Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History by Michael L. Gillette (review)

Springtime visitors to the nation’s capital might not know that they can largely thank Lady Bird Johnson for the profusion of vivid tulips and daffodils and blossoming trees that characterize the area’s landscape. Community beautification, sparked by her love of nature growing up in rural eastern Texas, was high on the first lady’s agenda after Lyndon Johnson’s January 1965 inauguration. As she recalled for oral historian Michael L. Gillette: “[Pierre] L’Enfant had laid out the city of Washington with all those circles and triangles, where there were [now] mostly just a dilapidated, a fallen down bench, and a few scraggly plants” (357). Mrs. Johnson believed that beautifying the city would have a ripple effect, with visitors who took pride in the beauty of their capital city going back home to “Keokuk, Iowa, or Selma, Alabama, or wherever they might be” and doing the same thing there (357). Indeed, those early beautification efforts, a term the first lady and her advisers never quite liked but could not think of anything better, were part of a burgeoning environmental movement that ultimately encompassed the push for clean air and water and preservation of scenic areas, parks, and wilderness.

The first lady’s recollections about her beautification efforts cover a mere three pages in the last chapter, which deals with Mrs. Johnson’s reflections on her White House years. Yet they illustrate the impressive value of this book. In every way, it is a classic example of oral history at its best. The book is a life history, not just of the prominent years when Mrs. Johnson shared her husband’s public life on the national stage. And as such, it is a social and political history of the twentieth century, revealing important themes about life in the segregated South, in Texas, and in Washington, DC, through the eyes of a woman who grew up in a well-to-do rural family, married a man she knew barely three months, and was indoctrinated into politics by memorizing, at her new husband’s request, all the counties and county seats in Texas’s Fourteenth District, which Lyndon worked for as the congressman’s top aide.

Gillette’s book consists of edited, but extensive, excerpts from forty-seven interviews focusing on specific years throughout Mrs. Johnson’s life that he and several other oral historians conducted with her over nearly two decades, beginning in 1977. The book is extensively footnoted, with detailed information about accessing each of the interviews, including Interview 39 recorded in August 1994, which readers are told is a blank tape. (Surely it is a relief to oral historians everywhere to realize that even the best-planned and executed oral history projects can encounter recording gremlins.) A detailed bibliographical note lists dozens of biographies of Lady Bird Johnson and Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ); memoirs and oral histories of people who knew her; articles; the LBJ Library’s recordings of telephone conversations he had with her; and a limited amount of personal correspondence between the two, also at the LBJ Library. Such detail about the sources Gillette relied on is of inestimable value to other historians, as well as casual readers who want to learn more about this remarkable woman and her times.

In addition to the bibliographic details, Gillette does one more thing that people who call themselves oral historians should do but often do not. He provides detailed contextual information about the nature of the interviews themselves and his relationship with the interviewee, noting at the outset, for example, that Mrs. Johnson invited him to her fiftieth high school reunion because she knew he was interested in her early life. It turned into a day of experiencing the people and places she called home, including a stop at an overgrown cemetery where her mother is buried. Gillette, former director of the LBJ Library’s Oral History Program, also recognizes Regina Greenwell and Lesley W. Brunet, “whose prodigious research...