Lady Bird Johnson and Her Healing Words
Vietnam veteran Don Elverd shares how his encounter with Lady Bird Johnson while recovering in a Texas hospital had a profound impact on him.
A little more than 50 years ago, Don Elverd was sitting in an Army hospital near San Antonio, Texas, badly wounded. He was a 21-year-old United States Army sergeant who had served one tour of duty in Vietnam and had come home with three Purple Hearts.
The native Midwesterner had been shot in the arm and had suffered another bullet wound that had gone through the lung. His physical wounds would take about three years to heal, his emotional wounds even longer.
“This last one was pretty bad,” Elverd told East Wing Magazine recently in a Zoom interview from his River Falls, Wisconsin, farm, referring to the injuries that led to his third Purple Heart.
One day in 1968 in Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, where Elverd would recover from his injuries through 1970, he and other wounded veterans received an invitation. They were asked to join President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, at their nearby Texas ranch to be honored for their service.
Dressed in pajamas and a robe with his arm in a sling that also held his camera, Elverd boarded a Red Cross bus with a group of other soldiers—some using crutches and others wheelchairs. From the hospital, they were shuttled to the ranch. Elverd, now 76, remembers Lyndon Johnson stepping onto the bus upon their arrival and giving the men a “you’ve-been-through-the-hellfires” speech.
“‘Your country is proud of you,’” Elverd recalls the former president saying. Then Lady Bird spoke for about 15 minutes on the bus before inviting them to the yard. Elverd noted that she was somewhat shy about public speaking. But it wasn’t Lady Bird’s words as much as her actions that stood out to him.
Lady Bird and a Coca-Cola
In 1968, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam peaked at 549,500. The Tet Offensive, considered a major turning point in the war, also took place. It was during that campaign when Elverd was injured for the third and last time before being returned to the United States.
Elverd has vivid memories of Secret Service agents dressed in cowboy hats, cowboy boots and sport coats as he was seated outside at the LBJ Texas ranch during his visit. He remembers the first lady milling about, particularly this scene:
“I was reaching in my sling to get my camera and I see this Secret Service guy unbuttoning his sports coat. He puts his hand in there, you know, in case he needs to reach for a weapon. He doesn't know what I'm gonna pull out of this sling. So, I slowly pulled this camera out. And he nods. And so I’m taking some pictures and sitting in a lawn chair, and Lady Bird comes over and sits down by me.”
He remembers her asking questions like: “Where are you from, honey?” “How are you doing?” “What happened to you?” And, “Can I get you something to drink?”
“I’ll go get you a Coca-Cola,” she said to him.
And she did just that.
“I think she even helped me light a cigarette,” Elverd recalls. After pausing for a moment, he says of that brief encounter with Lady Bird, “She was just so sweet.”
“Sergeant, somebody wants to talk to you”
Following the ranch, the wounded soldiers were taken to a barbecue at a local high school. As Elverd recalls, Lyndon Johnson arrived there with General William Westmoreland, who commanded the U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. Elverd says the president and general shook hands with the soldiers and pinned decorations on them. He remembers Charley Pride, the popular African American country western singer, performing music, too.
After Pride’s performance, they went outside for the barbecue, and Elverd suddenly collapsed. He was rushed to a nearby hospital by ambulance.
“My lung had collapsed,” Elverd explains.
The next thing he remembers is a doctor pushing a landline phone on a tray up next to him while he was prone in a hospital bed.
“He said, ‘Sergeant, somebody wants to talk to you,’” Elverd recalls the doctor telling him. “And it was Lady Bird.”
In a slightly high-pitched voice tinged with a Southern drawl, she said:
“‘Oh sweetheart, I was so worried about you. I just wanted to check up and see if you were gonna be all right. I talked to your doctor, and he said you’re going to be all right, honey. Do you want me to call your mama?’”
Elverd responded, “No ma’am, you don’t need to call my mom.” Decades later, Elverd still regrets that split-second when he could have arranged a phone call to his loving mother from the first lady of the United States. Nevertheless, he looks back on the encounter with a certain softness.
“It was powerful,” Elverd says. “It was almost as if she was my mother. I mean, I felt really cared for by that woman. I felt like it was genuine. [Lyndon Johnson] is giving his little political speech, but she was the real deal. I felt like she was very concerned for me.”
“It was powerful,” Elverd says. “It was almost as if she was my mother. I mean, I felt really cared for by that woman. I felt like it was genuine. [Lyndon Johnson] is giving his little political speech, but she was the real deal. I felt like she was very concerned for me.”
First lady scholar Nancy Kegan Smith, who authored Modern First Ladies: Their Documentary Legacy and co-author of Remember the First Ladies: The Legacies of America’s History Making Women, described Lady Bird Johnson as a first lady who cared deeply and had “a tremendous ability to connect.”
Adding to her compassion was that the former first lady had two sons-in-law in Vietnam at the time. “Both her daughters were upset when in the March 31, [1968], speech, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run again, because they wanted him as their husbands’ commander-in-chief,” says Smith, president of First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE). “The war was very up close and personal for her.”
Later in life, Lady Bird spoke about the difficulty of that time period, according to historian Carl Anthony in the 2014 article “First Ladies & Veterans: The Vietnam War to Modern Times, Part 4.”
“I couldn’t handle the war in Vietnam,” she said in 1988, “I wasn’t big enough.”
Anthony points out that unlike all the foreign conflicts the U.S. had previously entered, the Vietnam War evolved without a formal declaration of war passed by Congress. As Anthony notes in the article, Lady Bird was struck by the mounting numbers of young Americans who were drafted to fight. “At a certain point,” he writes, “she never again had a day when she was unaware of the men either being sent to Vietnam or returning from there, dead, wounded or fully surviving.”
The connections of first ladies to military service span American history. Martha Washington comforted sick or wounded soldiers during the Revolutionary War; Mary Lincoln visited Union soldiers in hospitals during the Civil War; and Eleanor Roosevelt traveled to Guadacanal to visit U.S. servicemen. That tradition was embraced by first ladies such as Pat Nixon, Lady Bird Johnson, and Michelle Obama, and now Jill Biden is carrying the baton.
“I think that throughout the arc of the evolution of first ladies, one constant has been how much they care about veterans and the military,” Smith says.
“Look at Pat Nixon, who goes into South Vietnam when it was a war zone with [President] Richard Nixon, and she insists on going to a hospital to connect with the soldiers personally,” Smith says. “So yes, I think Mrs. Johnson had huge empathy and was incredibly appreciative and aware of the sacrifices that the soldiers were making and their families.”
Michelle Obama launched Joining Forces (supporting military and veteran families) during her two terms, an initiative continued by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
For Elverd, the encounter with Lady Bird was reflective of his time in a little hospital at the base camp where he stayed after being shot up. He remembers there was a nurse from Wisconsin who sat down in a chair at his bedside. The nurse asked him where he was from and how he was feeling.
“She put her hand on my forearm. And she just sat there with her hand on my forearm,” he recalls. “That was so powerful. That was so healing.”
A healed veteran helps others heal
Elverd’s life still revolves a lot around healing. Now, though, he helps heal others. After Elverd was discharged from the hospital, he became addicted to pain-killing medication. When he could no longer access the painkillers, he turned to alcohol.
“I was a mess,” he says.
He went through four inpatient treatment centers, including Long Beach Naval Hospital in California where former First Lady Betty Ford was treated for substance use disorder in 1978. He passed through four halfway houses, experienced half a dozen detoxes in three different states and had three seizures. But this month, Elverd says, he’ll receive his 46-year sobriety medallion.
For the past 33 years, Elverd has worked for the Minnesota-based Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to treating people affected by substance use and mental health conditions, as a practicing psychologist doing trauma work with veterans and first responders. And just as our interview starts wrapping up, Elverd shares that his survival led him to start a veterans group 38 years ago that still meets today. Before heading out the door to that loyal group of veterans, he thinks about others who may be experiencing something similar, to whom he says:
“You’re braver when you are part of a group than when you are alone. It’s really important for you to have some human connection, to get reinforcement from people who give a damn about you. That’s a big deal. When people are in peril, they withdraw. You’ve got to fight that.”
In many ways, that’s how that nurse from Wisconsin made Elverd feel. And it’s how his brief encounter with Lady Bird Johnson made him feel.
“I just thought she was so friggin’ human. She wasn’t like this icon,” he says of Lady Bird. “I didn’t think about it until now, but if she was as supportive of [Lyndon Johnson] as she was to me and us, man, did that guy have a powerful ally. She had this ability to make you feel like you mattered. You weren’t just a number.”