How Lady Bird Johnson Made LBJ Away

Joe BidenLyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency has been compared to that of Lyndon Baines Johnson for the highly significant reshaping of domestic politics. But here is another comparison that has not been adopted – and should be: the crucial role of Lady Bird Johnson in creating and executing the strategy that resulted in LBJ’s departure after a single elected term.

It’s a comparison that our current first lady should study carefully, because these next few days could be the most consequential of her life.

The parallels between Jill Biden and Lady Bird Johnson are clear: they were both wives and second ladies of senators before entering the East Wing; both faced turbulent crises — civil rights, COVID, January 6, Israel — tearing apart the social fabric of America. Now, as Lady Bird, Jill must help her husband make the final decision: whether or not to run for a second term.

When LBJ grudgingly accepted the vice presidential spot on JFK’s ticket in 1960, he was the Senate majority leader; the role was a downgrade by any light. For him, it was “like trying to swallow a nettle: bruised, sticky, prickly,” in Lady Bird’s account, detailed in my book, Lady Bird Johnson: Hidden in Plain Sight. But as second lady, while her husband foundered, she began to prosper. Often discouraged, Jackie Kennedy threw a large part of her ceremonial duties at her. Still, Lady Bird calmly accepted them.

For the Johnsons, promotion to the presidency and the role of first lady, not by election but by assassination, was far worse than choking on nettles. At first, Lady Bird genuinely believed that they were caretakers and would only remain in office for 13 months. But six months after assuming the presidency, and as a devout New Deal Democrat, she began to believe that LBJ – with her help – had the opportunity to fulfill his domestic political agenda – particularly civil rights and universal health care. – that FDR’s death in 1945 was not realized.

But she had two problems to overcome. One of them was LBJ himself; the other was the country.

LBJ lived under the cloud of depression, and after a massive heart attack nearly killed him in 1955, the prospect of not living to finish even his first full term was real. As much as LBJ has been painted as the personification of power, his formidable ability to wield it has come at an enormous cost to his physical and mental health. Serving as Senate majority leader nearly killed him; the presidency can finish the job.

Lady Bird’s fears were expressed as early as May 1964, when the inexorable pull into the invincible swamp of Vietnam was just beginning. Lady Bird then understood well, as she wrote in her diary, “the depth of [Lyndon’s] pain, when and if he faces the possibility of sending many American boys to Vietnam or some other place.”

LBJ was less concerned about his ability to defeat Barry Goldwater in November than he was about his ability to maintain public support and govern in the future.

Despite her rigid, two-dimensional public persona, Lady Bird Johnson possessed deep reserves of wisdom, resilience and, crucially for her husband, political judgment. And she was the only person in his immediate circle whom Lyndon trusted without reservation.

In May of that year, she retired to the Huntland estate in Virginia and, at LBJ’s request, wrote him a strategic memorandum. Huntland’s memo laid out the idea that LBJ commit to a full term – she didn’t want him to retire early and drive her crazy at the Ranch. “If you win,” she concluded, “we will do the best we can for three years and three or four months.” And then, in “February or March 1968,” she proposed announcing that she would not run for a second term.

Of course, LBJ ran and defeated Goldwater and, before Vietnam became the intractable crisis, passed the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society legislation that Joe Biden considers his inspiration.

In the fall of 1967, however, the mood in the country changed. After living in what she described as “isolated from life” in the White House, Lady Bird began her own change when appearances on American campuses to promote her environmentalism were drowned out by protests and while one daughter’s fiancé and another’s husband were preparing to move to Vietnam. .

“I want to know what’s happening, even if knowing means suffering,” she said. She had already begun counting down the days until the end of her term and in October of that year she launched her campaign to focus on Lyndon at the time of her public announcement that she would not run for a second term.

She helped write the January 1968 State of the Union; In his breast pocket was a section announcing that he would not run, but he decided not to hand it over. Instead, it was on March 31, 1968, in an Oval Office speech purportedly about Vietnam, that her husband explained her decision not to run for re-election.

The campaign was too tiring, and the priorities of the presidency as he saw it – a peace process with Vietnam, a deeper expansion of civil rights – had to be his focus. “I will not seek and will not accept my party’s nomination for another term as its President.”

Lady Bird also helped draft this speech, but it was her quiet strategy, nearly four years in the making, that LBJ embraced that night and from which our current First Lady can learn.

Convincing someone she loves to stop doing what she loves — and Joe Biden clearly loves his job and appreciates the potential of a second term — could very well be the most difficult moment of Jill Biden’s political career. But it could be just as important as saving the American republic this fall.

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