First Ladies by Margaret Truman

Author:Margaret Truman [Truman, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-42054-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1995-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Here Lady Bird relaxes in a field of bluebonnets, reminding us she was the First Lady who revitalized America’s love of natural beauty. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)

Lady Bird personally oversaw the White House lobbying for the bill, making numerous calls herself. LBJ put on the pressure in his own hell for leather way. The bill was being considered by the House on the day of a scheduled “Salute to Congress” reception at the White House. The President sent the solons a message: there would be no salute if they didn’t pass the bill first. It was quite late in the evening by the time they stopped wrangling and showed up at the White House with a voted bill. One Republican congressman, a certain Robert Dole of Kansas, was so annoyed he moved to insert Lady Bird’s name in the language of the bill, as if he wanted to identify her as the culprit not only behind the controversial measure but also behind the deflated White House party.

While she was raising the national consciousness about America’s natural beauty, Lady Bird somehow found time to be one of the mostest hostesses the White House has ever seen. At everything from formal state dinners to back lawn hoedowns, she and LBJ entertained a staggering two hundred thousand people in their five years in residence. Unlike most White House denizens, Lady Bird never seemed to grow weary of these handshaking marathons. She studied briefing books and consulted aides so she had something friendly and personal to say to almost everyone on the guest list. She topped this hospitality extravaganza by overseeing both her daughters’ weddings in the White House, an exercise in press relations and guest list juggling that can safely be compared to restaging D day twice.

Lady Bird’s achievements are all the more remarkable for another reason. She played her vibrant, creative role in an administration that was sideswiped by history, almost from the day Lyndon Johnson took office. The Kennedy assassination was only one factor in the creation of a torn country. Northern big city black ghettos seethed with anger, the rural South boiled with racial antagonism, as Martin Luther King and other leaders strove to win basic civil rights for their people. Multiplying the turbulence was the war in Vietnam, which LBJ reluctantly expanded in 1965, when it looked as if our small ally, South Vietnam, was on the brink of defeat by Communist North Vietnam.

As more and more Americans turned against the war, Lady Bird found herself drawn into the controversy. By 1967 protesters gathered whenever she visited a college campus to talk about beautification or the environment. Finally, they invaded the White House. First, the singer Eartha Kitt rose at one of the Women Doers luncheons and ranted against the Johnson administration. According to some reports, she even spat at the First Lady. Then a salute to the nation’s writers and artists in the Rose Garden turned into a boycott by some and diatribes by others who showed up only to denounce the President to his face.

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