Lady Bird Johnson Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library
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Lady Bird Johnson Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library
On October 14, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson got a shattering piece of news that he and his advisers feared could change the course of the nation's political history.
The president's closest personal aide, Walter Jenkins, had been arrested after allegedly having sex with another man in a public restroom.
Election Day was less than three weeks away. "This could be the whole ballgame," the worried president confided to his friend, John Connally. The president should distance himself from Jenkins, his advisers urged -- all except one: Lady Bird Johnson.
An extraordinary conversation between Johnson and her husband, who was in New York on a campaign trip, vividly illustrates her compassion, keen political instincts and pivotal role. The demeanor of Lyndon Johnson's wife may have been understated and traditional, but her place in his administration was anything but. With relatively little fanfare, she modernized the role of first lady from hostess in chief to a more professional and political presidential helpmate. Along the way, Johnson literally changed the landscape of the nation.
Jack Valenti, a longtime aide and friend of the Johnsons, describes the president's wife as "a southern lady, southern to the core" but also as his most trusted adviser. "He got from her honest judgment, even though it may have been a judgment he did not want to hear," Valenti said.
Both Johnson's soft and shrewd sides were on display in her phone call to her husband on the morning of Oct. 15. Her mission: to win approval for a personal statement of sympathy she wanted to issue about Jenkins. LBJ's initial reaction was dubious. It took his wife 12 minutes to outmaneuver one of the nation's most legendary political manipulators.
Valenti, who was travelling with the president and heard his side of the conversation in a room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, summed up the response of the Johnson inner circle to Lady Bird's intervention. "I just wanted to kiss her," Valenti said. "I thought, my God, that's real loyalty."
The statement that the first lady issued was deeply personal "My heart is aching today for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country," it read. Many historians credit her deftly-worded appeal for compassion with defusing what might otherwise have been a devastating scandal.
Like many unassuming and gentle people, Lady Bird Johnson lived much of her life in the shadow of others.
Her husband was an ambitious politician with an ego as big as his native Texas;her prececessor as first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, was an embodiment of glamor whose personal tragedy only added to her aura.
Many of Johnson's successors as First Lady have made bigger headlines: Nancy Reagan was more controversial; Betty Ford was more outspoken and iconoclastic; Hillary Clinton was more of a political pioneer.
But none left a more farflung or better appreciated legacy than Lady Bird Johnson.
A vivid writer (her memoir, White House Diary, became a best-seller), who earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas with Walter Cronkite, Johnson quickly understood the public relations value of her high-profile position and put it to use for a cause that she espoused long before Earth Day and Al Gore made it fashionable.
Her "beautification" campaign, sometimes viewed as garden-clubby frivolity in an era when the nation was grappling with the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, was the precursor of an environmental movement that Johnson continued advancing long after her husband left office.
The 1965 Highway Beautification Act, passed at the first lady's urging, may have been watered down beyond all recognition but it was still a significant enough bill to draw intense opposition, as Liz Carpenter discovered when the president sent her to Capitol Hill to lobby for it. Click here to listen to Carpenter's story.
In Texas, after her husband left office, Lady Bird Johnson persuaded some of the same wealthy benefactors who underwrote plantings of cherry trees, tulips and azaleas in Washington, D.C. to fund creation of Town Lake Park in Austin.
The cash prizes she awarded to Texas Highway Department employees who planted the most roadside flowers created a major tourist industry for the state, which now attracts visitors with its spring wildflower displays.
Inspired by what she had done for his home state, the late Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, in 1987 inserted a provision into the federal highway funding law that dedicates a small portion of the funds for roadside wildflower planting. Today, at least 38 states take advantage of the program that Bentsen created "as a direct result of his interaction with Lady Bird Johnson," says Lee Fuller, a former aide to the senator.
The appeal of Johnson's work crosses political divides. When she launched her Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin in 1982, one of her first fundraisers was Karl Rove, who later went on to become President George W. Bush's top political adviser.
"In her quiet, modest way . . she inspired people," said Nash Castro, a retired Interior Department official who worked with Johnson on many of her projects. "And I think she left this timeless legacy that will endure forever."