Jo Freeman Reviews: Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

 

 

Lady Bird Johnson appeared to be a typical political wife.  She devoted her life to supporting her husband – Lyndon Baines Johnson – and nurturing his political ambitions, sometimes at the expense of her two daughters.

 

But underneath that prim exterior was a woman who had her own agenda which she carefully pursued through a slew of competing demands. She was, as the author points out, hiding in plain sight. Indeed, hiding was her strategy for success.

 

Born Claudia Alta Taylor on December 22, 1912 in east Texas, her mammie nicknamed her Lady Bird. It became her chosen name – often shortened to Bird.  She was Lady Bird long before she met and married Lyndon Baines and acquired the name Johnson.  LBJ became their brand, which was given to both of their children.

 

When she became First Lady as a result of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Bird began a taped diary.  A few years after her death in 2007, the LBJ Library made the 850 entries public.  This book is heavily dependent on that diary, interpreted and expanded by an experienced author with a research team.  Consequently, it is 95 percent about her 62 months as First Lady, with minimal material on her earlier and later life.

 

Life with Lyndon was a political as well as a personal partnership, though Bird was always the junior partner. She had family money; he had family connections.  Together they elected him to Congress in 1936 and the Senate in 1948.  She used her inheritance to buy an Austin radio station in 1943 and a TV station in 1952. The fact that her husband was in the US Congress didn’t hurt when it came to getting licenses and advertising revenue.  He made the couple powerful; she made them rich.

 

Bird set up her own office in the East Wing of the White House with her own staff and projects.  The most prominent one was Beautification, a project she pursued with help from Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. Today we would call her an environmentalist, but her concern with expanding the national parks and opening park/play spaces in less attractive areas of Washington D.C. had to hide under the rubric of prettiness – a proper concern for a first lady.