Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 11, 1995 TAG: 9504120004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELISABETH BUMILLER THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: AUSTIN LENGTH: Medium
``It all began so beautifully,'' says the disembodied voice of Lady Bird, played over and over for library visitors from a recording made a few days after John F. Kennedy's assassination, the start of a spoken White House diary. ``After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and clear. We were driving into Dallas. ... Then, almost at the edge of town, on our way to the Trade Mart for the presidential luncheon, we were rounding a curve, going down a hill, and suddenly there was a sharp, loud report - a shot.''
There's a handwritten letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson on Nov. 26, the day after her husband's funeral:
Dear Mr. President,
Thank you for walking yesterday - behind Jack. You did not have to do that - I am sure many people forbid you to take such a risk. But you did it anyway.
One recent milestone in Lady Bird's life was the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a woman she never thought she would outlive. ``It was so unfair,'' she says. ``I had the feeling that she had finally arrived at peace. Her world around her was the way she wanted it to be.'' Although Lady Bird was with Jackie Kennedy in Dallas, the two were never close. ``Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights - that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood,'' Lady Bird wrote in ``A White House Diary,'' the book that grew from her recordings.
``Yes, we were distant,'' she says. ``But that suited both of us. She had done so many things that I wouldn't have known how to do. ... I was not equipped for, nor did I desire to do, that magnificent job that she did restoring the White House. She was much, much younger than me. She was beautiful. She was raised in a social climate that was never mine. I love my life, my background, the world I occupied, but it was totally different from hers.''
It was not easy to follow in Jackie's footsteps, and the striking thing about reading ``A White House Diary'' 30 years later is the insecure voice of a woman who became the first lady out of tragedy. ``I feel like I am suddenly onstage for a part I never rehearsed,'' she remarked the first year of Johnson's presidency.
Things have changed. ``You just finally shed that,'' she says.
She is predictably unhappy with her portrayal as LBJ's doormat in the first two volumes of Robert Caro's biography of Johnson.
``He never knew Lyndon,'' she says quietly. She describes her role as LBJ's ``best friend. As somebody he could talk to, absolutely without fear. And that he could trust and believe in.'' Lady Bird's crucial role in Johnson's decisions to run for president in 1964 and not to run in 1968, is well-known. In 1964, she says, ``I think he would have run, but I sure did want to make it clear that I thought he ought to.'' In 1968, as the Vietnam War split America apart, she again let him know her mind. She was terrified another four years in office would kill him, and she saw he was the wrong man for the time.
``This country needs to be united,'' she says. ``And sadly, sadly, he wasn't the man who could do it.''
He died in 1973, four years and two days after he left the White House.
by CNB