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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your President's Day with us. On this President's Day, we're going to spend some time getting to know some very special presidential confidants, supporters, and advisors. We'll hear about some people who made these presidencies possible. First ladies, women who joined their husbands as residents of the White House and who were determined to shape the Office of the First Lady in their own image. Let's get back into it with Lady Bird Johnson.

First Lady Johnson was the subject of a book called Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight by Julia Sweig and, as the title suggests, Lady Bird was a powerful person who kept a low profile but was instrumental in LBJ's ascent. Julia Sweig joined us on the show as part of our full bio series where we take a thorough well-researched biography, often with an intimidating page count, and break it down into smaller chunks over the course of a week. Without further ado, here's the first part of my conversation with Julia Sweig about Lady Bird Johnson.

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Alison Stewart: Before we start talking about Lady Bird, Julia, I want to talk about you and how you got interested in writing a book about Lady Bird and creating a podcast about her.

Julia: Well, I wanted to write a book about women and power, very broadly speaking. I had spent 15 years or more in the foreign policy space in a world that where the gender imbalance was just incredibly profound, often the only woman in the room, and experienced that in Washington, D.C. When I went about looking for a topic, I didn't have Lady Bird in mind. I had that broad theme and then discovered that when she was in the White House, she kept this vast audio diary. Some of it had been published. Then when I started the research, the LBJ Library started to release the full unredacted transcripts and original recordings of that diary.

Starting to listen to it and then read all of the secondary literature on the LBJ presidency, I realized this is a woman who's married to and in this longtime political and financial partnership and marriage with the president most associated with the concept of power in the American 20th century. There's my topic, especially because her material to my mind adds so much to how we think about the LBJ presidency and then back to that topic of woman in power. Plus her voice, as you'll hear, is very, very entrancing to listen to so having that original audio really drew me in.

The second thing, and that leads to the podcast, is because there's so much audio and because I personally wanted to explore working in a different medium, not just writing long form and short form, but doing audio storytelling. I have a longtime friend and creative collaborator, Adam Pincus, and we started putting together the idea of converting this story into pretty much an-- well, we call it a podcast, but it's an audio documentary.

Again, the 1960s and the LBJ presidency, there's so much material there for listeners to hear the story. It adds so much, I think, to the printed words on page experience of that moment.

Alison Stewart: Lady Bird Johnson was born Claudia Alta Taylor in Karnack, Texas, and was given this nickname, Lady Bird or Bird as a child. How did she come to have this nickname and why did it stick?

Julia: Well, Lady Bird was the full nickname. Lyndon Johnson later called her a Bird, but Lady Bird was given to her by one of her early caregivers when she was very, very young toddler. She was raised by her mother, but her mother died when Lady Bird was five years old. The caregiver was a descendant of enslaved people in deep East Texas, and that's who raised Lady Bird Johnson. Why the name stuck? That I have no idea.

That diminutive feminized way of talking about a little girl and then even a teenager and a full grown woman, that stuck with her. I think it's a product of the times. Her given name was Claudia, which is a name of a lot more gravitas, and she talked about the difference much, much later in her life.

Alison Stewart: What was that difference?

Julia: Well, there's a moment where we hear in 1968, now I'm jumping way ahead, where she makes a very serious speech to the American Institute of Architects, July of 1968. We've had tumult and polarization and uprisings in American cities a lot over housing and police brutality and the lack of access to nature in American cities is part of it. She puts the blame squarely on the architecture profession for buying into the chase after federal dollars to raise these huge tower and plaza spaces, raise our AISA after Urban renewal has razed, R-A-Z-E-D, neighborhood all over the country.

In any case, she gives this serious speech, which is an indictment and is given after the applause. An Azalea called Mrs. LBJ and she musses into her recording device later at the White House. It was one of those moments when I wish I had been Claudia all my life. In a way, I think Claudia, what she's saying there is that diminutive of Lady Bird deprived her of being seen as such a woman of substance that she really was.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Julia Sweig. We're talking about her book, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight. She clearly had a keen intellect. She went to the University of Texas in around 1930. What were her original career aspirations?

Julia: When she was in Texas she first did a degree in history and then an additional certification in journalism. She initially thought of herself as becoming a teacher, staying around Texas near her father, or maybe not farther afield than Austin, but she also amused about traveling as far away as Hawaii or Alaska to teach. That's before either of those places were states. She had this, I think, duality of being pulled to a more ambitious, far away part of the world, although in a pretty, gendered profession of teaching at the time, or even just staying and getting married and redecorating the house and being a more of a traditional southern privileged woman.

Alison Stewart: Lady Bird Taylor meets Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1934. Where were they both in their lives? How do they meet?

Julia: Well, lady Lady Bird had just finished college and she was figuring out whether she was going to go and try to teach somewhere else. She had planned a trip to Washington, D.C and a friend of hers said, "If you're going to go to Washington, D.C you should really--" Lady Bird had dated a lot, I should say, so she wasn't new to the dating scene, but a friend, a mutual friend said, "You're going to Washington. You should meet this aid to a member of Congress, Lyndon Baines Johnson." Lady Bird and her friend came to Washington, D.C. She didn't meet him here. She decided not to. By here I mean I'm speaking from Washington, D.C.

Shortly thereafter, they did go on their first date in Austin, Texas. He at the time was an ambitious young man thinking about whether to go to law school, the job of being a congressional staffer, as with today as a traditional entry point into politics for some people who want to run for office themselves and he was one of those people. He asked her to marry him at the end of their first date and she was totally taken aback by it.

That ensued then a six-week correspondence, very heady long distance phone calls, scratchy wire, letters back and forth. He then drove from Washington, D.C, now we're in November of 1934, to Karnack, Texas to her father's home, her home, which was called the Brick House, and essentially gave her an ultimatum. Like, "Agree to marry me now or this is over," and she did.

Alison Stewart: There's a great passage that describes their interesting interaction and how she perceives it. This is from the book, Hiding in Plain Sight. Pretty but not beautiful, the awkward girl who would become an excellent student of character, who was stunned-defined in Lyndon, someone who studied her to be appreciated for the intelligent well-read person she had become and by a man with such personal and physical charisma was intoxicating. In the 10 weeks of their courtship, Bird came to see Lyndon as the ticket to a life she could not possibly engineer on her own. She also understood from the very beginning that becoming part of Lyndon's blizzard of activity, need, desire, insecurity, ambition, potency, anxiety, and intelligence would involve significant uncertainty and risk, but also reward. What is it that she saw in him that really made her think, "Okay, I am going to be this person's partner?" Because she truly became his partner.

Julia Sweig: I think he flipped a switch in her. The part of her that was going to be content to stay in Texas and have a more stayed life that was muted by the ambition and thrill of attaching herself to somebody like Lyndon Johnson. I think ambition is not a word that we associate with first ladies and certainly not with Lady Bird Johnson but Lyndon had so much of it, and I think it was intoxicating. She initially wasn't wild about becoming the wife of a politician, but I think he really drew her in because he relied so heavily on her skillset.

She said later how much Lyndon stretched her. I think they stretched each other. She pushed him very, very hard and vice versa. The alchemy between the two of feeding off of one another's capacities, but also his reliance on her to be the grounded one when he was such emotionally capricious person, also gave her a sense of power and that he needed her also. I think she thrived on that as well.

Alison Stewart: Lady Bird believed in him so much that she bankrolled his political career. Where did this family money come from and how did they use it toward getting Lyndon elected and furthering his career?

Julia Sweig: Well, both her mother and her father were from Alabama. Her father's family was a tenant farmer on her mother's family's land. They fell in love and eloped together crossing social strata and eloped from Alabama to East Texas. Her mother's family were surely slave owners and they had a lot of cotton and later Timberland. When the mother dies, her estate is left to Lady Bird Johnson and she, Lady Bird, when Lyndon decides to run for Congress for the first time, calls her father and says, "I want you to release some money for the campaign." The father does. That's the beginning of it.

Initially, other than the financing, she doesn't participate so much in the day-to-day of his political campaign. By the next run for the House and then for the Senate, she is all in. Especially before she has kids, but even after really becomes part of his political operation.

Alison Stewart: Let's play a clip from the podcast Hiding in Plain Sight.

Speaker 3: Kennedy talked with the delegates about his fast ascent and he was nothing but gracious toward Lyndon Johnson.

Kennedy: I have found it extremely beneficial serving in the Senate, Senator Johnson as leader. I think if I emerge successfully in this convention, it will be the result of watching Senator Johnson proceed around the Senate for the last eight years.

Speaker 3: The Kennedy's new LBJ could help them with Texas, so Jack went to see the Johnson's at their hotel to see if LBJ would swallow his pride, give up his prime place in the Senate, and help JFK take the White House in exchange for the worst job in American government, Vice President. For both the Johnson's it was a crushing moment.

Speaker 4: It was like trying to swallow a needle, hurt, [unintelligible 00:14:17], spiny. He didn't want the job, but he felt an enormous sense of obligation to the Democratic Party.

Alison Stewart: How did Lady Bird Johnson view the Kennedys, and specifically Jackie Kennedy? There was a line that stuck out to me where she described the other Senate wives, including herself as, I think renz, or dull bird.

Julia Sweig: Gray renz.

Alison Stewart: Gray renz as compared to Jackie, this beautiful bird. How did she view the Kennedys and Jackie?

Julia Sweig: The bird of beautiful plumage and we were just a bunch of gray renz. Jackie comes to Washington when they get married in 1953, and she had actually lived in Washington, D.C when she was growing up. Initially, again, in the 1950s, Lady Bird is almost 20 years older than Jackie, and she sees it as her responsibility to bring this younger Senate spouse into the fold.

She's aware that Jackie comes from a totally different culture of debutante and France and [unintelligible 00:15:31] and a world that isn't anything like Lady Bird's. In the Washington context, Lady Bird just feels that it's her responsibility to raise Jackie into this and introduce her into the world of politics. Toward Jack Kennedy. Again, before 1960, she sees him as a young up-and-coming rising star. She understands that about him. It isn't really until the two families and the two political operations start to come together that the relationships get a little bit muddier when the script flips and the Kennedys are on top.

Even once that happens, Lady Bird's view towards Jackie is maternal almost. Jackie is battling with miscarriages. She is not game to go on the campaign trail. Lady Bird's been doing that now for a couple of decades, and she's happy to go do it as Jackie's surrogate, and she behaves that way. She travels all over the country with Rose Kennedy with the sisters. She brings them into Texas to try to diffuse the anti-Catholic bias. She really puts her political capital at the service of Jackie Kennedy and Jack Kennedy.

Alison Stewart: We'll be back in a minute with more of my conversation with Lady Bird Johnson biographer Julia Sweig. After a short break, we'll hear how she worked with Jackie Kennedy to get the White House through one of the most challenging episodes in its history. The hasty and unexpected presidential transition following JFK's assassination. That's on the way. This is All Of It.

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