The White House: The First Lady Bird

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The impact of First Ladies on U.S. history has never been particularly resounding, but all have contributed fascinating footnotes.

There was John Adams’ wife Abigail, for example. She hung laundry in the East Room of the White House; yet she insisted on receiving visitors in a chair built like an empress’ throne. Zachary Taylor’s wife Margaret never wanted him to be President. She felt that it would deprive her “of his society and shorten his life,” so she secluded herself in a wing of the White House, where she puffed away sulkily on a corncob pipe for the duration of his Administration. Mrs. U. S. Grant put so many tassels and hunks of ornate furniture in the East Room that people said it looked like a steamboat saloon; yet she was idolized as a model of high style. Despite the fact that she was cross-eyed, she refused to undergo a corrective operation because her husband liked her that way.

Fainting & Needlework. Ida McKinley, on the other hand, was given to fainting spells, and she whiled away nearly all of her husband’s term doing needlework. William Howard Taft’s wife Helen attended every Cabinet meeting with him, and when the press accused her of influencing policy, she insisted that she went along only to keep him awake. Woodrow Wilson’s second wife Edith was called “the Acting President” because only she and a doctor could visit—and presumably influence —her husband during the months that he lay ill after a stroke.

Eleanor Roosevelt, of course, all but made the role of First Lady an official national office. Harry Truman called Bess “the boss”—and in many ways she was, though she never pretended to be more than a displaced housewife. Once Truman found her burning some of the letters he had written to her. “Bess, you oughtn’t to do that,” protested Harry. “Why not? I’ve read them several times,” said Bess. “But think of history!” pleaded the President. “I have,” murmured Bess as she tossed the last bundle into the fire. Mamie Eisenhower, always the general’s lady, presided dutifully over social occasions when it was required, otherwise shunned the public gaze almost as much as Bess Truman. Not so her successor.

“Les Sentiments.” When her husband died, Jacqueline Kennedy was already recognized as the most dazzling First Lady in U.S. lore. It was inevitable that anyone following her would suffer by comparison. Such was the lot of Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson, bearer of perhaps the most unfortunate public nickname in years. But what kind of name has Lady Bird made for herself? Reaction to her so far has been politely cool. Says Maggie Daly, columnist for Chicago’s American: “She looks like every well-dressed woman of means. She does not have any special flair.” Observes Françoise Giroud, co-editor of Paris’ L’Express: “Lady Bird is the sort of person quí ne provoque pas les sentiments—she does not evoke feelings. Who cares about a grey lady bird?” And in London, a BBC executive snorted, “She’s so beige!” But Yolande Gwin, society editor of the Atlanta Journal, put it more positively. “She’s just plain old down-South Lady Bird,” says she. “I think she’s a much better symbol of the American woman and mother than Jacqueline Kennedy.” Indeed, that special quality of homebred, plain-folks Americanness may be the one unmistakable brand that will mark Lady Bird Johnson’s reign in the White House. At 51, she is cast more in the pleasant image of a neat, busy suburban clubwoman than in the queenly mold of a jet-set Continental beauty. She is intelligent, superbly poised and incredibly self-disciplined. Her skin is clear and abloom, and she has the figure of a teen-ager (5 ft. 4 in., 114 lbs.), but she is no glamor girl. Her nose is a bit too long,.her mouth a bit too wide, her ankles a bit less than trim, and she is not outstanding at clotheshorseman-ship. She has a voice something like a brassy low note on a trumpet, and she speaks in a twanging drawl; friends comes out “frayans,” affairs are “affa-yahs,” hogs “hoags.”

Cynical sophisticates find it hard to believe, but Lady Bird’s life is totally dominated by a genuine devotion to her role as Lyndon Johnson’s mate. She is the traditional countrywoman, the wife who by her very nature tunes all her labor and all her love to harmonize with the ambitions of her husband. In the tradition of Southern plantation patriarchies, Lyndon Johnson is head of the family—period. And as he himself admits, “I’m not the easiest man to live with.” He strongly influences her tastes —in clothes, coiffure and makeup. He has been known to swat Lady Bird so hard on the behind that her feet nearly leave the floor. Sometimes, when after-dinner drinks have flowed for a while, he launches into a few bawdy stories, fires out cuss words like buckshot. But Lady Bird sits by serenely, smiling faintly or gazing out a window.

Still, theirs is a marriage bulwarked by genuine, if sometimes uncomfortably showy affection. Lyndon keeps Lady Bird well-informed of his plans and decisions. At times, he will burst into a sedate White House tea, plant a kiss squarely on Lady Bird’s forehead and loudly announce, “I love you.” On a warm Washington evening, the two may saunter out of the White House, head for the grassy darkness beneath a giant tree. There Lady Bird may lie down with her arms stretched over her head. Lyndon may sprawl beside her, propped up on his elbow so that he can look into her face, and they talk quietly.

Dealer in Everything. Lady Bird* was born in a lonely antebellum brick house near Karnack, Texas, on Dec. 22, 1912. Her mother, Minnie Lee Patillo Taylor, a tall, eccentric woman from an old and aristocratic Alabama family, liked to wear long white dresses and heavy veils. She fussed over food fads, played grand opera endlessly on the phonograph, loved to read the classics aloud to tiny Lady Bird. She scandalized people for miles around by entertaining Negroes in her home, and once even started to write a book about Negro religious practices, called Bio Baptism. Naturally, most folks thought Minnie weird and standoffish. Says a longtime friend of Lady Bird’s, Mrs. Eugenia Lassater of Henderson, Texas: “Mrs. Taylor was a cultured woman. But she didn’t consort with Karnack people.”

Lady Bird’s father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor II, was a tall, bulky, money-minded man, son of an Alabama sharecropper. He had married Minnie Lee against her family’s wishes, then took her to East Texas, where he started a profit-making career that eventually made him a rich man. He ran a truly general store; the sign outside proclaimed, “Dealer in Everything.” Later he dabbled in real estate and money-lending at 10% interest, rented land and shacks to Negro tenants. Each day he rose at 4 a.m. to open his store, then returned home at sundown to spend the long night hours poring over his accounts and IOUs, checking and rechecking to see that his debtors were up to snuff on their payments. “Cap” Taylor did not share his wife’s liberal views concerning Negroes. Says Mrs. Lassater: “The Negroes were kept in peonage by Mr. Taylor. He would furnish them with supplies and let them have land to work, then take their land if they didn’t pay. When I first saw how he operated, I thought the days of slavery weren’t over yet.” Recalls Lady Bird’s brother, Anthony Taylor, now the owner of a curio shop in Santa Fe: “He looked on Negroes pretty much as hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Aunt Effie. For nearly six years of her life, Lady Bird lived in the crosscurrents between the occult but enlightened aristocracy of her mother and the shrewd dollar-sign language of her father; her two brothers, Tony and Tom III (the latter died in 1959), were both much older and were away at school. Then in 1918 Minnie Lee Taylor fell down the length of the circular staircase in the old brick house and died—and Lady Bird was left with Cap Taylor.

Never one to neglect business, Cap took the little girl to his store every day for a while, sometimes let her sleep at night on a cot in his second-floor storeroom near what she recalls as “a row of peculiar long boxes.” Her father told her they were “dry goods,” but Lady Bird later learned they were coffins.

Soon Cap decided he couldn’t both make money and raise a daughter all by himself. So Lady Bird’s upbringing fell to her mother’s sister, Aunt Effie, who moved from Alabama to Texas. Under Effie’s strict discipline, Lady Bird read prodigiously, plowed through Ben-Hur when she was eight, memorized poems that she can still recite today. But the dainty spinster aunt could never really fill a mother’s role. Says Lady Bird now: “She opened my spirit to beauty, but she neglected to give me any insight into the practical matters a girl should know about, such as how to dress or choose one’s friends or learning to dance.” In her early teen years, Lady Bird was a wallflower.

Mrs. Naomi Bell of Marshall, a schoolmate of Lady Bird’s, says, “Bird wasn’t accepted into our clique. There were 18 of us girls, and we couldn’t get Claudia to cooperate on anything. She didn’t date at all. To get her to go to the high school graduation banquet, my fiancé took Bird as his date and I went with another boy. She didn’t like to be called Lady Bird, so we’d call her Bird to get her little temper going. My mother would call her Cat. She’d say, ‘All right, pull your claws in, Cat.’ And when the rest of the gang was in the house. Bird would sneak in the back door and talk to my mother. She was a chatterbox. But she was timid. When she’d get in a crowd, she’d clam up.”

Boys v. a Man. At the University of Texas in Austin, Lady Bird had a Nei-man-Marcus charge account and unlimited use of Cap Taylor’s checking account. But. as Eugenia Lassater recalls, she was “stingy.” She still wore Aunt Effie’s old coat around campus. But her social life picked up a little. She learned to dance the Louisiana Stomp and acquired at least a sipping acquaintance with bootleg cherry wine. When she graduated in 1934, she had degrees in liberal arts and journalism.

It was at about this time that she met gangling, rawboned Lyndon Johnson, 26, who was down from his Washington job as secretary to Texas Democratic Congressman Richard Kleberg, a member of the famous King Ranch family.

For a first date, Lyndon and Lady Bird breakfasted at the Driskill Hotel. Lyndon was a fast worker. Says Lady Bird: “He told me all sorts of things that I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation—his salary as secretary to a Congressman, how much insurance he had, his ambitions, about all the members of his family.”

He also proposed. Lady Bird invited him to Karnack to meet her father. Cap Taylor was impressed: “Lady, you’ve brought home a lot of boys. This time you’ve brought a man.” But Lyndon scarcely seemed the man of Lady Bird’s dreams. Eugenia Lassater recalls that “when we would talk about getting married, Bird would just say she wanted a nice man and a big white house with a fence around it and a big collie dog. She wanted a nice nine-to-five man. A John Citizen.” Nevertheless, on Nov. 17, 1934, barely two months after they met, Lady Bird and Lyndon were married in San Antonio by a pastor they had never before met, with a hurriedly purchased $2.50 wedding band from Sears, Roebuck. Next morning Lady Bird stunned Eugenia Lassater with an exuberant phone call: “Lyndon and I committed matrimony last night!”

Howdy at the Barbecues. The couple lived on a frazzled shoestring in Washington on Lyndon’s $3,204 secretarial salary. In 1937, when Johnson wanted to run for Texas’ Tenth Congressional District seat, it was Lady Bird who made it possible. She got a $10,000 inheritance advance from her father and paid for the victorious campaign. The Johnsons soon jumped to a relatively comfortable $10,000 Congressman’s salary, but Lady Bird did not yet get the hang of buying the right clothes. “She was still tacky,” says Eugenia Lassater, “so I told her to turn herself over to a department store and let them dress her. Bird has credited me with teaching her how to dress. But it was the store.” (Even today she is no fashion plate. Washington society writers have caught her wearing the same beige turban for months now, and some archly refer to Bird’s familiar white chiffon evening dress as her “Vanity Fair nightgown.”) Says Lady Bird: “I like clothes. I like them pretty. But I want them to serve me, not for me to serve them—to have an important, but not a consuming part in my life.”

Once in Congress, Lyndon was on a whirlwind rise, and Lady Bird rocketed along beside him. In 1948, when he ran for the Senate, Lady Bird swallowed her shyness, forced herself to travel all over Texas, if only to say howdy at barbecues. On the night before the election, the car in which she was riding careened off the road, flipped over twice in the mud. “All I could think of as we were turning over was that I sure wished I’d voted absentee,” recalls Lady Bird. But she hopped out unhurt, hitched a ride, borrowed a dress, and the same night shook hands with 200 women at a reception.

Her 27 years with Lyndon as Congressman, Senator, Senate majority leader, Vice President and President have been rugged, sometimes lonesome, always at a hell-bent pace. Lady Bird suffered through four miscarriages and faithfully nursed Lyndon back to sleek and robust health after a near-fatal heart attack in 1955. She has efficiently managed the family finances over the years, and proved that she had much of old Cap Taylor’s business savvy when she bought and, with Lyndon’s help, nurtured a floundering Austin radio station into a multimillion-dollar corporation. “She can read a balance sheet as well as a truck driver can read a road map,” says a former associate. As proof of that, there are now public Johnson balance sheets that depict Lady Bird’s sizable financial holdings—even more sizable than her husband’s.

Sing Along with U Thant. In the capital, where a woman of such exalted station rarely escapes the scratch of a well-aimed shiv, Lady Bird has come off remarkably unscathed. Some people wonder if she is a sort of self-created Galatea, playing the role of a politician’s perfect wife, the possessor of a flawless mediocrity that generates warm admiration but no scorching envy. Brother Tony says that “Lady Bird has been in public life and in the public eye for so long that she has learned to be circumspect, even when she’s in a situation where she can let her hair down.” Others find her barefoot-folksy talk a little too much, as when she drawls, “He’s noisier than a mule in a tin barn,” or “I’m busier than a man with one hoe and two rattlesnakes.” But the overwhelming majority of the people who know her give Lady Bird exceedingly high marks for personal charm and attractiveness. “I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t like her,” says Blanche Halleck, wife of the House Republican leader. Lindy Boggs, wife of Louisiana Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs, and a longtime Lady Bird chum, is hard put to make her friend’s virtues seem real. “I make her sound like a combination of Elsie Dinsmore and the Little Colonel,” says Mrs. Boggs, “but this is the problem with Bird. When you talk about her, you make her sound too good to be true.”

Lady Bird’s accession to the White House did precipitate some clatter of dismay, however. “I suppose,” cooed Nicole Alphand, wife of the French Ambassador to the U.S., “that now we will all have to learn to do zee bar-bee-cue.” That has not yet become a problem, but Lady Bird has done her bit for zee folk music. Already a guitar-whacking bunch of folk singers called the New Christy Minstrels have entertained at a state dinner for Italy’s President Segni, and Lady Bird recently capped a banquet for United Nations Secretary-General U Thant with a lusty audience sing-along of Puff, the Magic Dragon.

When German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard visited in June, Lady Bird laid on a sumptuous state dinner beneath the stars in the Rose Garden and brought in Ballerina Maria Tallchief and the National Symphony Orchestra for entertainment. She has dispensed with white tie and tails in favor of the less imposing black tie. She mixes her guest lists with a style that would make Karnak’s eyes pop. At a rooftop dance for Costa Rican President Francisco Orlich, for example, guests included Evangelist Billy Graham, Comedian Jimmy Durante, Composer Richard Rodgers, Chase Manhattan Bank President David Rockefeller and Author John Dos Passes—while Lady Bird’s daughter Luci danced the frug to the music of Lester Lanin’s orchestra.

Even the most forbidding challenge seems like fun to Lady Bird; for example, the time last Christmas when the President popped into Lady Bird’s room one morning. “Bird,” said he, “let’s ask Congress over this afternoon.” So they had Congress over that afternoon—in fact, several hundred members dipping their cups into giant bowls of eggnog.

One of the Bills. Although daughters Luci Baines, 17, and Lynda Bird, 20, are almost adults, Lady Bird still gushes over them, possibly to make up for the many lonely nights they spent in the years when she and Lyndon campaigned or politicked with congressional cronies. “That has been one of the costs,” Lady Bird says. “It is one of the bills you have to pay for the job your husband has.” Yet the rapport between mother and daughters is natural, giggly and girlish. Still, she has to be mindful of the special security precautions that plague the family’s every move. Instead of reminding Luci to take her sweater, as an average mother would, Lady Bird often chides her daughter, “Now Luci, don’t forget to take your agent along.”

The President’s wife thrives on the whiplash excitement around her husband. Says Lindy Boggs: “Bird would be only half alive if she divorced herself from politics.” There is not a chance that she will. Last week, when a reporter asked the President if Lady Bird would be campaigning for him this fall, Lyndon replied with relish: “She is—and will be.” And she has been—and will be—able and invaluable. In 1960 she traveled 35,000 miles in 71 days for Lyndon, mostly in the South. Says Bobby Kennedy chivalrously: “Lady Bird carried Texas for us.”

She already has a healthy head start this year. In direct relation to Lyndon’s pet projects, she went 1) to Huntsville, Ala., in March and talked about Lyndon’s space program, 2) to Cleveland’s Riverview Golden Age Center in April and discussed Lyndon’s federal health and housing plans, 3) to hard-scrabbling Appalachia in May and spoke about Lyndon’s poverty war, and 4) to Atlanta’s Communicable Disease Center in May. And last week, on a trip billed by Lady Bird as a “land and people tour,” she charged into Montana, Utah and Wyoming with Interior Secretary Stewart Udall for four days that averaged more than 18 hours each —ostensibly to create interest in tourism and conservation and to dedicate the $81.2 million Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah. But she never missed a chance to clutch hands and to praise needy candidates. In Montana she described Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield as one of Lyndon’s “oldest and most trusted friends.” In Utah she told the folks that Senator Frank Moss is “always watching out for Utah.” In Wyoming she spoke of Senator Gale McGee: “Everybody knows Senator McGee—he’s your home folks.” And in Idaho she said: “We in Washington have heard much about Idaho from Senator Frank Church and his wife Bethine and Congressman Ralph Harding and his wife Willa.” “

Look, Y’AII!” Only once, during a relaxed and silent voyage in a 27-foot rubber raft down the twisting Snake River, was Lady Bird able to push away all reminders of wheelhorse politics and White House pressures. Wyoming’s magnificent Teton Mountains loomed over the river, and when she caught her first glimpse of the peaks, Lady Bird cried: “Look, y’all, just look!” Idling along at 7 m.p.h., she spotted a formation of Canadian geese. “Hey! Say, what are they?” she exclaimed. “Aren’t they gorgeous, strung out across the sky?” Then she dipped a paper cup in the water, drained it, and took out a little notebook to jot down some notes for her diary.

Suddenly Lady Bird spotted photographers on another raft waiting downstream to shoot more pictures. “O.K.,” she sighed. “Pass me my lipstick.” Now she was Lyndon Johnson’s wife again. The First Lady Bird put on a chipper smile, and the cameras went click.

* When she was two, her Negro nurse landsaked, “Lawd, she’s purty as a ladybird,” and the name stuck. A ladybird, as it is called in the Southwest, is not a bird at all, but a black-dotted little beetle, otherwise known as a ladybug.