It's Friday, Dec. 8, and the day of the week when I share a quotation intended to be informative or uplifting. Last week, I quoted Rosalynn Carter, may she rest in peace. Today, I'm invoking another first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, on a subject that is always relevant, and not just during the holiday season: How children should be treated by their parents and other adults in their lives.
Fifty-six years ago today, Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife Lady Bird Johnson met just before noon in the family sitting room at the White House with Raymond L. Scherer of NBC News, Frank Reynolds of ABC, and CBS' Dan Rather.
The breaking news story that impelled the session was not a looming foreign policy issue or a crisis here in the United States; you could call it a domestic issue. It was the purest kind of domestic matter, actually: The following day, President Johnson was to walk his elder daughter, Lynda, down a short aisle in the East Room to wed a U.S. Marine named Charles Robb.
The on-camera conversation with the First Parents was designed to reveal a softer side to the gruff, macho, and sometimes coarse Texan who occupied the Oval Office -- as indeed it did.
The first question in that December 8, 1967, interview came from Raymond Scherer and it was addressed to the first lady. The NBC White House correspondent asked whether the Johnsons' residence would "be a terribly lonely house with both your daughters married and gone."
"Ray, I am sure there will be moments when I will walk into Lynda's room and stand quietly and look at a snapshot, a sort of a yellowed newspaper story, a napkin with something from a party on it and those Ernest Shepard drawings on the wall that she loved so well, you know, from the Winnie the Pooh books," Lady Bird replied. "Then I will have a sudden little wave of loneliness."
When the same question was posed to the president, LBJ conceded that the White House would seem lonelier than before. Then he spoke touchingly of the women in his household while mentioning the previous night's bachelors' dinner.
"They asked me to make a few observations," the president added. "I told them that there were many pluses and minuses in life … but I am not sure that I ever stressed the great pluses for me -- my three girls: Mrs. Johnson, and Lynda, and Luci."
Dan Rather followed up, prefacing his question with a rather inappropriate statement: "Mr. President, there are those who have said over the years that Luci was your favorite. Would you talk to us about the contrasting personalities of the girls?"
Johnson obliged, but only after taking issue with Rather's tone-deaf premise.
"I have never known many parents who had favorites among their own children," he replied. Warming to the question about his daughters' differences, however, LBJ continued: "I think you see different things in different children. I think Mrs. Johnson has expressed it very well. They are quite different. Luci writes it and Lynda reads it."
Johnson spoke glowingly of Chuck Robb and his pride that he was going to serve in Vietnam, betraying only a hint of the worry that would be felt by any father-in-law, not only the commander in chief. The president also mentioned his own childhood. "My father used to say to me that you will never know what it is to be a father until you are one."
"He also said to me when he would spank me as a youngster, ‘Lyndon, this hurts me worse than it does you,'" Johnson added. "I never did quite believe that. I wondered if he really knew how much it was hurting me and how could it hurt him that much."
This piqued the interest of Dan Rather, a fellow Texan, who asked three times whether the Johnsons had employed corporal punishment in their child-rearing methods.
"Oh, I was an outlaw compared to these dainty little girls," the president replied. "We have never had any problem like that with them. I think they are so good because I have had very little to do with raising them. Their mother is the one who brought them up."
So Rather turned to Mrs. Johnson, who also deflected the question. "I really don't have any experience with boys," she said. "But I haven't found it difficult with the girls."
"Well, how did you handle discipline when they didn't do something that you thought they should do, particularly as they got older?" Rather persisted. "What kind of discipline did you impose on them?"
"I just talked to them, Dan," Lady Bird said.
This could have been an awkward exchange, and certainly Dan Rather often prompted such uncomfortable moments in his career, many of them at the White House. But the news person who perseveres, even to the point of impertinence, is sometimes rewarded, and the public interest is served. What came next may have been prompted by presidential pique, but it's one of the most poignant observations ever made by a president, one who was speaking as a protective father on behalf of a classy first lady.
"The answer is she didn't apply any [punishment], Dan," Lyndon Johnson interjected.
"She would just say, ‘Always remember you are trusted, always remember you are loved, always remember we care and I know that you are going to do what is right.'"
And that is our quote of the week.
