I wouldn’t put Betty Ford on a list of “old school” First Ladies. Old school First Ladies were for all intents and purposes blanks who did little or nothing while “in office” and little or nothing after their tenure. Betty Ford broke the demure First Lady mold all to hell.
And Barbara Bush is a horrible old cunt who couldn’t carry Ladybird Johnson’s water in the fucking Sahara.
That seems to be the popular consensus among journalists and White House staff from her husband’s administration who have spoken to the issue. That entire patrician family reminds you of why Nicky and Alix and their sick little boy all bought a trip to the basement one night, or why this month was briefly named Thermidore.
.
I thought Thermidore was August?
Does he not realize that behavior like that is going to seriously erode his chances of becoming First Lady himself?
Lady Bird did seem like a thoroughly decent, tough, admirable person. A good friend from Johnson City would have breakfast on the porch with her several times a year and said she was just a fine, classy woman, every bit as interested in what everyone else was doing as thet were in her. A life well spent, I’d venture.
Is it true that she hated being called Ladybird? I heard that, and it made it pretty frustrating to not remember her real name when I heard she died.
Lyndon just called her Bird. So far as I know it’s a name she had from early childhood and was probably more natural than Claudia to her.
Funny story from Billingsley, Alabama: her great-grandparents were charter members of the Baptist Church there and when her grandparents donated a lot of money to rebuild it early in the 20th century a big marker was placed thanking them and the new wing was called the Patillo Wing. For this reason the church hoped that Ladybird, whose wealth came initially from a maiden aunt from B’sley (who moved to Texas to care for her when her mother died) and formed the basis of a huge fortune (Ladybird was worth hundreds of millions of dollars- I read in one obit that she’d given $30 million over the years just to universities) would give a “stupendous” contribution when the church burned in the 1960s and she was First Lady.
She sent a White House ashtray instead. It’s framed and in the entry of the church. According to my mother, the minister at the time remarked “It’s not so much she didn’t send money that offends me, I mean she hasn’t been here in Lord knows how long… it’s the fact she sent an ashtray to a church that just burned down.” (She later redeemed herself by sending autographed copies of her speeches and an original oil portrait of her and LBJ to them for a charity auction in the 1980s.)
And Thermidor, it turns out, actually goes from mid-July to mid-August.
I’d be very surprised if she objected to her nickname. She was in a powelful enough position that if she had wanted to quash it, she could have.