IN FEBRUARY 1960, WHEN the field of likely nominees for that year’s presidential election had narrowed to five, Newsweek compared the men’s wives and predicted that one of them would preside over the White House in the next four years. As it turned out, two of them did; and before the decade ended, three of the five had served as First Lady. With very different personalities and priorities, each carved out an individual response to a turbulent period in American history—one of exhilaration, then questioning and delusion as attention turned from space exploration and the Peace Corps to John Kennedy’s assassination and then to Vietnam. In less than a decade, the style of First Ladies changed too, so that campaigning became a requirement instead of an option. Acting as White House hostess dropped as a priority; spearheading substantive reforms rose. In short, the president’s wife moved out of the society columns and on to the front page.
Of the five singled out by Newsweek before the major parties convened to choose their candidates, only Evelyn Symington fell from national prominence. Muriel Humphrey, the most traditional of the five and the one who described herself as a “mother of an ordinary family,” never lived in the White House, but she saw her husband take the vice presidency in 1965, and after his death she served briefly as a United States senator from Minnesota. The remaining three in Newsweek’s list, Pat Nixon, the disciplined “super-duper” wife of the vice president, Lady Bird Johnson, the “human-dynamo business-woman,” and Jacqueline Kennedy, the youthful, “stunning egghead,” all got a chance to preside over the White House.1
As soon as the two major parties made their nominations in 1960, attention focused on Thelma (“Pat”) Ryan Nixon and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whom the New York Times described as “fantastically chic.” Beginning what became almost unqualified adulation of everything the Kennedys said or did, the Times announced in mid-July that Jackie had already captured “fashion’s high vote” by showing an interest in clothes that paralleled her husband’s approach to politics: both the Kennedys combined “confidence, individuality, a mind of [their] own and a knowledge of issues.”2 Photogenic Pat Nixon, already a familiar face since her husband had just completed eight years as vice president, fared less well in the Times, but crowds came out to see her campaign for the Republicans.
This prominent role for candidates’ wives marked a new development, fostered by the proliferation of television sets. By 1960, nearly 90 percent of American homes boasted at least one set. (The figure had been less than 50 percent when the Trumans left Washington in 1953.) Mamie Eisenhower had not ignored the medium—she had chatted amiably with Edward R. Murrow on “See It Now,” but the aging military wife lacked the charisma of a star. Both candidates’ spouses tried to do better in 1960, and one major newspaper emphasized how they had broken precedents: “Never before have the wives of both candidates been so active. … Mrs. Nixon sits in on strategic councils with her husband, travels extensively, and follows a busy schedule of press conferences.”3 Not many years had passed since Eleanor Roosevelt had deemed campaigning for one’s husband to be in poor taste—a view that Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower apparently shared.
Neither Jackie Kennedy nor Pat Nixon took real pleasure in the political game but each had learned, with varying degrees of success, to disguise her feelings. Pat Nixon insisted she found handshaking invigorating and the difference in crowds “interesting,” while the less experienced wife of the Massachusetts senator fought to curb her tongue on the subject. She had already angered reporters with her flip answers about wearing sable underclothing. Her lack of enthusiasm for the long hours of handshaking and small talk that went with winning primaries showed up in several ways. In the Midwest, she had reportedly baffled one audience by suggesting that everybody join in singing “Southie is my Hometown,” a song virtually unknown west of Massachusetts.4
Jackie Kennedy’s pregnancy (announced soon after her husband’s nomination) allowed her to retire to Hyannisport for the rest of the campaign, an absence generally interpreted as her best contribution to victory. Some wags suggested that the impending birth had been contrived to keep her home, and one story labeled the pregnancy a hoax: John Kennedy would wait for the election returns to come in and then turn to his wife and say, “Okay you can take out the pillow now.”5
Although Jackie’s political interest remained very low, she evidently had known the goal of John Kennedy’s ambitions before she married him in 1953. According to her cousin, John Davis, she had initially dismissed John as “quixotic because … he intended to be President.”6 John Davis concluded that Jackie found the “unity and spirit” of the Kennedy clan appealing after the “dissipation and squabbling” in her own family, but that she never completely disguised her boredom with politics—or her preference for discussing art and artists.7
If the woman whose husband would be president did not enjoy going to the people, she could perfect another campaign style which made them come to her. By remaining aloof—but glamorous and confident in her aloofness—she stirred up more interest than if she had mingled with the crowds and hugged every child in sight. Jackie Kennedy had the uncanny knack of intriguing a nation, partly because her personal history read like a fairy-tale with more than its share of sophistication, money, and villains.
Born on Long Island in 1929 to a stockbroker and his society-conscious wife, Jackie Bouvier attended the fashionable Chapin School in New York and then the prestigious Miss Porter’s in Connecticut. After her parents divorced and her mother was remarried, this time to Hugh Auchincloss, who was considerably wealthier and more successful than Jack Bouvier, Jackie and her younger sister Lee divided their time between Merrywood, the Auchincloss estate outside Washington, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island. When time came for college, she took two years at Vassar and a year in Paris before finishing at George Washington University. Her stepfather arranged through a family friend for her to go to work for a Washington newspaper and soon she had her own byline for a column, “Inquiring Photographer.”
Although many other young women in the 1950s compiled similar records of international travel, multilingual competence, and careers of their own, none of the others topped off their accomplishments with marriage to a senator who seven years later won the presidency. Jackie’s youth (she was only thirty-one when she became First Lady), her wit (she had joked with reporters about the meaning of “egghead”), and her flair for fashion all put her in sharp contrast to her immediate predecessors. She would have aroused curiosity even if she had done nothing more than play the White House hostess, but she resolved to do more.
Just weeks after John Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon, Jackie gave birth to a son, and within days, she was announcing through her social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, “sweeping changes [so the White House would become] a showcase of American art and history.”8 Following this precedent-breaking, pre-inaugural announcement, Jackie assembled a large staff, until eventually Baldrige reported that she had “forty people … in the First Lady’s Secretariat.”9 Not all of them could boast the credentials of Baldrige, who came well prepared for the job. The daughter of a congressman, she was a veteran of American embassies in both Rome and Paris, and she had been on the Kennedy staff since the summer of 1960, well before the outcome of the election was clear.
Astute observers did not fail to note how the wife of the presidentelect tailored her public statements to complement his upbeat, energetic approach to the office. While John Kennedy incorporated phrases about a “new frontier,” his wife talked of “new beginnings” and the “best” of everything. The New Yorker, in an amusing article entitled “Mrs. Kennedy’s Cabinet,” underlined the parallels when it compared the Kennedys’ appointments. Both John and Jackie had included Republicans (Letitia Baldrige and Douglas Dillon), the New Yorker pointed out, and both had rewarded early boosters (in her case, the hairdresser Kenneth). Their most important selections, however, had come slowly, with both Kennedys announcing on the same day the designer of her inaugural wardrobe (Oleg Cassini) and his secretary of state (Dean Rusk). Both Cassini and Rusk had been, the New Yorker explained, “rather dark horses.”10
As soon as her husband was sworn in, the new First Lady moved to leave her imprint on his administration. Old tensions about whether a president’s wife should stress humility in order to appeal to the people or set herself apart at a royal distance went all the way back to the Monroe administration. Jackie Kennedy quickly took her place in the elitist camp. Within a week of the inauguration, she had begun her campaign to upgrade the taste of the nation. On January 25, she met with an old friend, the artist William Walton, and experts from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Gallery to discuss plans for restoring to the White House its original furnishings.11 That same afternoon she took tea with George Balanchine, the Russian choreographer who then headed the New York City Ballet. By the end of her first week on the job, she had made clear that although she had listed her priorities in the same order as had Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower, placing husband and children first, she meant to perform in a very different way.
For a start, she meant to gain notice, and she began in what had traditionally been the province of presidential wives. Each White House family had enjoyed considerable freedom to choose what to bring into the mansion and what to throw out. Over the years many valuable pieces had simply disappeared—sold at auction or carted off as junk. Presidents did not usually involve themselves in the decisions (James Monroe and Chester Arthur were the notable exceptions), and wives could choose to reflect their own personal preferences or treat the mansion as a museum of the country’s treasures. Following structural renovations in the 1920s, Grace Coolidge had prevailed on Congress to pass legislation permitting the president to accept appropriate antiques, but so few were forthcoming that the law had little effect. Lou Hoover had attempted to stimulate interest in the White House by asking a secretary-friend to write a book on the subject, but depression times were hardly conducive to attracting donations of the Federal or Early Empire styles.
The early 1960s found Americans in a more giving mood, especially when a popular First Lady and new tax laws encouraged them in their generosity. Television did its part by making Jackie Kennedy a celebrity. During her first year in the White House, two networks produced documentaries, showing how she had popularized the pillbox hat, bouffant hairstyles, and the name “Jacqueline” for baby girls. No one could explain exactly why she had achieved such instant stardom, but one commentator suggested that she appealed to the country’s fascination with youth. The youngest First Lady since the 1890s, she underlined her youth by being frequently photographed with her two little children. More subtly, however, Jackie Kennedy offered a new model of womanliness. Here was a First Lady who seemed acquainted with Europe, informed about literature and the arts, yet attractive enough to compete with movie actresses and sex symbols. The “dumb blond” stereotypes of the 1950s appeared curiously dated, and NBC concluded its adulatory program on Jackie Kennedy with the question: “Whatever became of Brigitte Bardot?”12
This enormous popularity helped promote the campaign to furnish the White House with authentic antiques. The First Lady prevailed on wealthy individuals to contribute, assembled a professional staff to oversee the collection, and engaged scholars to give guidance and advice.13 To insure that her efforts could not be cancelled by a successor with different tastes, she secured passage of legislation making the furnishings of the White House of “historic or artistic interest … to be inalienable and the property of the White House.”14 John Kennedy feared that she might be criticized for extravagance, so it was arranged that the sale of White House guidebooks, which began July 4, 1962, would help finance the project.
Jackie Kennedy’s efforts to restore the White House (she did not like the term redecorate) received considerable publicity, including a one-hour special on national television during which millions of viewers watched her move through the mansion and describe the provenance and significance of the furnishings and artworks. Jack Gould, television reviewer for the New York Times, pronounced her an extremely able historian, art critic, and narrator, but even such an admirer as he could not fail to notice that she sidestepped the substantive questions. When narrator Charles Collingswood asked her what relationship the federal government should have with the arts, she thought it too “complicated” to answer but she reiterated her view that the White House deserved “only the best.”15
But something besides Jackie Kennedy’s interest in art came through that night. In escorting television cameras around the White House, she projected the image of a little girl, her breathy and hesitant, Marilyn Monroe–type voice moving over a very narrow pitch range. For those viewers who had seen Jackie at her television debut on the Edward R. Murrow “Person-to-Person” program in 1953, this appearance marked some progress. A new bride at that time (the program was entitled “Senator John Kennedy and His Bride”), she had said very little, and her incongruous holding of a football during the time she was on screen caused some viewers to wonder if she had anything to say.
Her participation in the televised tour of the White House in early 1962 was more than a personal milestone. Harry Truman had escorted television crews around the renovated White House in his administration, and Tricia Nixon would later perform this task for her father. Jackie did not come across as exactly professorial, but she did inject a somewhat worldly note, and she signalled the possibility that a president’s wife could bring some of her own interests to the job of First Lady, at least as long as those interests remained traditionally feminine. As a New York Times reporter observed: “It is now all right for a woman to be a bit brainy or cultured as long as she tempers her intelligence with a ‘t’rific’ girlish rhetoric.”16 This was a small beginning in altering attitudes about what constituted femininity, but it marked a change from Mamie Eisenhower’s unwillingness to show that she could think and Bess Truman’s reluctance to be seen.
Jackie rationed her appearances—even those at family gatherings. Her cousin John Davis explained how a group of Bouviers and Auchinclosses proceeded to the White House after the inaugural parade, but the new First Lady would not come downstairs to see them, even after her mother went to intercede. True, the schedule of a president’s wife at inauguration time is packed, and Jackie had given birth by Caesarean section only two months earlier, but her relatives were understandably bewildered by her treatment—to them, she was, according to Davis, “just Jackie.”17
Most Americans remained oblivious, of course, to tensions within the Bouvier-Auchincloss clan, but they could read in any newspaper that the new president’s wife had little time for the luncheons and teas that typically filled a First Lady’s calendar. Citing obligations to her children, Jackie Kennedy simply refused to go. Sometimes she sent her husband or her secretary or enlisted the vice president’s wife, but she adamantly preserved most of her time for herself. Her refusals to appear caused considerable embarrassment to those left with the task of inventing excuses for her. Katie Louchheim, an active Democratic Party regular, acknowledged that she could not persuade Jackie to meet even briefly with the consort of an important South American, although the visitor was such an ardent admirer of the American First Lady that she had brought a piece of her wedding silver as a gift.18
Although reporters later grumbled about Jackie’s failure to cooperate with them, they continued to turn out flattering copy. Even Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who wrote regularly for Redbook, climbed aboard the press’s pro-Kennedy bandwagon and suggested that the new First Lady had managed to alter Americans’ ideas about White House occupants. Allowed little freedom to voice their own opinions or expose their own tastes, most First Ladies had attempted to remain discreetly unobtrusive, but not Jackie Kennedy, who, Mead explained, had “gladdened the eye” and awakened Americans to their cultural heritage.19
Mead’s analysis, stated in such general terms, missed an important point about the Kennedy years. Several of Jackie’s predecessors, especially the young ones such as Julia Tyler and Frances Cleveland, had “gladdened the eyes” of their countrymen and women, but none had done so in quite the same way. Many of the others had contented themselves with echoing the administration line and staying close to home. Jackie Kennedy insisted on being her own person—breaking all kinds of precedents for First Ladies by going off on her own extended vacations. Previous presidents’ wives had limited themselves to dutiful family trips (such as Bess Truman’s summers with her mother and daughter in Independence) or to serious, fact-finding missions (such as Eleanor Roosevelt’s car trips to both the East and West coasts) but none gained the attention of Jackie’s luxury-packed international forays. She often vacationed away from Washington without her husband, yachting one time in the Mediterranean with Aristotle Onassis and friends, another time riding elephants in India with her sister, still another summer introducing her daughter Caroline to the sights of Italy.
Jackie evidently gave considerable attention to leaving her mark as First Lady—her correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt on the topic and her determined effort to restore the White House would argue that she meant to be no slouch—but she refused to include subservient wifeliness in her definition of First Lady. For those political wives who sacrificed all individuality in order to fit themselves into a faceless mold, she showed considerable contempt, and her reported comment that Lady Bird Johnson would crawl down Pennsylvania Avenue on broken glass for Lyndon reveals more about the speaker than the subject.20
Not surprisingly, her record involved many contradictions. Although she was sometimes pictured as a rather spoiled princess, she persisted with projects she considered worthwhile, such as the White House restoration which she had been “warned, begged and practically threatened,” she said, not to undertake.21 Aloof and unapproachable in a country that stressed friendly casualness in its leaders, she managed to remain much admired. Even the country’s historians got caught up in the contradictions in her appeal. Long after she had left the White House, one hundred American professors rated her sixth among all twentieth-century First Ladies, but in “integrity,” that supposed sine qua non of government, they rated her last.22
Even her femininity involved contradictions. Soft-spoken, yet assertive, she refused to concern herself with important national or international issues although she appeared intelligent enough to do so. Both John and Robert Kennedy underlined this interpretation of her role. Robert, the attorney general, noted approvingly that she was the kind of wife who would not worry her husband at the end of a long day with, “What’s new in Laos?” John Kennedy made the same point when he said, “I don’t have to fight the day’s political battles over again at night.”23
Like many politically ambitious men of his generation, John Kennedy had trouble taking women seriously, a trait possibly influenced by his parents’ distinction between the education of sons and daughters. The boys had the best preparatory training and Ivy League schools while the girls were enrolled in intellectually less rigorous women’s schools.24 In other important ways, the parents had set distinctly different models for their children. While Rose Kennedy had her children’s respect, she never received the homage they paid their father, whose brashness, blatant ambition, and separation of wife and family from other romantic interests contrasted sharply with Rose’s piety and dependence.25
Later revelations of John Kennedy’s sexual activities in the White House would titillate readers and inspire television programs, but little was published on the subject before his death. Even the most casual White House observer could see, however, that a different model of wifeliness accompanied Camelot. Jackie Kennedy’s decision to play something other than the loyal wife may have resulted from John’s decision not to play dutiful husband; but regardless of the causes, it paved the way for future First Ladies to act on their own. Eleanor Roosevelt had been perceived as separate from Franklin, with her own friends and interests, but Franklin’s physical incapacity partly excused the deviation. John Kennedy was not disabled, but Jackie struck out anyway, thus helping prepare the way for her successors to maintain their own individuality.
The Kennedy administration ended before the feminist movement of the 1960s got its full start, and most women’s magazines continued to present a model that included the old combination of kitchen, kids, and kindness to all. Diamonds and hope chests still dominated the thinking of most young women, while graduate schools cooperated by setting firm quotas to hold the line against female applicants. First-rate medical schools accepted only a handful of women in each class.
The description of the Kennedy years as a kind of Camleot came from Jackie Kennedy in speaking to the writer T. H. White a few days after the assassination. Although she no doubt intended to make a different point, her description aptly fitted the mentality of the young president and his circle of close advisers who resembled chivalrous and energetic knights eager to do battle. John Kennedy named no women to his cabinet—although Dwight Eisenhower had—and none to any highly visible, powerful post although Janet Travell served as one of his personal physicians. Of all his appointments requiring Senate approval, less than 3 percent went to women, about the same as in the Eisenhower and Truman administrations.26
India Edwards, a longtime Democratic Party regular, blamed the president’s “Irish Mafia” for excluding women from power, and she suggested John Kennedy viewed women as “nothing but sex objects.”27 Nan Dickerson, television correspondent and Kennedy friend, pronounced John Kennedy “the complete male chauvinist … and he thought it ridiculous to pay them the same as men.”28 Lady Barbara Ward, the British economist, told an interviewer after John Kennedy’s death: “[He] had little empathy for the trained, intelligent woman—he may have, but my impression is he hadn’t.”29
John Kennedy’s appointment of the Commission on the Status of Women is often singled out as an important step in beginning the federal government’s move into guaranteeing women’s rights, but in light of his total record, his motives seem suspect. The impetus for that move came from Esther Peterson, a former lobbyist who had known John Kennedy in his Senate days. She worked for him in the 1960 campaign and then prevailed on him to take some action on women’s rights, which he did in spite of his own reluctance.30 By appointing the commission, John Kennedy deflected pressure to do something more substantive.
Whether or not that record on women’s issues would have changed in a second Kennedy term remains unknowable. The First Lady had just returned from a vacation in Greece when she consented to make one of her rare political trips with her husband. Partly to mend Democratic fences in preparation for the 1964 election, the president and vice president went together to Dallas, where, with the assassin’s bullet, the Kennedy administration ended. Thus it happened that Lyndon Johnson, unlike other vice presidents in similar circumstances, was there to be sworn into office on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, just ninety-nine minutes after John Kennedy died.
The quickly improvised ceremony aboard Air Force One was delayed until Jackie Kennedy arrived; photographs of the inauguration show her standing, in a pink suit stained with her husband’s blood, alongside the grim-faced Johnsons. This marked an unprecedented appearance of an ex–First Lady, as though her presence might help confer legitimacy on the transition even though the details of the assassination—who killed John Kennedy and why—remained unclear. No woman widowed as First Lady had ever been present for the inauguration of her husband’s successor—even Eleanor Roosevelt did not attend Harry Truman’s inauguration in 1945 although she was still in the White House at the time.
In planning for John Kennedy’s funeral, Jackie assumed a far more prominent, publicized role than had any of her predecessors in similar circumstances. Presidential widows had attended their husbands’ funerals since 1881, and both Florence Harding and Eleanor Roosevelt had made important decisions about the services, but none of them provided quite the drama Jackie Kennedy did.
Six years earlier when her father died, she had amazed her relatives with her decisive orchestration of his funeral. She oversaw the flower arrangements, located a particularly appealing photograph, and insisted that the obituary be hand-delivered to the New York Times.31 Now turning that same determination and confident taste to her husband’s funeral, she chose the smaller St. Matthew’s rather than the huge Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was within walking distance of the White House so mourners could move toward it in a procession that combined the spirit of a western town at “High Noon” with the ritual of a Mediterranean village. Few from among millions of television viewers who watched the veiled, black-clad Jackie Kennedy walk behind her husband’s coffin would ever forget the sight. After the funeral, she stood to accept the condolences of leaders who had come from all over the world; and then, as though to assure a permanent reminder of her residence in the White House, she arranged for a plaque to be placed over the bedroom mantel recording the number of days that “John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline” had lived there. This last effort proved unnecessary, because she had stimulated such great interest in the White House and its occupants that no future First Lady could ignore her example.
Certainly the immediate successor, Lady Bird Johnson, could not dismiss Jacqueline’s popularity as inconsequential. Later the First Lady from Texas wrote that she doubted “anyone else is a star when Mrs. Kennedy is present,”32 but she set out, nevertheless, to make a record for herself. Claudia Alta (“Lady Bird”) Taylor Johnson (1963–1969) had already served a long Washington apprenticeship, having arrived there as a bride in 1934. Except for two years (1935–1937), she had spent at least part of every year in Washington while Lyndon progressed from being secretary to a congressman to congressman himself (1937–1949) and then U.S. senator (1949–1961) and majority leader (1955–1961). Despite that long acquaintance with the capital, she apparently never expected to live in the White House, and in November 1963, she described herself as feeling as though she were “suddenly on stage for a part I never rehearsed.” She may well have been the “political wife” who told Abigail McCarthy “in confidence”: “If I had known that this was going to happen to me, I would have changed my nose and my nickname.”33
The nickname had been conferred many years earlier, soon after she was born in a small town in east Texas in 1912. A nursemaid had pronounced the baby “pretty as a ladybird,” and the name had stuck. Later, when she met and married Lyndon Baines Johnson, he seized on the coincidence of their initials and proceeded to extend it to every possession or offspring—daughters, dogs, and ranches. Lady Bird confessed she had come to live with her name (friends and family called her “Bird”) although she had suffered some embarrassment when, traveling through Europe with her husband, she heard the nobility-conscious ask, “Lady Who?”
When Lady Bird Taylor was five, her mother died. Although she later insisted that her childhood was never lonely, many students of the Johnson record have concluded otherwise. A sickly, unmarried aunt assumed responsibility for much of Lady Bird’s upbringing, and although she initiated her niece into the pleasures of literature and nature, she left other areas untouched. “She never taught me how to dress or dance,” Lady Bird later remembered, and her weakness and frailty presented a model of what to avoid, rather than what to attempt. Although the aunt had genuinely poor health, Lady Bird suspected “that some of it must have been psychosomatic. She was completely mild and unaggressive, and … because I saw how inhibiting it was to her life to be so weak and full of illnesses. … I set my sights on being more like my father, who was one of the most physically strong people I have ever known.”34
Bright and quick, Lady Bird finished high school at fifteen but arranged to rank third in her class, one-half percentage point behind second place, because she feared giving the graduation speech required of the top two students. Still too young to enter college, she enrolled for an additional year at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Dallas, a choice that was hers rather than her father’s. He had not been impressed with the school but bowed to her wishes, showing a faith in a fifteen-year-old’s judgment, she later said, that she hoped she extended to her own daughters.35
Later, when she enrolled in the University of Texas, Lady Bird had more than the average student. She drove her own car, had an unlimited expense account at Neiman-Marcus, and a checkbook that required only that she fill in the numbers. Yet hers was neither a glamorous nor luxurious life. She wore her aunt’s cast-off coats and never emerged as a belle at parties, showing early evidence of both the shyness and spending habits that she retained through adulthood. She continued to shop for “seconds” in linens long after she became a multimillionaire. For John Kennedy’s funeral, she reportedly borrowed rather than bought the requisite black attire.36 Although she liked to characterize herself as “careful [with money] only to the point of not liking to see waste,”37 even her kindest supporters used stronger terms. Nan Dickerson, the news correspondent, described her friend Lady Bird as “both very rich and very frugal.”38
This carefulness extended beyond money to other areas of young Lady Bird’s life. Having completed requirements for her liberal arts degree at the University of Texas, she remained another year to earn a journalism degree as well, and just to make sure that she had prepared for all contingencies, she perfected her typing and stenographic skills. It would be difficult to contrive an education for an American woman in the 1930s that prepared for more eventualities than the one that she worked out for herself. She had hoped to become a newspaper reporter but carefully enrolled in courses that would qualify her for a teaching certificate, not because she ever wanted to teach but because she hoped to go to some faraway place “like Alaska or Hawaii.”39
A woman as careful as that might be expected to proceed very cautiously in choosing a husband, but after years of plotting to get herself out of small-town Texas, Lady Bird Taylor made the most important decision of her life in uncharacteristic haste. Following a two-month courtship, carried on mostly by mail and telephone between her home and Washington where Lyndon Johnson worked, she married the tall, overpowering Texan who, she later admitted, resembled her father in many ways.40
Twenty-six-year-old Lyndon, then employed as Congressman Kleberg’s secretary, had been visiting his home state when a friend introduced him to Lady Bird and he immediately engaged in a courtship which she herself described as “whirlwind.”41 He arranged a date with her at the earliest possible moment, which happened to be breakfast the next day, and then regaled her with every detail of his life story: how he had come from a poor family, worked his way through Southwest State Teachers College, taught briefly, and then taken a job in Washington. He even told her how much life insurance he carried. Lady Bird admitted she was impressed. “I knew I had met something remarkable,” she later said, “but I didn’t know quite what.”42
Two months after that first encounter, Lyndon returned from Washington to marry her and, even though she remained unconvinced, he loaded her in his car, told her “now or never” and started off towards San Antonio. Her Aunt Effie had counseled caution, but Lady Bird’s father had warmed immediately, telling his daughter: “This time you brought home a man.”43 In spite of the fact that her aunt “was scared to death” for Lady Bird, the marriage took place on November 17, 1934. Even the bride conceded it was “kind of whacky. You know some man comes in and wants to marry you, and you’ve only known him two months.”44
After a short honeymoon, the Johnsons settled in Washington and Lady Bird, at twenty-two, began what she later described as her education in politics. She had not previously shown any interest in the subject but Lyndon proved a persuasive teacher. He brought home a list and told his bride: “I want you to learn the names of all these counties—. . . [the ones] my boss, Congressman Kleberg, represents. These are the county seats. These are the principal communities in each county and one or two leaders in each. Whenever you travel around with me; when we get to this town, you want to know … .”45
At home, Lady Bird learned that a political wife had other responsibilities as well. Their small Washington apartment became “open house” for any of Lyndon’s political friends—and for those he hoped to bring into that category. For a woman who had never cooked a meal, she learned fast, not only to prepare food for her husband but also for whatever number he brought with him unannounced. And she did it all on a minuscule budget. When Lyndon’s salary totaled only $265 a month, he took $100 for his car, insurance, and other personal expenses, leaving her $165 to pay for everything else, including an $18.75 savings bond every month.46
When a Texas congressman died in 1937, leaving his seat vacant, Lyndon decided to try for it. Lady Bird borrowed against her inheritance, still under her father’s control, to stake him to the race. Although Robert Caro, one of Lyndon’s biographers, later concluded that the campaign cost many times the $10,000 that Lady Bird put up for it,47 she took much of the credit for financing it, and she admitted that she carried with her the relevant bank withdrawal slip until it became too faded to decipher. Lyndon’s campaign manager later recalled how Lady Bird had attempted to use her financial support as leverage to influence how that first political race was run: “She came and told me that she was helping pay for this campaign and she wanted her husband to be a gentleman. She didn’t want him to [speak out against the other candidates.]”48
In the end it was more than Lyndon’s victory in 1937 that drew Lady Bird to politics. She found her husband more vibrant and exciting during that first difficult race for Congress than ever before or after, and she loved being part of it all, if only from a back seat. She lacked both the confidence and the inclination to campaign openly and such participation would have been highly unorthodox in Texas at that time. Although the state had elected a woman governor in 1924, she had been a stand-in for her husband, who had been impeached, convicted, and removed from the same office.49 Candidates’ wives still stayed in the background in the 1930s and 1940s, and one senator’s wife pretty much set the standard. When asked if she campaigned for her husband, she replied: “No, indeed. … I just go along with Mr. George and sit on the platform to show them I don’t have a cleft foot.”50
Lady Bird Johnson might never have moved beyond such a definition of her role had not the war intervened. Lyndon Johnson had represented Texas’s 10th Congressional District a little more than four years when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Within hours, he asked to be assigned to active duty, at an officer’s pay which was one-third what a congressman earned. Lady Bird took charge of his office and managed it without compensation until he was called back, along with other congressmen, a few months later. She frequently singled out this period as a turning point in her life, because it helped her understand her husband better, but more importantly, it gave her confidence that she could do things on her own. She attended to the needs of Lyndon’s constituents (a word written with a capital “C,” she sometimes said) as though they were her own, providing detailed answers to their inquiries and escorting those who came to the capital to see the tourist sites. Although she never showed an interest in holding office herself, one aide judged that she could have defeated Lyndon in an election for his job.51
Rather than setting out on her own, Lady Bird played the supportive wife—a designation that in this case involved financial support. Her own modest inheritance would never have financed Lyndon to the top of the political ladder, and elective office itself paid little. The Johnsons then set out to make the money that would support them during his career in government. When an almost bankrupt Austin radio station went up for sale in late 1942, Lady Bird took more of her inheritance, borrowed an additional $10,000 from the bank and bought the station. The former journalism student explained that she and her husband had always wanted to own a newspaper but could never afford to buy one so they settled for a radio station instead. She moved to Austin for half a year to oversee staff changes and help select programming, and by the time she returned to Washington, the station showed a small profit. When time came to license a television station in Austin, her KTBC was the only applicant, a situation later students of the subject found intriguing. Hard evidence that federal agencies favored the Johnsons over competitors is difficult to assemble, but David Susskind later voiced the objections that many people shared with him when he queried Jack Valenti on the matter, “If you wanted a station in Austin and you knew that a Senator’s wife wanted one too, wouldn’t that be enough to kind of scare you off?”52
As television gained popularity and technical sophistication, the revenues of Lady Bird’s Texas Broadcasting Corporation skyrocketed and the market reached beyond Austin. When asked about her phenomenal success, Lady Bird attributed it to timing and a good staff, saying her family had entered the field just as the industry underwent great expansion and they had profited from the work of an exceptionally astute group of employees. She suggested that her own role in management of the stations had been exaggerated,53 and evidence suggests that Lyndon maintained a close, protective eye on what happened to the corporation, even after he became Senate Majority Leader.54
It would be wrong, however, to conclude that she functioned merely as a figurehead for the empire-building of her husband, whose political aspirations made too close identification with the company unwise. She continued to review weekly packets of information on the corporation all her Washington years (until the presidential period when the holdings were placed in trust),55 and after Lyndon’s death, she resumed an active role in the corporation. The family ranch was turned over to the National Park Service before Lyndon’s death, because he apparently decided that his wife would not want to manage it, but the considerably more valuable broadcasting empire remained under family control. After 1977, when her business manager died, Lady Bird increased her role, and when an interviewer asked how it felt to be “back as a business-woman,” Lady Bird answered that it had happened in a way that she had not anticipated, but that she was “enjoying it.”56 Her daughter Luci remarked in 1984 that she had never appreciated her mother’s business acumen until she sat with her on corporation boards and understood how hard she had worked “to build up a family business for us all.”57
While marriage to Lyndon may have pushed Lady Bird to meet new challenges, such as buying a radio station, it had its trying side as well. He frequently berated his wife in front of others, criticizing her clothes or her makeup, but when he chided her, “You don’t sell for what you’re worth,” she chose to hear the compliment in the remark rather than the censure.58 Robert Caro, in his book on Lyndon, reported that the criticism started as soon as the marriage ceremony had ended. On the first day of their honeymoon, the Johnsons stopped to visit old friends, and as soon as they sat down to talk, Lyndon noticed a run in Lady Bird’s stocking and told her to go change. When she hesitated, evidently embarrassed, he insisted that she leave the room immediately.59
Later Lyndon’s list of “Don’ts” included full skirts and T-strap shoes because he thought they made her look fat. She dieted and exercised because he made no secret of his preference for svelte women, and she wore the reds and yellows he liked and struggled with high heels even though she admitted she “hated them [and] always felt I was going to fall down and that … people weren’t really meant to wear high heels, the Lord didn’t fix the foot that way.”60 Rather than complaining, she insisted, in the manner of a diligent student defending the excesses of an overzealous teacher, that his likes were her likes: “What pleases Lyndon pleases me.”61 She pointed out that she grew because of his demands, and she later told an interviewer: “I think we were a whole lot better together than we were separate.”62
The petite woman who had, one friend said, the “touch of velvet and the stamina of steel,”63 found few critics except those who disdained her unfailing loyalty to her husband. Even Lady Bird once admitted that her view of her role might be too traditional for some tastes: “I really wanted to serve my husband and serve the country, and if that sounds—geesy, well … “64
This was no easy assignment she set for herself, and reporters marveled at how she managed. Lyndon Johnson could be exceptionally coarse; one journalist reported how Lady Bird had sat through a 1960 press conference, head held high and appearing not to hear a word, while Lyndon announced to the assembled group that his sleep the night before had been interrupted by some “vigorous activity.” He winked to underline his meaning and then suggested that dubious reporters could check with Lady Bird.65 Her silence should not be mistaken for approval or acquiescence, and she later told an interviewer: “I thought his jokes were—his language was too—it did not please me.”66
Lady Bird learned to accept Lyndon’s raucousness and his chiding as well as his continuing use of their home as an extension of the office. Marvella Bayh, the spunky wife of the Indiana senator, recalled that Vice President Johnson had taken her and her husband to The Elms, the Johnson home in 1963, soon after the Bayhs arrived in Washington. “He went from room to room, opening doors and calling out,” Bayh wrote in her autobiography, “and then finally he opened a door and there was Luci in her bathrobe with her hair in rollers. “She greeted us with a big smile,” Bayh wrote, “as if she were accustomed to having her bedroom door thrust open to admit strangers.”67 Nan Dickerson remembered that Lyndon once called Lady Bird from an Austin airport saying that he was bringing home nine reporters for the weekend. When they arrived an hour later, everything was prepared for their comfort.68
More than household management was involved in Lady Bird Johnson’s political education. After Lyndon accepted second spot on the Democratic ticket in 1960, she took speech lessons and then traveled 35,000 miles in two months to speak to voters.69 Before 1960, Lady Bird’s work for Lyndon had been within the traditional woman’s sphere—telephoning, stuffing envelopes, and shaking hands at tea parties—but her new role, as wife of the vice president, imposed other demands. Because Jackie Kennedy frequently refused to appear on ceremonial or political occasions, Lady Bird substituted, and one Democratic party official pronounced her “more than generous” with her time.70 Sometimes this meant preparing in only a few hours to speak to large audiences; when Lady Bird filled in for Jackie on national television, one reporter deemed her “Washington’s Number 1 pinch-hitter.”71
In November 1963, when Lyndon became president, Lady Bird’s opportunities for action increased, and she proceeded to alter the public’s expectations of what a First Lady might do. Much of what she did is detailed in her book, A White House Diary, which resulted from the tapes she made during her husband’s presidency. It was the most complete record of a First Lady’s tenure since Eleanor Roosevelt turned out her daily columns.
Comparisons between the two women came quickly, with many observers noting that both grew along with their husbands’ political successes to personalities of their own. The fact that both women began their marriages as shy, supportive helpmates should not obscure, however, important differences between them. Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird did not thrive on the controversies inherent in politics, and she disapproved of First Ladies who involved themselves in issues that might divide the country.72 Lady Bird kept her views on civil rights and Vietnam to herself, and she never sought an individual constituency for herself. Nor did she pursue a political or diplomatic career in her own right. After her husband’s death, she withdrew from public life and ventured out only when her son-in-law, Charles Robb, sought help. It had all been fun, she said, and she had learned a lot but “Politics was Lyndon’s life, [not mine and] 38 years were enough.”73
While Lyndon lived, his ambitions always came first with Lady Bird, and she put all her energies into helping him. He could have won the 1964 election without carrying states below the Mason-Dixon line, but his wife volunteered to campaign there because she did not want to lose those states “by default.”74 Many southerners had vigorously opposed President Johnson’s stand on civil rights and any move by him to change their minds seemed doomed to failure, but his wife’s campaigning was something else. On a train dubbed the “Lady Bird Special,” she wound her way out of Washington into the Carolinas and over to New Orleans, giving forty-seven speeches along the way.75 Assisted by daughter Lynda for the first two days and then by Luci, she enticed local politicos to join her (although many of them would have balked at being photographed with the president.) Because they could pass off an appearance at Lady Bird’s side as simple chivalry, one after another recalcitrant Democrat climbed aboard. Some of the holdouts sent their wives.
Lady Bird did not meet individuals to bargain on specific matters—her husband’s staff had come along to perform that task—but in her deep Texan accent she pleaded with crowds of southerners to understand that her husband was one of them. When hecklers tried to out-shout her, she waited a moment and then said, “Now you’ve had your say. Will you give me mine?” “There will always be somebody in the audience,” she later pointed out, “who will say, ‘that’s fair.’”76 For a woman who had always hated giving speeches, she did remarkably well. When the trip ended, just about everybody agreed that she had helped win votes for Lyndon—the disagreement came over how many. Making the president’s wife appear all the more courageous, her Republican counterpart in that election took only a traditional handshaking role.
After Lyndon Johnson achieved his own clear victory in 1964 and held the presidency in his own right, Lady Bird resolved to do more for the success of the administration. The history of presidents’ wives taking on causes for themselves went back almost ninety years to Lucy Hayes’s temperance stand. Ellen Wilson had lent her name to a housing bill, and Eleanor Roosevelt had assisted artists, women, blacks, and other groups she judged in need of her attention. Most First Ladies had contented themselves, however, with supporting non-controversial charities. Lou Hoover had become publicly associated with the Girl Scouts, and Bess Truman spoke up in behalf of the Cancer Society. Jackie Kennedy’s White House restoration had attracted so much favorable publicity that Lady Bird perceived a public expectation that she should do more than sit in the White House, and she set out to find a cause of her own.
Choosing an area in which she held a deep and lifelong interest and one in which her staff believed Lyndon would not interfere, Lady Bird Johnson launched her “beautification” project. The interest went back to childhood and lasted into retirement so it was not contrived for the moment. She frequently said that she enjoyed most those hours of the day just before sunset when she drove around the family ranch. After Lyndon’s death, she spent most of her energy on wild-flower preservation. It was a devotion, her daughters noted with some exasperation, that had not been passed on to them—“It did not come with the genes.”77
The early 1960s offered a propitious time for encouraging Americans to care more for their environment. Rachel Carson’s book, describing a “silent spring” when birds could not sing and trees could not green because of the effects of harmful chemicals, was published in 1962, the year before Lyndon became president. The First Lady’s campaign to capitalize on that concern was named “beautification,” even though she disliked the term and called it “cosmetic and trivial [sounding] … and … prissy, [but] try as we would we couldn’t come up with anything better.”78 First Ladies had traditionally concerned themselves with the appearance of the capital, but Lady Bird went further than the others. Unlike Helen Taft, who arranged for the planting of the cherry trees, Lady Bird persisted in linking natural beauty with the quality of life, and she attributed problems of crime and juvenile delinquency, in part, to the ugliness in which people lived. Contests sponsored by her Committee for a More Beautiful Capital rewarded neighborhood participation, and she lauded historic preservation that linked people with their past.79 Her beautification efforts did not stop in Washington—she went national—and in thousands of miles of traveling around the country, she planted trees, shot rapids, and urged people to care more about the world they would pass on to their children. Headstart, an education program for preschool children that Congress initiated in February 1965, stayed on her agenda and she became its Honorary Chairman, but for most Americans she was permanently associated with environmental concerns.
Some issues, perceived by the public as “soft” because they directly touch people’s lives—matters such as aging, care of foster children, education, the arts and the environment—are often relegated to insignificant spots on the president’s agenda. Deep concern and caring, not commonly associated with strength and power in American politics, tend to fall more within the responsibility of a surrogate of the president, often a wife or daughter. When visiting orphanages and homes for the aged, planting trees, and sitting in on kindergarten classes cannot command high priority on the president’s schedule, a spouse can substitute, and each First Lady since 1963 has chosen a project from within these categories. Foreign policy questions, defense strategies, labor reforms, and banking practices are not likely choices for presidents’ wives’ projects.
To conclude, however, that the “soft” issues are trivial would be wrong. In many cases, they concern people more directly than do international confrontations and bureaucratic regulations. Before writing off Lady Bird Johnson’s efforts as a contrived publicity stunt or as innocuous garden-club-lady work, it is important to remember that she appropriated for herself one of the few areas of the administration in which she would have been permitted a significant role of her own. Her husband gave no evidence of consulting with her on troop buildups, harbor mining, or bombings in Cambodia. But even Lyndon Johnson would have agreed that a successful administration had many parts and that people could not think about Vietnam all the time (although by 1968, it may have seemed to him that they did). Sometimes their minds moved to the polluted streams and the need to improve classrooms for their children—areas in which an additional spokesperson for the administration could be of help.
Lady Bird Johnson was particularly suited for this role because she appeared naturally more concerned about people’s feelings than he was. When it came time to defend her friends, she sometimes acted on her own without clearing the matter with Lyndon. Her public announcement in behalf of Walter Jenkins is a case in point, although some accounts of this episode have her seeking the president’s approval. Jenkins, who had worked for the Johnsons since the 1940s and whose wife and children were close to the Johnson family, was arrested in a Washington men’s room on a morals charge just weeks before the 1964 election. The president, in New York for a speech, remained silent until he could assess his options and the possible consequences, but Lady Bird responded immediately. J. Russell Wiggins, then of the Washington Post, recalled her decisiveness: “All other times she would have followed Lyndon to the guillotine if it were necessary [but this time she acted on her own, summoning me to the White House] and in [she] came. My God, she was like a vessel under full sail. She came into that room, and she issued a statement declaring full loyalty to Walter Jenkins. She read it, and she said she wondered if we’d print it.”80
When Lady Bird turned that same decisiveness to environmental issues, she knew she would not find unanimity on a solution. On a factfinding trip with friends outside the capital, she had been appalled by a “tunnel of filling stations, billboards, neon signs and dilapidated little buildings.” Yet she understood they had a purpose and a right to be there: “These enterprises are conveniences for people and this is private enterprise. What is the answer?” she pondered in her diary.81 Although few Americans would stand up to defend large billboards and junkyards that lined the highways, little agreement appeared on who should pay for their removal. What constituted “fair” compensation for billboards erected many years earlier, and what was the role of the federal government in dictating to the states in such matters?
The highway beautification program was promoted on many fronts. Federally sponsored conferences on the subject began in early 1965, and regional meetings were scheduled to involve governors and city officials. The administration prepared drafts of several bills on the subject, and Lady Bird went to work lobbying. She telephoned congressmen and urged her friends to do the same. Guest lists for White House dinners and receptions reflected an interest in enlisting votes, and when Lady Bird spoke to members of the Associated Press, she encouraged editorials on the subject. Reporters who followed her suggestion received a personal thank-you. Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s chief of staff, recalled that she had put on her “best perfume and [gone] to Capitol Hill to call on members of Congress I knew. We needed every vote we could get, for the billboard lobby was active and well-heeled.”82
The president pressured the House Rules committee to report the measure out (which it did by a seven to six vote) and then he urged the House to act during a night session on October 7. Notwithstanding some grumbling about the measure being a present for Lady Bird, the Highway Beautification Act became law in October 1965. It provided federal money for states that controlled billboards and junkyards along noncommercial highways. States that failed to comply with the new law within two years risked losing 10 percent of their federal allotments. Three-quarters of the compensation to billboard and junkyard owners would come from Washington. Additional money was authorized for landscaping and roadside development, but it would come from the Treasury instead of the Highway Trust Fund so as not to jeopardize new road building. Neither the president nor the First Lady conceded that the law went as far as they would have liked, but it marked a beginning.
Lady Bird’s association with the Highway Beautification Act was not unprecedented—and the reaction was predictable. Cartoons featured her as they had once pointed to Eleanor Roosevelt’s activities—one picture showing a maze of highways running through a forest, with the caption, “Impeach Lady Bird.” Criticism remained light-hearted, however, and she wrote in her diary, “Imagine me keeping company with Chief Justice Warren! [whose impeachment had been sought by some right wing groups.]”83
The busy First Lady was everywhere. In addition to the more than 700 various appearances, she gave 164 speeches while her husband was president.84 Nineteen “women-doer” luncheons recognized other achievers, and it was during one of these luncheons that the singer Eartha Kitt made her much publicized attack on Lady Bird because of the president’s failure to wind down the war in Vietnam. Kitt waited until Lyndon had made a brief appearance and then left before she lashed out at Lady Bird. Young Americans understandably turned to crime, according to Kitt, because they felt hopeless about their future in a country that offered few jobs but drafted young men for war. Only Kitt knows whether her attack on the president’s wife resulted from her perception that power was shared in the White House or from an entirely different conclusion that Lady Bird was weaker and more vulnerable than the president. Regardless of the motivation, Kitt’s outburst put the president’s wife on the spot, requiring her to reply in a situation that was widely reported. Thus she was drawn into a controversial area whether she wanted to be there or not.85
Lady Bird underlined her prominence by appointing a larger and better-trained staff than any previously seen in the East Wing of the White House. Liz Carpenter, a Texas newspaperwoman who had arrived in Washington about the same time as Lady Bird, served as press secretary and head of the first Lady’s staff. The social secretary, Bess Abell, daughter of Kentucky senator and wife of the assistant postmaster general, could hardly be expected to run her operation without directing a seasoned eye to the political implications. The First Lady’s press section of six full-time employees, under the direction of an experienced Washington reporter, represented quite a change from the preceding administration. A team of four handled details of the social secretary’s office, and another four answered correspondence. Two staff members dealt only with beautification issues, and even this entourage did not complete the team since others came from the president’s wing to work on temporary assignments.86
Expertise became as much a mark of the East Wing as of the West. Unlike Jackie Kennedy who liked to scrawl long memos on legal pads, Lady Bird was a remarkably well-organized businesswoman and ran her side of the White House in the manner of a chairman of a large corporation. One aide, who worked for both her and Lyndon, judged her wing more efficient than the president’s.87 Leaving details of flower arrangements and menus to assistants, she was tutored on the issues by the best advisers available, including McGeorge Bundy and members of the Council of Economic Advisers.88
The successful combination of energy, organization, and experience won Lady Bird many admirers. Within two years of moving into the White House, observers pointed out that she had altered the job. “What Lady Bird Johnson has done,” Meg Greenfield wrote in the Reporter, “is to integrate the traditionally frivolous and routine aspects of the East Wing life into the overall purposes of the administration and to enlist the peculiar assets of First Ladyhood itself in the administration’s behalf. They are assets no one fully understood until Mrs. Johnson moved into the White House—or at least no one fully understood their potential political clout.”89
By the time Lady Bird prepared to leave Washington in early 1969, James Reston, the syndicated columnist, pronounced her “probably the most remarkable woman who has presided over the White House in this century.”90 Shana Alexander called Lady Bird “quite possibly the best First Lady we have ever had.”91 The same historians who rated Jackie Kennedy eighth among all First Ladies placed Lady Bird Johnson third—right behind the formidable Eleanor Roosevelt and Abigail Adams.92 Lady Bird may well have found her predecessor’s example daunting but it never paralyzed her.
Presidents’ wives traditionally refuse to admit they have models, and they give little credit to their predecessors. Perhaps a fear of being judged inferior to the ideal explains this ahistorical approach, or maybe it results from a lack of information. Lady Bird Johnson insisted that she never patterned herself on anyone else—she engineered her own ways to help Lyndon, but she did see some parallels beteween herself and her predecessors. They had all concentrated on their husbands’ well-being first, she noted, and tried to provide a setting in which the men could do a good job. “But from then on,” she wrote, “it’s just whatever makes your heart sing. What do you know about? What do you care about? What can you do to make this a better administration?”93
By 1968, Lyndon Johnson had to face up to his own questions about his administration because he encountered problems on several sides. The country’s monetary system appeared in trouble, and several of the nation’s cities had suffered outbreaks of violence and destruction. In the summer of 1967, National Guardsmen had been called out to restore order when rioting erupted in New York City, Rochester, Birmingham, Alabama, and New Britain, Connecticut.
The president from Texas had not ignored the fact that black and white Americans still faced very different opportunities a century after the Civil War ended. In July, 1964, he signed a Civil Rights Act, often deemed the most significant legislation of that kind since Reconstruction. It outlawed discrimination in public places, including restaurants, theaters, and hotels, and it attempted to provide for Negroes to take jobs alongside white workers regardless of the prejudices of employers and union officials. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, placed the registration of voters under federal scrutiny so that the right to cast a ballot would not depend on race. But for all these words on paper, equal opportunity was not yet a reality, and several inner cities seemed poised to explode with anger and frustration.
The subject that eventually dominated the 1968 presidential election, however, was the war in Vietnam. The United States’ involvement there in the 1950s had attracted little notice, and even at the end of the Kennedy administration when 15,000 American “advisers” served in Southeast Asia, the men and women at home paid little attention. But by the middle of Lyndon Johnson’s full term as president, the Vietnam War represented a major drain on the country’s public purse and morale. Eventually, nearly nine million Americans would serve in the conflict, and more than 47,000 would die. Televised reports of the fighting brought it very close, and in 1968, talk of a new draft system, based on a kind of lottery, threatened to involve many American homes where enlistment had not been considered. Young people redefined their career plans or left the country to avoid participating in or supporting a war they could neither understand nor justify. The president’s own advisers split over whether or not to continue support of South Vietnam against its northern neighbor and over what level that support should reach.
Still, most Americans expected Lyndon Johnson to seek a second term of his own, and he surprised them by announcing in March 1968, that he would not. The Minnesota senator, Eugene McCarthy, outspoken critic of the American policy in Southeast Asia, had already demonstrated the potency of anti-war sentiment; and Robert Kennedy, seen by many as his brother’s rightful political heir, threatened to erode Lyndon Johnson’s support in other quarters. Neither of these challengers managed to capture the party’s nomination, one being stopped by an assassin and the other beaten at the party’s convention by the incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey. In November, when the Democrat proved unable to put enough distance between himself and the less popular aspects of the Johnson record, the Republicans took thirty-two of the fifty states. Richard Nixon, who had appeared to renounce politics after his 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California, reemerged as a national leader.
Pat Nixon, who had thrived on those few years of private life, dutifully returned to full-time volunteer work for the administration, but she had to reconcile her old ideas about the job with the new models popularized by her immediate predecessors. Her entire Washington apprenticeship had been served under First Ladies Truman and Eisenhower, neither of whom moved beyond ceremonial appearances and social leadership. But styles had changed by 1969, and many Americans expected a more activist White House consort, one who employed a large staff of her own and involved herself in issues and causes.
Showing that she understood the shift, Pat Nixon tried to attach herself to a cause that would complement her husband’s agenda for social welfare measures. Before the election, she had announced that she would concentrate on adult education and job training.94 After the inauguration, she turned to volunteerism but except for one short trip to the West Coast in the summer of 1969, her efforts received little public notice. She then announced, through the Education Office, that she would spearhead a “Right to Read” program,95 and when that project produced little, she spoke of becoming “more active in the environment field.”96 The next year she widened her horizons to “improve the quality of life.”97
Some of Pat’s critics blamed her husband for her failure to identify with any one project,98 but other observers pointed out that she brought her own disabilities to the job. To ignite the country’s enthusiasm, any one of these projects needed a crowd pleaser—someone who spoke easily to large groups. Yet Pat Nixon, who could charm individuals, stiffened in front of large audiences. It was her misfortune to come into the White House at a time when leaders faced the nation through television, a medium that made her uncomfortable and one that never flattered her.
Her two immediate predecessors had often been described as distant (Lady Bird) or uncaring (Jackie) in personal encounters, but both blossomed in public appearances. Jackie Kennedy, in particular, was singled out for her icy treatment of reporters and political visitors, and Bess Truman remarked after a visit to the Kennedy White House that it was as though a “veil came down” over Jackie’s face during conversations. Yet she dazzled millions of television viewers as she conducted them on a White House tour. Pat Nixon’s veil was of a different weave—and she lowered it on public, rather than private, occasions, causing observers to characterize her as cold and unfeeling. White House aides reported that Lady Bird Johnson, even in posing with a muscular dystrophy poster child, questioned her staff on the disease, its causes and treatment, while Pat Nixon stuck to light conversation and contented herself with hugging the child and complimenting her on her dress or her smile.99
Pat Nixon’s youth, truncated like that of several First Ladies by the death of a parent, may explain some of the restraint in her personal style. For most Americans, she was quintessential Irish, because so much had been made of her name and her birth just hours before the dawn of St. Patrick’s Day in 1912. Few people realized that her mother had immigrated from Germany and was a miner’s widow with two young children when she met and married William Ryan. Later she bore him two sons and a daughter, Pat. Like many of the Europeans who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century, Kate Halberstadt Bender Ryan never lived to see her adopted country deliver on its promises. But before she died of cancer in her early forties, she had convinced her second husband to give up the dangers of mining for a more healthful, but never prosperous, small farm outside Los Angeles.
Even with the housekeeping chores that Pat assumed after her mother’s death, she continued to excel in school. She caught up, in grade level, with her two older brothers and, at the same time, took part in many extracurricular activities. When she won election to vice president of her class and secretary of the entire student body, she impressed those she worked with as masking a “strong personality” behind a “very quiet” exterior.100 “It was only after I worked with her for a while that I understood what she was doing,” the student body president later explained. “You wouldn’t know what was hitting you because it hit so suddenly. I know we’d be conducting meetings [of the student body] and I was supposed to be conducting them but it wound up that she was taking over.”101
Pat’s father died (of tuberculosis) about the time she graduated from high school. Orphaned and with little money, she earned her way by sweeping floors and working as a teller in a local bank. When the chance came to drive an elderly couple to New York, she took it, although superhighways had not yet, in 1932, smoothed the hills or straightened the curves across the continent. The couple’s old Packard performed imperfectly and she was, at twenty, she later told an interviewer, “driver, nurse, mechanic and scared.”102
For two years Pat Ryan worked in New York as an X-ray technician, and by the time she returned to Los Angeles, she had saved enough money to enroll at the University of Southern California. Before she was graduated in 1937 she had prepared herself for several careers, having earned a merchandising degree and two traditional back-ups—a teacher’s certificate and secretarial skills. She had even found work as a movie extra, but full-time jobs were scarce in the Depression years, and in the end she accepted an offer to teach commercial subjects at Whittier High School.
Little about Pat Ryan up to that time suggested the stiff, robot figure whom Americans would later caricature. Her students found her so lively and likable that they selected her to advise the Pep Committee, organized to arouse school enthusiasm.103 Robert C. Pierpoint, who later covered the White House as a correspondent for CBS, was a member of the Pep Committee, and he remembered Miss Ryan of his Whittier student days as “approachable, friendly and outgoing. She was happy, enthusiastic, sprightly. Her disposition was sunny, not intermittently but all the time. … We liked her enormously.”104
Since Whittier encouraged its teachers to take part in community activities, the new commercial subjects instructor went down to try out for a production of the local drama club. A young lawyer, back in his hometown after graduating from Duke (where his glumness had earned him the nickname Gloomy Gus),105 auditioned the same night and his attraction to the new teacher was so immediate and immense that he proposed marriage that same evening. “I thought he was nuts or something,” Pat later recalled.106 He was ten months younger than she and not yet established in his profession but he pursued her with the same diligence he turned to just about everything he did. Two years later, when she was twenty-eight years old, she accepted.
The arsenal of skills that Richard Nixon’s wife had carefully accumulated now went to develop his career. While he served in the Navy during World War II, she worked in a San Francisco bank, and when he got the chance to run for Congress in 1945, her savings helped finance the campaign.107 She contributed her considerable secretarial skills to winning that election and then to running the congressman’s office, all without a paycheck of her own.
Whenever Pat Nixon was questioned about her use of time, she emphasized (some thought excessively) her domesticity. Until 1952, when her husband ran for vice president, she did her own housework, and she once confided to reporters that whenever she had a free evening, she took down her husband’s suits and pressed them.108 Rather than talking about what she read or her views on national issues, she shared her thoughts on sewing dresses for her daughters and stitching up draperies on her home machine. Her husband emphasized the same helpmate quality in Pat when in the famous “Checkers” speech, he referred to her as a “wonderful stenographer.”
Pat Nixon retreated farther and farther from the vivacity of her youth as her husband moved up in politics. She performed as energetically as anyone on the campaign trail, but she showed more stoic determination than real pleasure, and her distaste for politics grew as the races became dirtier. In 1950, when Richard Nixon ran for U.S. senator from California against Helen Gahagan Douglas, he accused his opponent of being pro-communist and called her “Pink Lady” at a time when such a charge was particularly vicious. Douglas replied in kind, pronouncing Congressman Nixon a “pipsqueak” for whom she had “utter scorn.”109 This campaign prompted the pro-Douglas Independent Review to come up with a nickname that stuck: “Tricky Dick.”110
In 1952, when Pat Nixon watched Dwight Eisenhower abandon her husband as running mate—until he could go on national television and convince viewers that he had properly handled campaign funds—her disillusionment with politics grew. Although she encouraged Richard to make the speech that could clear him, she resented the humiliation of having to bare the family’s finances for the entire nation. As her husband put it in his Memoirs, she “lost zeal in 1952 for politics.”111 By the mid-1950s she so strongly wanted her husband out of office that she obtained a written promise from him not to run again, but after signing the pledge, he broke it four times: 1960, 1962, 1968, and 1972.112
Instead of retreating (as her nineteenth-century predecessors often did) or publicly pouting, Par Nixon dutifully accompanied her husband on every trip where her presence was requested. When Dwight Eisenhower sent his vice president on all kinds of international missions and advised him to “take Pat,” she went. In Caracas, where the Nixons were spat on, had their car stoned and the windows broken, they feared for their lives. Other trips proved less dangerous but very tiring, requiring that the Nixons leave their two young daughters for weeks at a time. Pat later estimated that she spent only a fraction of her time at home.
During her husband’s vice presidential years, Pat evolved for the public, at least, a stiff, fixed smile and perfectly coiffed hair and she began to keep herself what was frequently described as “painfully thin.” If she could not control many parts of her life, she would concentrate on those she could, and in the process she obliterated the lively high school teacher who had charmed her students. Robert Pierpoint, who had not seen her since the days of the school Pep Committee, could no believe the change. He found her tense, nervous, and drawn. Off camera, she could still be caring and warm but on film she became a “marionette,” he wrote, “playing a politician’s wife.”113 Foreign reporters came to a similar conclusion. “She chatters, answers questions, smiles and smiles, all with a doll’s terrifying poise,” a London newspaper reported in 1958 after she had visited there, “[but] there is too little comprehension. Like a doll she would still be smiling while the world broke. … One grey hair, one hint of fear, one golden tea-cup overturned on the Persian carpet and one could have loved her.”114
By the time of Nixon’s presidency, the robot had become a popular image to describe wives who erased all spontaneity to please their husbands. Ira Levin’s novel (and later movie), The Stepford Wives (1972) was only one of several attempts to treat this theme. In this particular account, mechanical figures substitute for human beings with no one the wiser because the women had repressed so completely all individuality.
Stepford husbands were successful businessmen who thought they required personality-free spouses, but politicians’ wives began to apply the robot image to themselves. When Betty Ford learned of her husband’s elevation to the vice presidency, someone asked what she planned to do. “Just wind me up and point me in the right direction,” she answered, “and I’ll be there.”115 Angelina Alioto, wife of San Francisco’s mayor, disappeared for seventeen days and returned to explain: “I’m nobody’s robot.”116 Marion Javits, who abandoned her own career because of criticism that it conflicted with her husband’s Senate work, put the matter only somewhat more subtly: “No one knows better than the woman who accompanies the man who shakes the hands how faceless one can be.”117
Pat Nixon did not employ the robot image, but her husband’s cousin, Jessamyn West, hinted at it when she reported that Pat insisted she was “never tired,” something she had in common, West pointed out, with God and machines.118 Pat included subservience as an essential part of being a good wife when she told a reporter: “A man has a right to make his own decision about his career and a woman should support that decision.”119
Richard Nixon underlined his wife’s facelessness by giving no evidence that he considered her opinions when framing his own. A longtime aide to the president admitted that he had never once heard Pat’s name mentioned.120 In his books, Richard refers to his wife’s looks or to her courage and patience but not to her ideas. When questioned by the press on whether he tried out a particular speech on her, Pat replied: “He never tries anything out on me.”121 Researchers who later sought information on her White House years were likely to receive the curtest of all refusals from Richard Nixon’s office.122
There is a long, documented record of Richard Nixon leaving his wife out of significant decisions. According to one biographer, Pat thought she had convinced her husband to refuse the second spot on the Republican ticket in 1952, but then learned while watching television that he had accepted.123 The dilemma of whether or not to try again for the presidency in 1968 was resolved on a trip he made alone, and according to one magazine writer, Pat did not receive notice of his decision for several days.124
In the White House, the president’s staff quickly picked up and exaggerated for their own reasons Richard Nixon’s evaluation of Pat’s insignificance. Jealousy between the East Wing and the president’s side is a staple of White House history, especially since the First Lady’s role has become more visible and her staff larger and more astute politically. Careers on both sides are quickly made and destroyed in the high-pressure atmosphere of the executive branch, and a constant jockeying for position reminds all participants how high the stakes are. However strong the president’s advisers believe themselves to be, they understand that the president’s wife enjoys a unique position, and part of preserving their power involves limiting hers.
The staff assembled by Pat Nixon complained of condescension from the West Wingers, especially H. R. Haldeman. The First Lady and the chief of staff made no secret of their dislike for each other—he called her “Thelma” being her back,125 and she objected to his puritanical views on smoking and drinking and to his hypocrisy in other matters.
Helen McCain Smith, an aide to Pat Nixon throughout the White House Years, reported that Haldeman was “always pushing, pushing, pushing the President to keep [Pat Nixon] away from the public, to dump her, advising [the President] not to take her on trips because he would do better on his own.”126 “I couldn’t believe that Haldeman could be that stupid,” Smith continued, “He simply did not realize her potential and her very significant assets. … Many times we would receive staff memos from Haldeman informing us that the President was about to go somewhere and we would see that the First Lady was not included.”127 Pat’s assignments were sometimes treated a jokes. Rather than building a significant spot for her in some project that would complement her husband’s work, John Ehrlichman explained that he had sent her off to “do the Indians” (visit a reservation) in order to keep her quiet and get her out of sight.128
Had she been stupid or behaved in a way that would have embarrassed the president, such treatment might be understandable, but many Washington reporters liked Pat Nixon. One of their number later wrote: “[We] found that the tense, guarded campaign wife with the rehearsed smile was in relaxed moments a warm and peppy person.”129 Another veteran of the Washington scene put it more bluntly, perhaps because she was speaking off the record. “Mrs. Nixon had these ideas,’ but [the President] wouldn’t let her do anything about them. Each time she set out to try, her side of the White House would check with his, and by the time the answer came back, it was too late.”130 For Pat Nixon’s staff, the explanation for being excluded lay in the attitudes of the president’s staff: “You wouldn’t believe the sexist attitude of some of those guys,” one of Pat Nixon’s aides told a writer, “and Haldeman was the worst of the lot.”131
Pat Nixon was thus forced to turn her most productive efforts inward—to the White House where West Wingers apparently allowed her a free hand. Helen McCain Smith noted that Pat’s contributions lay in two areas: she made the mansion more accessible (by arranging special tours for disabled and blind persons, preparing a booklet on the gardens, adding exterior lighting, and changing the guards’ uniforms to less imposing blazers); and she restored authentic antiques to the state rooms. Many of Jackie Kennedy’s acquisitions had been copies, Smith noted, and the total effect was more “frenchified” than some people would have like. Pat Nixon managed to bring in, without congressional appropriation of any kind, chairs that had once belonged to the Monroes, Duncan Phyfe pieces, and other authentic American furniture. She also restored the Map Room and arranged for the transfer, either by gift or on loan, of several important paintings of presidents and First Ladies.132 Pat, always a modest woman, played down this particular aspect of her tenure, and when television cameras came to tour the White House, Tricia provided the commentary.
Pat’s supporters noted evidence of her democratic appeal. Americans flocked to the White House and during her second year, the number of visitors broke all records.133 She chatted endlessly and tirelessly with hundreds of people, one observer noted, and “had more ways to say someone had a pretty hat than anyone I ever knew.”134 Her concern with those she called “the little guys” as opposed to the “big shots” led her to pay careful attention to the mail she received, and she insisted on an individual reply to each letter. She refused to use a facsimile of her signature, even in the face of staff arguments that no one could tell the difference. For four or five hours a day, she looked over responses that had been prepared, sending back for revisions those she deemed in need of improvement. She followed up on some of the requests herself, helping an immigrant woman, for example, with her citizenship problem. Right up to her husband’s resignation, when the White House seemed in disarray and confusion, Pat Nixon persevered with her mountain of mail, causing one writer to conclude that she had “abdicated” her First Lady role to her daughter Julie.135 Pat’s critics ridiculed her dedication as misplaced martyrdom, while her supporters thought it substantiated her promise to help the “little guys.”
Popular magazines failed to spread the word of the Nixon acquisitions, just as they played down Pat Nixon’s travel. Her daughter Julie later pointed out that her mother was the most widely traveled First Lady (eighty-three nations).136 She crisscrossed the United States many times. These could be gruelling trips, as one reporter noted when she chronicled one western visit. Pat Nixon was “pelted by rain, sleet, snow and hail [then] sat serenely through sheets of rain in an outdoor amphitheater” before proceeding on to another city where she dedicated a new industrial arts building and addressed a crowd of 5,000 young people, most of whom were not old enough to vote.137 “I do or I die,” Pat Nixon was frequently quoted as saying, “I never cancel out.”
Her White House residence ended in 1974, after a series of events connected with Watergate. President Nixon had arranged to record what went on in his Oval Office so that he would have a full account of his administration, and when he was accused of being involved in a break in at the National Democratic Party headquarters, the contents of the tapes gained importance. The burglary at the apartment building complex, known as Watergate, occurred in the summer of 1972; but not until two years later, after several of the president’s aides had been implicated, did attention turn directly and unremittingly to the Oval Office. A House Committee, appointed to decide whether sufficient evidence existed for a bill of impeachment, heard testimony in nationally televised sessions. Then opinion turned increasingly against the president. Experts testified that the tapes had been altered, and a lengthy blank spot could not be adequately justified, although the president’s loyal secretary tried to assign the blame to her own clumsy foot on the erase pedal of her office machine. By August 1974, the president’s options had narrowed to one, and he became the first president in American history to resign from office.
In his final speech as president and ever since, Richard Nixon refused to accept blame for acting improperly. For him, the culprits were news reporters who had treated him unfairly. He hinted that he might have fared better had he destroyed the tapes before they became the subject of so much attention and well before their contents were revealed. His lawyers had convinced him, he said, not to destroy evidence.
Pat Nixon, whose counsel the president apparently rejected or never sought, had reasoned otherwise, and reportedly told her friend, Helene Drown, “I would have burned or destroyed [the tapes] because they were like a private diary, not public property.”138 The First Lady’s press secretary gave corroborating evidence: “Very early, before they had become the subject of litigation, [Pat] urged him to destroy them but he did not listen. … [She] believed the whole idea of the tapes was ridiculous. They simply never should have been done.”139 Pat evidently concluded that public service did not extend to providing the material for one’s own indictment.
That she felt she had failed in this, as well as in other parts of her husband’s administration, is hinted at in statements Pat made. She frequently said that she wanted to be remembered only as the “wife of the President” but when Jessamyn West asked her how she differed from Dolley Madison or Grace Coolidge, she replied, “Does it matter?”140 On that hot August morning in 1974, when the television crews gathered at the White House to record Richard Nixon’s last words as president, she stood behind him, apparently struggling to hold back tears. In a speech so rambling that it frightened some listeners, he spoke warmly and at length about his mother whom he called “a real saint,” but about his wife, he had not one word. As the Nixons walked with the Fords, who would replace them, to the helicopter that would take them on the first leg of their trip to retirement at San Clemente, Betty Ford, seeking to make conversation, remarked on the red carpet that had been rolled out. No longer impressed by red carpets, Pat Nixon replied: “You’ll see so many of those … , you’ll get so you hate them.”141
The woman who had humbly stated how she hoped to be remembered showed in her announcements about volunteerism, literacy, and the environment, that she would have preferred to do more than play the hostess. That she failed is no doubt due to her own uneasiness in a public role and to the limited value which the president’s wing placed on her contributions. It may not be true (as reported in the Atlantic Monthly) that a White House aide overheard Pat tell her husband, “You have ruined my life,”142 but it is certainly accurate to say that reporters “observed with alarm [his] coldness.”143
The Nixon years serve as a reminder that every First Lady relies on the president to set parameters of her power and effectiveness. If he refuses to involve her in any important decisions or show that he regards her seriously, she is forced into an insignificant role no matter what her own inclinations may have been. Even the greatest ambition cannot override a veto from the Oval Office. According to Letitia Baldrige, John Kennedy “never interfered” with his wife’s White House restoration project,144 and Lyndon Johnson’s active support of the beautification project is well documented. Richard Nixon relied on his wife and daughters to help in campaigning, but their roles apparently ended—except for ceremonial appearances—as soon as the votes were counted.145 Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who insists her parents were closer than people thought, could offer only one instance of her mother’s attempting to influence policy. According to Julie, Pat encouraged her husband to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.146
Pat Nixon finished off the turbulent 1960s—a decade in which three very different First Ladies presided over the White House. Even in fiction, it would be difficult to create a more diverse trio. In the 1960 election, a patrician horsewoman from the East was pitted against a miner’s daughter from California; and the two women whose husbands shared the Democratic ticket that same year stood, if possible, even farther apart: the frugal, but rich, Texan, whose loyalty to her husband went beyond the usual bounds, and the young mother who spent considerable energy examining (on approval) expensive jewelry and paintings.
But the three women shared a great deal, too, possibly of more significance that divided them. Each had come through a troubled youth, having lost at least one parent through death or, in Jackie’s case, divorce. They had all shown exceptional self-discipline in shaping their early lives, a control that persisted into adulthood and through their marriages. While philandering and insensitivity became part of the public records of their husbands, the wives stoically carved out their own niches, and refused to disappear into obscurity or relinquish their own dignity. All very much women of their century (Mamie Eisenhower had been the last First Lady to be born in the nineteenth), they had graduated from major universities and each had worked (or prepared to do so) before her marriage, unlike their three immediate predecessors whose formal education had stopped with boarding or finishing school and who never held jobs before their marriages.
First Ladies of the 1960s were hardly isolated from what went on around them. They had come of age when more married women than ever before were working outside their homes. The White House years of Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and Patricia Nixon coincided with the beginning of a new feminist movement that redefined objectives for many women and made them less tolerant of their sisters who continued to see themselves solely in terms of their husbands’ accomplishments. A widening political consciousness, as shown in increased attention to international issues and to the method of selecting presidential candidates, helped restructure campaign strategies and draw entire families into the process of winning an election and then helping win history’s favorable account of an administration.
Perhaps most important in the redefinition of the job of the president’s wife were the new federal programs. The “New Frontier” and the “War on Poverty” extended the federal government’s role in such areas as housing and transportation (both of which gained cabinet status in the 1960s). Subjects that had once been the concern of local politicians were now discussed on the national level. When something did not suit, voters found it easy to make the capital the center of their discontent. Chartered buses headed toward the Potomac with thousands of Americans ready to demonstrate in behalf of one point of view or another. Men and women who could not volunteer their congressman’s name knew very well the address of the White House and the face of each occupant.
Television increased recognition of presidential wives and pulled them into the public arena. Jackie Kenndy’s clamorous reception in Paris caused her husband to introduce himself as the “man who had accompanied her.” Lady Bird Johnson learned to factor in demonstrators on any trip she took, and she went to sleep in the White House to the chants from anti-war protesters outside:
Hey/Hey/Hey
L./B./J./
How many boys/
Did you kill today?
Later Pat Nixon learned to walk coolly through showers of confetti, accompanied by jeers of, “If this was napalm, you’d be dead.” The job of First Lady was no longer private and ceremonial—it had moved into the public arena of matters affecting the nation’s prestige abroad and of issues seriously dividing the country at home.