'Lady Bird Johnson' Review: Behind the Smile

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

A minor sport during the Johnson administration was watching Lady Bird Johnson's face when the president was rambling on, whether at a podium or a party. Her smiling gaze would be hardly different from the standard adoring-political-wife look, which she had perfected.

But Lyndon Johnson knew the difference. He soon shut up.

We reporters who covered social events at the White House had also seen her coolly send an aide upstairs toward the close of a state dinner, with the message that the president (and whichever junior official's young wife was with him) should return to the party to say goodbye to his guests. He would do so.

So perhaps Lady Bird Johnson was not the totally uncritical and subservient wife she was generally assumed to be. And perhaps planting flowers, in her "Beautification Project"—for which Washingtonians continue to be annually grateful—was not her only political or civic contribution. Yet such presumptions have persisted in the copious histories of that administration, prompting Julia Sweig to correct the record by writing "Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight."

Mrs. Johnson tried to be visible to the future. She recorded a lengthy diary, expressing the hope that her children, grandchildren, and, she added, the entire nation, could see what she had seen—she did not explicitly add the hope that they could also see what she had done.

Perhaps the diary was too lengthy. An 800-page excerpt, published in 1970, was hardly noticed. Ms. Sweig twice refers to the text as “eye-glazing,” although she valiantly plowed through it all, in order to make a case for a separate legacy. Unfortunately, she also picked up the diary’s approach, which, she notes, was the opposite of President Johnson’s “tendency to overshare”: to reveal Mrs. Johnson’s experience without revealing herself.

“Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight” is not a biography. Ms. Sweig refrains from probing Mrs. Johnson’s psyche. She briefly summarizes her subject’s early life in Texas before 1934, when, at age 21, she met and married the future president, who at that time had been elected to no public office. Mrs. Johnson’s periodic professions of self-doubt are mentioned but not explored. The author quotes her subject’s writing, including texts for speeches, but no attempt is made to reproduce the colorful Southern way that Lady Bird Johnson actually talked, which was of the “see y’all real soon if the Lord be willing and the creek don’t rise” variety.

The well-known scandals of the time are not dismissed, but they are mentioned in an offhand, dignified way. Rather, the intention is to set the record straight; to give the woman her due. Finally. In the reams written about the Johnson administration, Mrs. Johnson has generally been portrayed as a nice lady who planted flowers, faithfully loyal to her husband, which is more than he was to her.

Yet we find that Lady Bird was his most effective political adviser in regard to his career moves. Lyndon Johnson did not just talk things over with his wife: He asked her to prepare position papers listing the pros and cons of his choices. One document, which Ms. Sweig reproduces in the book, considers whether he should try to retain his inherited presidency by running in 1964 and contradicts the general perception that his running was a given.

“I’m probably the only living person who would attest, believe, swear that he never wanted to be president,” she says in her diary. While acknowledging that either decision would lead to painful criticism, she describes the boredom, frustration and envy he would feel in early retirement. “You may look around for a scape-goat,” she concludes; “I do not want to be it. You may drink too much for lack of a higher calling.” That he would not run again in 1968 surprised the nation, but she had long agreed that it was the time to leave.

Still, the public perception that he craved power was not wrong. The truth was that, having had great power in Congress, and then having been sidelined as vice president, Johnson keenly felt aware of his restrictions as president. Tellingly, Mrs. Johnson responded to his bemoaning the limitations of the highest office with “Who do you think you are—majority leader?”

She was a stalwart campaigner for the causes of her husband’s administration, determined to minimize the alienation of the south, where she was sometimes cheered, sometimes spat upon. Her approach was always to soft-pedal differences, even the gaping ones between the southern segregationists of her background and the civil rights agenda she supported. Lady Bird Johnson was not without her own ambition.

It is now an accepted idea that presidents’ wives should have their own first-lady causes. Although Eleanor Roosevelt was active politically, and Jacqueline Kennedy extended the housekeeping duties to refurbishing the White House, it was Mrs. Johnson’s work that led to the expectation that the president’s wife should have a “project,” meaning a domain of her own, preferably a nurturing one.

She became an active environmentalist and conservationist, concerned with community-sanctioned urban renewal (in contrast to the slum-leveling that had been gentrifying neighborhoods by displacing inhabitants). Her efforts went into maintaining national parks and local ones, desegregating them as recreational facilities for the poor. She fought to block the upheaval of building highways through cities, and to remove such blight as proliferating billboards and visible junkyards. She enlisted allies, such as landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; architects Nathaniel Owings and Victor Gruen; and muckraking writer Jane Jacobs. And she leaned on politicians, notably Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall—and her husband, who pushed through the legislation she needed, which became known as “Lady Bird’s Bill.”

To make Mrs. Johnson’s cause palatable, the administration gave it the gentle name of “beautification.” She lived to regret this: “I’ll never forgive Lyndon’s boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project,” Ms. Sweig quotes her as saying. “But I went ahead and talked about wildflowers so as not to scare anybody, because I knew if the people came to love wildflowers they’d have to eventually care about the land that grew ’em.”

The term had an honorable pedigree. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who designed Washington, wrote of beautifying it; Frederick Law Olmsted used the term “City Beautiful” for his movement transforming American cities; and the National Parks Commission was launched with the intention of beautifying what had been industrial squalor. At her 1965 White House Conference on Natural Beauty, chaired by Laurance Rockefeller, most of the 800 participants were men. Nevertheless, beautification came to be considered girly, and therefore trivial.

Then it was accused of being a grotesque attempt to smear cosmetics over the horrors of the Vietnam War. The Johnson domestic accomplishments—including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid—were overshadowed by the war. It did not matter how ladylike and discreet Mrs. Johnson had always been in advancing a benevolent domestic agenda; she was tarred with the extreme antagonism toward the president. The presidential proclamation of 1967 as the “Year of Youth for Natural Beauty and Conservation,” Ms. Sweig suggests, was seen as particularly offensive, since American youth were abroad, dying at war.

In addition, the author writes, as the civil rights movement grew into massive protests, “the word beautification, despite two years of effort to undo its visceral connotations, still telegraphed white derision of black spaces and a painfully superficial, gilded do-gooder faith in the artifice of liberal reform.” Marches, assassinations (of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy) and riots followed. Lady Bird “couldn’t fathom how nonviolent mobilizations, or how legislation her husband had passed, laws and policies that she had campaigned for and promoted, had somehow opened the door to the violence and racial animus engulfing the country.”

At a convention of the American Institute of Architects in 1968, Ms. Sweig concludes, Lady Bird “fully departed from euphemism in setting forth her environmental values and vision,” saying “I am one of millions of Americans who are troubled—and hopeful—about the physical setting of life in our country. As you may know, my concern has been expressed in an effort called ‘beautification.’ I think you also know what lies beneath that rather inadequate word. . . . For ‘beautification,’ to my mind, is far more than a matter of cosmetics. To me, it describes the whole effort to bring the natural world and the man-made world into harmony; to bring order, usefulness, and delight to our whole environment. And that of course only begins with trees and flowers and landscaping.” Environmentalism would in time become a major cause, particularly engaging America’s youth. Mrs. Johnson had been doing the right thing at the wrong time.

As a correction of history, and validation of effort, this is a worthy book. But there is not a juicy word in it about surely one of the most colorful administrations of modern times.

How Mrs. Johnson managed to remain calm and discreet while dealing with her husband’s volatile and erratic moods, his flagrant infidelities, his financial shenanigans, his drinking, and his occasional public cruelty directed at her is not to be found here. She “could not bring herself to record a negative word about her husband’s bad temper,” Ms. Sweig explains. “Instead, she explained his ferocity and sensitivity as two inseparable facets of his total being and pushed herself to compensate for the former by demonstrating more than her share of the latter.”

When her husband not only invited one of his former mistresses, actress and congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, to stay at the White House but also gave her a nightgown and robe belonging to his wife, Lady Bird recorded having an enjoyable breakfast with the guest.

Although she noticed that the contempt the Kennedys had held for the then-vice president continued, with Robert Kennedy being sullen at the passage of his late brother’s civil-rights bill, she went out of her way to show sensitivity and graciousness to Jacqueline Kennedy.

When two Johnson loyalists caused explosive and politically damaging scandals—Bobby Baker’s financial and Walter Jenkins’s sexual—she only commiserated with them.

And so she has been pegged as a long-suffering but always nice lady who only wanted to make things pretty, but was caught up in tumultuous times she did not understand.

Now she has her wish, to be on the record in a way that should be acceptable to her descendants, who presumably do not want to hear about the trials of being married to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

—Ms. Martin’s most recent books are “Miss Manners’ Guide to Contagious Etiquette” and “Minding Miss Manners in an Era of Fake Etiquette.”