Personal History (66 page)

Another strange and difficult first experience was being an object of interest throughout the media and being interviewed. This happened a few times during the first year. In one published interview, I said I did not find it difficult to be a woman executive in a field dominated by men, and “after a while, people forget you’re a woman.” That last was bravura, brought on by my newness and inexperience. Women’s issues hadn’t yet surfaced, and I simply wasn’t sensitive to how people viewed me. Since I was so painfully new and had so much to learn, the unpleasantness of being condescended to and the strangeness of being the only woman in so many rooms got mixed up in my mind. But I didn’t blame my male colleagues for condescending—I just thought it was due to my being so new. It took the passage of time and the women’s lib years to alert me properly to the real problems of women in the workplace, including my own.

I also had my first experience in a labor situation and didn’t do very well. The
Star
underwent a wildcat strike by the typographical union. There was a lot of grumbling about how the paper had fired a union executive, and our union at the
Post
made it clear that it hoped we would not support the
Star
’s management. The Washington newspapers traditionally had negotiated with the craft unions together, and we were just deciding to support the
Star
when, one evening at dinner, I met Jim Reynolds, a distant friend, who was assistant secretary of labor—representing labor, of course, a fact I didn’t fully appreciate. “You’re not going to support the
Star
, are you?” he asked. I said it looked as though we were. He said how foolish that would be and gave his reasons. I picked up the phone and made the mistake of passing this on to John Sweeterman, who took it, not unnaturally, as my own opinion and therefore my direction, and drew back from his plans to support the
Star
. The whole incident was very upsetting to
Star
executives, who in the end had to give in to the strikers. Crosby Boyd, the
Star
’s president, came over to see me and said he hoped this was not a new policy, since historically we had supported each other. I agreed to continue our old ways. This was a lesson about the weight of my voice—I hadn’t understood that I could no longer say something without its carrying a message that I might not want to convey. Later, when
our very survival was at stake, the
Star
, under new ownership, chose not to support us.

I also had my first encounter of many with a reporter’s getting into trouble with a dictator in a foreign country, usually over the reporter’s freedom to report. In this case it was Bob McCabe, who represented
Newsweek
in Hong Kong. He had actually been jailed in Indonesia, and I talked about it with George Ball in the State Department, who promised to keep on top of the matter and, indeed, did make a statement to President Sukarno. This was the first of a series of battles with dictators—which go on to this day—in which it is always important to let the political leaders know that the organization and its executives personally stand behind the reporters.

I made my first business call for
Newsweek
with Fritz, this one on the Chrysler Corporation. Although this kind of visit continued throughout my working life, the amount of good they do is hard to measure. I do believe, though, that in the end knowing a company’s executives sometimes makes a difference in large advertising decisions. At the least, it establishes you as a human presence.

A bigger test for me, and another first, was a speech to the
Newsweek
advertising-sales meeting in Puerto Rico. I vividly recall the terror of giving this first speech, but I had quickly discovered that I had no choice—giving speeches was part of the job description. Because my father, mother, and husband had all written their own speeches, I wasn’t aware of speechwriters. For this particular speech, I sat down with my pencil and a pad and wrote out some thoughts of a personal kind. When I got to the part where I felt I had to say something about
Newsweek
, I was completely stuck and consulted Fritz, who reminded me that Emmet Hughes, Eisenhower’s former speechwriter, who had been hired by Phil as a
Newsweek
columnist, was supposed to provide this kind of assistance. Emmet took my start and completed a speech that we called “I Believe in Individuals,” which I delivered on wobbly knees. Even reading from a text took more experience than I had, but the emotion of the moment helped me muddle through, and the speech was actually well received.

Learning to create and give speeches was an agony for a long time. Emmet helped me on one or two other occasions, but finally refused to go on, because I was so hard to work with. I simply didn’t know when a text was fine and finished and when it needed more work. For years, I had no one to help me. I went through several speechwriters but couldn’t figure out how to formulate with them what it was I needed or wanted to say, or to appraise the outcome. Meg Greenfield, who arrived at the
Post
in 1968, offered to help, and was essential to the speech process for many years. It wasn’t until eighteen years later, when Guyon (Chip) Knight arrived at the Post Company, that the problem was completely solved.

In any case, all of these firsts during that first year of my working life added up, and I began to realize that just by putting one foot in front of the other I actually was moving forward. Despite all the inner turbulence and confusion, and despite my feeling unsure that life could really go on without Phil, my days were becoming more endurable and even, at times, interesting again.

O
N
N
OVEMBER
22, 1963, I had invited my old friends Arthur Schlesinger and Ken Galbraith to have lunch with the editors of
Newsweek
to discuss their views of the “Back of the Book” section of the magazine. I stopped by the White House to pick up Arthur, who was working there at the time, and we flew to New York and assembled for lunch with Ken, Fritz, and all the top editors and others concerned. We were having drinks when someone came flying down the hall, stuck his head in, and said, “The president has been shot.”

Our reaction was disbelief—either there was a mistake or it would be all right—yet we were panic-stricken. We rushed to a television set, and the reports quickly made it apparent that the situation was very serious. A Secret Service man, Clint Hill, who had accompanied Jackie to India when Ken was ambassador there, was quoted as saying that he thought the president had been fatally wounded. Ken said, “If that comes from Clint Hill, it has to be taken seriously.” When the horrifying news came that the president was dead, we moved quickly to get to the airport to return to Washington. Ken later recalled the contrast between the total crushing feeling in the car and the still-exuberant noonday crowds, who hadn’t yet heard what had happened.

When we got back to Washington, we went together to the White House. I was reluctant to go, since I was much less close to the Kennedys than either Ken or Arthur, but they both insisted I come with them, so I did. We went into a room full of people in which Ted Sorensen was giving orders. After we’d been there a short time, he looked up impatiently and asked everyone who didn’t have a specific job to do and a right to be there to clear the room, at which point I departed, certain the remark was aimed at me, even though a great many other people left, too.

Our sense of loss was enormous—for the country and for so many of us personally. Isaiah Berlin summed it up best when he later said, “I feel less safe.” Bill Walton remembered that, after helping make plans for the funeral, he returned to his house, shattered, and my mother phoned him, crying. According to Bill, she was just so straightforward. She said: “We’re nothing but a goddamned banana republic,” and hung up.

The day after the assassination, I went back to the East Room of the White House, where President Kennedy’s casket was lying in state, and
then I went to call on Lady Bird, who had invited me to tea. (Liz Carpenter, who became Lady Bird’s press secretary, later said that President Johnson suggested that she talk to me.) Like all of us, the Johnsons were in shock at the loss of Jack Kennedy. At the same time, they were having to take on their enormous responsibilities as president and first lady, and to take them on with such heavy feelings. As Liz Carpenter explained, “If you only knew how awful we all felt after the assassination. Not only because we’d lost this golden president, but because it happened in Texas. It was just a hell of a burden to bear.” Lady Bird described it this way: “They look at the living and wish for the dead.”

She has also spoken about what it was like for her to become first lady: “I feel like I’ve walked on stage for a part I’ve never rehearsed.” Although this was an apt description for my own new role in life, I felt at a total loss to be of any help to her. We were all so much in shock that it was hard to imagine any other administration and any other people in the roles of president and first lady. I admit that I didn’t appreciate at the time that Lady Bird Johnson would do things very well in her own way.

Liz Carpenter also later talked with me on the phone about what kind of program would be right for Lady Bird to undertake, bringing up the idea of “beautification” as one possibility. Because I had worked for so long on the District’s severe social problems, I worried that beautification was too superficial. Liz wisely said that Lady Bird had to choose something on which she could have a real impact. Liz was right, and the beautification program was a triumph. Happily for me, Lady Bird asked me to be a member of her Beautification Committee, and I was delighted to serve.

W
HOEVER FOLLOWED
John Kennedy would have had a difficult time. Certainly a new era had begun. On December 3, less than two weeks after the assassination and before the Johnsons had moved into the White House, Joe and Susan Mary and I were invited to dinner by the president and Lady Bird. As we walked into the entrance hall of the Elms, we saw the portrait of Sam Rayburn hanging just to the left. The president spoke of how much he lamented that Rayburn and Phil weren’t there at this moment, when he most needed their advice.

My memory of the evening is spotty. Jack Valenti was present, and I think we four were the only guests. Susan Mary remembered that the president was in a friendly, gentle mood, which she said “was astonishing in view of the fact that he soon told us over cocktails he had been having a very rough day because what he called ‘the Kennedy men’ … had come one by one to present their resignations to him.” He also talked about what had happened in Dallas. He described sitting with Lady Bird in a
room at the hospital waiting to hear the news from the operating room. He couldn’t remember what the room looked like except that it was small and there were a lot of sheets in it. Twice Lady Bird had left to see if she could help Jackie, who was standing alone in the hall, but she had come back and reported that Jackie preferred to remain alone. It was while they were still in the room with the sheets that someone—Susan Mary thought it was Kenny O’Donnell—came in and said, “Mr. President, the president is dead.” Then Johnson stopped talking about the events of November 22 and began telling Texas stories. It was an unusual night.

B
Y THE BEGINNING
of 1964, I had got a bit of a start on my job, but on a personal level I was lonely. Life alone had to be figured out—single life is hard to resume after twenty-three years of marriage. I was miserable every time I did another thing alone that Phil and I had done together, or any time I entered a place that flooded me with memories. For ages, I couldn’t look at anything of Phil’s—especially his handwriting or personal objects. As quickly as I could, I did over his rooms, both at R Street and at the farm. For a while the associations with Glen Welby were so gruesome that I wanted to walk away from it, but I had to remember that the children didn’t have that horrible scene in their heads. For them, Glen Welby had no negative associations; they loved the place and everything about it. So I kept going there, although I rebuilt that bathroom so that nothing was in the same place, and changed things around so that I wasn’t so spooked every time I walked into the house. For me, always, Glen Welby was the essence of Phil. It was his ponds, his fields, his fishing, his hunting, his dogs—in short, his creation. It was the place where we had spent so much time together, and it was the place that was so inspired by his presence, not to speak of being the scene of his death.

I remained lonely in most places, especially when I went to New York. People were generous about hospitality, but I hated being alone in hotels. At first, I was painfully shy, but, because I found it so hard to be alone, I began going out a great deal. Social life quickly became spoiling and fun for me. I started to see more people in New York, including Truman Capote, the Paleys, and, to a lesser extent, the Jock Whitneys and the James Fosburghs (Babe Paley’s two sisters were Betsey Whitney and Minnie Fosburgh), as well as Pamela Churchill Hayward and her charismatic husband, Leland.

In Washington, I also began to see more and more people—advertisers or business types related to the paper, a combination of friends (new and old) in journalism and government, from both parties. It was Washington at its best. Looking back, I am appalled at how much I went out. I had grown up with my own parents going out all the time, so I suppose it
was easy for me to slip into a pattern of doing the same, or traveling a lot without the children, first with Phil and then on my own. Somehow, after his death, I didn’t think to change the pattern—I didn’t realize that I should have worked harder to make more time for the children.

Though my going to work had definitely made it easier for me to resume life after Phil’s death, it certainly made it harder for Bill and Steve. In effect, they lost both parents at once. Up to that time I had been a fairly present mother, attending school functions, driving teams to sports events, trying to be back in the afternoons when the kids got back from school. All that was mostly over now, though I tried to be with them as much as possible, at least getting to some of their school occasions. I faithfully attended Bill’s and Steve’s football games and took the boys with me to events when I could, although undoubtedly not enough. In different ways, they were both having a hard time. Billy led a typical teenage life at St. Albans, but at home he lived very largely behind his closed door. Steve had the hardest time of all—too old to be left with a baby sitter, yet not old enough to be on his own. A gifted boy, Steve was not a jock, as his older brothers had been, and as the St. Albans School formula called for. Like Don, he had skipped a grade, a disastrous idea for both of them, which Don had warned against for Steve when it was suggested by the school. In fact, St. Albans was probably the wrong school altogether for Steve.