Recollections of the Fishbowl

Lyndon Johnson departed Washington unloved by virtually everybody. Quite the opposite was true of Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, whose warm and buoyant manner as First Lady created for her an admiring constituency untainted by L.B.J.'s problems. So it was a festive homecoming for Lady Bird last week as some 500 of her friends gathered in Washington at a luncheon launching her new book, A White House Diary (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $11).

With characteristic respect for history and contempt for waste, Lady Bird documented her five White House years by squirreling away appointment sheets, memoranda, letters and, above all, by talking almost every day's events into a tape recorder. The result was some 1,750,000 words that will eventually be available to scholars at the L.B.J. library. Diary is a sampler, some 300,000 words in nearly 800 pages, constituting a singular account of an exacting and freakish assignment, that of being a First Lady in the second half of the 20th century.

Princess from Poteet. Lady Bird describes her life and job in relentless and often random detail, but the mass of minutiae finally creates a greater impact than would a more structured and selective account: choreographing state visits and congressional receptions, greeting everyone from the strawberry princess from Poteet to the descendants and collaterals of the previous 34 presidential families, planning the clothes, planting the trees, patiently acquiring art and artifacts for the White House.

It was also her lot to face the chants and placards of protesters, the direct abuse of the odd preacher or entertainer and, more than any of her predecessors, to do it all in the eye of the TV camera and the press.

Lady Bird is neither a reporter nor an amateur historian; one does not find insights into air strikes or bombing pauses. What she does convey eloquently are the fears and anxieties of a fiercely devoted wife, especially during the last two bleak years. In 1967 the Johnsons entered what she calls "the Valley of the Black Pig."*She was frankly alarmed by demonstrators: "Through every pore, you sense a sort of animal passion . . . What if I had suddenly broken into a run?" What she did, of course, was assume her "riding in the tumbrel" stance--shoulders square, head high, smile in place.

She agonized for her exhausted husband, slept fitfully and suffered from a recurring nightmare in which she wandered lost through endless rooms. The months before L.BJ.'s decision not to run again were the worst; to her, the thought of another campaign seemed like "an open-ended stay in a concentration camp."

In personal matters, Lady Bird can be startlingly honest. There is, for example, the matter of Luci's conversion to Roman Catholicism, which brought out the Bible Belt streak in Lady Bird. "I feel a sense of separation," she confesses, "as though she were going off to live in Timbuctoo." She was fearful, or at least apprehensive, about the so-called Eastern establishment. The woman who routinely entertained the world's leaders reverted to the girl from Karnack, Texas, on a trip to Boston. She meekly accepted a scolding from a pushy Adams descendant who complained of being left out of a White House assembly for the Adams family. During commencement exercises at Radcliffe College, she spent her time searching the graduates' faces "to determine what made them different from other girls." She was totally enchanted by the Rockefellers--any Rockefeller--even hinting at one point that she had a younger one in mind for Lynda.

Cop Caps. One wishes for more vignettes because those she tells are so good. There is Tom Dewey toddling off in L.B.J.'s too-large pajamas during an unexpected White House stay. Or Mayor Richard Daley in 1964 earnestly outlining his solution to possible race riots in Chicago: the cops would wear caps instead of helmets "so that each would look like a friend down the block."

The most poignant aspect of the book is the shadow that the Kennedy family, particularly Jackie, cast over the Johnsons. Lady Bird admired Jackie's courage and beauty, and her account of Jackie's first hours of widowhood, with its image of her pink suit over the body like flowers over a grave, is the best that has been written. But by never entering the Johnsons' White House, Mrs. Kennedy maintained a ghostly occupancy that lifted only when she ran off with Aristotle Onassis. In a rare bitter passage, Lady Bird writes that L.B.J. might better have replaced all Kennedy's aides quickly but did not because he felt he would somehow be dishonoring the dead.

Lady Bird had no reason to see Kennedys around every corner. She may have been the best First Lady of all--vibrant, energetic and durable. She was totally involved in a job that has provoked withdrawal and self-pity in others, and there has never been a hint of a credibility gap in anything she did or said. The diary is an extension of her person--a rare, refreshing private face in the public maelstrom.

*The image stems from an ancient Irish legend which predicted that the peasants would one day overcome their oppressive enemies in a climactic battle in a mysterious Valley of the Black Pig. W.B. Yeats used the phrase for the title of a poem in 1896.

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