Lady Bird Johnson, 1912-2007
The more so as details of the outrageous and roguish behavior of her husband, President Lyndon B. Johnson, emerged in tape recordings and extensive scholarship, including a volume by LBJ biographer Robert Caro, which detailed Johnson's philandering and mean and humiliating outbursts in front of others against her ideas and lifestyle, even down to how she fixed her hair and the shoes she wore.
Once, when LBJ was still the Senate majority leader, Sidey was having a late drink with him in the Johnson ranch house in Texas. Lady Bird and a staff member came down the stairs responding to LBJ's shout. They were both in pajamas and night robes. Johnson stood up, gathered them in his huge arms and began to fondle a breast of each woman. Sidey later said that Lady Bird's restraint — she did nothing, but sweetly — is what calmed him down. After the White House, when confronted with some of these stories, Lady Bird shunted all wrath aside.
"Lyndon always did like the ladies."
Like everyone else who studied the couple, Sidey had wondered during his coverage of the Johnson saga, almost from day one, how Lady Bird stood it and never — yes, never — retaliated with anything but a serene and enduring love of the rarest kind. "I adored him," was about as far as she would go to describe her feeling which he said was "awesome in both its physical and intellectual dimensions." She found a natural force, understood that and guided it to the top. Otherwise she might have been a forgotten housewife in clunky shoes and he just another eccentric and embarrassing politician in mohair suits who marched into oblivion.
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