Ep. 82 – Hiding in Plain Sight: A Conversation with Julia Sweig

Welcome to Race and Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice, and citizenship.

Well, today we are excited to speak with Julia Sweig, who’s an award-winning author of books on Cuba, Latin America, and American Foreign Policy. She served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for 15 years. Her writings appeared in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post Foreign Affairs in the Nation.

Sweig holds undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a master’s degree, and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins Univers. She is a senior research fellow at the L BJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and the creator, host, and executive producer of the A B C News and Best Case Studios podcast series in Plain Sight, Lady Bird Johnson.

And we are here to talk about the really brilliant book, lady Bird Johnson, hiding in Plain Sight by Julius Sweig.

I’m so happy to be here with you, Peniel. Thanks very much for having.

You know, when I read this book, I was really, um, surprised at just how much more that I learned about Lady Bird Johnson in the sense of you really portray her as both this very, very important and influential first lady, but also this person who was a citizen and an advocate for the environment, an advisor and counselor to her husband, president Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Very, very intelligent. Very, very forceful. Somebody who had strength and resilience in ways that her public image didn’t convey. I’m interested what inspired you to do this kind of research on Lady Bird Johnson, who’s usually not thought of as as that essential First Lady in the way of someone like Eleanor Roosevelt.

But I think when somebody reads your book, it’ll change and sort of shift their appreciation for Lady Bird Johnson.

Well, thank you for that introduction, and that is of course a really essential question. Two parts why, why a first lady and why a Lady Bird? And the, the, that has to do with my own experience in some sense, which is, In your intro, you noted that I had worked in foreign policy for many, many years, and that’s a very gendered place to work and my experience over many years of being one of the only women in the room.

Was that I, I came away just feeling I wanted to find a topic that would let me enter into the matter of women and power and how women navigate different kinds of power and use their power and deploy their power, or dodge power or manipulate power, and in writing about Cuba and Latin America and American foreign.

Tends to be, at least in the diplomatic history vein, or just sort of straight, what is the White House or Congress doing on X matter or how to shape what they’re doing on X matter. That’s a male story for the most part. So I, I pulled back from that to try to find a way to get into the women in power.

Theme without having a First Lady in mind, and certainly without Lady Bird Johnson in mind. But as a, you know, we wanna find archival material that’s new, that tells a new story, that brings a new perspective, maybe onto an old story. And when I learned that Lady Bird had kept recorded audio diary the entire time she was in the White House, and that most of that material had been completely unex excavated, or unmined unread, unfiltered.

The Johnson historian Cannon. And then started getting into the material itself, which just shows all of these new angles on the Johnson presidency and certainly on her that really sealed the deal for me.

And so talk to us about, um, Claudia Alta, Lady Bird, Taylor, , , and you know, the origins, there’s so, it’s such an interesting, I think, Childhood and adolescence.

So I wanted you to talk about her pre LBJ. We’re gonna get to LBJ, but you know who, who was Claudia Alta? Who becomes Lady Bird? Why the nickname and how did her growing up impact who she became?

That latter question is tough. Always, right? I mean, we can extrapolate, but she was raised in the deep South on the border of East Texas and Louisiana, and she had parents, both of whom were from Alabama, who eloped together because her father was a tenant farmer on her mother’s family’s pine and cotton property in Alabama.

She grew up in. County adjacent to the county where Harper Lee grew up so very much a, a place where race and class lines were thickly drawn. Her mother, when her parents left and and moved to Karnack, Texas, she only had her mother in her life. For about four or five years until her mother died, and she was raised by the, the children or grandchildren of enslaved people, and by her father, she had two older brothers who were at boarding school and out of the picture, and her father brought an aunt from Alabama to help raise her.

Both the mother and the aunt were quite. Cultured and literate and readers and who followed music and theater and, and they were, they went up to the, the WK Kellogg Institute in Indiana for health rituals that Lady Bird participated in, which is an important part of who she became. But her early childhood is one of being a loner and doing that in the deep south in a very segregated time and place of American history.

And with the book you, you start with this chapter, the Surrogate, and I want, I wanna come back to that and exactly what do you mean by that? But you compare and contrast her with Jackie Kennedy, I thought in very, very interesting ways, in the ways they sort of help shape their husband’s public careers, but also some of the, the pain and the hurt that they both experienced with these partners.

Let’s talk about that in terms. The start, even before getting into the weeds of the Johnson presidency.

Mm-hmm. ,

actually, she’s the wife of a congressman. She’s the wife of a senator who becomes Senate majority leader. She’s the wife of the vice presidential candidate who very much, um, wants to be vice president.

Really inexplicably to some people because it’s not a job with any kind of power, but he’s going to become obviously, The president, but no one could have imagined that happening. So who is Lady? Lady Bird Johnson in the sense of not just Claudia Alta Taylor. And how does she grow into that role of being Lyndon Johnson’s political partner even before the White House?

Well, I think it’s important to, to recognize about her. . You know, she went to college in the late twenties, early 1930s, depression era, but she has a double major in history and journalism from the University of Texas. She was very well read and she was very bent on acquiring an education that would allow her well before Lyndon was in her sight to potentially not.

go back to Karnack and raise a family or take care of her father, but really explored the world. And how did you explore the world as a young woman of means? In the 1930s, you could be a teacher, you could be a journalist, you could maybe be a secretary. But attaching herself to Lyndon Johnson, catapulted her into Washington DC and politics of.

An era that was a very hopeful era. In a sense. It was the period of the New Deal when the Roosevelt’s Eleanor’s another, that’s another marriage, another presidential marriage that was complicated and fraud. And you asked about Jackie Kennedy. You know, I’ll leave Eleanor aside for a second, but the, the Jackie and Lady Bird similarities are often.

overlooked because the contrasts are so massive. But the similarities to your question about these fraught men that they were with is that Washington is a place where men in power very often helped one another hide their sexual liaisons. And that was certainly the case of Jack and Linden and Jackie and Lady Bird had to endure, not.

their awareness of their husband’s affairs, but also multiple miscarriages and the desire to have a family and some degree of privacy. But the difference between Jack one, difference between Jackie and Ladybird is that. Lady Bird had a, you know, it’s a, it’s a funny part of the marriage of the Johnson’s.

She became, and it wasn’t immediately, but she became very much part of the Johnson political operation as sort of one of the most senior staffers, although surely unpaid for, for most of it in the traditional sense. And so she realized that in order to keep up with Lyndon’s whirlwind of activity, Brilliance and political ambition she would need not just to be a traditional spouse, but a participant spouse in that ambition,

and I think throughout Julia, you show how she is often both his wisest counselor, but also she bears the brunt of.

His at times erratic behavior and personality. I mean, you, you talk about how he’s plagued by heart disease, but also really depression. I mean, there’s so many highs and lows with the Johnson, um, presidency, but just his own character that you describe here. Yeah. I wonder about that. Like, you know, she, she has to really withstand a lot in order to keep both that marriage together, but she’s the person who’s constantly.

Trying to make sure he doesn’t really, um, just give it all up, which he eventually does right. By March, um, 31st of 1968, he does publicly what he had always been threatening to do, even after Jack Kennedy was assassinated. Uh, he had threatened not to run in 1964, and many people felt the only reason he didn’t is that that would’ve paved the way for Bobby Kennedy to be president.

you know, um, the trajectory. If we’re gonna jump into, before we jump into the White House years and what was triggered by the JFK assassination, you put your finger on something really important, which is her role in help, helping keep him on the rails in terms of his physical and emotional and mental.

You know, I think today we would certainly characterize his mental health as one that suffered from very significant bouts of depression. And, um, there are other people that have worked with him that have talked about. His depression, and it did fall to her. She came to learn how to handle it. She was not a person who, who, who suffered from depression herself.

Um, but she spent a lot of time helping him manage his, the heart attack, the heart disease. You know, his father and his uncle both died when they were 60 of heart failure, and LBJ came into the White House. when he was 56. So between having had a massive heart attack in 1955 when he was already majority leader.

So the, the overlay of health concerns was it was always a big cloud for them. And, and Lady BIrd, uh, was smart enough to, and tough enough to learn how to handle it. And he was wise enough to realize that he couldn’t do it really anything without.

Now when we think about even before the White House years, how did she help in the 1960 campaign?

Because you talk about that in the sense that, you know, Lyndon goes from being, uh, Senate majority leader to really having to play second fiddle to the Kennedys, who are at times warm and gracious and at times, um, not with them.

Yeah. You know, she talked about it in her oral histories as the moment in Los Angeles at the convention in 1960 when Jack proposed, they run as VP on the ticket.

You know, it was like a nettle stuck in LBJ’s throat, you know, he couldn’t swallow it and he couldn’t cough it up. It was just this horrible feeling of being stuck where if you stay as majority leader and have said no to the guy that become, the president in the White House, you’re sort of, you know, politically emasculated cuz the White House will have its own agenda if you’re having a majority of, in both the Congress and the the White House.

If you accept it means giving up, accept the vice presidential slot on the ticket. It means giving up so much power for what everyone has described as the worst job in Washington DC. So they were stuck and they wound. After, you know, a very storied, sleepless night trying to figure it out, saying yes to the proposal against Bobby Kennedy’s objections, et cetera.

Lady Bird, in 1960, the Lady Bird Jackie story takes this new turn where, Lady Bird really undertakes, and this is why I titled that chapter, the Surrogate to Stand In for Jackie, who’s minding a pregnancy after multiple miscarriages and doesn’t really, isn’t that interested in politics, doesn’t wanna do the rope line, doesn’t have the people skills that Lady Bird has.

And doesn’t wanna be out there schlepping around the country. Ladybird takes Rose Kennedy and all of the sisters and takes them down to the south and not only wins Texas for them, but makes a big play in the south and in the country at larges saying, look, it’s okay to have a Catholic in the presidency.

It’s not something that we should be scared of as Americans. And so she’s a surrogate, not just for for Jackie, but for Lyndon. For Jack and has kind of a gas doing it. And so by the time Jack’s in the White House and Lady Bird is second lady, she’s having a much better time in the office of the vice presidency or holding than slot than than Lyndon Johnson ever did.

Now I want to jump into the LBJ presidency, but I wanna talk about, you have a great chapter of transitions, uh, succession and how deaf Lady Bird was in that transition. But it’s safe to say both through your book and the scholarship that I’ve read, Lyndon Johnson was not a happy vice president. And, and being vice president weren’t great years.

The period from January 20th, 1961, all the way to November 22nd, 1963, it seems that he had a enmity with Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and him couldn’t stand each other. Bobby basically, Was a kind of co-president, a kind of co architect with JFK. He was the person mm-hmm. last in the room who, who Kennedy really listened to, the president really listened to, so I just wanna put that out there.

How did Lady Bird help keep LBJ together? During the very, very unhappy vice presidency, which al almost lasts for three entire years.

I mean, during the vice presidency, the main role that she played on that front in terms of L B J was a little bit impenetrable to me. You know, the, the period of time that’s better documented is really once the assassination catapults them into the White House.

She spoke retroactively about how she had such a better time than LBJ did, and her role was mainly in the. I hate to use this phrase, the social lubricant, the political role that she played both with, with Jackie and with Jack and kind of keeping the channel open and always saying, you know, lady Bird, they’re public actors on the public stage, and I think of this as a lot of theater.

So in theatrical improv, the rule is always say, To your interlocutor. Ladybird always says yes to Jack and to Jackie, but especially to anything that Jackie asks her to show up to all this ceremonial events that Jackie doesn’t have the time or space or interest in doing. And I think that always say yes.

Approach to Jackie is the way that she helps Lyndon put a good face to the extent that he could on being. Pretty much eviscerated in terms of the previous power he had as majority leader. I mean, there were some exceptions. He had the space portfolio and that was meaningful, but nothing like the power that he had as majority leader,

and by the time Lyndon Johnson becomes president, you really show how deft Lady Bird is.

I thought in two great, great pivotal moments of especially the first year of the presidency is one the transition where I think you show, which I’ve always felt even when I read Carro, you sort of contrast and juxtapose LBJs impatience with her patience in terms of the transition. Because I think it’s really, really important to say that because it is this real shocking thing that the president is assassinated.

And I think one of the reasons Bobby Kennedy has a big problem with LBJ is really the alacrity that he, he, he wants to assume power, really. You could say constitutionally needs to assume power, but we’re, we’re all still human beings though, you know? So the constitution could tell one thing, but this president, young father of two, Been assassinated in cold blood in front of his wife, and it seems like Lady Bird is much more emotionally intelligent about what needs to occur so that uh, the Johnsons don’t appear to be some kind of usurers to this fallen kings throne.

Well, I think she’s conscious from the get-go of the need to avoid that appearance. And you know, Lyndon, we know it was clear before I did my research, very much so. Made more so by her own material. That LBJ was grousing about wanting to get in the, into the White House as quickly as possible. Now there were only 14 days between the assassination and the day they moved in, and so it really fell to Lady Bird and he was obviously from Carro.

We see very, very busy with his office set up in the old executive office building, working. in every way that he could as president from the jump. But what Ladybird did was manage the, let’s say, the public choreography of that transition. And she did it. And this Camille, I found really poignant to take a look at how Ladybird and Jackie did that together.

You know, there’s been a lot that we’ve seen in both movies and writing. Jackie’s establishment of the Camelot mythology and the immediate aftermath of Jack’s death. And that’s all true. But what was going on between the two of them was this kind of excruciating dance to have Jackie and the kids move out and Ladybird and her kids who were teenagers and her husband obviously move in all publicly.

I mean, there was a lot of private stuff that went on and, and there’s a particular. We produced a podcast, as you mentioned about this as well, and it was very poignant to do this because Lady Bird’s tapes were audio to hear her talk about this moment on the Tuesday after the assassination, going to the White House and having Jackie take her on the tour of the Family quarters and.

talking about, well, this is Caroline’s room, and this is John John’s room and ladies talking about, which will be loosies and which will be Linda Birds. And then they walk into a room and there are the boots of the riderless horse. And so the mood shifts from kids and wallpaper to Jack’s death. And Jackie talks about Jack in the first person and neither of them.

Correct it, but Lady Bird records it in the aftermath and so it just, it gives you a sense of their joint, but also very separate and isolated enterprise in making that transition work. Lady Bird for Landon, who’s still alive, and Jackie for Jack, who’s now dead. So I found it very poignant

and once she, she’s in the White House, you document her role in the 1964 election.

You document how she comes to evolve and see herself in the position, especially once they are elected as First Lady. I wanna talk about that evolution, both her as a counselor, but then. , you know, you really look, I think, make us reconsider her as this really, this environmental activist instead of the idea of Lady Bird and sort of the beautification of Washington DC with the flowers.

And obviously at UT we have the Lady Bird Wildflower Center. So the flowers were really part of a bigger objective. So I, I want to talk. Sort of her growth in the role of First Lady and also this idea of being this kind of urban environmental activist in DC very segregated city, a lot of black poverty.

And they come in, the Johnsons come into office right when the civil rights movement is cresting, right? And so I want to talk about that in terms of how she is. Growing against the backdrop of this real maelstrom that continues to get more chaotic and tumultuous day by day.

That’s a, that’s a great introduction.

Do you wanna go back, though, to her role in 64 in terms of will he run, will he not run? Or should he just die into the environment? Go into, okay.

Yes. Yes. Cause I thought that was pivotal.

Yeah. In 1964, there was no Vice president , and I’m not saying that Ladybird became the vice president, but Linden was operating without a partner in the White House.

Ladybird was his partner, and there were at least two moments in 64 and then one in 65, and then later in 68. But it’s different. But there’s two moments in 64. LBJ had very, very serious doubts about whether he should run in the 1964 presidential election. And the second moment comes right before the convention and.

Summer of 1968, August, excuse me, 64. But the first one that was so surprising to me was to see that in May of 1964, before the first civil rights bill was passed, before the war on poverty had been declared, not least of which funded really before the, the Johnson Great Society agenda had been set out.

Lyndon’s looking around and looking at Vietnam in particular, and great metaphor, but true. He has a. Toothache and this is , the ache of his whole appro thinking about the presidency, and he asks Ladybird to lay out. A document for him, which I took the liberty of renaming the hunt strategy memo be, but I found it in a folder just called Letters, Mrs.

Johnson to the president or campaign letters. And it’s a nine page handwritten memo that’s dated May 14th, 1964, in which she lays out to him. The pros and cons of running are not running gives him her advice, which is that he should run and says to him very pointedly. , you should run. You’ll very likely win.

And then in February or March of 1968, you can announce that you won’t be running for a second term. And of course, Peniel, we all know that that’s precisely what he did, but I don’t think we knew until. Now really, that she had mapped out the arc of his presidency as early as four months into their White House tenure.

And that really for me, set the tone or raised the game to me, showed me how much he relied on her, her influence, and also her standing so that when she decides once he is elected on his own right, what her big policy issue is going to be. , she has the standing with him to really take the ball and run with it.

And that’s where, as you say, she kind of grows into this urban environmental activist, which is a complete, again, you asked me why Lady Bird. I mean, I was completely surprised to see that the word beautification and the emphasis on flowers were. Euphemisms for a much deeper environmental agenda that wove together sort of emerged, as you say, in this context of the cresting civil rights movement in the United States.

Talk to us about the White House Arts Festival, which takes place on June 14th, 1965. You’ve got a striking picture from the White House lawn of members of the Joffrey Ballet leaping across the South lawn in front. I love that photograph sculpture, me Too Sculpture by Alexander Calder. So in a lot of ways, you know, lady Bird was very much interested in art and very cultured and very, you know, sophisticated.

Woman and educated, but we usually think of that in the context of Jackie Kennedy. So talk to us about, you know, what is she doing in the White House and why is something like the White House Arts Festival so important, especially, you know, you caption this and say, you know, Lady Bird, the person who brought hundreds of the country’s most celebrated contemporary artist to the White House.

Yeah, it’s, it’s a surprise too. But if you don’t mind, I just wanna go back to the, the environmentalism that Ladybird undertook or, or grew into, and just say that, you know, Urban renewal and hundreds of millions of dollars into urban renewal in the 1950s, plus hundreds of millions of dollars into highway transportation, national freeways.

That’s the context for Lady Bird coming in and looking at American cities and looking at how infrastructure money is spent and how. Kind of directly it, it laid into the physical wellbeing of communities of color in American cities. And that was certainly the case for Washington dc. So she was a policy wonk and her mind space was all about taking a look at, you know, how people’s wellbeing is affected by.

Direct impact or, or the prohibition on access to nature in American cities. And I, I say that because she was very thorough in the way she studied it, and very strategic in the way she tried to build public consciousness about it. And that’s very much in contrast to the matter of. The White House Arts Festival.

It’s true. And again, sort of very surprising cuz we think of Jackie Kennedy and the Kennedys as the stewards of high art who brought art to the White House in a way that really hadn’t been done before, but in 1965. Linda asks her, what do you think of this? And there’s a proposal on his table to try to, I guess, steal some of the Kennedy thunder, or at least demonstrate that they’re not a bunch of yokels in the White House, and that they too can support art, not just high art, but art for the people.

And in fact, the Johnson presidency puts more public funds into the arts than any presidency. Almost since that might have changed. But when I last looked, their, their net dollars into the arts was significant. And so in 1965, when they still have. by and large popular opinion behind them, although not sort of elite intellectual opinion, it’s starting to fray over Vietnam and intervention.

In the Dominican Republic, they host a day long arts festival in the White House that turns into pretty much of a fiasco over Vietnam. But what you saw is the Johnson’s hat bringing Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and artists and writers and playwrights and dancers. to the White House and to Washington for an arts festival, and they’re pretty much panned because.

They’re attacked by some of the artists and writers that come for their policies in Vietnam and it looks like a kind of try too hard Texas scale extravaganza, or at least it’s reported that way and, and it pretty much withers on the vine doesn’t have the long-term sticking power that the environmental policies, they both support winds up having.

And now

I want to talk about you. You described this in the chapter somewhere between the words gut and pot, earth kits, uh, appearance at the White House 1968, and we’re flash forwarding to by the time the Vietnam is roiling. Dr. King has come out against the Vietnam War in 1967. This is after the high points of Civil Rights, voting rights acts, and the popularity of the Johnsons Things are beginning to curle in the actor Earth Kit, who’s very well known in the black community.

And the white community. Broadway had been on Batman as Catwoman of course, but she very forcefully, she’s invited to the White House January 18th, 1968. She speaks out against the Vietnam War. She’s really not attacking Lady Bird, but the press and then the White House comes to really excoriate and vilify Earth.

The kid, even though lady. Response is pretty measured. Talk to us about that and what the impact of that is and, um, what is Lady Bird’s role in sort of trying to shape the perception of the Eartha kit appearance at the White House in 1968?

I found this to be Lady Bird’s lowest point in the Johnson presidency.

I mean, one could argue that her lack of public. Recanting of the Vietnam War was as well. But the relationship between Lady Bird and Linden on Vietnam is a separate subject at merit’s. Serious discussion. Unearth, uh, this was just unequivocally really, really bad. And I say that having written a book that’s by and large, pretty sympathetic to her, as you can hear.

Mm-hmm. Ladybird had, you know, just for context, Betty Friedan publishers The Feminine Mystique in 1963, not long before he’s assassinated, J F K puts out the findings of the Presidential Commission on the conditions of women. That’s not the exact title. The feminist movement is, is coming along, but it has not been born in full flower yet at.

But Ladybird is very interested in emphasizing women as professionals, and she holds a series of luncheons, both a second lady and then definitely in the White House with women professionals. Some of it is about supporting her husband’s agenda, and some of it is just a curated feminist agenda that she wraps in.

A nice White House ladies luncheon, but is feminist nonetheless. So in January of 1968, though, you know, now we’ve had the, you know, mass uprisings in American cities for a couple of years, and you’ve gotta. Uh, political campaign for the presidency underway, and what is the beat on the ground of the Republicans and even in the Democratic party to a certain extent, is how are we fighting crime in American streets?

And there’s a crime bill that LBJ has just introduced in the Senate the night before in his State of the Union. It’s a crime bill that winds up doing a lot of damage in the country over a few decades. and Ladybird is hosting something to to backstop. Her husband called Crime in American Streets and she invites Earth a kit.

Now why? Why Eartha Kit? Because Eartha, this is a part of her story that I think is not so well known, has been working with her body and her money that is teaching dance classes in Watts and doing kind of youth empowerment stuff in Anacostia, in Washington dc She has been working to. American kids in black communities for much of the decade and supporting the Civil Rights Movement all while be, while being a global superstar.

She’s testified in Congress about it. She has some standing, so the White House invites her to come and give her perspective. And these luncheons are not, they always have a few speakers, but they’re run. They’re small enough that they’re run, that there’s some. Give and take, but Earth Kit doesn’t exactly read the room.

Or maybe she reads the room and she doesn’t care, but she shows up at the White House. Thinking that she’s been asked to participate in a discussion and she comes out with a position both directed to the president who stops by and to Ladybird that basically says, you guys, if you wanna get an idea of why people are in the streets, why American kids are so unhappy, , you have to look at Vietnam.

It’s not just urban conditions, it’s not just what’s happening at home. It’s the connection between home and abroad. And she’s really the first person that brings the, a very pointed critique of Vietnam, right into the, the president’s home. at a moment of incredible tension in the country around the limitations of what’s happened on the civil rights front and the sort of degradation of the American body politic because of Vietnam.

So the White House goes nuts, right? This is a black woman challenging a southern white woman in her own home, right? It’s, she breaks protocol, right? You don’t get out of your lane. You’re supposed to only speak about what you were asked to speak about, and she brought it all together. And to your question Peniel about what was Lady Bird’s role.

You’re right. If we look at the transcripts and look at what each of them said, it’s all pretty measured. But there were some journalists in the room and pretty soon the public reporting on the on this and then the White House spin about it went. All negative, not all negative, but wound up resounding very negatively.

Certainly the White House campaign to to muzzle earth a kit was very effective and it wound up propelling her into kind of professional exile for about a decade.

Yeah. And in, in certain ways, it reminded me while reading it of, um, contemporary efforts, Basically quiet people down and prevent teachers from teaching about American history by attacking it as CRT.

Um, so just the, I was sad. Bob Gregory Peck and

Oh yes.

Lady Bird and people who I admire and President Johnson. I just was sad for the, for, for the country. To see, and, and, and in this case it was a Democratic president and democratic administration, not a Republican one, just telling people to basically shut up, uh, in a country.

Yeah, basically shut up, pride myself on, um, you know, freedom of speech and these ideas about liberty and democracy. So we don’t have a ton of time left. I want to talk about March 31st, 1968 because you, you’ve shown. She basically plotted that out. But nonetheless, there are some fits and starts. There’s a speech where he’s supposed to give it out and he, he doesn’t it, his memoirs, he, in 1971, he says he forgot the speech.

Lady Bird says he absolutely did not forget the speech.

Yeah, I love that.

And, and I, I believe her, you know, like the whole notion of, you know, believe Yeah, I believe her. Talk to us about that date, because that’s really the end of the presidency. And one thing, you know, I’m interested in the fact. In certain ways, even after March 31st, there are parts of him that do want to run again.

Right. I don’t think he understood how that announcement sort of robs him of power in, in the presidency because you’re not gonna run again. So it’s really, no, nobody has ever done that before and I don’t think anybody ever will do that ever again. So how does she take all of that.

So let’s

to start with one of the last things you said when he announces at the end of March 68th, that he is not gonna run for a second term, that he is gonna focus on the Vietnam Peace Talks.

He’s also looking at Bobby Kennedy, who has just announced that he is going to run and Eugene McCarthy, who has just come too close for comfort in the New Hampshire primary. , but then Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. And so by the time you get to the late summer of 1968 and certainly August of 68 in the Chicago convention, there’s part of lbj, which is kind of itching to be seen as the party’s savior who can come in and knit it all back together.

So the, the big factor is Bobby’s. off the playing field, so to speak, when you get to sort of the end of days in the August convention. So going backwards to Lady Bird, she’s mapped it out in 1964, and so by the end of 1967, really the fall when she’s starting to really be uncomfortable. The protest against the war in Vietnam and against her.

The fact that she can’t get her environmental policies across because Vietnam just is taking up all the space. The fact that her two daughters, spouses that are going to Vietnam, all of that kind of conspires to get her ginned up to start focusing on when is LBJ gonna tell the country he’s not running again?

It takes her until the end of March of 1968. Get that, those words to come out of his mouth and the fall start in January of 68 is precisely as you described it, but the, by the time it gets to March of 68, Lyndon’s really on board and she has been, you know, consulting with their, some of their very close advisors very carefully without really telling them exactly what the timing could be, but just taking their pulse on.

What it would be like if this were to happen. Talking to the doctors and talking to Lyndon, kind of relentlessly about it and LBJ gots on board because, you know, remember by March of 1968, the country has gone. The country. The National Security Establishment has undertaken a pretty significant policy review on Vietnam.

We’re just on the other side of the Tet Offensive American cities are. Pretty much significant upheaval and his health is top of mind because they’ve become grandparents. And that’s the other thing I found kind of poignant, which is the fact of grandchildren really shifts things for him. He becomes this devoted grandfather and the idea of being able to go back to the ranch and enjoy themselves, you know, wets his whistle about that he could survive not being in the arena and actually enjoy himself.

And that’s certainly the case she makes to. .

So you, you write this epilogue to survive all assaults where you look at the end of the White House years all the way to July, 2007, and you know the arc of Lady Bird’s Life. What kind of life does she both have with Lyndon, but it’s only really four years before his death and a much fuller sort of post presidency, post First Lady Life.

What kind of life does she have and sort of what lessons does she leave us? .

Well, you know, she has the kind of life that she probably longed for, which is much less of a public life. Well, first of all, as you say, he. He doesn’t survive for many years. He dies in 1974. On the day that the Roe v Wade decision is issued by the Supreme Court of massive heart failure, he became very depressed and very ill.

When he went back to the ranch, he started smoking again, 19 73, 19 73. Next, excuse me, 1973, he starts smoking again. It just unwinds pretty quickly, and she. in the aftermath of his death. She keeps her foot in public life quite a bit. It’s very much focused on Texas. She builds the LBJ Library and Museum as an institution.

She’s on the board of Regents of the University of Texas. She’s on the board of Trustees of National Geographic. She puts a lot of her heart and soul into that wildflower center, which is of course, Native plants and wildflowers, but it’s also about environmental education. And she spends a lot of time traveling around the world with her daughters and her grandkids and dividing her time between the ranch, which she stays on for quite a while, even after it’s been deed to the National Park Service.

And also, and I think this is pretty poignant too. Rekindles her friendship with Jackie and they see one another every summer up at in Martha’s Vineyard. She goes to Jackie’s funeral and Jackie dies, and she lives a very, very long life. She doesn’t die until 2007 when Barack Obama is running in the primaries against Hillary Clinton.

And so when you think. What have you learned from Ladybird? Any final thoughts in terms of, in the context of the times that we live in now? So polarized, so much division in certain ways, similar to theirs, but also dissimilar? Any lessons gleaned?

Well, you know, I mean, one lesson gleaned from Ladybird is you gotta know your brief.

This was somebody who as a public figure, studied and. Forced herself to become as knowledgeable as possible about the things that she cared about. She was also a woman of terrific discipline, not just in terms of knowing what she needed to know, but in terms of taking care of herself, her body, her mind, having time and nature tending to her spiritual needs.

I don’t mean God needs, I mean, sort of humanity. Her humanity and wellbeing. And then also, you know, she kept a sense of humor. , that’s something to be appreciated and I would say, To speak to the matter of the tumultuous times. You know, one thing is that she was very constrained by the expectations of the role of the First Lady, and we still have not had a woman as president.

And I think until we have that, whoever is in the White House as partner is going. Be stuck with the kind of constraints that Lady Bird and pretty much everybody since has been stuck with in various different ways. And sometimes I found myself pail wishing that especially on the environmental policy matter, she had found a way to be significantly more explicit about what she meant behind that word beautification and all those flowers.

All right. Well, thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed this conversation we’ve been discussing. Lady Bird Johnson, hiding in plain sight with author Julia Swag. Julia Swag is an award-winning author of books on Cuba, Latin America, and foreign policy. She’s written. For numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

She’s a senior research fellow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and the creator, host, and executive producer of the A B C News and Best Case Studios podcast in Plain Sight, lady Bird Johnson. I would definitely tell people to both read this book. Listen to the podcast.

It’s a brilliant book. You’re such a great story to teller Julia. So it’s been,

oh, thank you. It’s been great. Thank you so much,

um, for taking lessons me for, for my next one, . It’s, it’s been great to read and, and to learn from you. So thank you for discussing this with us on race and democracy.

Oh, I’m so happy to be here with you, Peniel, please.

Let’s do it again soon.

Definitely. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode, and you can check out related content on Twitter at Pan Joseph. That’s P E N I E l J o S e p h, and our website, csr d dot lbj dot u texas.edu. And the Center for Study of Race and Democracies on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal arts development studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Thank you.