‘The Lady Bird Diaries’ Review: A President’s Wife on Tape

During an early chapter in “The Lady Bird Diaries,” Lady Bird Johnson sounds wistful, imagining what life will be like—back in Texas, on the ranch—if only her husband decides not to run for president in 1964. But she concludes that he probably will. “And then he, and I, and the children will be criticized and slandered and for things we have done, and things we never did at all.” What she would be blamed for from the start, it always seemed, was not being Jackie Kennedy.

Dawn Porter is one of our more interesting and intelligent documentarians (“Gideon’s Army,” “Spies of Mississippi”), though “The Lady Bird Diaries,” based on 123 hours of personal tape recordings made by the then-first lady, would seem an almost perverse way of commemorating the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination, if it weren’t also a way of celebrating a woman of sharp intelligence, keen political instincts and one who entered the White House under a cloud that never seemed to pass. She hadn’t a warm smile or the Kennedy instinct for the camera. But she was, as evidenced, an invaluable adviser to her husband, as well as a kind of seer: If he did run, she says regarding LBJ’s ’64 campaign, he would struggle, painfully, to accomplish “his vaulting ambitions for this nation.” He would then “some three years and nine months from now, in February or March of 1968, announce he will not be a candidate for re-election.” President Johnson made the announcement he wouldn’t run on March 31,1968.