Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 11, 1995 TAG: 9504120021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELISABETH BUMILLER THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: AUSTIN, TEXAS LENGTH: Long
Suddenly she finds something. ``Oh, Engelmann's daisies, I can see those,'' she says, pleased. ``And this is obviously coreopsis, gold with a sort of dubonnet center.'' Yes, she says, of course her lack of sight is frustrating. She laughs. ``How not? But it's not something that you can overcome. And they tell me that I probably will never be completely blind.''
And yet at 82, three decades after she lived in the White House, Lady Bird Johnson still looks forward. Her wildflower center opens in its new $9 million home outside Austin next month - the reason she has made a rare emergence from the comforts of private life. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the University of Texas remains a passion, as do weekends at the LBJ Ranch, winters in Acapulco and summers on Martha's Vineyard with old friends like Walter Cronkite and Beverly Sills. She says the real riches in her life are her seven grandchildren and two daughters - Luci Baines Johnson, who runs what is left of the Johnson family business, and Lynda Bird Robb, the Virginia senator's wife. Age has in its way liberated her. ``You give in to not working,'' she says.
A minor stroke two years ago left Lady Bird with ``vastly less energy'' and she walks with a cane. ``Rather like a ship in a heavy sea,'' she says. After the deaths in the past two years of Pat Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she talks openly of her own funeral. ``I want everybody to have a real good time there,'' she says cheerfully, ``because it'll be the last gathering in that house.'' On her death, the home that served as the Texas White House will be turned over to the National Park Service.
Most of America remembers Lady Bird as the class act of a powerful, difficult marriage. ``He may not have been perfect,'' she once said of her husband, ``but at least he was fun.''
People laughed at her beautification program at first - ``Beautification was sort of a prissy-sounding name,'' she admits - but her legacy of 250,000 tulips and 42,000 daffodils transforms the face of Washington again this spring. Historians say she remains the most important first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.
She was the first national chair of Head Start, the monument of Johnson's War on Poverty that is now a target of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, but the gracious Southerner in her - or, more likely, the savvy pol - resists harsh language.
``I am not in politics anymore,'' she says. ``And of course he has a very important position as speaker of the House, and he has his opinions. ... And I think though all of the programs he mentioned may well be reduced and changed some, as far as being obliterated, I do not think they will.'' Her voice, deeper with age, retains a beguiling Texas cadence.
``Among the things that fill my life,'' she says sweetly, ``I wouldn't say that Newt Gingrich is one.''
She is dressed in a bright peach suit, with gray hair brushed loosely off her face. She leads the way in the LBJ Library, past the signed portrait of Pope Paul VI (``Lyndon had a fascination with popes,'' she says later), to a comfortable sofa that faces a display of such Johnson-era state gifts as a 6th century B.C. Grecian bowl from King Constantine II and a gold filigree purse from Haile Selassie. Enormous windows show the state capitol, downtown Austin and a vista of dismal clouds.
``You see that sky out there?'' she says, worried. The wildflower center's big preview weekend, with Dan Rather as emcee, is at the end of the month, and she fears the unusually gray, dry spring will delay the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush from making their normal breathtaking impression. ``She can't do anything about the rainfall,'' later says her daughter, Lynda Robb. ``But she wants everything to be absolutely top-notch.''
Lady Bird's lifelong love affair with nature is well documented: Girl from east Texas grows up loving the violets of the countryside, is moved to preserve them when her husband the president tells Americans in his 1964 Great Society speech to clean up the air and water and save the wilderness.
If Lady Bird and the wildflower center are not on the cutting edge, as some native plant specialists say, they are America's leading popularizers of a sometimes ideological and esoteric movement. ``It took her to make it palatable and accessible,'' says Ken Druse, environmentalist and author of natural gardening books.
As Lady Bird will tell you, no one is suggesting we uproot the tulips in Washington's parks and replace them with native grasses. Never mind that the native plant people refer to the tulip as an ``alien.''
``It is,'' she says. ``It comes from Asia Minor. As do so many of our good things. And Lordy mercy, cheers to them. May we keep on growing them and cherishing them and all that.'' But ``the indigenous things have not had anybody to speak for them and I want to preserve them. I want them to be there for my grandchildren and yours and everybody's. No ma'am. This is not a cut-things-out, this is an add-things-on. This is a natural respect for what the Lord put in your portion of the country.''
Lady Bird says she'll be happy to give a quick tour of her new wildflower center, a half-hour drive through rolling hills where bluebonnets are starting. She changes from pumps to sensible walking shoes, then sighs that 60 years in the public eye are quite enough. Even now, she employs one full-time and one part-time secretary to handle mail.
``Lyndon might rise out of the grave and appear to me in anger if I didn't answer letters,'' she says. ``But I've got to quit being on the public scene. I'm too old and too tired.''
The wildflower center is a series of buildings in native Texas sandstone, connected by courtyards and terraces. Unfortunately, there isn't a wildflower in sight. A front-end loader pushes dirt and boulders in what will be a showplace of a meadow. The center will have display gardens, a children's house, a cafe, an auditorium, a gift shop. It will offer lectures, and operate as a national clearinghouse.
To Lady Bird, this is the natural evolution of her work as first lady. ``I think a first lady, whoever she is, her first job is always to try to give her husband a more comfortable place in which to work,'' she says. ``And then whatever it is in his program that appeals to her most, that makes her heart sing, she'll pitch in and help on that.''
And if she were to wake up in the White House tomorrow? Would she be the same kind of first lady?
``I presume I would have in this imaginary world my same husband?'' she asks.
Of course.
``I think I would try to do the same thing,'' she says. ``Because you see, at 82, I am a product of a generation and a time before a woman was necessarily an activist. ... I have not become a child of the '80s and '90s. I am a child of the '20s, of the Depression, of the emergence on the world scene of America. And I belong to a different age.
``And'' - she laughs - ``I'm me.''
by CNB