In the first years of Lady Bird Johnson’s marriage to Lyndon Johnson, everyone around them felt so bad for her. At parties, Lyndon would yell to Lady Bird across the room: “Hey, Bird, look how good so-and-so’s wife looks in that red dress! Why can’t you look more like her?”. Or he’d bark at her “BIRD! Bring us more biscuits!” At home, he ordered her around like a servant, and borrowed her nightgown for other women to wear to bed with him.
Lady Bird really didn’t need to put up with Lyndon Johnson — she was a smart, ambitious, financially independent woman. She had two degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, which was highly unusual for a woman born in 1912. And her dad was a very wealthy businessman. But she clung to Lyndon Johnson and put up with his bullying like a saint. She completely devoted herself to meeting his every need and whim. When things got hard, she would remind herself of the wedding vows she had made to him, 3 months after they met, without thinking about whether he was upholding his end of the vows.
As her reward, over the decades, she slowly became one of Lyndon’s closest strategic advisors and political campaigners. When he became President, she was probably his closest advisor as he navigated the Vietnam War, passed the Civil Rights Act, and introduced the Great Society to combat poverty, crime, and environmental pollution. As First Lady, she also advocated for her own policies around early childhood education and highway beautification, and represented the US at numerous diplomatic and political meetings.
Today we’re going to do something a little different: whereas our first two episodes were about women who gained a lot of power in their own right, today we’ll be talking about a woman whose power was almost entirely derived from her husband.
Lady Bird’s story is one of how a cripplingly shy girl, born in 1912 in rural Texas, was able to reach her greatest ambition to “become somebody” in the world, by attaching herself in a strategic way to a powerful man. I think her life is worth studying for a couple reasons.
First, she had a lot of political power for a woman of her time.
Second, her husband Lyndon Johnson was one of the most politically savvy people in American political history, and Lady Bird played quite an active role in aiding his rise to power—so we can learn from the strategies that the two of them employed in growing his/their political power.
Third, her power was largely derived from her husband, and, like it or not, it’s still a question for women today of whether to marry a powerful man—and potentially derive a lot of her power from his—or to strike it out on their own. If you do choose to attach yourself—whether through marriage or otherwise—to a powerful person and serve as their second in command— Lady Bird’s story shows us what it was like to be married to the most powerful and ambitious man of her time, and what the costs were.
Family and childhood
Ok, so let’s start by looking at where Lady Bird came from.
Like the two other women we’ve covered on this show, Lady Bird had a stern, ambitious, and powerful father who she greatly looked up to.
Lady Bird’s father, Thomas Taylor, was the richest man in their small Texas town. Thomas Taylor was born into extreme poverty in Alabama. One day, he fell in love with the daughter of the richest and meanest man in his Alabama town—her name was Minnie.
He told Minnie’s father that wanted to marry Minnie. And Minnie’s father laughed in his face. He said Thomas wasn’t nearly good enough for his daughter. And Thomas said, ok, i’m going away to texas, and when i come back i’ll be so rich you’ll be begging me to marry your daughter. So he went to Texas to open a general store very similar to Minnie’s father’s store. Indeed he did get really rich, and he did end up marrying Minnie. For the rest of his life, he was obsessed with being richer than Minnie’s father, but not nearly as obsessed with being a kind or faithful husband to Minnie herself.
By the time Lady Bird was born, Minnie and Thomas’s relationship was rocky. Minnie was described as being “emotionally and physically unwell.” Minnie actually died when Lady Bird was 5.
A friend tried to comfort Thomas by saying Minnie was better off in heaven. And Thomas snapped - how can you say that? What about this little girl she left behind? What am I supposed to do with her? And in that moment, 5-year-old Lady Bird actually feels such sympathy for her dad, that she resolves to be as little of a burden to him as possible.
So Lady Bird grew up really isolated, in her father’s big house. In her second-story bedroom, pine trees obscured the view out her window, and she spent a lot of time alone reading the books that her dead mother had left behind, or wandering around the woods. Her aunt Effie came to look after her and contributed to the isolated, dreamy vibe of her childhood. As Lady Bird put it, “Aunt Effie opened my spirit to beauty, but she neglected to give me any insight into the practical matters a girl should know about, such as how to dress or choose one's friends.”
Socially, she was cripplingly shy, awkward, and sort of plain-looking. She was an excellent student, but she always looked up to the girls who were more outgoing and beautiful, and she sometimes sabotaged her grades because of her shyness. There was one girl who was blonde and outgoing and also a great student, and at some point Lady Bird realized that, if she came in first and the other girl came in second in the exams, they would stop being friends - clearly the other girl was a bit jealous of her - so Lady Bird intentionally did worse in order to preserve their friendship. Similarly, at the end of high school, she again sabotaged her own grades in order to avoid having to give a valedictorian speech.
Despite being self-effacing and shy, Lady Bird had an inner strength and boldness. She was insecure about how other people perceived her, but seemed confident in her own assessment of her own worth. From a young age she was ambitious, adventurous, and determined to make something of herself. She had strong convictions about what she wanted to do with her life, and she had the intelligence and family money to make her dreams happen.
After high school, she was determined to go to college despite her dad thinking it was useless for girls. Not only that, but she persuades her dad to let her go to UT Austin instead of staying at a small girls’ college. And instead of driving to Austin, she decides to fly there, just for the adventure of it - and again persuaded her dad to pay for it. Once she lands, she decides to “put this being shy business behind her.” She makes a close group of friends, she goes out drinking, and she dates a bunch of men - one thing all of them have in common is that they’re extremely ambitious. She also takes her coursework seriously, unlike most of the other female students. She earns two degrees (in history and journalism) and decides to become a journalist, traveling around the world to cover theater and current events.
Marriage
But, before this could come to fruition, she met Lyndon Johnson. On their first date, as soon as he saw her, he jumped up, waved his hands up and down, and proceeded to talk to her with a crazy amount of energy. She’d dated a number of ambitious men before, but she felt that she’d never met anyone with Lyndon’s energy or drive. He literally proposed to her on the first date, she said maybe not yet.
Over the course of the next 10 weeks, he wooed her by talking about he wanted to read books with her, go see art and history, all these things he actually had no interest in—he won her over—and then, 10 weeks in, he made a surprise visit to her house and gave her an ultimatum: marry me now or never. So she’s obviously a bit taken aback and still not completely ready to commit, but she says, um, ok, I’ll marry you… and immediately he’s like ok great. We’ll be married tonight.
So literally a few hours later, they are in a church. Lady Bird puts on an old silk dress that she dug up. Her best friend is there, having just jumped in a car and sped over to be her maid of honor. Lyndon’s assistant presents a pair of 10 cent rings from Sears to serve as the wedding rings. She’s 22 years old, and she’s given up her career prospects to be Lyndon Johnson’s housewife.
Ok, let’s pause here. What can we learn from her story so far? If we look at her marriage purely from a career perspective, you *could say* that actually, you know, she thought she wanted to be a journalist, but more importantly, she wanted to *be somebody*, period—and along came this man with great political ambitions—and she can see clearly that he’s going places—she trusts her intuition that says she’s never met anyone with this amount of energy and drive—and so, basically, she sees an opportunity to join a rising star and decides to do it. You know, the feminist icon Sheryl Sandberg once said: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocketship, you don’t ask what seat!” In this case, the seat happened to be as his wife, which obviously makes it a bit more complicated—but stiill, I think you can look at this episode and praise lady bird for seeing a good opportunity, trusting what her gut was telling her about it—enough to commit after just 10 weeks—and being decisive in taking the opportunity.
Lyndon’s power strategies and Lady Bird’s role
Once they married, Lady Bird took on several roles to aid Lyndon’s rise to power.
First, she helped him cultivate important relationships and improved his public image. One of Lyndon’s key strategies for gaining power was to cultivate relationships with older and more important men, charm them, and convince them to help him out. Starting at a young age, Lyndon had been good at flattering older men and women; he would quite literally sit at their feet, look up at them intently, and listen with rapt attention while they were speaking. And it worked wonders — in college, he sucked up to the dean very successfully to get rare housing, financial aid, and work opportunities that allowed him to finish school in spite of his extreme poverty. People started calling him a professional son, because he was so good at inspiring paternal or maternal feelings toward him in other people.
So once he got to Washington, DC, he got to work cultivating older men. At any hour, if it happened that he managed to get a hold of an important politician, and wheedle them into having a homemade dinner at his house, he might unexpectedly call Lady Bird and demand that she have both a delicious meal ready and a gracious smile to greet them. This continued even on the weekends - Lyndon was especially good at bonding with single older men who didn’t have sons, and essentially becoming a surrogate son to them and getting them to be very invested in his career. A key part of this strategy was recognizing that, while most politicians went home to their families on the weekends, these single men had nowhere to go, and would happily accept an invitation to a homemade meal. Soon after their marriage, Lyndon started inviting Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn - a single man in his 50s - to weekly Sunday brunches at him and Lady Bird’s home.
So Lady Bird, who’d always been so shy, and waited on by servants her whole life, learned to charm Sam Rayburn with her genuine warmth, slight shyness, and Southern cooking. She became a big reason that Rayburn would come over so often to the Johnsons’ home, because Lyndon himself was.. Well, he was known from a young age for being a liar, and just generally fulfilling the stereotype of the oily politician. And you know, Sam Rayburn is Speaker of the House; he’s not a dean of some random small-town college, he sees through these things. So Lady Bird did a lot to help build trust between Rayburn and the Johnsons. In addition to charming Rayburn herself, she got good at smoothing over tense moments—if Lyndon said something offensive, she would say something to put them at ease again.
Rayburn aided Lyndon’s rise in the House, and helped him ascend to the Senate. As a Senator though, Lyndon started to cultivate a new single, childless man: Richard Russell. Richard Russell of Georgia, proud descendent of southern plantation owners, passionate believer in racial segregation, was the leader of the powerful Southern bloc in the Senate, which again and again voted down and filibustered any attempt by other politicians to pass Civil Rights legislation. For someone like Lyndon, who desperately wanted to become president one day but was also from the South, this presented a double bind. Any Southern Senator had to join the Southern bloc and help it prevent Civil Rights legislation under Richard Russell’s leadership, or else they would lose the support of their home state and thus be unable to even maintain their position in the Senate, let alone think about the presidency. But because the rest of the country was becoming so passionately in favor of Civil Rights, any Senator who opposed Civil Rights would inevitably lose on the national stage. As long as this status quo held, everyone believed it was impossible for a Southerner to ever become president.
But Lyndon Johnson did it. Not only that, but he actually passed the Civil Rights Act as a Southern president. And the way he did it was by cultivating such a strong relationship with Richard Russell, that Russell essentially covered for him and allowed him to maintain plausible deniability on his Civil Rights stance, such that he could keep growing his power both regionally and nationally.
Of course, this relationship involved much more than just inviting Russell over for dinner every Sunday, but still Lady Bird did an excellent job playing the role of surrogate daughter-in-law to him.
Lady Bird’s quiet charm had a similarly positive effect on Lyndon’s public image. Once she started appearing with him on the campaign trail, voters who met her would often say things like, I don’t know if I agree with Johnson’s policies, but I’d do anything for that sweet Lady Bird. She, the girl who was so terrified of giving a valedictorian speech at her rural high school, became such an effective campaigner that, eventually, during Lyndon’s 1964 presidential campaign, she did a bunch of solo campaigning without him. This was right after Lyndon had passed the Civil Rights Act to grant equal rights to black Americans, and people in the South were furious—especially since Lyndon and Lady Bird were Southerners and had seemingly betrayed the South in the cause they cared most about. Against this backdrop, Lady Bird traveled through the South in a chartered train, at one point giving 45 speeches over four days. At most stops, people came to boo and heckle her, spitting at her and trying to drown out her speaking voice. Lady Bird dealt with each instance in a graceful way, and even spun it in her favor—the south was really big on manners and courtesy toward women, and she was able to basically dunk on the anti civil rights people for violating southern manners toward her, a woman, in a way that LBJ himself obviously could not have done.
On her own, Lady Bird was shy and sweet, unlikely to be a main character. But as Lyndon Johnson’s ally and foil, she excelled. Lyndon’s brashness brought them both into the spotlight; once there, she made sure they could stay.
2 Serving as his business partner
In addition to smoothing over his relationships and public image, Lady Bird became a savvy business partner.
Three years into their marriage, Lyndon wanted to run for Congress. But he was dirt poor and didn’t have the money to launch a campaign. So Lady Bird called her father and convinced him to let her use a big chunk of her inheritance money to finance Lyndon’s campaign. And Lyndon won.
A couple years into his term, WWII broke out, and Lyndon had to go serve in the army for a year. During that year, Lady Bird ran his entire Congressional office.
This was no mean feat—Lyndon was extremely demanding with the way he ran his office. His motto was that if you do absolutely everything possible, then you will succeed—and Lyndon could not stand failure. He was one of the most hardworking people on Capitol Hill. Even as a congressional assistant, he would literally sprint to his office on Capitol Hill every morning at the crack of dawn, eager to get to work as soon as possible. And he’d be the last person in the office, long after the sun had set.
He had a policy that his office must answer every single letter that a constituent sent in, and try to do them any favor that it possibly could. For example, a Mexican-American woman once complained that her husband had died fighting in WWII, but the local funeral home wouldn’t conduct his funeral due to racism; LBJ’s office arranged for her husband to instead be buried as a veteran in Arlington National Cemetery. This kind of thing obviously took a lot of time and effort, but it really endeared him to voters. Of course, he was also extremely demanding that his assistants work around the clock to make all this happen, and bullied them into ensuring that they executed every task perfectly.
On top of this, to grow his power and ensure that he had the leverage to do all these favors for his constituents, he cultivated close relationships with rich political donors. He personally got them to donate huge sums of money to the party, and then he would distribute that money to his fellow Congressmen who were running for re-election. That way, once these other politicians were re-elected, they would owe Lyndon favors.
So Lady Bird, at age 29, with almost no work experience, had to step into Lyndon’s shoes and take over all of this while he was away at war. And she proved extremely competent at all of it. She didn’t have Lyndon’s style of bullying his employees, but she had steely determination and willpower underneath her softer manners, and she never hesitated to roll up her sleeves to do the dirty work, or to work long hours. Lyndon’s employees and colleagues quickly learned to respect her. Increasingly, when she and Lyndon discussed his office, he would ask her for her input and defer to her opinion.
When he got back from the war, Lady Bird was relegated back into her old role as housewife — but her yearlong stint had earned her a good deal of respect and self-confidence. A year later, the Johnsons spotted an investment opportunity in the form of a radio station in Austin — they felt that they could buy the radio station and make it more profitable and successful. Once again, Lady Bird used a big chunk of her inheritance—$17,000, which was a lot back then—to purchase the station, and she personally took over the day-to-day operations and management of the station. With the help of Lyndon’s political connections, it made them millionnaires within a couple years.
Lady Bird needed to strategize, on her part, to keep the marriage
On her own part, Lady Bird had to do some politicking at home. Lyndon Johnson was not a faithful husband. He had affairs with many women, most of whom he wasn’t actually in love with—but occasionally he really would fall for a mistress.
In particular, there was this one woman, Alice Glass, who Lyndon fell deeply in love with; he talked seriously about divorcing Lady Bird to marry Alice. And Alice was, well, where do I begin—the photographer Arnold Genthe, who photographed the world's most attractive women for Vanity Fair, described Alice as the "most beautiful woman" he had ever met: six feet tall, slim, strawberry blonde hair reaching down to her waist. The multimillionaire Charles Marsh abandoned his wife and kids to throw himself at her feet, and built her a gorgeous mansion. Alice hosted these incredible dinner parties of intellectuals at this beautiful mansion and always sparkled at the center of the conversations—she was intelligent, witty, and well-read. And you know, Lady Bird had always been able to take pride in her intelligence—Alice was intelligent and even more well-read than her—and lady Bird had always felt insecure about her looks and social skills—which alice had in spades—and then of course alice was having this intense emotional and physical affair with lady bird’s husband—so really I can’t imagine how hard this must’ve been for her.
But Lady Bird was determined to hang onto her seat. The way that Lady Bird responded to their affair was by working on herself, while pretending to him that she didn’t notice the affair happening right in front of her eyes. She lost 15 pounds, she read more books, she became a more gracious host, and she doubled down on serving Lyndon in all of his needs and demands. Also, she overcame severe health difficulties to become pregnant with Lyndon’s children.
Perhaps the biggest sacrifice she made for Lyndon, though, was prioritizing his career and his needs over the needs of her two daughters. When her daughters were growing up, she often left them at home to go campaigning or attend political events with Lyndon. On occasions that Lyndon did come home for dinner, the household staff would dress the girls in bold, colorful dresses to please their father. Their older daughter, Lynda, took all this to heart—she herself internalized that her father’s career came first, developed a strong interest in politics, and then gave up her career to become the housewife of another ambitious man, Senator Chuck Robb — though she wasn’t as subservient to him as Lady Bird was to Lyndon. Their younger daughter, Luci, rebelled more — she would accuse Lady Bird of not being a “real mother,” provoked her parents by converting to Catholicism, and got married as soon as she could, at age 19, to gain independence from them.
But thanks to all of Lady Bird’s sacrifices, Lyndon realized at some point that he simply could not live without her. The incident that really drove that home for me was — Lyndon really, really wanted a son, and Lady Bird finally became pregnant with a boy. When she went into labor, however, she started bleeding profusely. The doctors called Lyndon to the hospital and told him that they could either save his baby son, or save Lady Bird—he would have to decide. Lyndon chose to save Lady Bird, even knowing that her health was too weak for her to ever give him another son.
So, Lady Bird won. Lyndon continued to have affairs, but never seriously considered leaving her again. Lady Bird became First Lady. Alice Glass had a string of like 5 husbands, never fully committed to anyone, and does not even have a wikipedia page now. Not to say that having a wikipedia page is the ultimate yardstick for success, but still, Lady Bird achieved more in her life by hard-committing to one path, as imperfect as it was, than Alice achieved with all her natural talent and beauty.
One lesson here is that Lady Bird did a great job of not letting her ego get in the way of going after what she wanted. If you really care about something—and Lady Bird really did care about her marriage—you should put your ego aside and just do whatever it takes to preserve it. Another lesson is that, in men, a lust for power often goes hand in hand with a lust for women. If you’re going to go for a super-powerful husband, you should probably also accept and remain clear-headed about the likelihood of other women appearing in his life.
Conclusion
To wrap it all up, here are some great things Lady Bird did:
- She committed to her decisions. One of those decisions was accepting that she wasn’t cut out to be the main character, and picking out the right person to play a supporting role to.
- She was clearsighted about what commitment entailed, and she didn’t let her ego get in the way of following through on her commitment to Lyndon.
- As Lyndon’s supporting figure, she:
- Served as his softer, more trustworthy, more personable counterpart—and grew from a shy girl into a confident public speaker on the national stage.
- She embodied his work ethic of “doing everything possible”
- She regulated his emotions and served as an invaluable strategic advisor because of her intimate understanding of his emotions and his entire psyche.
- She accepted and tolerated his infidelity as part of the price she paid to be his wife
We are now 3 or 4 generations out from Lady Bird, but I actually still think these lessons are applicable. It’s now a lot easier for a woman to be a main character than it was back then—but if you still aren’t a main character sort of person today, that’s ok — I think there’s no shame in acknowledging that you are best cut out to be a supporting figure, as long as you acknowledge it honestly to yourself. And of course, if you are a supporting figure kind of person, you don’t need to necessarily support your husband—you can also just work for a boss or a company that is ambitious. But, regardless of whether you’re a main character or a supporting one, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Stay tuned!
Sources:
- Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson by Jan Jarboe Russell
- Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight by Julia E. Sweig
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volumes 1-3, by Robert Caro (Means of Ascent,The Passage of Power, Master of the Senate)