Russell - Lady Bird

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

San Antonio: A Cultural Tapestry

( WITH M ARK L ANGFORD AND C ATHY S MITH )

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1999 by Jan Jarboe Russell

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Jossey-Bass, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Designed by Colin Joh

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Russell, Jan Jarboe [date].

Lady Bird : a biography of Mrs. Johnson/Jan Jarboe Russell.

p. cm.

A Lisa Drew Book.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 318) and index.

(he: alk. paper)

1. Johnson, Lady Bird, 1912-.

2. Presidents spousesUnited States biography.

I. Title.

E848.J64R87 1999

973.923'092dc21

[B] 99-27544

CIP

ISBN 0-684-81480-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-5011-0699-6 (eBook)

Excerpt from The Red Shoes, is from The Book of Folly by Anne Sexton. Copyright 1972 by Anne Sexton.

Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

All rights reserved.

In memory of my mother, Laverne Pope Jarboe, who, like Lady Bird, sacrificed her own wishes and desires for her family, and for my husband, Lucky Russell, who requires no such sacrifice.

I stand in the ring

in the dead city

and tie on the red shoes...

They are not mine,

They are my mothers,

Her mothers before,

Handed down like an heirloom

But hidden like shameful letters.

Anne Sexton

O n a long and rainy day in November 1994, I spent eight hours with Lady Bird Johnson, talking to history. The interview was for an article that was to appear in Texas Monthly magazine. Lady Bird, then eighty-one years old, met me in the kitchen of her house, which is located on the side of a steep hill in northwest Austin. Standing at her stove, dressed in a pleated navy skirt, cotton blouse, and black lace-up shoes, Lady Bird leaned against a steel cane and fired the first question.

Do you take your coffee black or with sugah? she asked, rolling her r like a big old Southern marble in her mouth. I recognized that I was on familiar terrain. I could feel the past rising up between us, like the steam from the kettle that she picked up from her back burner. Internally the landscape that we shared was the American South, our motherland.

All through that day, we talked about the major events of the Cold War era, when her husband, Lyndon Baines Johnson, wielded power ferociously like the American equivalent of the Greek god Zeus, and Lady Bird stood resolutely by his side, like Zeuss ambitious wife, Hera, who achieved immortality through the power of marriage. We talked about civil rights, Vietnam, his efforts to end poverty, their disparate upbringings. Naturally, we talked, as well, about wildflowers and her own individual path to serenity: the planting of peaceful gardens. If we can get people to see the beauty of the native flora of their own corner of the world with caring eyes, she said, rooting herself in the pleasures of the soil, then Id be real happy.

In that first interview, we also touched on the darker parallels between Johnson and Zeus: their pride, their petulance, their philandering, and all of the manners of tricks they used to hide their infidelity from their wives.

When I asked how she handled her husbands indiscretions, Lady Bird, who was legally blind in one eye and had very little vision in the other due to a condition called macular degeneration, yanked a pair of sunglasses from her eyes, looked straight at me, and said in a firm, Hera-like voice: When people ask me these sort of things, I just say, Look to your own lives. Look to yourself, everybody. Fix yourselves, and keep your problems to yourself. The public should weigh what public servants are doing, not their private, innermost feelings. I think we are getting into such a state of intimacy of everyones lives that we dont judge people by what they are able to do for the country.

She was speaking from high atop her throne as Lyndon Johnsons queen. However, she was also speaking for historys line of long-suffering First Ladies, who have borne similar indiscretions and humiliationsthose shameful letters as the poet Anne Sexton called themby tying on red shoes, the conventional expectations of the culture that the way to handle such matters is to persevere and keep your problems to yourself.

Lady Bird issued that declaration of warning for the country not to delve too deeply into a Presidents intimate feelings four years before President Bill Clinton, another Southerner, was acquitted of impeachment charges over a sex scandal and his wife and co-sovereign, Hillary Rodham, would remake herself in Lady Birds image by stoically refusing to vent her humiliations in public.

In the process of trying to count the cost of such stubborn fidelity, I inevitably encountered resistance from Lady Bird herself. Three years into the research of the book, Lady Bird abruptly ended our series of interviews. Her decision came after I asked questions about Johnsons key relationships with other women and published an essay in Slate, an on-line magazine, about the public release of Johnsons private telephone calls of 1964. In a letter written on December 5, 1997, Lady Bird brought her participation in the book to an end.... Your conclusion about me may well come at Lyndons expense.... she wrote,...there is no way to separate us and our roles in each others lives.

The tone of the letter was icy and final. By the time she wrote it, Lyndon Johnson had been dead almost twenty-five years, but Lady Bird was still functioning as his chief defender. Who could blame her? Like Hera, her identity and power came solely from her husband. I remembered a comment she had made near the end of our first day together. The conversation had turned to death, and I asked Mrs. Johnson if she believed in heaven.

Oh yes, I do, she said. I do know that there is something hereafter, because all this has been too significant, too magnificent, for there not to be something after. Heaven, to me, is a mystery, a place Ill know what all thisthe events of my lifemeant.

History, too, is that kind of place. This book, then, is an effort to examine what the life of Lady Bird Johnson has meant, to her and to all those who have followed in her red shoes.

L ady Bird Taylors life with Lyndon Johnson began with an ultimatum. Lets get married, an overwrought twenty-six-year-old Lyndon wrote her from Washington shortly after the two met on a date in Austin on August 1, 1934. If you say no, it just proves that you dont love me enough to dare to marry me. We either do it now, or we never will. It wasnt that Lady Bird didnt love him. She loved him at first sight.