Just finished reading: Hiding in Plain Sight
I just finished reading Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, by Julia Sweig. This was has been on my list ever since I listened to the podcast. And it’s been on my shelf since the fall. The more I learn about Lady Bird, the more fascinating I find her.
Let’s get to it…
Flip through my sketchbook.
Then scroll through some doodles. As always, no spoilers here. These doodles are not necessarily representative of the most important parts of the book or even the main ideas. Nor are they in any particular order. They’re just a collection of things that jumped out at me.
Jackie and Lady Bird
As Julia Sweig points out, both Lady Bird and Jackie had a “powerful spouse with significant health issues and with barely concealed and apparently unapologetic infidelities”. To add to the humiliation, both women knew that many within their circles helped to make the philandering possible. Both also endured multiple miscarriages.
When Jackie gave Lady Bird her personal White House tour (four days after JFK was assassinated and three months after the death of their newborn Patrick), Jackie cautioned “don’t be frightened of this house. Some of the happiest years of my marriage have been spent here.” She added “you will be happy here.”
I knew JFK and LBJ were both unabashedly adulterous. I still found it shocking that LBJ lent his mistress his wife’s nightgown and robe when she stayed at the White House. And that Lady Bird had breakfasted with her and declared it “the most stimulating hour of the day.”
A loveliness
Born Claudia Alta Taylor, Lady Bird was raised by descendants of enslaved people. One of the woman dubbed her “Lady Bird” because Claudia was (in Sweig’s words) “too weighty a name for such a spritely child.”
When I looked up “Lady Bird” to see if it’s a specific type of bird or if it just meant female bird, I was served a bunch of photos of ladybugs. (A bunch of lady bugs are called a loveliness. So I was served up a loveliness of lady bugs.)
I checked with writer Shannon McKenna Schmidt to solve this mystery. She shared a line from Michael Gillette’s Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History — “The nickname ‘Lady Bird,’ another word for lady bug, attached itself early.”
So there you go. 🐞
Lasker!
Philanthropist and advocate Mary Lasker lobbied LBJ for years to get him to fund medical research and polio vaccines. According to Lady Bird, Lasker was able to elicit in LBJ “the oddest combination of cynicism and undying belief in the mind of man.”
The name Lasker was familiar from when I read about Warren G. Harding years ago. Sure enough, that Lasker was married to this Lasker:
Harding’s campaign was the first with a massive and coordinated focus on PR and advertising: billboards, sound and movie clips, print, photo opps, etc.
Lasker (Harding’s ad guy) was huge and made a big impact in the ad world, but he didn’t get much credit for his role in changing political campaign strategy.
Like Harding, Lasker got his start in the newspaper business.
He was previously William Jennings Bryan’s press secretary.
Oral hygiene was critical to the Viet Cong
They kept their toothbrushes in their front pockets. Lady Bird noted “an intensive training in ideals that is lacking on our side.”
Robert Moses
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker was fascinating. I wondered if Robert Moses would show up in this book. He did! Now I wonder if that’s a sign that I should read The Power Broker.
Eradicating poverty, disease, and ignorance
Quoting Barbara Ward’s book The Rich Nations & The Poor Nations, LBJ declared “the mission of our times is to eradicate the three enemies of mankind — poverty, disease, and ignorance.”
What a lovely idea.
I would very much like to eradicate these things in our times.
Let me take the tough ones
On her whistle-stop tour campaigning for LBJ, Lady Bird didn’t want to go to just the “easy” cities.
Before the trip, she spent hours calling officials in the cities she was visiting asking for support. Predictably, her call with Strom Thurmond (“the most hilarious call”) was unsuccessful.
She hated the word “beautification”
Like many, I equated Lady Bird with making things prettier. Planting flowers and the like. Her mission was far more important and far more thoughtful and far deeper than that. She said “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 the wildflowers they’d have to eventually care about the land that grew ‘em.”
George Wallace… what the actual eff.
I knew Wallace wasn’t a great guy. This story was still shocking and appalling:
When his wife Lurleen had their fourth baby, doctors told him they discovered uterine cancer. He didn’t tell her. (This apparently was a thing. [Male] doctors not telling their [female] patients about diagnoses and letting their husbands choose what to do with that info.)
Four years later, she started bleeding out of the blue and that’s how she found out. While recovering from a freaking hysterectomy, she announced she’s running for governor … because there’s a two-term max and he can’t run again but also he wants to maintain power and control, ya know?) She wins. She’s inaugurated. Cancer returns months later… and she dies. (Months after he’s into the presidential primaries… where his slogan was Win with Wallace in 1968. I imagine there must have been a tiny asterisk somewhere exempting Mrs. Wallace and anyone who was not a white guy from all of the winning.)
As Sweig puts it: “in dying in office from a disease that could have been treated six years earlier, she was the most proximate victim of his ambition and paternalism.”
Not the same but also… huh?
Lady Bird was just five years old when her mother died. Her older brothers were at boarding school at the time. Their father T.J. (Thomas Jefferson Taylor) waited a full freaking year to tell them.
Beefed up security
After Bobby Kennedy was shot, LBJ ordered protection for all of the other presidential candidates:
Eugene McCarthy
Hubert Humphrey
Richard Nixon
Harold Stassen
Nelson Rockefeller
Dick Gregory
He also tried to get Congress to pass laws to “bring the insane traffic in guns to a halt.”
“The disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. could see “nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly — to get rid of the disease of racism.” He was done waiting and had enough with the “myth of time” where if you just “be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out.”
Lady Bird found out he’d been shot from her daughter Lynda while they were guests at Mar-A-Lago (invited by owner Marjorie Merriweather Post), which (as you can imagine) sent me down a tangent that I won’t get into here. I will say that one of her husbands had a coat of arms.
The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, by Steve Fraser; here are more doodles
After being shot twice, Vietnam war medic Lawrence Joel dragged himself out to continue treating other wounded soldiers. He was the first living Black soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honor.
Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum opening
When the LBJ Presidential Library opened, distinguished guests included:
Averell Harriman
John Connally
Thurgood Marshall
Not The Lorax, because he’s not real. But Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) was there and he brought his book, The Lorax
Hubert Humphrey
Gregory Peck, who was not dressed as Abraham Lincoln because that would have been very odd and also because he didn’t play Abraham Lincoln until more than a decade later
Two tiny tangents: I just learned that Geisel used to be a political cartoonist! Also, Gregory Peck was in Moby Dick. Twice. Which I mentioning because Moby Dick keeps appearing in all of my reading and research and I’m starting to think it’s another sign.
Putting the “fun” in “funicular”
I knew The Lorax was not the first time Dr. Seuss showed up in my sketchbooks. However, I didn’t remember that this Dr. Seuss reference had Averell Harriman reference right next to it, too.
My mom used to read Dr. Seuss’ Happy Birthday to You! on my birthday and I read it to my kids on theirs… and never questioned what “funicular” meant (“a railway with very particular boats that are pulled through the air by funicular goats”) until I read about Harriman’s funicular in The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War, by Catherine Grace Katz.
Speaking of The Lorax…
Here’s a little doodle of Ronnie: “a tree is a tree — how many trees do you need?”
In closing…
To wrap this up, here are two Lady Bird quotes I found particularly powerful:
“Don’t hold back. Don’t be shy. Step forward in every way you can to plan boldly, to speak clearly, to offer the leadership which the world needs.”
_________________________
“Be aware of your hidden strengths. You have the capacity to change the face of your community, to elevate the life around you. Through the centuries, women have been the prodders. Good works go forward in proportion to the number of vital and creative and determined women supporting them. When women get behind a project, things happen.”
This might be a record for me
Besides this wrap-up, doodles inspired by this book are already sprinkled in quite a few other blogs. (Bunny Mellon alone was mentioned in three other posts.) Here’s the list so far:
Leslie, Thelma, and Hiram
(my collection of People We Know By Names Other Than Those They Were Born With)
PS
Have you watched The Lady Bird Diaries yet? If not, may I recommend watching a little, reading a chunk of the book, then finishing the documentary? Let me know what you think!
More posts like this:
🐞