Lady Bird Johnson: A Political Journey

[Guest Gandalf Grey]

Lady Bird Johnson: a political journey

 

By Sidney Blumenthal

Created Jul 16 2007 - 9:07am

 

The obituaries of former first lady Lady Bird Johnson extol her

beautification projects, graciousness and steady handling of the outsize

personality of her husband. But she was also an unwavering supporter of

civil rights and through the decades kept close ties to key people in the

movement. Her achievements are inseparable from her marriage. Lady Bird [1]

managed Lyndon's turbulence, quietly offered her counsel, ignored his

wandering eye, and calmed those he might upset. Nothing of that relationship

was easily reducible to simple motivation. Over time, rather than becoming

more submissive and diminished, she became stronger, more formidable and

clearer minded. At almost every turn, at every difficulty and problem they

encountered, Lyndon discovered and rediscovered his reliance on her strength

and judgment.

 

Lady Bird belonged [2] to the other south, the liberal south that confronted

the harsh realities of segregation and the monolithic system of power that

enforced it. She came to her beliefs gradually and, like many other

southerners, engaged in an internal struggle to remake herself and her

legacy. She was born in December 1912 in a part of east Texas ten miles from

the Louisiana border, amid cotton plantations and "many, many blacks", she

wrote, "totally part of the Old South ... a whole feudal way of life." The

bricks of her large house had been handmade by slaves. Her grandfather had

fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh. Her father was known to whites as

"Cap'n" and to blacks simply as "Mister Boss." Her mother came from a big

and influential family in Alabama, where as a girl Lady Bird spent her

summers.

 

"She did not start out as an all-out civil rights person. It took getting

there," Harry McPherson, a long-time aide to Lyndon Johnson, told me. "My

recollection is of an enormously civilised woman who was also politically

intelligent and knew how important the civil-rights issue was to the country

and to her husband. That was the main tide she was sailing on. But there was

a riptide, the long southern background, the Montgomery, Alabama, background

of her family."

 

When Lyndon Johnson was first elected to the House of Representatives in a

special election in 1937 and arrived in Washington, he and his wife

immediately became part of a small circle of liberal southern New Dealers.

"We were so young and so liberal", Lady Bird said later. Among the Johnsons'

friends were such New Deal officials as Clifford and Virginia Durr [3] and

Aubrey W Williams, who became important figures in the civil-rights

movement.

 

The Durrs were from Alabama; Virginia's brother-in-law was Hugo Black,

appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to the Supreme Court. Williams,

another native southerner, was deputy to Harry Hopkins, Eleanor Roosevelt

and FDR's close aide, and had hired 28-year-old Johnson to run the National

Youth Administration in Texas, which became a gleaming example of New Deal

success. "Lady Bird and mother were very close friends from the very early

days for the New Deal," Lucy Hackney, Virginia's daughter, told me. "They

were a group of southern liberals - that's what they thought of themselves

at that point. She was younger than mother. Mother introduced her to

Washington, had been up there a little longer."

 

The Durrs eventually moved back to Alabama, becoming central figures [4] in

the civil-rights movement. In 1954, when Senator James Eastland, an

arch-segregationist from Mississippi and chairman of the Senate

internal-security sub-committee, subpoenaed them and Aubrey Williams,

Virginia called Lady Bird. According to Virginia's memoir, Outside the Magic

Circle [5] she woke Lady Bird up. "Bird", she said, "you know, Jim Eastland

has called Aubrey and me down to New Orleans, and we're going to be put on

the hot seat in one of those inquisitions. I've got to speak to Lyndon."

Lyndon came on the phone. "Why, baby, I don't know a thing about it. That's

terrible. What can I do for you?" Now the Senate majority leader, Johnson

arranged things so that no other Democrats showed up at the hearings.

 

Johnson had made a kind of separate peace with the southern barons who ruled

the Senate, refusing until his masterful [6] field-marshalling for the 1957

Civil Rights Act to push for such legislation [7]. In Alabama, meanwhile,

the Durrs led the fight against the poll-tax, which effectively

disenfranchised blacks. Lucy Hackney recalled: "When my mother was doing the

poll-tax campaign, Lyndon would say, 'Darling, I'll do that if you've got

the votes'." But the consummate politician of his generation was keeping his

counsel. He was, after all, the only southern congressman to vote for an

anti-lynching bill in 1938.

 

In December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when a department-store worker

named Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a segregated public bus,

launching the boycott that brought a young minister, the Reverend Martin

Luther King Jr [8] to the city to lead it, the Durrs were deeply involved.

Parks, in fact, had been trained as a civil-rights worker to undertake her

mission. And after she was fired from her job, the Durrs hired her to work

for their family as a seamstress. "Lady Bird was very supportive of mother",

said Lucy Hackney. "They were very close during the bus boycott. Lady Bird

called, stayed connected."

 

Michael Janeway, a young aide in Senator Johnson's office whose father and

mother -- Eliot Janeway, the economist, and Elizabeth Janeway [9] the

novelist - were close to the Johnsons, is now a professor [10] at the

Columbia Journalism School. He remembers Lady Bird reading Harper Lee's To

Kill a Mockingbird almost as soon as it was published in 1960. "Despite

being more southern than Johnson, she was absolutely civil-rights-oriented,"

Janeway told me. "The closest relations she kept up were to Virginia and

Clifford Durr, Lindy Boggs [11] (wife of Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs,

who later filled his seat), Aubrey Williams. So many people felt they could

talk to her who couldn't talk to him (Lyndon Johnson). When he was in one of

his manic-depressive phases and they fell out, she was the behind-the-scenes

mediator. Some people maintained a separate relationship with her."

 

An epic journey

 

In the closing days of the 1960 campaign, Lyndon Johnson [12], the

vice-presidential running-mate of John F Kennedy, feared that they would

lose his home state of Texas, and he rushed to Dallas on 4 November.

Conservative southerners had excoriated Johnson as a traitor to his region

and race for having endorsed the civil-rights plank of the Democratic Party.

"LBJ", they contended, meant "Late Blooming Judas" or "Let's Beat Judas".

Lyndon and Lady Bird arrived at the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas to be

greeted by a hostile, well-heeled crowd - later dubbed the "Mink Coat Mob" -

led by a far-right congressman, Bruce Alger [13]. (Alger took pride in

voting against the school-milk programme.)

 

At the emergence of the Johnsons in the lobby, the crowd spat upon them,

grabbing Lady Bird's hair and clothing. After this "High Noon" incident,

Johnson appeared in a new light different from the stereotypical Texas

wheeler-dealer. For Lady Bird, the event remained traumatic, and years later

she exhibited physical nervousness when it was brought up. But it did not

deter her.

 

When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, striking down Jim Crow

[14] in July 1964, he famously remarked to his young press secretary, Bill

Moyers [15]: "We have lost the south for a generation." But he did not

intend to give it up so easily. Months later, he sent Lady Bird on a

1,682-mile, eight-state, forty-seven-stop campaign-train tour of the south.

Her speeches consisted of honeyed and steely words. "I am proud that I am

part of the south. I'm fond of the old customs," she said. Then she quoted

Robert E Lee's injunction after Appomattox, "Abandon all these local

animosities and raise your sons to be Americans!" And she urged acceptance

of the Civil Rights Act [16]. "There is, in this southland, more love than

hate."

 

As the train drew deeper south, the crowds grew menacing. In Mississippi,

the Ku Klux Klan tried to blow up a railroad bridge. In Columbia, South

Carolina, Klansmen burned a cross and thousands of hecklers assembled before

the state capitol to jeer. Signs read: "Black Bird, Go Home," and "Johnson

Is a Nigger Lover." In Charleston, 10,000 people gathered to shout her down.

"Today", Lady Bird said, "the south, like the rest of the nation, is at a

crossroads ... It is the choice between a new progress - and a new

nullification. Here in Charleston, once the hub of the Old South, you have

to make that choice."

 

President Johnson flew to New Orleans [17] to embrace his wife as she ended

her exhausting trip. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, was running

well in the south - and he would carry five deep-south states, an augury of

a new Republican realignment. Yet Johnson was determined not to concede [18]

the south, but to fight for it. The night before his visit to New Orleans,

Moyers sent him a campaign memo noting that "several people in New Orleans,

including our advance men, feel the President should not refer to 'civil

rights'." On 9 October1964, Johnson delivered the most dramatic speech [19]

of the campaign.

 

"Now, the people that would use us and destroy us first divide us ... But if

they divide us, they can make some hay. And all these years they have kept

their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities, and dividing us.

Whatever your views are, we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of

Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in

the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it,

and I am going to enforce it..."

 

Then Johnson recounted the story of an old southern senator who confided to

Representative Sam Rayburn [20], Johnson's mentor from Texas: "'Sammy, I

wish I felt a little better. I would like to go back to old' - and I won't

call the name of the state; it wasn't Louisiana and it wasn't Texas - 'I

would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I

just feel like I have one in me. The poor old state, they haven't heard a

Democratic speech in thirty years. All they ever hear at election time is

Nigger, Nigger, Nigger!'"

 

"Let us now praise famous women"

 

After his election, the progress of Johnson's "great society" [21] became

mired in Vietnam. As the war escalated and opposition grew, and her old

friends turned into protesters, Lady Bird still maintained contact, but she

became increasingly recessive and even depressed. She was fraught with

anxiety about her husband's health and the fate of his presidency.

 

I met Lady Bird six years ago, through a friend of mine, her nephew, Philip

Bobbitt, who had been a colleague in the Clinton White House. She had

suffered some hearing loss and her eyesight was dimmed, but her mind was

clear and sharp. Another couple was present, from Texas, wealthy

Republicans, talking up the virtues of George W Bush [22] and Lady Bird

quietly but pointedly encouraged debate with their conservative views.

 

Lady Bird was of her time and ahead of it. As first lady she was a bridge

between the eras of Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton [23]. Unlike

either of them, Lady Bird reserved her influence strictly for behind the

scenes and did not impose herself in public apart from her husband's agenda,

except on environmental issues, on which she was a pioneer. She shares the

glory of the greatest presidency for civil rights since Lincoln. In 1960,

after seeing Lady Bird's picture in Time magazine, Virginia Durr wrote to

Lyndon: "Of course I've thought that Bird is your secret weapon ... Southern

womanhood really has something when they are like Bird." Let us now praise

famous women.

 

 

 

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson