Ep. 2: Thank You, Mrs. Vice President

In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson

ABC News

History, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are moments in Lady Bird’s audio diaries that truly re-write the known history of LBJ's presidency. This episode includes one of the most consequential. In a memo to Lyndon just five months into his presidency, Lady Bird predicts how the Vietnam war will derail his administration, and proposes a clear end-date for his time in office -- fully four years before he shocked the nation with his announcement in March of 1968 that he wouldn't run for reelection. We hear Lady Bird’s growing sense that Bobby Kennedy will become LBJ's political rival, and RFK’s bring-down-the-house performance at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1964. In the run up to the ’64 election, Lady Bird makes a Whistle Stop tour of the South — her home turf — to try to keep Southern Democrats from defecting over Civil Rights. But she’s met with open hostility, and worse. And on her return to Washington, a sex scandal involving Lyndon’s closest aide presents an October surprise that could easily upend the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	First, just a quick announcement.
0:08.0	I wish now to announce that I will not be a candidate for reelection.
0:12.5	This decision is made easier by the fact that I can feel my conduct with the presidency,
0:17.1	which I came in such a tragic hour of national rending.
0:21.3	He's not been without some solid accomplishment, thanks to the grace of God and the sturdy cooperation
0:26.7	of the American people.
0:28.8	Just Lyndon Johnson's statement that he won't be running for reelection.
0:33.1	Lady Bird read it into her diary in the spring of 1964.
0:36.9	He never did give that speech.
0:39.0	In fact, he didn't write it.
0:41.3	Not a word of it.
0:42.8	Lady Bird did.
0:43.8	I hope he won't use it, but that's fair.
0:48.8	When I was working in the Johnson Archives in Austin, Texas, I found a file marked very
0:53.4	simply, letters, Lady Bird Johnson to Lyndon Johnson.
0:57.5	It's been sitting in the LBJ library since the 1970s.
1:02.0	It's a pretty well-known fact that LBJ got cold feet right before the Democratic Convention
1:07.0	in August of 1964.
1:09.7	But in that box of letters, I found a bigger story.
1:13.6	In May of that year, just five months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated,
1:18.2	thrusting LBJ into the presidency, Lady Bird is laying out for Lyndon something much more consequential
1:24.2	than whether or not he's going to run in the fall.
	...

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