followed by prime minister's questions of the british house of commons. later, democratic candidate martin o'malley speaks of muslim -- muslim leaders at a mosque in ♪ >> this week on "q&a," historian betty boyd caroli. she discusses her book "lady bird and lyndon," an inside look at the marriage and political partnership between lady bird and lyndon johnson. brian: betty boyd caroli, your new book about lady bird and lyndon, you started in the prologue this way. "at exactly 4 p.m. on december 9, 1964, lady bird johnson started a slow, dignified descent down the wide stairway from the residential quarters of the white house to the state

floor, where more than 600 guests were waiting." why did you start it that way, and what were you talking about? betty: well, i wanted to draw the reader into the story, because that was a very important day for the johnsons. remember, their older daughter was getting married, but it was also one of the worst periods in the presidency. you know, lady bird said that the first two years were wine and roses, and the last years were pure hell. and so, this was a happy family occasion, you could say, in the middle of what was really a devastating period for them. and i wanted to get the reader into the story before i began talking about her childhood, which was extremely troubled, as you know. brian: what else was there about the wedding, that you said in the prologue, that was important? betty: well, i guess for me, what stood out was, she says in her unpublished diary, that as lyndon walked down the aisle, because they are in the big east room for the actual ceremony, with linda on his arm, lady bird wasn't looking at her daughter, she was looking at lyndon, and she said she noticed that his

hair was grayer than before. that is an amazing statement for her to make, that her eyes were not on the daughter, but the husband. brian: what was the symbolism for you that johnson left the reception to fly to texas? betty: i found that really hard to explain, how a father could leave his daughter's reception just a few minutes after it started. i mean, he did dance with lady bird, but he took off with some friends, and that left the bridal couple. can you imagine? a woman who has just been married and her father doesn't even stay around to see the guests leave. it was for lady bird to see the guests and bridal couple off. brian: we talked about the nine roosevelt women earlier. why did you spend all this time on lady bird johnson?

betty: she's always been depicted as a plus one. she became, i think, the first modern first lady. in other words, she had a big staff, she had a very important project, she wrote her book as soon as she left the white house. she really invented the modern first lady. so i thought, how could she be so insignificant and do all those things? and then there was the mystery about how her mother died. there were a lot of things about her story where i thought i just wanted to write about her. after she died, many of the papers became available, her unpublished diary. she wrote a big 800 page book.

she recorded eight times that much. i was dying to get my hands on that. i got the final segment this june. it was a very big help. brian: where did you have to go to find the diary? betty: remember, she did not keep a diary in the usual sense of writing everyday. she did not type. she recorded. she did not record everyday. the days she could not get to it, she had a big brown envelope. that had to be transcribed. who transcribed it did not always understand her accent. i was told i would have to wait until it was re-transcribed.

it was told to me in the transcript that mrs. johnson looked at a picture and said, oh, it looks like a bowl of jelly. they listened to the recording, and what she said was it looks like a "botticelli." i got the final segment this year. brian: did you ever get an interview? betty: i did not. i got a note back from her saying she was ill. i did not follow up. her office was good to answer. i would ask who worked for who and how many letters did her office receive. she always made sure they got answered.

brian: her love letters were on the lbj library website. i went on there and got this one from lyndon johnson. where were they both in september? betty: they met september 5, 1934. she had graduated from university of texas. they went to the office of somebody they both knew. they spent the next five days, she was introduced to his family, to his boss, some friends. then, she took him back on monday to meet her father.

wednesday to monday, they spent those days together, and he was only asking her to marry him. he left tuesday morning to drive back to washington. september 11 was the first letter he wrote her, from the memphis hotel, that he wished she had married him. maybe that's the letter? brian: they are all on the website. he said, "it was hard to leave you. it is always hard to feel that you have not quite won. i would hope that you would want to go with me. if you did, i did not understand it that way." he goes on to say, "you mean everything to me. i hope i may mean as much to you." "it was hard to tell you how much it meant to be with you in your home." that is five days after they

met? betty: yes. the letters are an incredible source for understanding the sort of man he was. now, we know his insistence on secrecy. he would write, "something's happening, but i can't tell you what." the letters tell you a lot about his needs. "i need someone like you to nurse me and help me climb." i could never figure out why someone as cautious as lady bird would marry someone just a few weeks after she met him. it is hard to figure out how many days they knew each other before they married. they met september 5. he left, came back on halloween,

and she had already planned a visit to her aunt in atlanta, georgia. she went off on a trip. they were writing hot and heavy letters. she marries him. they get into a car starting towards san antonio. she says she figured she could always get out in austin before she got there. she didn't even unpack before she got back from her aunt. it always amazes me that a woman who saught advice on every single topic before she acted married him in a hurry. brian: here's kirk douglas reading these letters. let's watch this. >> we walked through an old colonial mansion.

it always gives me a very poignant feeling. there were the tallest magnolias i've ever seen. >> my dear, this morning i am ambitious, proud, energetic. i am madly in love with you. i want to see people, i want to do things with the drive. if i had a box, i would make a speech. plans, ideas, hopes. i am bubbling over. >> lyndon, tell me as soon as you can what the deal is. [laughter] >> i'm afraid it's politics. i know i have not any business, not any proprietary interest.

but i would hate for you to go into politics. [laughter] betty: well, i think that letter about not wanting him to go into politics has been taken out of context. she was political as a young woman. she was writing in the same letters, do you like to debate economics and socialism, religion? as a student at the university of texas, she would go to the legislature to listen to debate. i think that was taken out of context. she was interested in ambitious young men. she saw lyndon as one. if it was politics, she was willing to go. brian: the same thing that baffles a lot of people is her reaction to his womanizing. i'm going to pull this out. you say lyndon needed a "bevy of beauties around him, and bird made room for all of them."

betty: when you look at her background, her father, you look at the letter in which she tells him off about how he's out dancing with another woman, and later, he is dining with that same woman. i looked for her response to that. she doesn't reply to anything about this. later, she says she knew the relationship was not platonic. there's a very complicated history, what she wanted why she wanted beautiful women around him. she says he did better work, with his ego. in the book, i talk about how lyndon always wants the most beautiful women beside him, and tonight it is, and then she names a woman.

when you read her history, you understand. brian: another quote. although you're telling a story from horace busby. "lyndon drove with one hand and used the other hand go under the skirt of the woman seated between him and bird." betty: some people say, and i quote a woman reporter, that in a way, lyndon made a show of affection in order to rile lady bird. whenever they were walking side-by-side, lyndon would take her hand, if she was in view, as though he was having his sexual

relation with the woman reporter. he flaunted his attractivness. brian: melvyn douglas, he was an actor, she was a congresswoman. i want to show you some video of helen douglas who ran against dick nixon and lost. >> she condemned the fear of internal communism as irrational and the host of the distance of the house committee on un-american activities. politicians in both parties called the former actress a "bleeding heart liberal," a "do-gooder." john f. kennedy quietly gave nixon $1000 to defeat her. mrs. douglas was the perfect target for nixon's style of campaigning.

>> it was an unseeded campaign he waged against me. the essence of that kind of campaign is this: to avoid the issues, you work up bogus issues. betty: the relationship with lyndon goes back to their days together in the house. when she came in the house of representatives from california in 1945, she was gorgeous, hollywood-smart, and glamorous. she was the most glamorous woman

in the house. she stands out like a birthday cake on the salad bar. she is in lyndon johnson's office the first day she is there. she was attacked on the house floor by congressman rankin for the same thing set in the 1950's, being a communist. she stood up and said, "are you referring to me?" there was a scene. lyndon gets the speaker and gets rankin to answer helen's question. rankin says he wasn't, which is not true. it is interesting, how public

lyndon came to her rescue. they would walk hand-in-hand, his car would stay over at her house. brian: he was married at the time? betty: yes, for 11 years. but you read in lady bird's diary how much she liked helen. where do they go to commiserate? this was shocking to many people. we think of fdr as being sick for a long time. people knew he did not look good. lady bird said he looked tired, but there was shock. this was the only president many people had ever known, certainly

in the johnson case. lyndon said he "was like a daddy to me." where do they go to commiserate? they go to the house of helen douglas. brian: on our radio station, we ran phone conversation with lyndon johnson. this was in 1964, january 1. lady bird is on the phone. listen and see what you think. >> he never knew you the way i did. i said he might be one of the really great ones. >> hello. that is what i said.

this man might turn out to be one hell of a present. >> well, i hope i am good as a president. >> i ran into your friends, right and left, and liked them all so much. >> tell them that evelyn's out here. she's running the big law office for wyman. >> i know them. i like them. >> keep your ear to the ground. california is a messy place, worse than texas. i asked her to keep her ear to the ground. >> tell her to report to us every now and then. i like the women to like him, and i like him to like them. he said he and roz did well, partly because of you.

>> there are complications, but it's going very well. betty: that is so typical for her to get on the phone and ooze charm. there's a later case where helen goes over to the white house and they invite her to stay. ladybird has breakfast with her and is so enthusiastic about how great she is. this is after 15 years of washington talking about lyndon's affair with helen. betty: it was a fairly open marriage at that point. brian: we might come back to that point. i want to go on to another part of the book, where you talk about lady bird johnson's business experience. you had figures on how much money was dispensed to her and

the children. let's start with this. a man named a.w. morrison was a trustee. "the two men did not speak for the remainder of lyndon's life." betty: he was a rancher, a neighbor. that was the first stop on most of their trips back to texas. when it came time to appoint a trustee to look after their holdings, when lyndon became president, he was one of the people they could trust to do that. his family had lent money to lyndon to go to college. this was a relationship that went way back. it became complicated. a.w. was lending.

it was very complicated. when it came time to end the relationship, to settle the property after the presidency ended, lyndon said they decided to "split the blanket." they never spoke again. brian: bill morrissey cut him off. and tom johnson, who was his press secretary. betty: after the presidency ended, tom johnson wanted to give a book party for bill moyers. they call lyndon johnson and say they want him to come to the party.

the phone went dead. johnson said he could not sever the relationship. he went to lady bird, and she talked to lyndon. she said to him, just because tom is loyal to bill moyers doesn't mean he isn't also loyal to you. it was mended, a little. brian: back to business. how did their business start, and what was it? betty: lady bird had a journalism degree. she was the first lady to have 2 degrees, and the only one up to hillary clinton. she said she always wanted to own a newspaper, but it was too expensive.

in 1942, a station in austin came up for sale. it was losing money. she had money inherited from her mother, who had died a long time ago. it partly came from uncle claude, whom she was named for. she could not buy it without doing research. she went to a member of the fcc and who had been a johnson friend. she said, do you think it is a good idea? he says yes. she buys the station and goes down there in 1943. i have evidence she washed the windows and dealt with programming and got into it. of course, that little station gradually became the basis of an empire. it didn't make money.

her first money was in august of 1943, and the profit was $17. she used the entire amount to pay a dental bill. of course, when television became an option, that, i found interesting. one of the interpretations given to the broadcasting history of the johnson family is that lady bird had nothing to do with it. there is so much evidence to the contrary. their lawyer talks about a meeting, where they had to decide whether to go into television or not. it was expensive, so much equipment and programming. it's a bigger deal than radio. lyndon holds back, but lady bird says it's a risk she wants to take. so, they go into tv.

brian: there was a time when the one television station in austin belonged to lyndon johnson. betty: it's impossible to think about a senator being on the commerce committee, in charge of communications, the fcc, not having influence with the people making decisions. to what extent he actually, it has never been shown, any concrete evidence that he influenced people. it seems to me to be absolutely clear that just being in that job was an influence. i compared it to the obama daughters getting into college. i bet they both go to their first choice. when you are the daughter of the president, you have clout. lady bird johnson was a person

who people said, in the case of getting a license for tv, he said, "i didn't apply." "i knew johnson's wife was applying." just the fact that he was on the committee in the senate, the committee in charge of the fcc, we don't have to say anything more. brian: the station was sold, and at one point, johnson worked for the los angeles times. the amount of money that was distributed, how did you find it? betty: i use printed sources. there were some subjects that became too complicated to follow

up individually, like certain gifts he gave the staff members. i relied on other sources, like the wall street journal. i've never heard those amounts were wrong. brian: you talk about president johnson having a falling out, after going out of the white house with walter cronkite. what was the falling out about? betty: when he left the white house, both johnson's, i think they were the first couple to do this, they signed contracts to write books. lady bird's got out by 1970, and lyndon's by 1971. their money goes to the lbj library. lyndon was to do an interview

with walter cronkite, but he felt the editing did not do him justice. he felt it was not a fair presentation of his handling of subjects like vietnam. i have a picture in the book of lady bird and walter cronkite, after lyndon died. they were boating together off of martha's vineyard. remember, he was a classmate of lady bird. they were both in the journalism school. it is interesting to see the way she keeps this friendship. cronkite, johnson, after lyndon has broken off.

it is a very important role she plays in his life while he is alive, to mend the fences. he could be crude, cruel, make fun of them because of their weight or what they were wearing. there's a famous story of how he criticized jill kelley sondra. he would say he did not like the way someone's tie was tied. lady bird would say, maybe he likes his tie that way. she would say, you've been delivering bad messages. sometimes, you confuse the message with the messenger. she was good when it came to mending problems. brian: these are your words. it sits in during the walter cronkite interviews.

"he went on and on about how communist controlled the three major networks and dozens of other communication outlets. according to richard goodwin, he even named names. walter lippmann is a communist. you would be shocked by the things revealed by the fbi." and he accused cronkite. betty: you are reading from the description of the ranch. richard goodwin let loose with all these names. it was lady bird who said, now lyndon, don't you think you should think twice? some of those reports might not be correct. the crisis that was averted, she would never confront him, but to say, "now, lyndon."

she called it "infiltration." brian: the interview we did with her in 1999, the first question was about a taping system. the answer was a surprise. >> did it bother you when you heard you were recorded? lady bird: no. not that i recall. it would not have bothered me. it happened. i knew vaguely that it was happening. i let it happen. someone had been under the bed with a microphone.

no, i wasn't hurt or shocked. mostly, i just knew this was the real, raw stuff of what went on. betty: she was amazingly courageous to let those tapes be opened. his recording system was created so he knew he would quote someone correctly. the recording system would be left on, because it always shocked me a bit to see he was recording his own wife. secretaries told me other people could turn that on. there were, i think, 800 hours of recorded conversations.

he gave them to his most trusted secretary, and he asked him not to open them until 50 years after his death. that would've been 2023. harry middleton knew about the tapes and went to lady bird in 1990. he asked if they should open them. she said, yes. now, you can hear her telling him how bad his press conference was. you can hear her argue with him about how to treat the walter jenkins matter. brian: keep in mind, she does not know she's recorded. what happened to walter jenkins?

betty: their top aide since 1939, 25-years or so, the families were close. the johnsons went to the jenkins home. he was arrested on a morals charge one month before the biggest election of lyndon's life in a public restroom. when the johnsons heard about it, lady bird was in the white house, and lyndon was in new york campaigning for bobby kennedy. she called him to say what they should do. brian: let's listen. lady bird: i would like to do two things about walter. i would like to offer him the number two job at the radio station.

lyndon: i would not do anything on that line. lady bird: i don't think that's right. i think if we don't express support to him, i think we will lose the entire love and devotion of all of the people who have been with us. lyndon: well, you can imagine what state i am in. i don't want to create any more problems. betty: of course, what she did do, she wrote a letter

supporting jenkins. she said, my heart goes out to this man. this nervous breakdown deserves our prayers and attention. she called in the editor of the washington post to print it. she did not know she was being recorded. she took the right stand, and lyndon was really backing off. she says it was close to the election. we are talking mid-october. the election was in early november. he felt, any indication that his top aide was vulnerable to blackmail would be a death sentence for the election.

that's the way she explained it. she sort of defended lyndon. at least, she did not attack him. brian: did they get him a job? betty: lady bird went to see the family about a month after that. she talks about it being a very hard visit. she continues to work for them and does their taxes right up until, as long as he was alive. brian: i am going to ask you about robert carroll. how did he help you at all, and how many sources like that did you go to? betty: i tried to talk to his biographers, for example, bob carol. i asked him if she had changed his opinion.

there is a letter, saying in 1976, i want to come to the library to do a book on lyndon. here it is, 40 years later. we're still waiting for the volume. he said to me, he does think lady bird was a mood stabilizer. he had extreme mood swings. "lyndon could start down the stairs in a good mood, and arrive at the bottom in a bad mood." she would say, in her diary, "he's in the dumps today. it's all doom and gloom." then, "he's all better."

bob had interviews with lady bird. i tried to get interviews with historians who had talked to her, which i could not. brian: i wanted to get your take on this other affair. >> about alice, i had to write at length about. i don't think the johnson people, they have never forgiven me. you could not write an honest book about him without making her a rather major figure. he was close to her for years. he always was driving down to virginia, to her estate. betty: the relationship with alice glass was greatly exaggerated.

it is true, in the late 30's, she was a glamorous figure. lady bird talks about going to their home, the home she shared with charles marsh, and thinking these were the most sophisticated people around. in the research i did, i could not follow a relationship and a close relationship between lyndon and alice after the early 40's. things did not line up. we may never know what happened. it's true she went and married five times after that. i make the point in my book that it's a good thing lyndon johnson did not divorce lady bird. it's a thing a lot of people thought he would do in 1939. i don't think we would've heard of him again. he needed lady bird.

brian: here's the roughest one. you write about a woman named madeline duncan brown. >> i get to the driskill hotel, and he's crying. to saying, i miss you. i blurted out that i was pregnant. he had a fit. >> he had a temper, no telling what he might do. >> he broke a lamp. finally he calmed down and he said, "it takes two to tango." i was relieved he said that.

brian: is that true? betty: she wrote a book. she's the only woman with whom lyndon's name is associated for an affair. she says the affair began in 1948 and resulted in a son. she says she continued to see him. there is documentation that many historians have accepted as true. she was set up in a house with credit cards and servants. he arranged for that to continue after his death. lady bird not believe that.

the son sued, but he died before the case was settled. you have all these books about women who had affairs with john kennedy. on the lyndon johnson side, it is a sparse record. madeline brown was involved in all these conspiracies. she is a part of that, and that has discredited her. so far, people have not been able to discredit her on this. brian: what papers were you able to find? betty: there are a couple of interesting files.

remember, at pearl harbor, she was in alabama going over financial papers. she knew she would inherit land and money from her uncle. she heard about the pearl harbor report and the fdr speech. when she was back in washington, lyndon had signed up for active service. she took over his office for six months in 1942. i loved looking at her correction. she went over every letter, and there was one in which a person wrote to a constituent in texas, saying he was off fighting the war, where the president wants

him to be. lady bird said that was not true. the president wanted him back, doing legislative work. the letters she was writing, "please send me any news you can." she gave every baby in the district a congratulations letter. she was one thorough person. that was, i learned a lot about how she operated. she was an authentic person. when she invited the women reporters upstairs at the white house, she said, "i enjoyed the visit." jackie kennedy would never have invited anybody out there. most of the first ladies, if you

go back in the 20's century, they did not want reporters seeing what happened upstairs. she would invite them up and they, "i feel good about it. i'm an open person, but next time i will put away the books i'm reading." i don't think she was embarrassed about reading them, but she was embarrassed about which authors got mentioned. i heard she was a great reader, but in her diary, she does not say she likes this book because of that. she felt later that would favor a writer over another. in that way she kept quiet. brian: is the unpublished diary available for anybody to read? betty: yes. as of june, the last segment is out. nothing changed my view. there were a few comments.

the unpublished diary fills in a few things left out of the published one. she talks about going to bobby kennedy's funeral. she said jackie kennedy looked at her as if from a veil at a distance. what she really wrote was that jackie kennedy looked at her from a distance with hostility. it makes it different, to add hostility. there are some places i was able to fill in from blanks. brian: what year did you write your first book? betty: 1987. i was teaching women's history. i did not want to write a book about women who became famous because of marriage.

i had said i wanted to write a little about eleanor roosevelt. i was working at cambridge. every time i had to wait for a box of papers, i would pull down an encyclopedia and read about sarah polk or some of the first ladies. it struck me that they all married down, almost all of them. they married into families that were economically below theirs. why did the women marry down? i told my editor i would write the book in two years. it took four or five.

lady bird johnson is the perfect example of the conclusion i came to, which is that these women saw something in those men, ambition, opportunity to really climb and make a mark in the world. lady bird's father, he liked lyndon. he was not opposed to the marriage. he thought it was too fast. she's a good example of that. brian: what would you have thought of lyndon? betty: everybody says he is the most complicated person you could imagine. "he is a crude and cruel man, but he will make a great president."

when i tried that line on people that met him, they would say he was the most loving and supportive person. if he heard that a parent or relative had never been into an airplane, he'd arrange it. he would make birthday parties for his staffers. lady bird loved that. she did not have the spontaneous generosity he did. brian: we've got a home movie of lady bird from camp david. we will throw it up on the screen. there's john steinbeck on the right.

there's mrs. johnson and the president with someone's baby. the reason i show this is, how much did you watch? betty: it's all online. if you go to their website and look at the home movies, maybe there are 35, i would suggest to watch the one of the 1941 campaign. lyndon gave her the movie camera, and she goes around doing opposition research. they lost the election for senate in 1941. but she said it was her favorite campaign. brian: you wrote, "vacations

made him testy." betty: they went to disneyland, and the girls, vacations were not on his list of his favorite things. that is one thing lady bird did do after his death, she traveled the world. brian: you write, "as much as she loved him, she continued to be shocked by his acting out. she was not alone in failing to see how a grown man could grow throw such childish tantrums." betty: when he throws food or spits in a plate. she said, "i'm bewildered by his behavior, but no more than he is

himself." brian: was he bipolar? betty: several staff said he would be in a manic stage. they went to a bad period in 1965. that was the year of the higher education act, medicare, the voting rights act, the beautification act. it was a rich period. the president had real highs and lows. bill moyers became alarmed and went to lady bird to see what could be done. she said she'd already acted. she called in his doctors, who examined him to see if there was something wrong.

they called it the stress of hard work. he was never diagnosed as bipolar. many people have concluded he brian: you said you live in new york and vienna? betty: new york and venice. we decided we needed our own home. brian: do you teach? betty: not for 20 years. brian: where did you grow up? betty: ohio, in the center of the state on a farm, north of mount vernon, south of mansfield.

i went to overland college. i went to penn state for a masters in communication. i have not lived in ohio for some years. brian: will you do another book? betty: i promised my husband not to sign another contract. i have three in the basement. one is something i was working on in 1982. she's an important figure in the settlement house movement. she has a name my editor said would be too hard for people to pronounce. i would like to finish it. i started a book about my great-grandfather, a historical fiction book. he was a captain in the virginia cavalry. i would like to do a book about venice. brian: here's the cover.

explain to us, who chose the cover? betty: well, you have lady bird with her left hand on his back. you would not say she is pushing, but she is supportive. the photograph captures the sense of the book well. brian: our guest has been betty caroli. the book is "lady bird and lyndon." betty: thank you very much. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015]

for free credits chris, -- transcripts. >> if you enjoyed this week's interview, here are some other programs you might like. an interview with robert caro, talking about his biography of lyndon johnson. dallek on the kennedy evan thomas and discussing the life and career of richard nixon. you can see these at www.c-span.org. n