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    Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President
    Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President
    Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President
    Audiobook16 hours

    Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President

    Written by Betty Boyd Caroli

    Narrated by Amanda Carlin

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    This “smartly written…stunning” (The Boston Globe) portrait of Lady Bird as the essential strategist, fundraiser, barnstormer, and ballast for her husband Lyndon offers “a penetrating analysis…of a marriage that paired two complicated but devoted figures, a coupling that changed the face of America” (Richmond Times-Dispatch).

    Marriage is the most underreported story in political life, yet it is often the key to its success. Historian Betty Boyd Caroli spent seven years exploring the archives of the LBJ Library, interviewing dozens of people, and mining never-before-released letters between Lady Bird and Lyndon. The result “redefines the First Lady as an iron fist in a white glove” (Vanity Fair) and helps explain how the talented, but flawed Lyndon Baines Johnson ended up making history.

    Lady Bird grew up the daughter of a domineering father and a cultured but fragile mother. When a tall, pushy Texan named Lyndon showed up in her life, they married within weeks with a tacit agreement: this highly gifted politician would take her away, and she would save him from his weaknesses. The conventional story goes that Lyndon married Lady Bird for her money and demeaned her by flaunting his many affairs, and that her legacy was protecting the nation’s wildflowers. But Caroli shows that she was also the one who swooped in to make the key call to a donor, to keep the team united, to campaign in hostile territory, and to jump-start Lyndon out of his paralyzing dark moods.

    In Lady Bird and Lyndon, Caroli restores Lady Bird to her rightful place in history. But she also tells a love story whose compromises and edifying moments many women will recognize.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 27, 2015
    ISBN9781442397392
    Author

    Betty Boyd Caroli

    Betty Boyd Caroli is the author of Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President; First Ladies: Martha Washington to Michelle Obama; Inside the White House; and The Roosevelt Women. She has been a guest on Today, The O’Reilly Factor, Lehrer NewsHour, Al Jazeera, Booknotes with Brian Lamb, and many others. A graduate of Oberlin College, Caroli holds a master’s degree in Mass Communications from the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in American Civilization from New York University. She currently resides in New York City and Venice, Italy.

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    • 3/5
      BIOGRAPHYBetty Boyd CaroliLady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a PresidentSimon & SchusterEbook, 978-1-4391-9124-8 (also available in hardcover and as an audio book), 480 pgs., $14.99October 27, 2015 Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor and Lyndon Baines Johnson met in the Texas Railroad Commission Office in September of 1934. He proposed the next day and they eloped two months later. Lady Bird, the independent, determined, business-minded offspring of a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional marriage, needed a vehicle, as a woman in Texas during the Great Depression, to “let her deploy her ambition” and decided Lyndon was that man. In Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President, Betty Boyd Caroli makes a convincing case that Lady Bird was certainly not the timid wallflower as she is so often portrayed in biographies of President Lyndon Johnson, but rather a “girl [who] gradually became a figure of steel cloaked in velvet,” who transformed herself into the “model political wife” and an example for future first ladies. In simple prose, and with access to private letters, “most of them not available to researchers until Valentine’s Day in 2013 and not used by a Johnson biographer until now,” Caroli creates an informal, sometimes gossipy tone, with a pop psychology bent. Caroli’s thesis is that Lyndon could not have been as successful as he was without Lady Bird (“fixer, enabler, smoother-of-feelings”) and that those letters prove her case, revealing “the implicit deal the pair struck with each other: that Lyndon would fulfill her ambition of being matched with a man as charismatic and as comfortable with power as her father while taking her away from him, and that Bird would provide Lyndon with a ferocious devotion equal to his mother’s and the emotional ballast he needed to achieve his ambition.” While Lady Bird and Lyndon is the story of a marriage, not of individuals, it is evident that Caroli admires Lady Bird and the book concentrates on her. Caroli explains away Lady Bird’s shortcomings but spares Lyndon nothing in detailing manic-depressive behavior, paranoia, verbal abuse (“the treatment”) of everyone in his orbit, including his wife, and his seemingly countless affairs. While important to a marriage biography, the regular reports, not to mention an entire chapter, on Lyndon the “sexual conquistador” are repetitive enough to be tiresome. Lady Bird and Lyndon is full of fascinating details about the behind-the-scenes functioning of a partnership that affected the lives of many millions of people. I have a much fuller picture of the actual person of Lady Bird. In the end, though, this book tells the story of a pathological relationship that, nevertheless and no matter the personal costs to the individuals and the collateral damage inflicted, appears to have attained its public goals. Is that success?Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
    • 5/5
      Lady Bird and Lyndon is an impressive history. It demonstrates clearly that Lady Bird was Lyndon's anchor and without her he couldn't function. It was startling to learn that he was a serious manic depressive who would take to the bed in the White House for days with the blankets covered up to his head. He was that depressed. And to think that it was he running the country and managing the war in Viet Nam is frightening. He was a beneficiary of her wealth and her great concern for him though he was most abusive of her. She would look the other way and say "well that's Lyndon". She didn't want a second term in the White House but wanted to go home to their ranch in Texas and enjoy life. She strongly influenced him not to run again. By that time he was so unpopular that he didn't want the embarrassment of not being nominated again. The writing in the book is superb. I recommend it unqualifiedly. Enjoy.