Means of Ascent (16 page)

Since 1938, moreover, Lyndon had been spending many weekends at
Alice Glass’s Longlea. Sometimes Lady Bird would accompany him, and sometimes he would leave her back in their little apartment in Washington. Whether or not she was aware of her husband’s affair with Alice—and the Longlea circle was certain she was—weekends
at Longlea must have been especially difficult for her: to Alice’s adoring
sister, Mary Louise, and to Alice’s best friend,
Alice Hopkins, both of whom knew of the affair, she was an obstacle to Alice’s happiness, and, of course, she was not at home in the brilliant Longlea salon. No matter how many times he met her, Charles Marsh had trouble remembering her name; he was constantly referring to her as “Lyndon’s wife.” “Everybody was trying to be nice to her, but she was just out of
place,” Alice Hopkins says, and although the first part of that sentence may not have been true, the second was—and Lady Bird knew it; decades later, describing Longlea in an interview with the author of this book, she said: “
My eyes were just out on stems. They would have interesting people from the world of art and literature and politics. It was the closest I ever came to a salon in my life.… There was a dinner table with ever so much
crystal and silver.…” She appears to have felt keenly the contrast between herself and her hostess: “She was very tall, and elegant, really beautiful.… I remember Alice in a series of long and elegant dresses and me in—well, much less elegant.”

T
HROUGHOUT
L
ADY
B
IRD
J
OHNSON’S LIFE
, however, there had been hints that behind that terrible shyness, there was something more—much more.

At the University, there had been her decision to get a journalism degree, and the courage with which she forced herself to ask questions at press conferences—and the glimpses her few beaux had beneath the quietness. One of them, Thomas C. Soloman, was to recall that for a time “
I thought I was the leader.” But, he says, he came to realize that “We had been doing what she wanted to do. Even when we went on a picnic, it was
she who thought up the idea.… I also knew she would not marry a man who did not have the potentiality of becoming somebody.” J. H. Benefield came to realize that the shy young woman “was
one of the most determined persons I met in my life, one of the most ambitious and able.”

Handed the task, customary for congressmen’s wives, of escorting
constituents visiting Washington, she carried out the assignment with unusual thoroughness, not only arranging the standard 8:30 a.m. tours of the Capitol but taking the visitors farther afield: to Mount Vernon and even Monticello. Realizing that her husband, despite his pre-nuptial avowals of fervent interest in culture and history, would never visit the Smithsonian or the Civil
War battlefields, she made these tours with his constituents instead. And after a while, when a visitor had a question about a building they were visiting, the answer would be readily available. A friend came to see that “she must have read everything about the city of Washington and its history, and the Capitol, and Mount Vernon and Monticello; I don’t mean just guidebooks but biographies of Jefferson and Washington. She knew everything—and I mean
everything—about the gardens at Monticello and how Jefferson had planned them. She even knew about the Civil War battlefields. She had done a tremendous amount of work, without telling anyone.” Asked a question, she would reply in a voice so soft as to be almost inaudible. “She would never say one word unless you asked,” one Texan says, “but if you asked, she always knew the answer.” Not only did she grant, eagerly, graciously, any favors
that the visitors requested, she suggested other favors—hotel reservations, train schedules for a side trip to New York. “
I early learned,” she says today, “that
CONSTITUENTS
was spelled with capital letters,” and she didn’t forget their requests. Her husband had told her to get a stenographer’s notebook and carry it in her purse everywhere, jotting down anything she had to do. She never
forgot the notebook; it—and her diligence in crossing off the items written in it—would be remarked upon by her friends for the next forty years.

Even
at Longlea, there were hints—although the Longlea “regulars” didn’t notice them. She seemed always to be reading. One summer was to become enshrined in Longlea lore as “the summer that Lady Bird read
War and Peace”;
the scintillating Longlea regulars snickered because the quiet little woman carried the big book with her everywhere—even though, by the end of summer, she had finished it.
When, during the loud arguments to which she sat silently listening, a book would be cited, Lady Bird would, on her return to Washington, check it out of the public library. One was
Mein Kampf
, which Charles Marsh had read, and to which he was continually referring. She read it, and while she never talked about the book at Longlea, when Hitler’s theories were discussed thereafter, she was aware that, while Marsh knew what he was talking about, no one else in the room
did—except her.

And there were other qualities—which were noticed even though their significance was not. To the regulars’ condescension, Lady Bird Johnson responded with an unshakable
graciousness. While
Alice Hopkins says that Lady Bird “was just out of place,” Mrs. Hopkins adds that
“If everyone was just trying to be nice to her,” she would be nice right back, calm and
gracious—“self-contained.” Even
Alice Glass’s sister has to admit that there was something “quite remarkable in her
self-discipline—the things she made herself do. She was forever working,” not only on her reading, but on her figure—she had always been “dumpy,” but in 1940 or 1941 the extra weight came off, and stayed off.

And as for her husband’s affair with the salon’s mistress, “Oh, of course,” Lady Bird must have known, the regulars say. Wasn’t her husband often going—without her—to Longlea when, as she could easily have determined, Charles Marsh was not at home? “I could never understand how she stood it,” Mary Louise says. “Lyndon would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend, just leave her home.” But
stand it she did. “We were all together a lot—Lyndon and Lady Bird and Charles and Alice,” Mary Louise says. “And Lady Bird never said a word. She showed nothing, nothing at all.”

When, at
Texas State Society parties or other Washington social functions, her husband bellowed orders at her across the room, or insulted her, she never showed anything, either. She would sit silently, or say simply, “Yes, Lyndon,” or “I’ll be glad to, Lyndon,” and she would do so as calmly as if the request had been polite and reasonable. People might say to one another, “I don’t know how she stands
it,” but she stood it—and she stood it with a dignity that his shouts and sarcasms could not rattle, a dignity that was rather remarkable. But most acquaintances didn’t really notice this. Their attitude toward Lady Bird Johnson was influenced by her husband’s attitude toward her. She never tried to talk very much, of course, and when she did, she wasn’t listened to very much. She was just a drab little woman whom nobody noticed.

A
S FOR POLITICS
, apart from entertaining her husband’s guests and his constituents she had no connection at all with this major activity of his life.

During her husband’s campaign for Congress in 1937—he had been unopposed in 1938 and 1940—she had, as always, had a welcoming smile and a warm meal for him and his aides at all hours of the night. But when, occasionally, someone—someone who didn’t know her well—raised the possibility that she herself might campaign, the very suggestion that she might have to face an audience and speak brought such panic to her face that the
suggestion was always quickly dropped. Sometimes she could not avoid standing in a receiving line at a reception for the Congressman—and although she would shake hands and chat with the strangers filing by, she would perform this chore with so obvious an effort that her friends felt sorry for her as they watched; the bright smile on her face would be as rigid as if it had been set in stone.

The 1941 Senate campaign was little different. She learned of her husband’s decision to run only after the decision had been made; he didn’t bother to tell her until after the press conference at which he told the public. Then he flew down to Texas to begin the campaign; Mrs. Johnson followed by car, so unessential was her participation considered. Having purchased a movie camera, she took pictures of Lyndon as he gave speeches, but they
were for showing at home, not for use in the campaign. “
I went around with my little camera, cranking,” she was to say many years later. As she said this, she held up an imaginary camera in an amateurish way and pantomimed turning the crank, and as she did so, she hunched over a little, portraying—vividly—a timid little woman hanging back at the edge of a crowd, pointing a camera at her husband. Whatever she looked like to others, that
was what Lady Bird Johnson looked like to herself. Did she have any other role in the campaign? “I packed suitcases and got clothes washed, and tried to see that Lyndon always had clothes; every day Lyndon went through three or four or five shirts. Traveling with him, trying to get him to eat a regular meal, or taking his messages. Just being on hand in his hotel to answer the phone so he can take a shower. And sitting on the platform at all the big rallies.” And the
few words she had to say on the rare—very rare—occasions when she represented her husband at a minor event (“Thank you very much for inviting me to this barbecue. Lyndon is very sorry he couldn’t be here”) were such an ordeal that they made her friends cringe. Her single attempt to contribute something more ended in embarrassment. She had been making big pitchers of lemonade, and baking batches of cookies, and lugging them to the campaign volunteers
working in various offices around Austin, and she decided that on these visits, in order to thank the volunteers for their efforts and to spur them on to more, “I would give
this little speech to them: ‘Every single vote counts.’ ” She wrote and rewrote the few paragraphs of that brief talk, memorized it and nerved herself up to give it. But she evidently repeated it too many times. Meeting her on the street one day, a friend
smilingly began to quote her speech back to her, and since the friend was not a campaign worker, Lady Bird felt that her speech had become a joke quoted around Austin. That was the end of her speechmaking in that campaign. Forty years later, she was to tell the author of this book that when the friend quoted her speech back to her, she realized, “Maybe it had made the rounds. I guess I gave the speech too often.” Hearing a change in her voice as she spoke, I glanced up
from my notepad. Mrs. Johnson was at that time sixty-eight years old. Her face was lowered, and she was blushing—a definite, dark red blush—at the memory of that humiliation so many years earlier.

As for the less public side of the campaign—the planning of strategy and tactics—the planners say that the candidate’s wife was almost never
present. “Well,” she says, “I elected to be out a lot.” Asked why, she replied: “I wasn’t confident in that field.” Was there also another reason? “I
didn’t want to be a party to absolutely everything,”
Lady Bird Johnson says.

B
ACK IN
W
ASHINGTON
after the campaign, she had a new apartment, in the Woodley Park Towers off Connecticut Avenue, much more spacious than the Kalorama Road apartment and with a living room that, she recalls, “just hung over Rock Creek Park, and was just filled with green.” But an apartment wasn’t what she wanted. “I had been yearning and talking about having a home,” she recalls.
The Johnsons had been spending about six months of the year in Austin, and every year they seemed to be living in a different apartment there—small and temporary. And in Washington, more and more of their friends were buying homes. “The central theme of my heart’s desire was a house,” she recalls, but there was no money to buy one. She and Lyndon had wanted children, but after seven years of marriage there were no children; she had had three miscarriages.
In an attempt to solve what she describes as a “gynecological problem,” she underwent an operation in Baltimore in September, 1941, but it did not appear to have been successful. “This was
a sadness,” she remembers, and changes the subject. But sometimes, despite herself, her sorrow slipped out; an old friend was to remember chatting with Lady Bird at this time, about other topics; every so often Lady Bird would pause, and a wistful look
would cross her face, and she would say, “
If I had a son …” or “If I had a daughter …” During the Fall of 1941, she was still taking constituents to Mount Vernon—she was to say she stopped counting after her two-hundredth trip—and she was very tired of those trips. Nellie Connally says, “She was
like a sightseeing bus. That’s what congressional wives did: they
hauled the constituents around.” During that Fall, she still entertained constituents at dinners—dinners at which her guests paid little attention to her. Anxious for something else to do, she enrolled, with Nellie, in a business school in Arlington, taking courses in shorthand and typing; years later, Mrs. Johnson, almost always careful not to say a derogatory word about anything, would say of the business school: “That was a
dull, drab little
place.” And all during that Fall, the weekends at Longlea continued, as did the Texas parties at which her husband ridiculed her, or shouted orders at her. “
The women liked her,” Nellie Connally says. “Every woman sympathized with her. If they didn’t like her for herself—and they did—they liked her because they saw what she had to put up with. It made what they had to put up with not so bad.”

And then, after Pearl Harbor, when her husband, along with John Connally and
Willard Deason, was preparing to leave on his first trip to
the Coast, Lyndon said that she might as well get some use out of her typing classes and took her along to type his letters. Telephoning his congressional office every evening, he was told about problems in the district: about federal installations for which he had obtained preliminary approval
before his departure—a big
Air Force base for Austin, an Army camp in Bastrop County, a new rural
electrification line—but that were now stalled in the federal bureaucracy; about scores of businessmen whose plans for construction or expansion of factories were stalled by lack of necessary approvals from federal agencies such as the new
War Production Board and the
Office of Strategic
Materials; about letters and telephone calls—hundreds of letters and telephone calls—from constituents about routine pre-war matters, and about new war-related problems. There was no one to handle these problems. In Connally,
Walter Jenkins and the brilliant speechwriter
Herbert Henderson, Johnson had possessed an exceptional staff, but Jenkins had enlisted in September, Henderson had suddenly, unexpectedly died in October, and
Connally’s departure left no one in Suite 1320 of the House Office Building except apple-cheeked
Mary Rather—charming, efficient, but only a secretary—and
O. J. Weber, bright and aggressive but only twenty-one years old and with just a few months’ experience. And the problems had to be handled quickly. If final authorization for the new military bases in the Tenth District was not pushed through, some other
congressman would snap up the bases for his district. If constituents didn’t get the necessary assistance in Washington, the feeling would spread that there was no one in the district’s congressional office except secretaries, that the district was without adequate representation in Washington—at a time when a congressman was needed with particular urgency. Johnson had no idea how long he would be away from Washington, and if his absence was to be prolonged,
voters might begin asking why he didn’t resign his seat and let the district elect a new congressman. The political danger was real—and imminent. Let dissatisfaction mount and, with an election scheduled for July 25, 1942, he might, if he didn’t resign, be replaced. Someone had to take over the office, to be in effect, in all but name, the Congressman from the Tenth District until the real Congressman returned. Someone had to handle a congressman’s
multi-faceted chores: to persuade Cabinet officers and high-level bureaucrats to cut through red tape and get the big projects moving again, to negotiate with the new wartime agencies on behalf of businessmen, to serve as the necessary link between constituents and federal agencies. Discussing the situation out on the Coast, Johnson, Connally and Deason agreed that choosing an ambitious young politician or lawyer from Austin, who might become a possible rival, was too risky.
Moreover, the choice had to be someone who was not only totally loyal but who would provide a sense of continuity, someone who would make the district feel that the
office was being run as if Lyndon Johnson were still there running it; someone, therefore, who was identified with Lyndon Johnson. It is unclear which of the men first suggested that the best choice—perhaps the only choice—was Mrs. Lyndon Johnson; she thinks it was Deason whom, to her
astonishment, she first heard mention her name. Her husband at first dismissed the idea, but the more it was discussed, the clearer it became that it was the only solution. On their return to Washington, Johnson learned that he and Connally would soon be leaving again, on a trip whose duration was indefinite. He told Lady Bird she would have to do the job. And when, on January 29, 1942, he and Connally left for the Coast again, Lady Bird Johnson went to Suite 1320.