The LuLac Edition #4,650, December 22nd, 2021

 WRITE ON WEDNESDAY

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Today would have been Lady Bird Johnson’s 99^th birthday. We feature on article from Peter Baker published earlier in the year about the former First Lady’s diaries. In it she highlights the battles her husband had with depression. Baker tells us how she coaxed LBJ back from the edge. It was a service to her husband but also the country.

LADY BIRD JOHNSON’S SECRET DIARIES TELL OF LBJ’S BATTLE WITH DEPRESSION

 He had been president for only two years, but that night in fall 1965 he had enough. Lyndon B. Johnson had spiraled into depression, and from his hospital bed after gallbladder surgery, he talked of throwing it all away and retreating into seclusion back home in Texas.

To a visiting Supreme Court justice, he dictated thoughts for a statement announcing he was indefinitely turning over his duties to Vice President Hubert Humphrey while recovering from fatigue.

“I want to go to the ranch. I don’t want even Hubert to be able to call me,” he told his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. “They may demand that I resign. They may even want to impeach me.”

Eventually, she coaxed him through that period of doubt and despair, enabling him to complete the final three years of his term. The episode was hidden from the public, and although she documented it in her diary, she ordered the entry kept secret for years after her death. But a new book reveals the full scope of those once-shrouded diaries as never before, shedding fresh light on the former first lady and her partnership with the 36th president.

The diaries reveal how central she was to her husband’s presidency. She not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade him to stay in office at critical junctures, advised him on how to use the office to achieve their mutual goals, guided him during the most arduous moments and helped chart his decision to give up power years later.

While she is remembered largely as a political wife and businesswoman with impeccable manners, an easy laugh, a soft Texas lilt and a quintessentially first ladylike White House portfolio promoting “beautification” efforts, the diaries make clear that behind the scenes she was also a canny political operator and shrewd judge of people.

“The preexisting image is one of two-dimensionality and stiff-upperlipness and not a hair out of place,” said Julia Sweig, who spent five years researching the diaries for the biography “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,” set to be published Tuesday. “But when you get into this material, you see what a rounded, multidimensional human being she is.”

Lady Bird Johnson began her diary shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy vaulted her husband to the presidency in November 1963, and she dutifully kept it up through the end of their time in the White House in January 1969. She released carefully edited excerpts in a 1970 book titled “A White House Diary,” but some portions remained sealed until long after her death in 2007 at age 94.

 Born Claudia Alta Taylor in a small East Texas town, Johnson was a force in her husband’s political career from Congress to the White House. She advised him through the civil rights movement, the enactment of the Great Society program and the Vietnam War, and she helped figure out how to handle the arrest of a close aide and used her beautification program to promote an environmental and social justice agenda.

Perhaps most consequentially, she steered her husband through his inner turmoil. As early as May 1964, six months after taking office, he contemplated his departure by not running for election in his own right that fall. The first lady drew up a seven-page strategy memo that presciently outlined his eventual course, suggesting he run for election but serve just one full term, then announce in March 1968 that he would not run again.

“LBJ often let his demons roam with her, knowing that she would quietly ward them off by appealing to his better angels,” said Mark Updegrove, president of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation and the author of “Indomitable Will” about the Johnson presidency. “He used her not only as a sounding board but revealed his subconscious to her, including expressing his darkest thoughts that he was trying to work through. She helped to work them out — or exorcise them.”

Peter Baker is a New York Times writer.