Lady Bird Is Gone

I loved her. They'll tell you about the wildflowers and the crusade against unsightly billboards. They won't tell you about what a great liberal she was, what a brave warrior against racism she was - that she risked her life for these principles. After the jump, my tribute to her, from my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Read this astonishing story to honor a great American - and a great Southerner.

The setup: in 1964, the South was abandoning Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Party, for the mere reason that it passed a civil rights bill. The excerpt begins: "Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to hunt where the ducks were, was ready to write off the Deep South altogether. His wife decided that was unacceptable..."

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The former Claudia Alta Taylor was born a Southern belle, and she felt the Southland's glories in her bones - things like "keeping up with your kinfolk," as she put it, "long Sunday dinners after church...a special brand of courtesy." She was also a woman without illusions. She understood that her beloved land was not just a paradise of courtesy with a crust of sin on top, that the cult of politeness served also as a daily reminder to blacks to keep to their place - a sinister cultural matrix structured by images of the virgin on her pedestal, keeping up with the kinfolk, cooking big Sunday dinners, and the savage black rapist against whom she needed constant protection. The legend Dieu et les Dames painted on the ceiling of the Mississippi capitol told the story at its most benign; the segregated bathroom signs--"WHITE LADIES" and "COLORED WOMEN"--at its most casually inhumane. Lady Bird understood, as other liberals - Yankees - did not, Southern fears that in sweeping away its ingrained racial hierarchies, the South would be swept away, too: no more family bonds thick as kudzu, no more delicacies soaked through with the fat of a freshly butchered pig, no more ladies, no more gentlemen - just assimilation into the desiccated, instrumentalist, thin Yankee civilization Southerners had despised since the beginning of the nineteenth century. To unvex the mind of the South, Lady Bird knew, would take the delicate, agonizing work of decades. And she felt the work as a calling.

It took physical courage for Lady Bird to do what she did - arrange a campaign tour for herself through eight Southern states. The original idea was to co-host a reception in the rotunda of each statehouse. the Secret Service nixed that proposal: closed circular spaces were a sniper's heaven. Hers would surely be the first whistle-stop in history to travel with its own minesweeper: a second train engine, traveling fifteen minutes ahead of the first, to detonate any bombs placed in its path.

The planning had been painful. Lady Bird spent eleven-hour days in September working the phones asking politicians for their participation. For the most part, only those not up for election offered hospitality. The Democratic nominee for North Carolina's governorship didn't return her calls. A Virginia senator scheduled a convenient hunting trip. Senator Byrd had been "jovial and courteous and darling," she reported to her husband - until she mentioned the purpose of her call, whereupon " an invisible silken curtain fell across his voice." Louisiana's governor John McKeithan embarrassedly explained that he "was working for the Democrats, you understand" - just after his own fashion....

She was unfazed. No candidate's wife had taken such a tour without her husband before. But she knew her people needed to hear some hard truths. Her husband could not do the job if she wanted to: the assassination threat was too great. But Southerners, she knew, would never shoot a lady off her pedestal...

The speaker's platform - the caboose -would be taken up first by Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana for a round of courthouse-style introductions. "How many of you-all know what red-eye gravy is?" he would say. "Well, so do I, and so does Lyndon Johnson." And then - forty times that first day - the nation's Southern Bell-in-Chief mounted her pedestal, cleared her throat, looked out at the picket signs ("FLY AWAY LADY BIRD, HERE IN RICHMOND BARRY IS THE CAT'S MEOW"; "LYNDON, WE WILL BARRY YOU"; "BRINKMANSHIP IS BETTER THAN CHICKENSHIP"...), took in a few moments of "We Want Barry!" chants - and thrust her secret weapon into the air: a single, white-gloved hand. That usually was enough. If it wasn't she would drawl, "This is a campaign trip, and I would like to ask for your vote for both Johnsons" - so they knew they were insulting both Johnsons, not just the husband. She was a lady; one continued on pain of one's manhood.

She told her audience that "to this Democratic candidate and his wife, the South is a respected, valued, and beloved part of this country." She reeled off a list of what Democrats had done for Culpeper - the roads, the factories, the navy yards, the dams - and raised the specter of Republican soup lines. And she was never too shy to remind them how proud Democrats should be of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - leavening the remark with a joke: "You might not like all I am saying, but at least you understand the way ah'm sayin' it."

It was in South Carolina where the white gloves and sugared words finally failed Lady Bird Johnson. South Carolina air was now being paved over by Strom Thurmond's radio ads - 'A vote for Barry Goldwater is a vote to end judicial tyranny' - and the evangelism of true believers like the minister Bob Jones Jr., whose college refused to bow to any "agnostic or materialist accrediting association," and who had adopted for his independent campaign for Barry Goldwater the apparently defeatist slogan "Turn Back America, Turn Back - Only a Divine Miracle Can Save America Now."...

In Columbia only a maternal bark brought peace from the hecklers: "This is a country of many viewpoints. I respect your right to express your own. Now is my turn to express mine. Thank you." The next stop, Charleston, had been chosen by Lady Bird because it had given 57 percent to the Republicans in 1960. And as her train approached, the tough old port was taking on a menacing aspect that recalled Dallas in November of 1963. Whispers shuddered through town: a band was ready to strike up a "hot beat" to incite Negroes to riot as Lady Bird arrived. The local paper pleaded with its readers for "courtesy towards the First Lady," as Nixon had pleaded with Texans for a "courteous reception" for Kennedy in Dallas papers on November 22. Twenty-four merchants failed to receive an emergency injunction to stop a rally at their shopping mall. She entered at dusk. The space in front of the platform at the mall was monopolized by the massed forces of the local John Birch Society chapters--and their children, who bore signs reading "BLACK BIRD GO HOME"; "JOHNSON IS A COMMUNITY"; "JOHNSON IS A NIGGER-LOVER."

Jobs and a better community...prosperity for Charleston...Polaris missile base...shipyard" - the words could be heard only intermittently for the wall of boos. Hale Boggs took the microphone and cried out in anguish: " This is reminiscent of Hitler! This is a Democratic gathering, not a Nazi gathering!"

Lady Bird and her entourage pressed on, shaken. In courtly Savannah, it was Johnson's seventeen-year-old daughter who was booed. That night the FBI made a yard-by-yard sweep of a seven-mile-long bridge that would convey the First Lady across a marshy expanse in north Florida...