ALAN PRICE: Good evening. I'm Alan Price, Director of the
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of all my library
and foundation colleagues, I'm delighted to welcome
all of you who are watching tonight's program online. I understand there
are over 700 of you registered for
tonight's program. That is tremendously exciting. Thank you for joining
us this evening. I would like to acknowledge
the generous support of our underwriters for
the Kennedy Library Forum's lead sponsors-- Bank of America, the Lowell
Institute, and AT&T-- and our media sponsors,
The Boston Globe and WBUR. We look forward to a robust
question-and-answer period this evening. You'll see full
instructions on screen for submitting your questions
via email or comments on our YouTube page
during the program. We're so grateful to
have this opportunity to explore Lady Bird
Johnson's role in depth with our distinguished
guests this evening. I'm now delighted to
introduce tonight's speakers. I'm so pleased to extend a
warm, virtual welcome back to the library to
Dr. Julia Sweig. Dr. Sweig is an award-winning
author of books on Cuba, Latin America, and
American foreign policy, whose writing has appeared in
numerous national publications. She served as Senior
Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
for 15 years, and concurrently lead the
Aspen Institute's Congressional Seminar on Latin
America for 10 years. She is a nonresident
Senior Research Fellow at the LBJ School of Public
Affairs at the University of Texas Austin. Her new book, which I've
heard great things about, is Lady Bird Johnson-- Hiding in Plain Sight. I'm also delighted to
welcome back to the library Dr. Ellen Fitzpatrick,
Professor of History at the University
of New Hampshire, to moderate
tonight's discussion. A professor and scholar
of modern American political and
intellectual history, she is the author and
editor of eight books, including Letters to Jackie-- Condolences From a Grieving
Nation and The Highest Glass Ceiling-- Women's Quest for the
American Presidency. Please join me in welcoming
our special guests. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Thank
you very much, Alan. I'm delighted to be here,
and to have a chance to talk to Julia about this
amazing book you've written. I learned so much
from reading it. It was absolutely fascinating. And I have a lot of
questions for you, as I'm sure our audience
will have as well. I wondered if you could start by
telling us a little bit how you found your way to Lady
Bird Johnson, which isn't obvious from reading
your CV or your short bio that your book provides. You've had a really
interesting career, and looks like you know a
lot about Latin America. And I'm wondering
about how you came to Lady Bird and your
decision to write this book. JULIA SWEIG: Well, I love
your opening question. And it is one that
deserves an answer. But I want to just thank you,
Alan, for agreeing to do this and take a detour from
finishing your semester with your students in
order to read the book and be with me here tonight. It's a great honor. And to my friends at
the Kennedy Library, thanks so much for having me
here with you and to everybody for coming. You know, I had spent 15 years
working in foreign policy and mainly focusing on Latin
America, often on Cuba, and did that living
in Washington DC and traveling all
over the region. And very often-- there
were two components that led me to Lady Bird. One is I was very often
the only woman in the room. And this kind of brought a
certain marination in my mind that I wanted to
try to get myself the time to think more broadly
about the topic of women and power, something
that about yourself. That was one thing. The second is that I just wanted
to teach myself something new. I felt that I had really
spent a good long time reading and writing and
traveling and being a practitioner on foreign
policy in Latin America, and I wanted to find
a vehicle to allow me to talk and think and
pursue some scholarship as a public intellectual
[AUDIO OUT] American politics and history, not just Latin
American politics and history. And I didn't have Lady Bird
specifically in mind initially. I had the general topic
of women in power. But then I learned that Lady
Bird had kept a diary while she was in the White House,
and of course Lady Bird Johnson is the
individual married to another individual
most associated at least in the 20th century
with the word "power." So once I read initially
her published transcripts and then began listening
to her audio diary and reading all of the
secondary literature on Johnson, it just answered
the question for me. This was the topic. And especially seeing how little
the material that she had left and the material about her in
the archives from her own time in the White House had made
it into the historiography, well, that just sealed the deal. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
Well, I have to ask you, because I'm envious. I have title envy this is
such a brilliant title, such a great title,
Hiding in Plain Sight. How did you come to it? Did someone else have a
good idea, or is it yours? Or-- it so perfectly
captures it seems to me what you did in this book. I won't say more because
then I'll give my own answer. Tell me how you came up
with this great title. JULIA SWEIG: Well, no, I mean,
I did come up with the title. It was staring at
me in the face. And it's for two reasons. One is because Lady Bird
Johnson herself is-- we think we know who she
is, or we thought we did, and yet here she was staring
at us, hiding in plain sight. Her story was one of a
two-dimensional person really. But in fact the historical
material, the source material to show us what a far richer,
more multidimensional person she was, was also hiding
in plain sight in the LBJ Library-- and not just her audiotapes,
but a vast amount of material that really puts
meat on the bone of that two-dimensionality,
mixing metaphors here. But-- so it just made itself
manifest that that was both-- that had to be the
subtitle of the book, ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
Yeah, it's wonderful. Because it so well captures
both points that you just made. I think that most Americans of
a certain age, myself included, who lived through the '60s
think that they know her. They have an impression
of Lady Bird, and I think overall
quite a positive one. And yet when one
finishes your book, one realizes how little we
did know, how much was really out of sight, how superficial
our understanding was of her-- at least mine. I'll confess to it. And secondly, the
purposefulness that she brought to ensuring that
although she and her husband might not be appreciated or well
understood in their own time, that eventually another
generation would look back and see their
time in office differently. JULIA SWEIG: Yes, I really
admire that aspect of her. And I'll tell-- you
know this, but I'll tell those of you
that have signed on to listen to us talk tonight,
which is that she was a history major and a journalism major. And she had really in
her bones this commitment to documenting and
understood the importance. She understood the lags
in history, I think. But especially as she
got deeper and deeper into her political career,
their political career together, and certainly once
they entered the White House, I think she understood--
you could see it, because she started preparing
to create the LBJ Library and to collect
material and record these audio diaries starting
eight days after the JFK assassination. And then within a matter of-- I would say before even
the beginning of '65 she understood
exactly your point, that it was going
to take a while to have a full appreciation
of the Presidency-- because of Vietnam essentially. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: I have to
interject there to tell you this anecdote, which is
I was stunned to come across your discussion of
the Women Doers lunches that she had where
she would bring these esteemed and accomplished
women to the White House and someone would
give a presentation. And one of the early
ones, maybe the first, was someone who was a mentor of
mine, Barbara Miller Solomon. JULIA SWEIG: Ooh. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: And
it brought back to me my conversation with Barbara,
who died many years ago, in which she told me about
going to the White House and how much she
admired Lady Bird. Barbara-- for our
other guests tonight-- was the head of what was then
the Women's Archives at Harvard and also taught at
Harvard in the history of American civilization. But she-- the Women's
Archives eventually became the Schlesinger Library
on the History of Women. And so Barbara was
an early guest, and you recount her
making an impression on Lady Bird when she
said to the other women at this luncheon,
save your letters. Save your diaries. This is the stuff
of Women's History. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. JULIA SWEIG: I mean,
I'm so touched. That makes this moment
even more special, Ellen. And the fact that she was
your mentor and the fact that she was the
first person Lady Bird invited to speak at the White
House and gave that message-- Lady Bird had already started
to keep her audio recordings. But I think that helped seal
the deal about the significance for the long term as far as
the telling of the history of the Johnson
Presidency, and as far as the importance for women,
especially of that time, to see their-- to value their own
stories, right? And that's what this act
of recording this diary was for Lady Bird. It was a significant
sign that she valued her participation--
not just her observations, but her participation
in that Presidency. That's amazing that
she was your mentor. I love that. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: She
was a wonderful person, and she was very,
a very, I think, perceptive judge of character. And she loved Lady Bird. She had nothing but
positives to say about her. I want to ask you about
this amazing source that stands at the center of your
book, the diaries, which have their own history. I wasn't sure actually whether-- were these just dictated? Did she have anything that
she wrote and then read into a tape? Or was it all just-- JULIA SWEIG: No. I'll tell you how she produced
them in the short answer, and then I'll give
the long answer. She recorded her voice first,
and that was then transcribed. But what's so impressive about
her is that her first draft was so good. She would sit--
and remember, this is a woman who's operating like
the CEO of the White House. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah. JULIA SWEIG: She's got her
hands in so many things-- her public role, her private
role, her kids, her husband, her policy issues. And she finds a way
to record 123 hours over the course of five years. It's 1,750,000 words. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Wow. JULIA SWEIG: So she would
take a manila envelope that her staff put
together for every day. And in that envelope was his
daily diary, her daily diary, press clips, various ephemera,
seating charts for the state dinners, memos, all
kinds of material. And she would sit--
and this was her this was her very brilliant mind
and capacity for synthesis-- she'd read it all,
turn on the recorder, and then dictate in almost
always cogent, perfectly composed sentences
and paragraphs. And that's how she did it. And she started-- and she very
seldom rewound and rerecorded. What was done was done right. She was very
disciplined about it and obviously very confident,
and so the material itself reads really well. Often it's very
beautiful, especially when she's writing about nature. Her studies of character
are sharp-witted. She goes from the sublime to
the silly in just a nanosecond. There's just a lot
of material in there. And then, of course,
there's the rich material about major decisions
in the White House that her husband is making and
their discussions about those. All kinds of things. So that's how it's done. Recording and then transcribed. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Now there was
also the mind-numbing material as well, I assume, right? JULIA SWEIG: Yes. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Like who
sat where at which state dinner, and what-- JULIA SWEIG: Well, that's true. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of
the social stuff. There's a lot of the
discussion of when she's getting ready to-- when she's organizing two
weddings for her daughters. There's a lot of
wedding planning. There's a lot of the material
that you would associate if one isn't-- that kind of two
dimensionality of-- what do First Ladies do? They do the social stuff and
they do the ceremonial stuff. All of that is in there. And it can be a bit eye glazing. But the nuggets of gold so
far outweigh that to my mind. I mean, otherwise
I wouldn't have been able to stick with this. But she does-- I mean, a friend of mine--
and I live in Washington DC-- criticized me for saying that
the seating charts and who's sitting where was mind-numbing,
because, he said, you know, that's the ultimate
power, to decide who's sitting next to whom. So I have to have more
respect for that than I might have at the beginning. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Well, this
is where your readers are advantaged by the
fact that we have you, who through all of this, and
you picked out the great stuff and you've put it all into
this wonderful narrative. I wondered-- the diary
has its own history-- JULIA SWEIG: Thank you. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
--some of it published when both of the
Johnsons were still alive as the White House Diary. This was a redacted version
that came out in 1970. And then you tell us that six
years after her death in 2007 the LBJ Library
began to release more of the diary, the transcripts,
make more of this accessible. I wondered if the diary
is entirely released now. Is it entirely unredacted now? And I wondered too about what
was left out in the version that she had some control over. JULIA SWEIG: Right. So yes, it is now all released. And anybody can go onto
the LBJ Library's website and you can listen to the
audio of every single entry-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Wow. JULIA SWEIG: --and see the
transcript right there. And what you can
also see in the way they've digitized the hard
copy of the transcript is that beginning-- since she published in
1970 the first volume, and it was redacted but
it was still 780 pages, she went through-- because
a lot of the transcribers couldn't understand
her accent so well, so she corrected
some of the words and made some small
grammatical changes. In some cases you can
also see this, now that they've released the
full, unredacted versions. She did, in very few cases,
mark some material closed for ten years and then review. And there's a particular
instance in the book that we can talk about that's
very interesting and very surprising-- or not surprising,
but very, very-- it's the only place I've seen
it reported where she does that. But generally, it's all there. It ended-- she stopped
recording on January 31, 1969, so that all of the
material is now available. Did I-- you asked
three questions. Was there a third
I didn't answer? ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes,
I think you covered it. JULIA SWEIG: OK. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
But maybe you have to tell me now what was the-- JULIA SWEIG: OK. I'll tell you now. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Come on. I can't wait for these
secrets to be revealed. I'm on the edge of my seat. JULIA SWEIG: No, no,
I'll tell you now. But-- so-- one of the
themes in the book, and it's a theme that we
know about Lyndon Johnson, has to do with his emotional
volatility and his depression. She writes about his
depression throughout-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: OK. JULIA SWEIG: --the time that
they're in the White House. We also know-- and
there's some new material in the book that
really develops this-- that she was a very significant
influence on the way he entered the White House. I'm, not talking about
the assassination but I'm talking
about the transition that she and Jackie
orchestrated. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: But also in
the early months of 1964 he had a lot of trepidation
about whether he was going to even run later in '64. We can come back to that. And then, of course
she has a major role in orchestrating
his exit in 1968. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah. JULIA SWEIG: But in
October of 1965-- and I assume from this that
there must have been other moments that she
didn't record about it, although that could
be incorrect-- when he goes into the Bethesda
Naval Hospital for his gallbladder surgery-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah. JULIA SWEIG: --he's checked
into the hospital for two weeks, and she moves in with him. And he's-- It's a long surgery
but his convalescence is going OK. One day she leaves to go spend
the day at the White House. They've had tea balls and melon
for breakfast-- and by the way, I absolutely love the
detail she provides-- and she comes back and she
walks into-- and it's dusk in October, so you can
imagine the light-- and she walks into his hospital
room and he's sitting there with Abe Fortas-- Abe Fortas, their
long-time advisor, who by now is a Supreme
Court Associate Justice. And Lyndon is telling him
that he'd like to resign, and that he wants to dictate his
resignation statement to Abe-- which he does. The only documentation
that I found-- because I looked-- of
this moment of LBJ's-- obviously his
post-operative depression, but just his feeling so
crushed by the weight of being President-- the only place I've seen that
documented is by Lady Bird. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah. This is really important,
what you just said, because it really-- for me, because it's a
segue into some of the-- I have 15 questions, and
I've asked you 1, 2, 3. JULIA SWEIG: Uh-oh. OK. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: I've got
to pick up the pace here. JULIA SWEIG: I better
answer more concisely. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: No,
it's not you, it's me. So I'm leading you into
the substance of your book, and you've opened several
questions in a row that I wanted to ask you. It seems appropriate to begin
with the circumstances that brought the Johnsons
into the White House. Her diary starts with the
entry on November 22-- about November 22, 1963-- that's taped just eight
days after the Kennedy assassination. And it was no secret
that the Vice Presidency hadn't been an entirely happy
period in LBJ's political life. But I wondered if you would
say a few words about-- which I found so
interesting in the book-- the relationship between the
two couples, the Kennedys and the Johnsons, prior to
the death of President Kennedy and during the Kennedy
White House years. And also how this
tragic circumstances in which the Johnsons of course
came into the White House and just really two
weeks after moving in, taking up residence
in the White House. It's framed by this
national tragedy. But your discussion
of the relationship between the Kennedys and
the Johnson I thought was very illuminating,
and I wondered if you could speak to that a bit. JULIA SWEIG: Yes, and-- I think my connection
is somewhat unstable. I just want to make sure
that you can hear me. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: I can. You're breaking up a
little bit but keep going. JULIA SWEIG: All right. I apologize. I'll just go back just to say
that in the 1950s, especially when Jackie and Jack
came to Washington-- they were married in 1953. By 1955 LBJ is the
Senate Majority Leader, and that confers upon
Lady Bird the seniority. And she rules the roost among
Senate wives in Washington. And in the Kabuki theater of
Washington DC, she was on top. And she was almost 20
years Jackie's senior. Made an effort to bring her
in and open the door to her, and Jackie wasn't so wild
about being a political spouse. She did it, but she wasn't
the kind of political animal that Lady Bird was. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: But of course by
1960 the script has flipped. And now, with a 1960
convention in Los Angeles, the Kennedys are on top and the
Johnsons, quite uncomfortably, find themselves placed in
the position of not being able to say no to
the offer to join the ticket as Vice President--
totally emasculating for LBJ. Lady Bird doesn't want to do it. But they don't see an out. Lady Bird and Jackie and the
Johnsons and the Kennedys embark on the 1960 campaign with
Jackie staying largely at home. She's dealing with miscarriages. She's pregnant. She's not going to go
out on the rope lines. So Lady Bird steps
in as her surrogate, as Lyndon's surrogate,
as Jack's surrogate. She travels all through
the South with her sisters and with Rose Kennedy. And she's later of course
credited by Bobby Kennedy as winning Texas for the
Kennedy-Johnson ticket. And she continues as
Second Lady to be there and makes herself indispensable. She says yes to all
the things that Jackie asks her to do, all the things
that Jackie doesn't want to do herself, including
going to Los Angeles to accept the Emmy Award
for the television show that Jackie did in
the White House-- which is kind of astonishing. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: But it just shows-- and I think that
Lady Bird's ability to make herself indispensable,
she learned that with Lyndon and she certainly
did it with Jackie. So by the time they get
to November 22, 1963, Jackie has enormously
poignant and loving feelings toward Lady Bird. And you can see in the
letters leading up to '63 when they're in the Vice Presidency,
especially between Jackie and LBJ and Jackie and
Lady Bird, it's filled-- as I write in my book--
with X's and O's and sort of inside jokes. And they do seem to have a
kind of contented way of being with one another. But when they go to
Dallas, at that time there's a rumor
that Jack Kennedy is going to throw
Lyndon off the ticket, and they've already looked
for an alternative for LBJ. He might become the president
of San Marcos College if he loses his
place on the ticket. The tension is really thick
inside of the Oval Office, and everybody knows about the
derision with which the Kennedy team treated LBJ. But there was more of
an intimate relationship than I think is known,
especially between Jackie and Lady Bird, that helped
them to get through those 14 days of transition. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. I thought that was really,
really illuminating. And both of the
Johnsons were extremely gracious in this terrible
period, but even before then it seemed as if the
two couples got along. And some of what's
been written since-- I think your book is
an important corrective to some of this. You also begin your book
with a real revelation, and that is the
ambition that Lady Bird had for her husband in 1964. So they come in, into
these tragic circumstances. Lyndon Johnson is going
to fill out JFK's term. But what you tell us, and
what Lady Bird told you, is that in fact he was deeply
ambivalent about even then seeking election on his own. This really upsets
the portrait of LBJ as craven in his
thirst for power, and with this overweening
political ambition. On the other hand, we
have Lady Bird saying-- trying to persuade him really,
it seemed to me, that-- come on. This is your moment. And you can't back out now. And that I thought was
really, really fascinating. Can you say a little bit about-- I think in some ways this
frames your whole book, when we learn from the get
go that he's not as into it as reported and
she's got ambitions. JULIA SWEIG: Yeah. At first I thought I would title
the book Lady Bird's Ambition, or Bird's Ambition, because,
that is the word that screams out from this material. And Ellen, what
you're talking about is a document that was
sitting in the LBJ Library in a folder called "Letters-- Mrs. Johnson to
President Johnson." But the document--
I took the liberty of renaming it without the
National Archive's permission, and I now call it the
"Huntland Strategy Memo." ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. JULIA SWEIG: And I wanted
to use the word "strategy" and I wanted to use the
word "memo" because the word "letter" is this kind
of feminized word. But senior advisors
in the White House write strategy memos
to the President. And Lady Bird Johnson to
me is a senior advisor to the White House writing a
strategy memo to the President, who she's married to. He, in May of 1964, is looking
down the horizon, as she is. Now this is when civil rights
is still stuck in the Congress. The War on Poverty
legislation hasn't passed. The Kennedy war council
who he's kept on board is pushing for
escalation in Vietnam. They don't feel as solid on
foreign policy as they do on domestic-- by "they,"
I mean the Johnsons-- and he is looking ahead at the
election and then afterward and wondering if he
can unify the country, wondering how much momentum
between November of '63 and over the course
of '64 he's going to be able to gather in order
to make the case for a sustained and successful Presidency. And he's miserable. He even has a toothache. And he calls her. This toothache is
a metaphor, right? She's out at Huntland, which
is an estate in Middleburg, Virginia. The reason why she's
there is another story. But he calls her and they
speak as they do on the phone all the time when
they're not together. And he asks her to write out her
analysis of the pros and cons of running or not running. And that's what
that document is, and that's what the prologue
of the book lays out. And it shows her
laying out the case. As you say, she says, you're not
ready to step out of the arena. And if you do, and we
go back to the ranch, you're going to be miserable. And I don't want to live
with you if you're miserable. You're too young. And what you should
do is you'll run, and you'll very likely win. And then we'll work our
hardest for three years with all the slings and
arrows that will come. But in February or
March of 1968 you can tell the world
that you won't be standing for a second term-- which of course we
know is exactly what he did on March 31, 1968-- which was a decision that
came as a huge surprise to everybody but
the two of them. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: This is like
a really big deal, it seems to me, what you offer here. Because that was going
to be my next question, was about the Huntland strategy. JULIA SWEIG: Oh, I'm sorry. I [INAUDIBLE]. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
No, no, you're doing a great job of
anticipating these things, in part because when I meant-- when I refer to
her ambition, this is not what others have
accused Hillary Clinton of, I think in an exaggerated
way, that somehow she was scheming to augment her
own power or something from the get go and saw herself as
her husband's successor. On the contrary, what-- and the charges
of ambition being a negative thing for the
wife of a President to have-- the ambition was really for
her husband's capacities that she believed in, and
what she thought as a moment that they shared,
that they could really accomplish some important
things for the country. And so that's the other
shoe that drops though in the Huntland strategy memo. It's right there
at the beginning, that it may well be a
one-term Presidency. That is-- JULIA SWEIG: Right. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --once
he's elected on his own, they're already anticipating
then what will eventually happen, that-- she's like, you
got to do this now, but then you can
stop, as you said. And that, I think, is
real news to people that lived through
seeing Johnson give his speech in March
of 1968 when he withdrew. The normal accounts are that he
was forced out by the anti-war movement, the
failures in the war, by his dwindling popularity,
the upheaval in the Democratic Party-- and here you have
this other side of Lyndon Johnson
that's being shown, and her role really in sort
of setting a time frame to it that was fascinating I thought. Well done. JULIA SWEIG: Well, thank you. And I thought it was a bit
of a mind blower as well, especially-- and you can imagine this-- I don't know how many
times I went back and read and reread all of
the other secondary literature to make sure that I hadn't
missed that somebody else had already picked it up. And what had been
picked up and gets a lot more attention is that in
August of '64, right before the Democratic
Party convention, he has another moment
of freak-out where he gets panicked and
sits down and writes out his own resignation statement,
and calls Lady Bird and Walter Jenkins-- read this. That's much more known. But the much earlier time
of May of '64 I found-- one or two people mention it but
kind of in passing, and never connecting it to what happened
in March of 1968, which, as you say, was digested at
the time as Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy and Vietnam-- and the kind of shock that
anybody, not least Lyndon Johnson, would step
away from power. Lady Bird was the only person-- I watched an interview she
did with Ted Koppel in 1997, and she is trying
to explain to him. And he pushes back. He can't fathom it. She says, I'm
probably the only one that believes truly
that LBJ really didn't want to be President. And now of course he did
want to be President, but the major trepidation and
insecurity that he had was, I think, impossible to
understand without Lady Bird. And your point about-- without
her role in the Presidency being illuminated. You're right about it, the
ambition that she had for him, for him as opposed
to for herself. But she also their jointness
of their co-mingled political enterprise was so
developed by 1964 that I think that she was
very excited about what they were potentially going to
be able to do for the country. They-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: --not just he. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. And I think you say somewhere
early in the book that you really can't know one of
them without the other-- that their lives were
intertwined so early and their political ideas, their
commitments, their values-- I think it's just extremely
illuminating, in part because she turned out to be a
person of such great substance. It's a much more
complicated story than-- Wilson has a stroke. Edith Wilson plays
this particular role. Or Nancy Reagan is whispering
things in Ronald Reagan's ear. This is a whole different model
here that you are describing, and one that I think really
has been heretofore unknown about her. I was struck by the fact that,
amazingly, Johnson from the get go felt trapped
by the war in Vietnam. I'm going to ask you more
about this in a minute, but even before the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution, which was passed in August of
'64, and well before the first deployment of combat troops
rather than the so-called "advisors"-- who we know were
doing more than advising-- he is-- really in
December of 1963, when he's first
in the White House and having to make
decisions about the war, Lady Bird is already
predicting the toll that this is going to take. And he is very,
very vexed by it. And I thought that that was
extremely interesting, how early he felt he had
only one way forward, towards escalation,
and how for all of her other remarkable
influences on him, she was at one with
him on that point. JULIA SWEIG: She was,
until she wasn't. And it takes too long for
them and for her to get there. I mean, I say that in hindsight,
but one of the reasons that I think she was-- so they're framing--
their thinking about Vietnam was
very much that they were children of World War II. And the geopolitical conflict
with the Communists was key. And one aspect of that
geopolitical conflict, whether with the Fascists
or the Communists, Is that you don't
betray an ally. So as corrupt as Saigon
was in South Vietnam, the idea that somehow
America will turn its back, let those dominoes fall--
it sounds all kind of cliché and hard to believe that the
thinking was that facile, but it was very
much in their bones. The second piece
of Vietnam I think for them that kept
those blinders on has to do with
American exceptionalism and with their Wilsonian notion
that we can take our model and watch it succeed
halfway around the world. So if we can bring development
and electricity to Texas, to West Texas, why not
to the Mekong Delta? So she really bought
into those two framings. And then the third
thing was they weren't-- their foreign policy chops were
pretty limited by comparison to the big Camelot
guys that stuck around. And between December
'63 and May of 64 when she wrote that memo,
where-- she writes also in her diary about
the way Vietnam is going to give him such pain. McNamara, the
Secretary of Defense, goes to Vietnam five times. And each time he comes back
pressing LBJ, pressing LBJ, pressing LBJ. And I think-- there's
recordings where you hear him say that
he doesn't actually see-- he knows that he's
walking into trouble, knows it's going to
derail him, doesn't know how to not get there,
not have it happen, not do it. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah. It seemed as if in that
sense their shared ambition created a kind of blinders
in which they were also-- I think McNamara's role for
them seemed very critical. You describe how upset
they were when he left the White House and what a-- that was a dark moment
anyway in the country, and seeing him bailing must
have been very difficult. JULIA SWEIG: The
other person, Ellen, if I could just say,
that they really admired, she really admired, was Bundy. And Bundy left the
White House much earlier than McNamara, but after
having really also pushed them to stay and to escalate. And there's another aspect
which actually ties back to LBJ's depression, which-- I think we all know people
who suffer from depression often can get out
of their depression through action and momentum. And sometimes I have the feeling
that Lady Bird, who was around for a lot of the
discussions about Vietnam but not steeped in the
strategic issues either, would push LBJ to make
a decision because she knew that he would feel
better once he had done so. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. Yes. And it seemed like
he did briefly. And then-- JULIA SWEIG: Right-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --the
inexorable nature of this comes through so
powerfully in your book. The Shakespearean
tragedy that is at the center of
this whole story is-- I'm not sure I've ever seen it
conveyed as powerfully as it is conveyed through
the lens of Lady Bird and what you've gleaned
from these diaries-- we have to turn
to beautification. I love the quote when-- I guess she said it later on. "I'll never forgive
Lyndon's boys for turning my environmental
agenda into a beautification project. 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." And what you portray in the book
is a much more complex story about Lady Bird's
engagement, in some sense really the first sort of person
in the White House promoting an environmental agenda
from urban planning. And also fascinating
the degree to which they attempted to join
this to the Great Society issues of not-- of creating green space,
improving urban environments. And I wondered if you
could talk a little bit and tell our guests about what
she was really doing here. Because it was a lot
more than planting wildflowers on highways. JULIA SWEIG: Yes,
it certainly was. And I have to tell you that
this is the part of the story that most surprised me. Well, there are a
lot of surprises. But I also really
kind of fell in love with the story behind the story,
with what was really going on. So the word "beautification,"
that-- she made that comment when she was in her 80s,
never forgiving Lyndon's boys. And it was always
a euphemism, one that she really didn't like. And by late '67, certainly
in the middle of '68, she cast it off definitively. And even her staff
would send out-- include in memos
like-- please don't use the word "beautification." We're talking about
the environment. We're talking
about conservation. She had-- as a Washingtonian,
not just a Texan-- spent 30 years in a
city that was a majority Black city without
Congressional representation, without budgetary control,
that was highly segregated, and where the majority
Black population had little access to nature-- even though the
National Park Service had vast lands in Washington,
DC that it controlled. The parts of Washington that-- of white Washington, had
gorgeous Rock Creek Park and the Potomac
waterfront, which was being developed
even back then, whereas along the
Anacostia River in Southwest and Southeast and
Northeast Black Washington-- although there is
some co-mingling. I don't want to
oversimplify it-- there was very little access
to desegregated park space. And she had grown up-- she lost
her mom when she was five-- for her, access to nature was an
essential part of her humanity. And she really believed
that Washington, DC could potentially become a model
for the rest of the country, where-- which was dealing with the
ravages of urban renewal. There were something
like 300 more cities in the country in
the '40s and '50s where urban renewal projects had
bulldozed total neighborhoods, often communities of color. And often those communities
wound up in terrible housing complexes, with no parks. That kind of thing. So although in Washington,
DC and certainly in Texas and with the
Highway Beautification Act she gets associated with this
ornamental approach of planting flowers, what
she's really trying to do is bring
together civil rights and what we would think of as
environmental justice today. And so it's a long
story in the book, but what you see is an
evolution where she really develops a very-- I would even call
it a radical vision for putting forward putting
federal and local money into desegregating park
space for local residents and local communities. That's the short
end of the stick-- of the story-- but
she puts together a very interesting
coalition of civil rights philanthropists and hippie
California landscape architects who have some sense
of how to mobilize federal resources to that end. And it's very much a
Great Society project. But since it was
called beautification, it really got lost in her
story and in the 1960s story. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah,
and I suppose in some sense trivialized, like a-- JULIA SWEIG: Yes. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
This is a woman's-- First Lady's-- undertaking and
appropriate to her sex and her position, but not
more than that. JULIA SWEIG: And to her name. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. JULIA SWEIG: And
to her name, right? Another euphemism. And also I should say-- I know we have
lots of questions, but she didn't do a great job
at articulating the totality of what she was trying to do. She was very cautious about
not really stating at the time what she was up to. And the flower thing
was a good cover, but she failed to give it-- on the messaging and
communication side of it, it got very much lost. And so the environmentalists
at the time, some of them even missed it. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: You know,
the flower thing though in and of itself was
a really great thing. JULIA SWEIG: Oh, it's
a really great thing. I'm in Washington, DC. It's exquisite here,
thanks to that. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
And also her-- these huge highways that
had been federally funded, highway projects
built in the 1950s, that were eyesores of
people traveling through. Now they could travel
from state to state, but they'd be seeing these
junkyards and huge billboards. And it was her idea to
try to seed all this. JULIA SWEIG: Right. And I don't think
that people understood that we had in Lady Bird, in
the White House, a woman who was taking on major industry
in trying to clean up what we saw along highways after
all that federal money went into it. She was taking on the automobile
industry, the junkyard industry, the
billboard industry. They were all in cahoots and had
no interest in self regulation. So when somebody puts
up a cartoon that says impeach Lady
Bird, the politics are pretty strongly
against the idea-- and it's not Hillary
Clinton on health care. It's Lady Bird on highways--
of a First Lady putting herself into the center of the arena
and challenging the status quo. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: She really-- you can see, it seems to me,
throughout your account her trying to thread the needle-- JULIA SWEIG: Yes. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --on the one
hand advancing women's issues, issues relating to-- and particularly, I
thought, the issue of race, having grown up in
the Jim Crow South, and both she and her
husband strongly taking really important steps-- but being careful when
she went to Alabama or she was on these
various speaking tours, whether it was
over issues having to do with the country's
racial struggles when she was in the South,
having been from the South, or whether it was over the
women's issues both, trying to advance what we would
see as women's issues but also do it in a way that
didn't sound overtly feminist. JULIA SWEIG: Feminist? ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah. It seemed that she-- and part of this, I'm sure,
or I assume you would agree, was generational. JULIA SWEIG: Oh,
entirely generational. And I have a certain
amount of respect for what she was able to pull
off and how she tried to do it. Because I think
she was a woman who was born at the beginning
of the century, who died at the beginning of
the following century. And in a way you
really get a sense about how much of the 1950s-- how much the 1960s were
still the 1950s, right? We sometimes think-- I
mean, you're a historian, so I'm not-- I'm saying the 1960s were
not just all about radicalism and hippie culture and
protest and Black Power and the feminist movement. There were still a country here
that was very conservative. And she had a kind
of curated feminism on women's issues,
which is to say she wanted to feature and
highlight professional women, but she didn't like
stridency of any kind. So on the women's issue she,
as you said, thread a needle-- never calling herself a
feminist, but making it clear that she believed
that women could and must have the [INAUDIBLE]. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: She-- JULIA SWEIG: On the
matter of the South-- go ahead. No, please. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: No,
I was interrupting you, and I didn't want
to be doing that. But I did want to come back
to the question of race-- JULIA SWEIG: Right. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --in
particular, because here LBJ helps to steer the
1964 Civil Rights bill to passage, extremely
important Civil Rights Act, and then in '65 the Voting
Rights Act, and she's all in, and both of them demonstrating
important commitments to racial advancement. And then as the '60s
wears on they're caught up in the maelstrom
of a radicalizing movement for racial
equality-- of Black Power, black consciousness. And she's confronted by
Eartha Kitt, who she memorably invites to one of her lunches. And you can see the way
in which the movement of the country and the times-- the Johnsons are caught
at a particular moment. I wonder if you could-- I'm speaking to this, I
want you to speak to it. JULIA SWEIG: OK. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: I'm
doing too much talking. JULIA SWEIG: No, that's OK. I'll speak to the
Eartha Kitt moment, but it comes in January of '68. So just to go slightly
backwards for a minute-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Sure. Yes. JULIA SWEIG: And say that on
race and on civil rights-- she had spent her summers
growing up in Alabama, as she said, just 20 miles
from the Edmund Pettus Bridge. If you could imagine,
Autauga County-- I'm not pronouncing it
with her southern lilt-- is right adjacent to
where Harper Lee grew up. So Harper Lee, the South
that Harper Lee depicts is the South that
Lady Bird grows up in. She for that reason is intensely
aware of the potential backlash among white Southerners
around civil rights. She deeply understands the
white supremacy of the South. And so until July of '64 when
the first Civil Rights Act passes, she's careful
about not active-- not too explicitly promoting
civil rights legislation. She promotes her husband. She promotes the New South. But she feels a
sense of trepidation, which was merited of course. And later she goes, after the
law is passed, to campaign all over the South to promote
civil rights among Southerners whom she relates to, and
she gets death threats for doing it. So she's a woman who
I think understands what the cost of keeping
racial apartheid could be and what the consequence of
leveling the racial playing field might be for
the Democratic Party, as LBJ so clearly said right
after the first law was passed. "It'll lose the South for
your generation and mine," he said to Bill Moyers. So those two pieces
of legislation plus the Great
Society programs-- when you think about the
literacy programs and Medicare and Medicaid and the
arts programs that were part of the Great
Society, all of that had a civil rights
component to it. It wasn't that they did civil
rights and then the rest of it was for white America. It was all about
their fundamental idea that government-- that the role of government
is to help lift and level the playing field. By 1968, Eartha Kitt
comes to the White House. And now we've had riots
in American cities summer after summer. These are political
uprisings that are challenging the lack of
jobs, the lack of housing, the lack of green
space, police brutality. They're not just chaotic,
unsubstantive protests. There's a lot of
content to them. They're called riots,
but they're also political uprisings. And Lady Bird is taken
aback by this, as is Linda. And they start to feel that
their own progressive self-- they don't recognize
the country anymore. They don't really understand
why all of this advancement has bred so much demands
for more, so much anger. And Eartha Kitt comes
to the White House for a luncheon, the title of
which is Crime in our Streets. And this is when Lyndon has
just introduced a big crime bill the night before in his
State of the Union address. And Eartha is invited because
she's a civil rights activist and she's a huge star. She's on Batman. She's performed
all over the world. She's Catwoman at this point. And she started to spend her
money in Watts and in Anacostia on youth empowerment programs. She's testified in Congress. So she's invited
to come and speak to talk about what's bugging the
youth these days, essentially. And she creates a
bit of a firestorm which then gets totally out of
control, because what she does is-- she's from the
South too, and she challenges a southern white
lady in the White House-- not so much over the crime
bill per se, but what she does, really for the first time--
that gets this public rebuke by the White House-- is she connects the war in
Vietnam to the war at home. And this is crossing a line. This is breaking protocol. You go to the White
House, you speak to what you're invited to speak to. You don't just upset
the choreography the way Eartha did. So the story in the book gets a
whole chapter, because the way it was subsequently
reported, I think, was wrong. The way the White
House spun what happened creeps into Bird's
own rendition of what happened. And so I think it
deserves some unpacking to show how spin machines-- and how a White
House-authorized spin machine-- totally destroyed
Eartha Kitt's career actually for a
couple of decades. And then-- it's the lowest point
that I found of Lady Bird's time in the White House. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Well,
it seemed as if initially from your account that
when Eartha Kitt gets up-- she was invited, as she later
pointed out, and invited to speak. I guess Lady Bird took her time
calling on her, anticipating from her earlier comment-- the President had
stopped in, and Eartha kind of got warmed up
with LBJ for a moment there in a question,
but didn't get too far. But then she's talking about the
juvenile delinquency and crime and-- Eartha Kitt saying
these young men who commit crimes, no,
they're not going to get sent to Vietnam. What's the motive
to get an education when there are no jobs? What's the motive to stay good
when you'd get drafted and sent to Vietnam? So it seemed as if the response
to this, really a lot of it was driven by the war and
the Johnsons' increasing defensiveness about the
war at that point in time. JULIA SWEIG: I think it was
absolutely driven by the war. I mean that's what
she was doing. She was connecting
what was happening at home with the anti-war
movement in the country. And at that point, in
January of '68, Lady Bird-- back to our discussion
about her Vietnam blinders-- she had begun to move
on Vietnam in the sense that she found her environmental
agenda being increasingly drowned out when she went to
speak on college campuses, and she no longer could
avoid the really bad press and pretty vicious protests
that had been largely aimed at her husband until then. And she had two daughters who
were sending their own husbands off to Vietnam. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. JULIA SWEIG: And I think it
was a turning point to her when she started meeting with
wounded service people who were coming to the
White House, who were quadriplegic and paraplegic. So she began to feel
a little bit more connected to the tragedy
of what Americans were experiencing when they came
back by meeting them directly. And you're right,
there were two things. One was that Eartha Kitt was
challenging them on the war, but also that she was
violating protocol. And I think there was a racial
component to this kind of-- how dare this woman
come in and tell us on our home turf what we should
do and think about a topic she wasn't even invited
to come and speak to? ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yeah. Yeah. So I think it I suppose
like some component of this was just having it all arrive
right in the White House. JULIA SWEIG: I think so. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: And-- JULIA SWEIG: I think so. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
The confrontation that occurred there. I was interested in-- I mean, there's so much to
what you've done here, I think. There are several
questions that people have asked about civil rights,
and I wondered whether in her entries how much of it-- how many asides-- I mean, was there anything-- are we getting the real are
we getting her real response? Or are we getting the response
that she wants recorded? Was there anything
in which she says, well this was a hellish day. I had to deal with-- is there a formality to the
dictated remarks, Julia? JULIA SWEIG: Well,
there's a formality, but there's also an openness. I think there's no
doubt that she was-- and an openness, by the
way, that surprised me. Because my impression
initially was that she was this stiff,
controlled character. And she was very controlled
and very compartmentalized. But listening to all of them and
reading all the accounts of-- what I was surprised
by the openness was how much she talked
about how she felt. So when she was exhausted
and when there was a bad day, or her struggles with
menopause and LBJ's moods and raising two teenage
daughters in the White House-- I mean, it's really in
the totality all there, but it's all delivered in
these kind of perfect sentences and word pictures and
cogent paragraphs. So you can think that it's-- and it is recorded for legacy. It is not a private diary. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: It is
a document meant to establish her role in this
history, very consciously. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. But she can't help but-- she's dropping-- there's no way
that she could have known then the bombshells that
she was dropping from the standpoint
of historians looking back on what
happened afterwards, and what we learn about
the inside events. JULIA SWEIG: Well, well that's
a really interesting point. She couldn't have known she
was dropping bombshells. They feel like bombshells
to us because they haven't been reported,
because her diaries haven't been included in the accounts
of the LBJ Presidency. They should have been. So they're bombshells
because there's this huge body of material
that's been written already and this seems to
be totally new. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: On the Huntland
strategy memo, by the way, LBJ reproduces the entire
thing in his memoir-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. JULIA SWEIG: --which-- of course
historians and Presidential memoirs, they're not-- you
use them for references. You don't use them as gospel. But I thought it was
interesting that-- or one does. I thought it was
interesting that LBJ was among the only people to
credit her for that strategy. It just takes time for it
all to shake out though. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Someone has
asked about Caro's portrayal of their marriage
versus what you have discerned from your research. You do mention that you
believe that she was well aware of his philandering-- JULIA SWEIG: Yeah. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --even to
the degree of having one of his paramours who stayed over in the
White House and had breakfast with-- the three of them at
breakfast the following day. She was not--
obviously she was there as a guest for the evening,
but there was a history. And-- JULIA SWEIG: Lady Bird
wakes up, and she's wearing Lady Bird's robe. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. What do you make of-- what's
your view of the marriage? JULIA SWEIG: Look, you
mentioned in the beginning of our conversation or
somewhat toward the beginning that notion of their being
totally intermingled, intertwined. That wasn't my phrase. That was hers. She in '97 cut off ties
with another biographer. And she wrote to
that biographer, you'll never
understand either of us if you don't understand
how totally intertwined we are with one another's lives. And I took that as my cue
really to think about the layers and complexity-- well, of her marriage, but of
any marriage of that length. They had been married
for 30 years, when they get into the White House. And-- of course I mean, I'm
not dismissing the infidelities or the pandering
and the vulgarity, but I think that the
focus on those things, which certainly comes out
in Caro, to the exclusion-- winds up diminishing her agency
and depriving her of substance. And we lose the full picture
if that's all we focus on. I think she of all people would
have said there's more to us and more to me than being the
victim of his philandering. And treating her as
victim is something that I really tried to avoid. The Caro depiction-- his fourth
volume goes until July of 1964, so I haven't seen whether
the way the marriage evolved is reflected in the way he's
going to treat the Presidency. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Did you see-- was there any hint any
reference to these infidelities by her anywhere in the diaries? Any hint of it? JULIA SWEIG: Well, only
in that reference to-- and the person that
she was talking about is Helen Gahagan Douglas-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: --who's a
very interesting character in American history too. She was a very
successful actress who then ran for Congress,
very close to the Roosevelts. And when she and Lyndon were in
the House of Representatives, they had a pretty open
affair in Washington, DC. He defended her when
Richard Nixon red-baited her when she was running again,
I believe for the Senate, in the 1950s and LBJ was
in the Senate at the time. And Helen Gahagan
Douglas was gorgeous, and she was intelligent. And when Lady Bird includes this
whole story about how much she revered a former
lover of Lyndon's who was in the White House "and
we spent the morning"-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
We've lost your audio for a second here, Julia. JULIA SWEIG: Oh. Oh, no. OK. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
But I'm hoping that the little elves
at the Kennedy Library are going to rescue us. JULIA SWEIG: Am I back? ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
Want to try again? JULIA SWEIG: Can
you hear me now? ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. Shoot. JULIA SWEIG: Am I back? ELLEN FITZPATRICK: You are. Yep. JULIA SWEIG: Oh, good. So I don't know where
I left off, but where-- what I was saying was that the
only place in the diaries where she talks about it is this
encounter and the morning she spent-- she describes reverentially,
her morning with Helen Gahagan Douglas. It's a little surprising,
to say the least. But I think she
compartmentalized. And there were some
of his affairs-- some of the women
whom she recognized and some that she just ignored. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: How about
let's talk a little bit about her as a mom. JULIA SWEIG: OK. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
She had two daughters, and it sounded as if as
the Johnsons' White House years came to a close,
they actually were-- she in some ways became even
more engaged with her daughters as the responsibilities of
the public life declined. There were the memorable White
House weddings, with really-- my laugh-out-loud moment in
reading your book when you quote the comedian Edie Adams
saying there was all this-- it was like a royal wedding
and all this national attention and press focused
on the first one, and Adams saying
"No one was invited to the wedding except
the immediate country." That was a great line. But it sounded in some
sense as if she was somewhat a hands-off mother and became
more engaged as time went on. Or is that not correct? JULIA SWEIG: Oh, no. I think that the-- sometimes
I thought of the Obamas and how Michelle Obama
would talk about how great it was to finally have
everyone under one roof when they were in
the White House. And there was a lot of that. Because after the JFK
assassination, Linda left UT. She moved into the White House. She went to George Washington. Lucy was at-- she was
still in high school, and there was a lot of time
when the whole family was there. Lady Bird's diaries are
filled with her delight at having much more
time with the girls than she had at earlier times. I think there was a lot of-- many, many years when
she was out many nights each week doing
politics with Linda. The social scene in Washington
if you're a political spouse was unrelenting, and she felt-- and the kids were
raised by nannies. And it was not until the
White House years where Lady-- my take is Lady Bird was able
to connect with her daughters more intimately in a
more sustained way. And then those weddings-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes,
which were amazing. JULIA SWEIG: --something that
would never happen today. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Right. JULIA SWEIG: 700 people for one
and 600 for the other, I think. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
One of our guests is asking what you think her
most satisfying accomplishment was during her
White House years. Do you have a sense of that? JULIA SWEIG: My quick
answer to that might not be the one that focuses
on the substance of her environmental agenda. It might be getting
LBJ out alive. It might be actually
succeeding in having him not run for a second term. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Well, that-- JULIA SWEIG: And of
course the tragedy of that is that he died four years
after they left the White House. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --that
indeed is a remarkable part of your story, when-- I was very struck in
reading your book at the way in which the war becomes-- the high ideals of both
Johnsons and the true progress that was made, every-- I think historians
and others who study this period,
read about it, those Americans who lived
through it, well aware of it, the way that the war came to
overshadow his Presidency, you feel as you move through
your book the gathering storm. And the exit that she and he
discussed early on, really-- it seemed at the State of
the Union, even before March, he was talking then about-- saying then that he was
going to end his Presidency-- JULIA SWEIG: Well-- ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
--would not run. JULIA SWEIG: --that's true. They start to really plot
the timing and the substance of his announcement beginning
in the fall of 1967. It's actually
really tied for her to her confronting the protest
movement around the war when she goes to New
England to inaugurate a couple of environmental
studies programs at Williams College and at Yale. And she can't-- she's not heard. The protests totally drown it Out. So they start planning
it in the fall of '67, even before the Tet
Offensive, which comes at the end
of January of '68 after that State of the Union. But there's this-- another funny
story in there is the dynamic between the two of them around
that State of the Union where-- it is written that
he-- it's not going on the teleprompter and
he puts it in his pocket, and then she realizes that
he's changed his suit. It's not in his pocket. And she goes to the Oval Office
to get him out of a meeting, and they stand and he
commiserates once again. Should I do it? Should I not do it? He's very Hamlet
about this choice. And winds up in January of
'68 basking in the applause around his crime
bill, which of course is another element of
defeat in a way, right? He's pushing law
and order as opposed to progress on civil rights-- and doesn't announce that
he's not going to run again. And she-- what I was
not able to find out was really how she
felt about that. There's not in her diary a
post-mortem on his failure to reveal that, just
the fact that he didn't read the statement. And then she spent the
first quarter of 1968 just adamantly pushing him to
get there and to get it done and to choose a
date and to do it. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. I think you suggest that
she was a little bit down after the State of the
Union, or there was some-- that was a really interesting
discussion, I thought. It seems to me as I'm listening
to you and having read what she had to say, it's so striking
that although the book is about Lady Bird-- and I can't
imagine anyone improving upon our understanding beyond
what you've done here of this woman-- that it really-- she was right
when she talked about this initial point we discussed,
that you can't really get one without-- understand one without
understanding the other. Because he's a-- obviously it's
his Presidency that drives this story, but-- and she's the subject. But he emerges in this book. We learn so much about him,
I think, in the refraction of this lens that-- the refracted light. I'm probably using
the wrong metaphor. I'm mixing up my optics. But it really is so illuminating
of his Presidency by-- JULIA SWEIG: Thank you. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --having
her voice in there. It's really very interesting. And I wonder-- for
some reason I don't think that would
necessarily be true of every President and
First Lady's story. JULIA SWEIG: Well, I'm not
a First Lady historian. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Nor am I. JULIA SWEIG: You know? And I feel like you're
correct, that it isn't necessarily true of
each presidential couple. But what she did, and I
wish everybody would do, is kept that record. So that we could put
her into the room and really tease out where one
stopped and the other started, and where were the issues on
which she was present or wasn't present. Back to Michelle
Obama for a second. In her memoir she says--
and it surprised me-- that there was only one
time in the two terms Barack Obama was
in the White House when he asked her to come to the
Oval Office during work hours. And that was on the day of
the Sandy Hook mass shooting in Connecticut in 2013. Lady Bird Johnson was in
the Oval Office every day. I mean I might be somewhat
exaggerating, but all the time. They were communicating and
working together constantly. She knit together the operations
of the East Wing and the West Wing into a joint
political operation. And she and LBJ and-- very important character in the
story, Liz Carpenter-- did it. But I don't know that other
White Houses were that commingled as these two were. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
Well, we've just had a question, a
wonderful question, from somebody asking about-- who was struck by how-- about Lady Bird and
Eleanor Roosevelt on both policy and-- emotional
confidantes and advisors to their extremely
powerful husbands, each critical of the emotional
and mental well-being of their husbands, their
philandering husbands. And they both achieved much
of their own personal and political agencies through
their role as First Lady. They pushed their
husbands left, when neither would have
particularly gone there absent the rationale and
the counsel of their wives. That was, I thought, a
stunner about birth control and her standing behind widened
access to birth control, and LBJ right there alongside
making this a policy issue. That was a super
interesting discussion. So the guest is asking
about your thoughts on the similarity between the
Roosevelts and the Johnsons. JULIA SWEIG: I couldn't say
it better than the guest did. I thought that that
was a perfect synopsis. I don't know that Lady Bird
pushed LBJ to the left. There I'm not-- I think
that they were pretty much on the same page in terms of the
civil rights agenda at least. I think she certainly-- as far as environmental
policy with her partnership with Stu Udall, the
Secretary of Interior-- absolutely did help Udall. And Udall helped her
to move LBJ along until the very end
on the environment. And of course labor-- and LBJ knew the Roosevelts. They were, when they came into
the White House, devout New Deal Democrats,
and they believed that it was their job to
push forward with what the Roosevelts had started. And Lady Bird had attended
lunches at the White House. Liz Carpenter was
a cub reporter who had covered Eleanor at the
teas that she used to convene with female journalists. They really felt very much to be
descendants of the Roosevelts, even though Lady Bird's
style was quite different. She was from the
South and she was not as active in terms of her
public voice as Eleanor was. She didn't have a
weekly radio show. She didn't have a column. Eleanor was more out
there in many ways. But Lady Bird found her own way,
and saw Eleanor as a model too. Explicitly so. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. It's fascinating,
because LBJ once referred-- at least once-- to
FDR as his political daddy. So they were certainly reared in
this, the New Deal liberalism. JULIA SWEIG: Yes. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
It's very influential. JULIA SWEIG: And
if I can just say-- I produced this podcast which
came out at the same time, so I was doing more research
in the audio archive. And there's this moment in 1965
when the president of ABC News called LBJ, and he wants
to ask LBJ for permission to work with Lady
Bird on a documentary about beautification
in Washington, DC. And LBJ says to
him, you don't need to be asking me about that. I'm like Mr.
Roosevelt. I let her do whatever she wants to do. I don't get in her way. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Well,
and her contributions were really interesting. I continue to-- I felt as I-- I really paused on the fact
that she mentioned that 2/3-- at one point 2/3 of her
conversations with Lyndon were about the Vietnam War. JULIA SWEIG: And
that was in 1966. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Yes. And that, despite the fact
that before a single detachment of combat troops arrive he's
getting all this advice-- we've gone over this--
from the Kennedy holdovers. But you have George Ball
the Under Secretary of State warning the war is unwinnable
and could result eventually in 50,000 American
soldiers dead. That was a moment,
reading that, that there was an understanding prior
to the escalation of this. JULIA SWEIG: Right. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: And this is-- you wonder whether, had
she pivoted earlier-- unlikely, I would
say, that it would have made much of a difference
in his thinking, but-- JULIA SWEIG: I don't know. But if you just
allow me, because I know that you don't, all
of you that are here, have the book, but I hope
you will read the book-- but I want to just
read a short thing that she said about
Vietnam in May of 1977 at the Kennedy Center
which gives a-- [AUDIO OUT] --just as sorry, just as
strained just as ripped, and not knowing the answer,
but feeling this country had to live up to
its commitment. It was extremely
painful of course, because he could not find an
honorable way to end that war and he wanted this
country to be united. So of course it was a very
eroding, wearing, painful period." And I think that says it all. That's what they
were talking about. That's what they
were coping with. ELLEN FITZPATRICK:
Well, and of course we know as historians
or students of history the long prehistory that
set the nation on this path, that was there before
Lyndon Johnson ever became President of the United States. JULIA SWEIG: Correct. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: But obviously
he has a pivotal role in that. Well, this is-- Julia, this is a
really amazing book. I feel that-- JULIA SWEIG: Well,
thank you, Ellen. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: --you did
something extremely important here. And it's also just a
wonderfully engaging read. You're a very,
very skilled writer and you've got a
great story to tell, and you've made some important
history in telling it. So it's been a great pleasure to
talk with you about this book. And I hope our
viewers or our guests here tonight will follow
up and read your book. It pays dividends. It's wonderful. JULIA SWEIG: Well, thank you. I'm just honored to
be here with you. And I thought you
covered so much ground, and it was a really
delightful conversation for me to have the chance
to participate in. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Thank you. OK. I think that probably does it. We've run out of time. And thank you to
the Kennedy Library for giving us the opportunity
to have this conversation. I would have loved to have
had it with you anyway, but nice to have
others joining us. And thank the guests as well
for their interesting questions, which I did work in. JULIA SWEIG: Wonderful. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Many of them
overlapped with my own, so-- very good. JULIA SWEIG: Fantastic. Thank you. Good night, everybody. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Good night. JULIA SWEIG: Bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]
