Margaret Fallon (Peggy) Palmer: A Portrait of Sam Rayburn’s “Lady Friend”

Margaret Fallon (Peggy) Palmer, ca. 1941. Hessler Studio of Washington, D.C.

Courtesy of Peggy Palmer Archive.

Sam Rayburn of Texas served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for seventeen years, longer than anyone in American history. Prior to that, he was House majority leader, and during the early years of the New Deal in the 1930s he served as its workhorse in the House as chairman of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. His near-half century in the House of Representatives began with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and ended with his death early into the administration of John F. Kennedy. He died in 1961 at seventy-nine years old.¹

Today he is portrayed as a master of the legislative process, a reputation he shares with his most famous protégé, Lyndon Johnson. But Rayburn’s reputation is of a cautious, yet skillful political pragmatist—a far cry from the bluster and ego for which Johnson is known. He is perceived as the quintessential man of the House: a self-described bachelor whose marriage was to the House of Representatives. The standard interpretation of Rayburn is that he was laconic, lonely, and isolated from people outside of the House of Representatives, which allowed Johnson the opportunity to cultivate interactions with Rayburn and become the protégé of a powerful man. LBJ biographer Robert Caro believed Rayburn was so alone that while “men who saw Sam Rayburn only in the halls of Congress feared him, men who also saw him outside those halls pitied him.” Rayburn had felt loneliness as a child, noted Caro, and he dreaded loneliness as a man. When Congress was in session, Rayburn was constantly in demand, but when it was not in session, Rayburn was alone. Randall B. Woods, another LBJ biographer, wrote that, “Rayburn lived alone in his apartment [in Washington, D.C.]. He was at times desperately lonely, venturing out only occasionally on fishing trips with colleagues or to baseball games or dinner with friends. But he was miserable when Congress was not in session.” It was Johnson, noted Woods, who “offered Rayburn the companionship of his family and personal affection.” “If ever anyone needed a protégé,” wrote Woods, “it was Rayburn.”²

But Rayburn was not always alone. He was married once in 1927 to Metze Jones, a beautiful woman from Northeast Texas and the sister of one of Rayburn’s closest friends. However, less than three months after the wedding they separated, and ten months later they divorced. The cause of their breakup is unknown, and the divorce papers disappeared long ago. Many years after the divorce, Rayburn remarked, “It was so long ago, it doesn’t seem as though I was ever married.”³

Most people in his district in Northeast Texas and in Washington never realized he had even been married—something that was politically desirable for Rayburn since he lived in an era and in a district when a divorced candidate for political office was anathema to voters. Quoting

Margaret Fallon (Peggy) Palmer, date unknown. Original painting by Benedict A. Osnis.

Courtesy of Peggy Palmer Archive.

an unnamed friend of Rayburn’s, biographer Alfred Steinberg wrote that the divorce devastated him: “At the time,” claimed the friend, “it almost wrecked him.” Another biography of Rayburn, co-authored by one of Rayburn’s staff members, noted, however, that in spite of the “indelible scar” caused by the divorce, Rayburn had a number of relationships with women and that he “had an eye for beautiful, stylish, well dressed women who were at ease in the Washington political atmosphere and who could talk knowledgably about public affairs.” Rayburn was such a private person that almost nothing has been known about the women in Rayburn’s life until now.⁴

One of those women who attracted Rayburn’s attention seemed to have a special place...