My Lunch with Lady Bird Johnson

In New York some time ago, I was invited to a luncheon with the late First Lady and seated at her table with Liz Smith and Liz Carpenter and a few other Texas ladies. At the time, I was a newly transplanted Texan and had just bought a country house in upstate New York. As a mark of heritage, I had seeded some bluebonnets in the garden, and the little creatures were just then trying to emerge from the ground. So I asked the nation’s First Gardener for some advice on how to raise bluebonnets in the Northeast. She replied, “Here’s my advice. Don’t be such a damned fool.”

The table roared with laughter, but I didn’t laugh so much when the conversation was repeated verbatim in the next day’s New York Times.