Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart, and we're back with more President's Day conversations about some of the women who have occupied the White House, working often behind the scenes, very much active participants in our nation's history, often with far less fanfare and credit than their husband's got.

This hour, we're talking about Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose ascent to the presidency was marked by national tragedy, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. My guest for this conversation was Julia Sweig, author of the book Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, and host of a podcast of the same name. Here's an excerpt from that podcast featuring reflections from Lady Bird's copious audio diaries. Here she is talking about that fateful morning in Dallas.

Lady Bird Johnson: Friday, November 22nd. It all began so beautifully. After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright, and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.

Alison Stewart: Inside a dimly lit exhibit space at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, a motion sensor triggers a recording. A soft, deliberate voice fills the room.

Lady Bird Johnson: In the lead car, president, Mrs. Kennedy, and then a Secret Service car full of men, and then our car, Lyndon and me.

Alison Stewart: It's the voice of Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of Lyndon Johnson.

Lady Bird Johnson: Mrs. Kennedy's dress was stained of blood, that immaculate woman.

Alison Stewart: I was so struck by that voice and the details she managed to capture.

Lady Bird Johnson: Exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn't get somebody to come in to help her change. She says, "Oh, no, that's all right, perhaps later." Then was an element of fierceness. She said, "I want them to see what they have done to Jack."

Alison Stewart: Those are from the audio diaries of Lady Bird Johnson. Within hours, Lyndon Baines Johnson became the 36th president of the United States, and Lady Bird became First Lady, a role she quietly transformed. While able LBJ wanted to serve and heal his country, he wasn't sure about running for president in 1964. When he couldn't make up his mind, he turned to his wife, who had it all planned out as we learn in this installment of Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight with Julia Sweig.

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Alison Stewart: We heard in the intro, Julia, Lady Bird Johnson's recollections of the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the aftermath of the assassination. As you listen to the recordings, what was noticeable about her skills of observation?

Julia Sweig: Yes, her power of recall, the details she is able to muster when she herself has been through this incredible trauma and tragedy, and yet she can bring detail and emotion and pacing and story to the arc of the narration of that day, both in terms of the exact moment leading up to the assassination. When she hears the shot, the images of Jackie's body draped over Jack in pink, the experience on Air Force One.

I'll tell you, Alison, I didn't discover this until after the book had gone to [unintelligible 00:03:53], she always had as part of this political operation they were in these little spiral notebooks with her, and she took shorthand notes about everything. Well, she had one of those when they went to Dallas. On Air Force One on that flight back, she's taking notes about what she's just experienced. If you can get your head around the capacity for control that would require. When she records that first entry, she's even got her journalist's notes that give it that verisimilitude that we hear.

Alison Stewart: What were Lady Bird Johnson's early concerns as she suddenly becomes First Lady?

Julia Sweig: First of all, she's got to orchestrate with Jackie a transition in a very short period of time to have the Johnsons move into the White House, and Jackie and Caroline and John-John move out. There's the prosaic acts of that physical transfer, which is happening totally in the public spotlight, and she wants to do it gracefully. There's all kinds of pressure from the public about how responsible she is for making that happen. Fortunately, Jackie makes it very easy, and the two of them execute that transition quite beautifully.

The second is being hit on November 22nd, 1963 with the succession to the presidency of LBJ under these horrific circumstances, feels like a way of taking power that's if not illegitimate, certainly, unearned and unelected, right? Lyndon Johnson was not a very popular vice president, I should say. Stepping into Jack's shoes, stepping into Jackie's shoes, doing it because of this tragic assassination just feels like an almost impossible task for the Johnsons.

She's got to worry about LBJ's ability to step in and do it with grace and standing in a way that will-- and she talks about this a lot, unify the country and keep the country unified. Finding the narrative where LBJ and, of course, Lady Bird are seen as people who can help heal the country. That's a second huge concern of hers. The third thing is just she says this, although-- I'm not going to say it's disingenuous, but because she was so experienced, it sounds a little off to me that she was thrust into a role that she wasn't prepared for. Well, I think she really was prepared for it, but I think she did feel totally overwhelmed by having to spin so many plates at once, again, totally in public, and so quickly

Alison Stewart: In the book, we learn-- I think people have known this, but we really get a sense of how truly ambivalent LBJ was about being president and about running for the presidency in 1964, which leads to something called the Huntland Strategy memo. This is actually how you start the book, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight. What was the origin of the Huntland Strategy memo? First, tell people what it was, and then we can talk about what it means.

Julia Sweig: First, the Huntland Strategy memo is a term that I gave to a document that I found, and I'll explain why. It's a handwritten nine-page analysis that Lady Bird Johnson wrote to LBJ in May of 1964. It's in a folder at the LBJ library called "Campaign Letters, Lady Bird Johnson to Lyndon Johnson." What it is is a memo really that lays out the pros and cons of Lyndon either running in November of 1964 or announcing to the country that he's going to step down and not run for his own term in his own right at all. I renamed it just just unilaterally.

I think the naming of a document, elevating it from the word letter to strategy memo, is an attempt to give it the significance to his presidency, and to her, and their partnership that is really due. He, in May of 1964, is watching the potential already for Vietnam to derail his and their domestic policy ambitions, right? He's starting to push the war on poverty legislation, civil rights legislation is already stuck in Congress. The Kennedy war council that he inherited, that he kept on board is pushing him to escalate in Vietnam.

He can't see a way to withdraw, and he knows that escalating has huge consequences for the country, for the boys he's going to send to war, and for his presidency. He's a guy that's anxious and that ruminates and turns over every stone when he's thinking through things. He says to her, "Look, could you lay out for me this analysis? What are the pros? What are the cons? What do you think I should do?" That's exactly what she does. She concludes, she says, "Look, you can step down, and here's a draft statement that I'm going to write for you," which she writes, "of what it would feel like to tell the country that you're getting out of politics now." She's like, "You can do that, but you're too young to retire. If you go back to the ranch now and step out of the arena, you'll be miserable. By the way, so will I?" [laughs] Then she says, "What you should do is you should run in November and you'll probably win." Then in February or March of 1968-- and this is where I think this is so important to her role in shaping the arc of his presidency. "In February or March of 1968, you can announce that you won't be running for a second term." Of course, March 31st, 1968 is the day that he says to the world surprising everybody but Lady Bird and a few others that he won't be running for a second term.

The Huntland Strategy memo sets the arc of the presidency in terms of chronology and foresees the issues that the Johnson presidency is going to wrestle with just four months after they come into the White House.

Alison Stewart: How did she change the role of First Lady?

Julia Sweig: Well, first of all, I see her as the bridge from Eleanor Roosevelt to Hillary Clinton in terms of modernizing the office of the First Lady to definitively make it a part and parcel of the overall White House political operation. She brings on board a chief of staff and a press secretary who's a seasoned journalist and political animal herself, and a Texan, Liz Carpenter, who happens to have worked for Lyndon, and is somebody that LBJ and Lady Bird rely on and trust.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Julia Sweig. We're talking about her book Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight. The book repeatedly refers to her dieting and restricting her food intake.

Julia Sweig: I'm glad you picked that up.

Alison Stewart: Was this internal pressure? Was this external pressure? What was this from?

Julia Sweig: I was really stunned by the amount of references in her diary entries to her body and to her consciousness about weight. She's a public figure. Lady Bird, I should go back and say, growing up, she wasn't a fussy, traditionally girly girl. There are lots of pictures of her in overalls and she was into being in the natural environment and hiking, and stuffing herself into the costumes of the public political animal didn't come easily to her initially. Lyndon, this is mutual but to answer your question, LBJ was constantly on her case about her looks. She was constantly on his case about his as well.

I think, of course, women in that era and still today grow up with enormous pressure from the media, from men, from the gendered expectations of what we do to look a certain way, and she had totally internalized that. Since she was constantly bopping between Washington and Texas-- when they were at the ranch, they would have these fish fries and they would eat to their heart's content, play to their heart's content, and then she'd come back to Washington and say, "I've got to go back on my coffee and hard-boiled egg diet."

I don't know about you, Allison, but I grew up around women of her generation. My grandmothers for example, who were exactly the same in terms of the diet, exercise, eating maniacal sense of what they had to do to keep their bodies looking a certain way.

Alison Stewart: It reminds me of those scenes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel where she's always going to exercise class to make sure she can fit into those clothes.

Julia Sweig: No, completely. I don't know if Lady Bird was actually measuring herself the way Mrs. Maisel did, but it does have exactly that feeling.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you about this interesting moment in the book because it really plays out beautifully in the podcast of the same name. We learned that one of their most trusted members of their inner circle, Walter Jenkins, is picked up what appears to him having been looking for gay sex or gay company. He's a married man with I think six children. LBJ's team, the lawyers, Abe and all, they just want to distance themselves, but Lady Bird has a very different idea and she's very clear about it. Tell us a little bit about what she wants and then we can actually hear them debate it out in a clip from the podcast.

Julia Sweig: Okay. I think of this as the October surprise of the 1964 election when Lady Bird is campaigning in the South, Lyndon's also outside of Washington campaigning. It's October of '64, and she comes back to the White House, and as you say, Walter Jenkins, an aid of 30 years, very close personal friend, political operator, intimate with the Johnsons, has been arrested in this gay sex encounter at a YMCA near the White House. Liz Carpenter, who I mentioned, who's there, her main press aid and chief of staff and political advisor, brings this to Lady Bird.

Lady Bird calls LBJ and says, "Look, my strategy and our strategy around this ought to be that we make a very quick public statement supporting Walter Jenkins, and that we organize a job for him back in our media company in Texas, and that we essentially embrace his humanity at rather than vilify him." In the meantime, Lyndon, as you mentioned, Abe Fortas, longtime lawyer-- by then, I think is not quite yet, but he's going to be associate justice on the Supreme Court, and Clark Clifford, one of these traditional wise men of Washington DC, have told LBJ that what he should do is basically throw Walter Jenkins under the bus and distance himself as quickly as possible.

Not offer him a job, let him stay checked into the hospital, get the press to kill the story and bury this as quickly as possible because Goldwater, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the GOP candidate is going to destroy the Johnsons and Lyndon Johnson and potentially risk the election over this. Lady Bird calls him and says, "I'm going to be making a statement that's going to embrace Walter. I think we should offer him a job."

Alison Stewart: Let's play a clip of that scene from the podcast Hiding in Plain Sight.

Lady Bird Johnson: I would like to do two things about Walter. I would like to offer him the number two job at KTBC. Do you hear me?

Alison Stewart: KTBC is the Johnson's television station in Austin. LBJ, not on board.

Lyndon Baines Johnson: I wouldn't do anything along that line now.

Alison Stewart: Lady Bird knows they're not going to be able to hide from this thing.

lady Bird Johnson: I don't think that's right. When questioned and I will be questioned, I'm going to say that this is incredible for a man that I've known all these years. A devout Catholic, the father of six children, a happily married husband, it can only be a small nervous breakdown.

Alison Stewart: LBJ would rather stick to his lawyer, Abe Fortas's plan.

Lyndon Baines Johnson: I Wouldn't say anything because it's not something for you to get involved in now. Whatever you do, don't do anything while I talk to Clark and Abe.

Alison Stewart: Lady Bird has actually gotten ahead of that.

Lady Bird Johnson: All right. Abe approves of the job offer, Abe approves of the statement.

Lyndon Baines Johnson: What?

Alison Stewart: She's already called both of them.

Lady Bird Johnson: Abe approves of the job offer. Abe approves of such a statement when questioned.

Lyndon Baines Johnson: Well, talk to Clark.

Lady Bird Johnson: I must say that Clark does not approve of the latter.

Alison Stewart: Neither does the president.

Lyndon Baines Johnson: Oh, I don't see any reason to know publicly. Because then you confirm it, you approve that you're part of it, everything else. You just can't do that to the presidency, honey. I don't think you realize the First Lady can't be doing it.

Julia Sweig: By the end of this 14 minute discussion, she has moved Lyndon Johnson to embrace the strategy that she's undertaken already. I think it's a stunning indication of how much of a back and forth between the two of them there is, how much influence and power she has over him, and of her humanity and grace. She says to him in so many words if we don't do this, we're going to lose the morale and the support of our own staff. Staff whose family members were closeted or who themselves may have been closeted. She never says that explicitly, but that I think is one of the things that she's saying and he comes around.

Alison Stewart: That was Julia Sweig, who wrote the book and host of the podcast series Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight. We'll have more with Julia after a short break when we'll talk about Lady Bird's role as an advisor to LBJ and how she helped him navigate his ambivalence about holding the highest office in the land. Stick around. This is All Of It.

 

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