The Power of the First Lady
How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands’ ambitions—and their own
How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands’ ambitions—and their own
Of the many images that lingered after the January inauguration of President Joe Biden—the twinkling hand gestures of the poet Amanda Gorman, the rakish eyebrow-waggling of the second daughter, Ella Emhoff—one of the more subtly significant was the scene of Doug Emhoff trying to figure out which side of his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, to stand on. As the first and second couples moved to ascend the Capitol steps, Emhoff stood to her left; changed his mind and dashed to her right; then sort of bobbled, hesitating, before settling at her left. In an otherwise scripted and sober ceremony, the shuffle injected a spontaneous note as the second gentleman sought his place—not sure quite what that place was.
Welcome to the club, any number of women might have told him. Emhoff joined a long line of female political spouses who have struggled, in a larger sense, to figure out where they should be and what they should do. With a key difference: For wives, the choices have almost always elicited harrumphing from some quarter or another—as the ruckus over Dr. Jill Biden’s use of her well-earned honorific served to remind us. Emhoff’s little side step of uncertainty got raves. “It’s just so cute!” exclaimed Jessica Jones, a viewer who entertainingly narrated the viral moment on Tiktok. And she’s right—it was.
As our vision of high-level political partnership gets a reboot (the first-ever first lady who’s not giving up her career, the first-ever second gentleman), it seems a good time to recall just how undefined the role of unelected spouse has been. We tend to date a modern shift to 1992, when Bill Clinton proposed a two-forthe-price-of-one presidency with Hillary. But the unpaid behind-the-scenes partner has been with us a long time, and the deal has never been straightforwardly feminist, as two new biographies of first ladies reveal.
In Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, Julia Sweig argues that for all her mid-century Betty Crocker flip curls, Bird (as her husband called her) had a “disarmingly modern” partnership with the president. She worked hard to be a “fully engaged participant” in Lyndon B. Johnson’s career, and while his biographers have rarely emphasized her centrality, Johnson himself certainly did. As did she: “Our presidency,” Lady Bird called it. In The Triumph of Nancy Reagan, the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty likewise invokes a teammate without whom her spouse would never have been governor of California, much less president of the United States. Tumulty makes the case that over the course of Ronald’s political career, Nancy “grew to understand her power.” Wielding their clout, the two first ladies could hardly be a greater study in contrasts—even as they shared a priority: vigilantly protecting their spouse above all, but also their own access and influence.
Born in 1912 and 1921, respectively, Lady Bird and Nancy both belonged to a generation sandwiched between two feminist movements. Both had lively, unconventional mothers who supported women’s suffrage—and yet both girls grew up during a time when second billing (or none) was a wife’s lot, even in the most collaborative marital enterprises. Young Claudia Alta Taylor, nicknamed Lady Bird by a nanny (or playmate—exactly who isn’t certain), was 5 when she lost her mother. The adventurous and well-read Minnie
Taylor died after a fall while pregnant. Lady Bird—the youngest child and only daughter of a wealthy East Texas businessman—took refuge, Sweig writes, in a rich “inner life that taught her how to take emotional sustenance from nature and books.” An excellent student, she earned a history degree in 1933 from the University of Texas at Austin, in an era when only a small percentage of women graduated from college; she then spent a year completing a journalism degree. Lyndon Johnson, an up-and-coming congressional staffer, instantly sized her up as the sort of smart, capable partner who would push him and expand his prospects. He proposed at the end of their first date, then launched a full-court press until she yielded after 10 weeks. “The wife, your wife, is the most important asset you’ll have,” he declared.
For her part, Lady Bird discovered that marriage promised her broader horizons than the teaching job she had envisioned. With her family’s money as a seed investment, she helped build an empire of Texas media and business holdings. She also used her inheritance to finance Lyndon’s successful bid for a House seat in 1937 and, in the years following, helped cultivate what she termed “our political machine.” During World War II, when LBJ was on active duty in the Pacific, she ran his congressional office. After he ascended to the Senate in 1948, she became a force in the Senate Wives Club, a group of spouses who exercised a sort of soft power in postwar Washington’s political life. The city was well stocked with influential women. At a time when the National Press Club barred female reporters, the Women’s National Press Club provided a home for the city’s contingent. An extraordinary group of Black women helped propel the civil-rights movement. In this busy milieu, Lady Bird was, she said, “so happy being the wife of the senator from Texas.”
So happy was she—and so aware of how her husband would chafe at a subordinate role—that when John F. Kennedy drafted LBJ as his running mate in 1960, she made the case for not accepting. But like his other advisers, she bowed to the inevitability of saying yes and fully entered into the campaign. The former majority leader’s power shrank while Lady Bird’s official ambit expanded to include public appearances, both on the campaign trail, where she stood in for a pregnant Jackie Kennedy, and as second lady. In the stunned aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, she sought out Jackie: “I tried to express something of how we felt. I said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be Vice President and now, dear God, it’s come to this.’”
It is startling to realize that, for the 14 months from November 1963 to January 1965, Lady Bird Johnson effectively was the vice president. LBJ, serving out JFK’S term, did not have a VP. Both Johnsons knew they had to “seize the momentum of the