taller T.J., Minnie, with her many freckles and ruddy complexion, made his jet black hair and olive skin appear all the darker.

  Who knows what really drew Minnie to the untutored T. J. Taylor? One answer seems obvious. T.J. acted much like Luther Pattillo in his ambition and business practices, and if most women marry their fathers, Minnie was simply following that instinct. Minnie had a rebellious streak, and she may have found T.J.’s rough edges exciting, so at odds with the social snobbery she witnessed at home. Naturally, her parents were dead set against her having anything to do with T.J., and it was all too clear that she could register her defiance to them by sticking with him.

  For his part, T.J. set out on the fast track to prove himself worthy. Leaving Autauga with an older brother in late 1898, he managed to pay cash for 116 acres as soon as he crossed the Texas border. Where he got that $500 (about a year’s wages for a working man) remains a mystery. He later told his daughter he had sold a saddle, but only a very elaborate saddle would have brought $500. And how would he have acquired such a saddle in the first place? His neighbors decided he must have robbed a train along the way. T.J. soon bought more land, swapping poorer acres for better, and when he opened a shop in Karnack, the sign he put out front, “Dealer in Everything,” sounded like a bloated version of his future father-in-law’s “general merchant.”