LADY BIRD JOHNSON: MOURNING A FORMIDABLE WOMAN
Posted: Thursday, July 12, 2007 2:55 PM by Daily Nightly Editor
Filed Under:
Brian Williams
by Brian Williams, Anchor and Managing Editor
It happened in the midst of our final hour before airtime—the noise and flurry of deadline pressure. We were talking about a Jim Maceda story from Iraq. Our Senior Producer of Foreign News, M.L. Flynn, a proud Texan, was looking at her computer screen when she blurted out, “Oh my, Lady Bird Johnson died.” My heart sank, and I found myself genuinely and profoundly sad.
A friend of mine who is close to the Johnson family had given me an indication earlier in the day that death was near for the former First Lady. At 94, she had been without her husband for 34 years. They had been married for 39. She became a widow at the age of 60. Her husband, who never believed he got enough credit for his life’s accomplishments, was even deprived of the nation’s full mourning attention in death: he died just two days after Nixon’s second inaugural, and just 26 days after the death of Harry Truman. Having given up the habit while President, he resumed smoking on the flight home to Texas...he never stopped, and never looked back. He was fond of saying that during his years in the White House, he “belonged to the country.” His retirement years, he said, belonged to him. He drank more heavily, his physical condition worsened, and his already-troubled heart grew weak. He lived for only four years after leaving the Presidency. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Johnson assembled her life around her children, her passions and her plans. She lived well, defined herself as an “activist” and insisted on being surrounded by the love of family and friends. It was that way at the end...her condition turned grave this past weekend, but she fought on... until life slipped away while she was surrounded by those she loved. (Photo: Lady Bird Johnson at the LBJ Ranch, 1991 | Courtesy LBJ Library)
After writing her husband the President when I was a young boy, I developed a keen interest in Lyndon Johnson. While Presidential history has always been a hobby, I paid special attention to the study of this endlessly interesting man and all those around him. Meeting and getting to know Mrs. Johnson was among the thrills of my adult life. She saw to it that I got to know members of the family and former aides, and she helped to get me involved as a speaker at the Presidential Library in Austin. She made it known through a mutual friend very recently that she still “enjoyed” NBC Nightly News every night— note her precision with words, meaning that she “listened” to Nightly News for the past 15 years or so, having been robbed of most of her vision by macular degeneration. That she was robbed of her speech by her last severe stroke was the ultimate cruelty for this ebullient woman who loved the English language and used it so beautifully.
In my home I have several letters that she dictated to me and signed. They are just like her: lovely, kind and personal. What a thrill it was to receive them, and what an honor it is to be able to hold onto them. Her legacy will be much discussed in the days to come -- her activism, the advice and counsel she gave to her husband, her beautification efforts. We should never forget another legacy: it was her decision to buck her husband’s wishes and release all of his recorded conversations (long before he wanted to) that has led to a new understanding of the Johnson years in the White House. I have listened to hundreds of hours of them... and many of them feature the sweet, lilting voice of Lady Bird Johnson.
(President and Mrs. Johnson and their dog Yuki near the Pedernales River on the LBJ Ranch, 1967 | Courtesy LBJ Library)
Another important quality to be mentioned here: the members of her Secret Service detail loved her. They loved their life in Austin, and they so respected the woman they served. Such affection is not always the case between individual agents and their “protectees”. While they were, in later years, relegated mostly to seeing to her transportation and comfort, they took their jobs very seriously and handled a grand woman with great care. She deserved no less.
One day, she arranged for the historian Michael Beschloss and my wife and me to visit the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas. We were given full run of the place, inside and out. There was his amphibious car. The President’s domino table. There were the wildflowers she so loved. I held in my hand the phone he grasped when he called his Secret Service agent to report the heart attack that killed him seconds later. Michael and I looked through his inert clothing still hanging in the closet—pointing out jackets and ties we remembered from archival photos of the President. The ranch house seems frozen at the time of his death in 1973. The swimming pool motor just outside the bedroom still hums along, the water churning, as it did on those summer afternoons when the President hosted his Cabinet Members in the scorching sun. He was in his element. They looked like sweaty men from Washington, unsure if they could loosen their ties in the blistering heat of Hill Country. Mrs. Johnson made sure I was given the same gift the President gave all visitors, from the same cabinet he used to reach into behind his desk. LBJ always loved having “the latest thing” – and this gift, bearing the Presidential Seal, was the latest thing back then: a new technology in writing instruments, a felt-tip pen.
On that wonderful day at the ranch, Mrs. Johnson saw to it that we were fed lunch, and I was given a seat in the old man’s chair at the dining room table, alongside the giant mural he loved. We visited LBJ’s grave on the banks of the Pedernales River. He is surrounded by an array of headstones of family members, but for a gap next to his. He’ll be joined there by his beloved wife in just a few days.
Their relationship started not far from there. And now it has all ended. Their daughters survive, as does one particular member of the fleet of Johnson grandchildren…a young man who looks spookily like the President as a young man—lanky, easy-going and always happy to meet you. The house that exhibits Lady Bird’s touch in every room will soon be on display for visitors. When we visited, it still seemed to be powered by her life force, and now that has stopped.
Jack Valenti is now gone. George Christian died a while back. So many of the men who served the President are no more. And now his North Star has gone dark. Even after being nicknamed “Lady Bird” by a family nurse as a child, Claudia Alta Taylor would have no way of knowing that as Lady Bird Johnson she would provide the match— in initials— with her husband. Lyndon Baines Johnson made sure every name he touched carried those same 3 letters. From “Little Beagle” Johnson to his daughter Lucy Baines. Let’s not forget Lake LBJ or the family radio station, KLBJ. It was all part of the plan. Just as that plan included the force of nature required to put these two people together in the first place... and for all time. What a formidable woman we mourn today. What a loss when her great heart stopped beating.
