Anyone who ever spoke to Lady Bird Johnson remembers the former first lady’s particular way of talking: her charming East Texas accent; her use of certain idioms that echoed another era, now long past. That distinctive voice is what we hear throughout Michael L. Gillette’s new oral history, Lady Bird Johnson, for it might just as easily be called an oral autobiography.
This project has long been in the making. Gillette, who directed the LBJ Library’s Oral History Program from 1976 to 1991, is the executive director of Humanities Texas in Austin. He and several colleagues, including Harry Middleton, the longtime director of the LBJ Library, conducted 47 interviews with Lady Bird over an 18-year period. The result, while not a perfect record, brings considerable light to bear upon Lady Bird’s early life and her middle years, before she and President Lyndon Johnson entered the White House after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.
The great disappointment is that so little of the book touches upon the later years of Lady Bird’s long life. Only the final chapter of the history addresses her White House years, and among the questions she answers there are softballs such as, “Did you have a favorite room in the White House?” Her rich and busy life after the Johnson presidency is covered in a two-page afterword, probably because the oral-history interviews ended in the mid-1990s as her health began to fail. As she would say, “The tooth of time has taken a bite out of me.”
Still, for those who wish to know more about the times and places that shaped Lady Bird Johnson, this book is a treasure trove. When the interviews began in the late 1970s, her memory was amazingly sharp, and her tales of her childhood and youth are full of rich flavor, mostly untouched by sentimentality.
One story we all know well is about where baby Claudia Alta Taylor got her nickname — when she was declared to be “pretty as a lady bird” by her black nurse, Alice Tittle. In truth, as Lady Bird told Gillette, the nickname came from two childhood playmates who also were black. “It was later deemed more respectable to assign credit to the nurse and thereby avoid the impression of interracial socialization,” Gillette notes dryly in the introduction to his first chapter.
Lady Bird was born in December 1912 and grew up in an East Texas where racism was casual, an everyday thing among white people. As she told Gillette: “One found it difficult to call blacks ‘Mr. or Mrs.’ … You had no hesitance at all if they were old and respected and longtime friends of your family in calling them Uncle Sam or Aunt Sarah … which is laughable now, but a little sad.”
She was a shy child from a well-to-do family who was left motherless before she was 6 years old. “Pathetic,” in the old-fashioned sense of pathos, is a word she often used to describe herself as a young girl, and even as a teenager and a young woman, she was sheltered and socially reticent, though she always had friends. When she went east to New York for the first time, as she said more than once, “My eyes were out on stems!”
Meeting Lyndon Johnson changed everything for both of them. He was liberal where she was conservative, outgoing where she was shy, fearless where she was hesitant. He overpowered her senses, brought an excitement she had never known in her life. It was a whirlwind courtship, and she was married to him almost before she knew it.
Lady Bird’s loyalty to LBJ meant that she would never discuss his marital infidelities. She summed him up thus: “Marvelous. Contradictory. Great natural intelligence. Showman sometimes; hurtful sometimes; very often tender and giving. … We all got as mad as could be at him from time to time, and hurt. But … he was an exciting person to live with, and I consider myself very lucky.
“I know we were better together than we were apart.”