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Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A magisterial portrait of Lady Bird Johnson, and a major reevaluation of the profound yet underappreciated impact the First Lady's political instincts had on LBJ's presidency.
WINNER OF THE TEXAS BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD • "[An] extensive, engaging new biography . . . in the Caro mold . . . To those who do not know [Lady Bird's] story, Sweig's book will come as a revelation."-The New York Times
"This riveting portrait gives us an important revision of a long-neglected First Lady."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols. 1–3
In the spring of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson had a decision to make. Just months after moving into the White House under the worst of circumstances-following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy-he had to decide whether to run to win the presidency in his own right. He turned to his most reliable, trusted political strategist: his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. The strategy memo she produced for him, emblematic of her own political acumen and largely overlooked by biographers, is just one revealing example of how their marriage was truly a decades-long political partnership.
Perhaps the most underestimated First Lady of the twentieth century, Lady Bird Johnson was also one of the most accomplished and often her husband's secret weapon. Managing the White House in years of national upheaval, through the civil rights movement and the escalation of the Vietnam War, Lady Bird projected a sense of calm and, following the glamorous and modern Jackie Kennedy, an old-fashioned image of a First Lady. In truth, she was anything but. As the first First Lady to run the East Wing like a professional office, she took on her own policy initiatives, including the most ambitious national environmental effort since Teddy Roosevelt. Occupying the White House during the beginning of the women's liberation movement, she hosted professional women from all walks of life in the White House, including urban planning and environmental pioneers like Jane Jacobs and Barbara Ward, encouraging women everywhere to pursue their own careers, even if her own style of leadership and official role was to lead by supporting others.
Where no presidential biographer has understood the full impact of Lady Bird Johnson's work in the White House, Julia Sweig is the first to draw substantially on Lady Bird's own voice in her White House diaries to place Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson center stage and to reveal a woman ahead of her time-and an accomplished politician in her own right.
WINNER OF THE TEXAS BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD • "[An] extensive, engaging new biography . . . in the Caro mold . . . To those who do not know [Lady Bird's] story, Sweig's book will come as a revelation."-The New York Times
"This riveting portrait gives us an important revision of a long-neglected First Lady."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols. 1–3
In the spring of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson had a decision to make. Just months after moving into the White House under the worst of circumstances-following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy-he had to decide whether to run to win the presidency in his own right. He turned to his most reliable, trusted political strategist: his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. The strategy memo she produced for him, emblematic of her own political acumen and largely overlooked by biographers, is just one revealing example of how their marriage was truly a decades-long political partnership.
Perhaps the most underestimated First Lady of the twentieth century, Lady Bird Johnson was also one of the most accomplished and often her husband's secret weapon. Managing the White House in years of national upheaval, through the civil rights movement and the escalation of the Vietnam War, Lady Bird projected a sense of calm and, following the glamorous and modern Jackie Kennedy, an old-fashioned image of a First Lady. In truth, she was anything but. As the first First Lady to run the East Wing like a professional office, she took on her own policy initiatives, including the most ambitious national environmental effort since Teddy Roosevelt. Occupying the White House during the beginning of the women's liberation movement, she hosted professional women from all walks of life in the White House, including urban planning and environmental pioneers like Jane Jacobs and Barbara Ward, encouraging women everywhere to pursue their own careers, even if her own style of leadership and official role was to lead by supporting others.
Where no presidential biographer has understood the full impact of Lady Bird Johnson's work in the White House, Julia Sweig is the first to draw substantially on Lady Bird's own voice in her White House diaries to place Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson center stage and to reveal a woman ahead of her time-and an accomplished politician in her own right.
Editorial Reviews
"A revelation . . . a book in the Caro mold, using Lady Bird, along with tapes and transcripts of her entire White House diary, to tell the history of America during the Johnson years."-The New York Times
"Sweig makes a persuasive case for Lady Bird's influence not just within her marriage but on her husband's career. In doing so, she forces us to adjust the lens through which we've viewed one of our most consequential presidencies."-The Washington Post
"A superb portrait that elevates Lady Bird's stature as one of the most accomplished first ladies of the twentieth century."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"With impressive research and admirable skill as a superb storyteller, Sweig's book for the first time captures the full extent of Lady Bird's influence on LBJ's administration and her importance in making the Great Society a landmark moment in American history. Hers is the best book written about Lady Bird Johnson and also a model for how we should understand the influence of First Ladies on the country's turn toward a more humane society."-Robert Dallek, author of How Did We Get Here?: From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump
"Sweig has given us a fascinating portrait of a marriage-and of a shrewd, tough, tender, and wise woman who understood the uses and limits of power. Her biography of Lady Bird Johnson is a magisterial, revealing, and rewarding work."-Evan Thomas, author of First: Sandra Day O'Connor
"This is the best book ever written about one of the most influential-and least understood-First Ladies in history. In Julia Sweig's beautifully rendered, intimate portrait, one can finally take the full measure of Lady Bird Johnson as environmentalist, feminist, and shrewd political strategist on whom her husband always depended but should have heeded more."-Michael Kazin, Georgetown University, co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
"Julia Sweig has gifted us with a most timely and splendidly enhanced portrait of Lady Bird Johnson: daughter of Alabama and Texas wealth-historian, journalist, activist, speechwriter, campaigner, successful businesswoman. Lady Bird championed the New South and was partner to LBJ's efforts regarding civil rights, human rights, and the Great Society. We learn about Lady Bird's previously unknown work for real environmental change, which extended far beyond ‘beautification' and floral plantings-with profound visions for a Green New Deal. This riveting portrait gives us an important revision of a long-neglected First Lady."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols. 1–3
"Sweig has written an inviting, challenging, well-told tale of the thoroughly modern partner and strate...
"Sweig makes a persuasive case for Lady Bird's influence not just within her marriage but on her husband's career. In doing so, she forces us to adjust the lens through which we've viewed one of our most consequential presidencies."-The Washington Post
"A superb portrait that elevates Lady Bird's stature as one of the most accomplished first ladies of the twentieth century."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"With impressive research and admirable skill as a superb storyteller, Sweig's book for the first time captures the full extent of Lady Bird's influence on LBJ's administration and her importance in making the Great Society a landmark moment in American history. Hers is the best book written about Lady Bird Johnson and also a model for how we should understand the influence of First Ladies on the country's turn toward a more humane society."-Robert Dallek, author of How Did We Get Here?: From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump
"Sweig has given us a fascinating portrait of a marriage-and of a shrewd, tough, tender, and wise woman who understood the uses and limits of power. Her biography of Lady Bird Johnson is a magisterial, revealing, and rewarding work."-Evan Thomas, author of First: Sandra Day O'Connor
"This is the best book ever written about one of the most influential-and least understood-First Ladies in history. In Julia Sweig's beautifully rendered, intimate portrait, one can finally take the full measure of Lady Bird Johnson as environmentalist, feminist, and shrewd political strategist on whom her husband always depended but should have heeded more."-Michael Kazin, Georgetown University, co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
"Julia Sweig has gifted us with a most timely and splendidly enhanced portrait of Lady Bird Johnson: daughter of Alabama and Texas wealth-historian, journalist, activist, speechwriter, campaigner, successful businesswoman. Lady Bird championed the New South and was partner to LBJ's efforts regarding civil rights, human rights, and the Great Society. We learn about Lady Bird's previously unknown work for real environmental change, which extended far beyond ‘beautification' and floral plantings-with profound visions for a Green New Deal. This riveting portrait gives us an important revision of a long-neglected First Lady."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols. 1–3
"Sweig has written an inviting, challenging, well-told tale of the thoroughly modern partner and strate...
Readers Top Reviews
G. B. Ishida
I am trying to read on and I will because I hate to pay and not finish a kindle book. Not quite bored but....The author's long sentences that are almost a whole page are distracting from Lady Bird. Too much detail about people that are part of the story but not necessary to write their histories. In addition, her adjectives are too many and over done in many of the accounts of Lady Bird and others.
Captain K
I have had a difficult time rating this book. As a work of scholarship it is little short of heroic - in addition to listening to countless hours of Mrs. Johnson's audio diaries the author (like her subject) has absorbed some issues that were novel then and remain challenging even today, such as exactly what "urban renewal" should be about. But the book is a tad more massive than the casual reader will want. I grew up in a VERY anti-LBJ household. As did Lady Bird, the author seems to bend over backwards to paint a sympathetic picture of this very flawed President. Yet it cannot be denied that he managed singular accomplishments in many areas, including conservation - and might have done much more had he not been hamstrung by Vietnam. But let us not ignore the fact this book is about, first and foremost, MRS. Johnson. To the extent anyone remembers her, they may think of billboards and flower gardens. Indeed, even the Johnson administration seems reluctant to have acknowledged that this was a college-educated journalist who, much like her biographer, was a quick study with a much deeper appreciation for what would come to be called "environmentalism." It is sad that the conventions of the day didn't give her a broader forum and looser rein. Thus I cannot deny that the book was an eye-opener. A bit too ambitious, perhaps - the author expands her scope to display the tremendous influence Mrs. Johnson had over her husband in all areas of his political career and, given his frequent missteps, tarnishes the otherwise sterling image of the First Lady conveyed through her conservation work. She had a blind spot when it came to LBJ and some of her poorer moments (rendered honestly by the author) came when defending him and/or appeasing wrongheaded voters. But this is biography, not hagiography. Again, not a light read, but one I appreciated.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
The Surrogate
Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a party is not to our party alone, but to the nation, and indeed to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom.
So let us not be petty when our cause is so great, let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our nation's future is at stake. -John F. Kennedy, speech to have been delivered in Austin, Texas, November 24, 1963
When he came to the White House, suddenly everyone saw what the New Frontier was going to mean.
It meant a poet at the Inauguration; it meant swooping around Washington, dropping in on delighted and flustered old friends; it meant going to the airport in zero weather without an overcoat; it meant a rocking chair and having the Hickory Hill seminar at the White House when Bobby and Ethel were out of town; it meant fun at presidential press conferences.
It meant dash, glamour, glitter, charm. It meant a new era of enlightenment and verve; it meant Nobel Prize winners dancing in the lobby; it meant authors and actors and poets and Shakespeare in the East Room. -Mary McGrory, The Evening Star, November 24, 1963
Claudia Taylor Johnson drew her initial impression of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy not from a luncheon for spouses or an evening social event in Washington, but rather, from Jack and Jackie's 1953 Life magazine wedding pictures. Jackie, she thought, was "absolutely the essence of romance and beauty." When the newlywed Kennedys moved to Washington, real life, as it turned out, was even more remarkable than the photos. As a freshman senator's wife, Jackie was "a bird of beautiful plumage" who "couldn't have been more gracious." By comparison, Bird felt, she and the other Senate wives were "little gray wrens." When the Kennedys married and Jack began his first term in the Senate, the Johnsons had already been in that chamber for four years. In the Washington, D.C., of the 1950s, the Johnsons and the Kennedys were not personally close. They didn't run in the same social circles. In fact, by the 1956 Democratic convention, Jack and Lyndon had become quasi-overt rivals. Elected Senate majority leader in 1955 and approaching the peak of his power in Congress, LBJ conveyed his standing to Lady Bird, who ruled the roost of Senate wives. Despite the differences between their husbands, Bird graciously inducted Jackie into the carefully choreographed courtlike world of Washington spouses, hosting her at their brick Colonial on 30th Place, Northwest, and otherwise brushing up against her youth and glamour throughout the decade. Finding Jackie impossibly young, Lady Bird worked to put her at ease at these spouse gatherings; Jackie liked Lady Bird and made a point of connecting with the Johnsons' elder daughter, Lynda, just eleven when they first met. But Washington was not entirely new to Jackie: At fourteen, she'd moved with her mother and her mother's new husband to an estate in Virginia's hunt country. She briefly attended the private girls' school Holton-Arms, and she finished her undergraduate degree at George Washington University before marrying Jack.
An accomplished equestrian, Jackie summered in the Hamptons and Newport; had studied at Miss Porter's School, Vassar, and the Sorbonne; and spoke French and Spanish. Lady Bird had studied French, briefly, and her Spanish was still limited to what she had picked up during her childhood in Texas. Jackie was twenty-three years old, Bird's age when Lyndon had already served for two years in the House. While Bird worked assiduously to grease the wheels of Lyndon's political office with endless socializing, charity events, and travel back and forth to and across Texas, Jackie struck Bird as being uninterested in the tedium of the game, content to spend her early years married to Jack as a society photographer for the Washington Times-Herald, taking a course in American history at Georgetown, or repairing to Hickory Hill, the country house in McLean, Virginia, that the newlyweds had purchased and later gave to Bobby and Ethel. Even if outward the cultural signs of their differences were rife, inward, the parallels between Lady Bird and Jackie ran deep. Each had made her mark in Washington as the young, newlywed wife of a young, ambitious husband. Both soon had to contend with their husbands' infidelities and the humiliation of knowing that their own political and social circles knew of and, indeed, often facilitated the behavior. Miscarriage after miscarriage plagued their quest for offspring. And by 1960, both had husbands for whom serious illness made the prospect of death loom large-Addison's disease dogged JFK throughout his adult life; depression, heart d...
The Surrogate
Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a party is not to our party alone, but to the nation, and indeed to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom.
So let us not be petty when our cause is so great, let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our nation's future is at stake. -John F. Kennedy, speech to have been delivered in Austin, Texas, November 24, 1963
When he came to the White House, suddenly everyone saw what the New Frontier was going to mean.
It meant a poet at the Inauguration; it meant swooping around Washington, dropping in on delighted and flustered old friends; it meant going to the airport in zero weather without an overcoat; it meant a rocking chair and having the Hickory Hill seminar at the White House when Bobby and Ethel were out of town; it meant fun at presidential press conferences.
It meant dash, glamour, glitter, charm. It meant a new era of enlightenment and verve; it meant Nobel Prize winners dancing in the lobby; it meant authors and actors and poets and Shakespeare in the East Room. -Mary McGrory, The Evening Star, November 24, 1963
Claudia Taylor Johnson drew her initial impression of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy not from a luncheon for spouses or an evening social event in Washington, but rather, from Jack and Jackie's 1953 Life magazine wedding pictures. Jackie, she thought, was "absolutely the essence of romance and beauty." When the newlywed Kennedys moved to Washington, real life, as it turned out, was even more remarkable than the photos. As a freshman senator's wife, Jackie was "a bird of beautiful plumage" who "couldn't have been more gracious." By comparison, Bird felt, she and the other Senate wives were "little gray wrens." When the Kennedys married and Jack began his first term in the Senate, the Johnsons had already been in that chamber for four years. In the Washington, D.C., of the 1950s, the Johnsons and the Kennedys were not personally close. They didn't run in the same social circles. In fact, by the 1956 Democratic convention, Jack and Lyndon had become quasi-overt rivals. Elected Senate majority leader in 1955 and approaching the peak of his power in Congress, LBJ conveyed his standing to Lady Bird, who ruled the roost of Senate wives. Despite the differences between their husbands, Bird graciously inducted Jackie into the carefully choreographed courtlike world of Washington spouses, hosting her at their brick Colonial on 30th Place, Northwest, and otherwise brushing up against her youth and glamour throughout the decade. Finding Jackie impossibly young, Lady Bird worked to put her at ease at these spouse gatherings; Jackie liked Lady Bird and made a point of connecting with the Johnsons' elder daughter, Lynda, just eleven when they first met. But Washington was not entirely new to Jackie: At fourteen, she'd moved with her mother and her mother's new husband to an estate in Virginia's hunt country. She briefly attended the private girls' school Holton-Arms, and she finished her undergraduate degree at George Washington University before marrying Jack.
An accomplished equestrian, Jackie summered in the Hamptons and Newport; had studied at Miss Porter's School, Vassar, and the Sorbonne; and spoke French and Spanish. Lady Bird had studied French, briefly, and her Spanish was still limited to what she had picked up during her childhood in Texas. Jackie was twenty-three years old, Bird's age when Lyndon had already served for two years in the House. While Bird worked assiduously to grease the wheels of Lyndon's political office with endless socializing, charity events, and travel back and forth to and across Texas, Jackie struck Bird as being uninterested in the tedium of the game, content to spend her early years married to Jack as a society photographer for the Washington Times-Herald, taking a course in American history at Georgetown, or repairing to Hickory Hill, the country house in McLean, Virginia, that the newlyweds had purchased and later gave to Bobby and Ethel. Even if outward the cultural signs of their differences were rife, inward, the parallels between Lady Bird and Jackie ran deep. Each had made her mark in Washington as the young, newlywed wife of a young, ambitious husband. Both soon had to contend with their husbands' infidelities and the humiliation of knowing that their own political and social circles knew of and, indeed, often facilitated the behavior. Miscarriage after miscarriage plagued their quest for offspring. And by 1960, both had husbands for whom serious illness made the prospect of death loom large-Addison's disease dogged JFK throughout his adult life; depression, heart d...
