Washington Institution Re-Emerges From Texas

When Liz Carpenter went home to Texas in 1976 after nearly 3 1/2 decades in Washington, her friends filled Ford’s Theater for a farewell. She had come out of small-town Texas armed with little more than a journalism degree and a super-energy personality, and she was leaving after a high-profile stint as press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson and as a public relations executive.

“When I first said I was going to leave,” she recalled, “everybody acted as though the Washington Monument would crumble. And the next question they asked was: What are you going to do with your Redskin tickets?”

She took that as a testament to the inconstancy and expediency of Washington. Carpenter herself, who had worked up from news service reporter to a mainstay of the capital’s social scene and power structure, might well serve as a testament to durability.

Just weeks shy of 67, Carpenter is on the circuit again, promoting her memoir, “Getting Better All the Time”; being entertained by Hollywood royalty--and recovering from a mastectomy.

When she signed with Simon & Schuster, she said in Los Angeles last week, “They gave me a year to finish the book. I think they were afraid I’d die. But I’m going to fool them. I’m going to live to enjoy the profits.”

Carpenter had wrapped up the manuscript when, in January, she discovered the lump in her breast. Now, the surgery behind her, she is back in high gear.

As she says: “I don’t have time to die. I’m booked up (for 1987),” and there’s a signed contract for a speech to be delivered in Oklahoma in 1988.

“When you feel no sense of purpose,” she says, “you’re in God’s waiting room.”

Carpenter, popping a candy into her mouth, is permitting herself a look back, putting into perspective almost seven decades of a life that took her from Salado, Tex. (pop. 1,500) to an office in the White House. “When I think that I went to Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conference wearing white gloves and a hat . . .”

She reflects, “I started covering Claude Pepper (the durable 86-year-old Democratic congressman from Florida) when I was 22,” and he was just easing into middle age. “The most darling, gallant of men . . .”

‘Spa Dropout’

Carpenter unwraps another candy. She is, she acknowledges, an incurable nibbler, an ample woman who describes herself as a “spa dropout” (5-foot, 1-inch, with a weight that fluctuates between 160 and 195). As she has written: “The Lord didn’t decree us all to be Twiggy or Brooke Shields. . . . I’ve made peace with my weight, and I wish everyone else would.”

She is a woman with an infectious warmth and a Texas-size sense of humor, who along the road has collected friends such as Walter Cronkite, Erma Bombeck, James Michener, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), Bill Moyers and Carol Channing. (But who still admitted to her excitement that George Burns was on the guest list for a party Sunday night.)

In 1942, Mary Elizabeth Sutherland, armed with a journalism degree from the University of Texas where she had been the first woman student body vice president and enthralled with “Front Page,” went to Washington where she had a job with a small news service. Two years later, she married her best friend from college, Les Carpenter; they became professional partners as correspondents providing an independent news service to newspapers in Texas.

After Lyndon B. Johnson was elected vice president in 1960, Liz Carpenter was signed on as an aide. She was there in Dallas, in the motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And, she reveals in her book, it was she who wrote the words spoken by LBJ when Air Force One arrived that night at Andrews Air Force Base.

In the ensuing years, as Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary, part of her job was to worry about “Luci changing the spelling of her name, Luci becoming Catholic, Luci having her ears pierced, Luci getting engaged, Luci getting married, Lynda getting married, a hot-tempered French chef and 40 of Lady Bird’s trips covering 200,000 miles.”

Now back in Texas, she has bought a hilltop house above Austin, which she promptly named Grass Roots. Famous friends and old-shoe friends gather there. And Carpenter is apt to serve up sing-along hymns along with Texas caviar (pickled black-eyed peas), grits, fried catfish, mustard greens and corn bread.

Jacuzzi-sitters may include “best friend” Lady Bird Johnson, who has bought a house nearby.

And there is a continuing cause, the women’s movement. Her personal journey into the movement began in 1971 when, together with Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus. (She will be a speaker at NWPC’s biennial conference next weekend in Portland.) In 1978, Carpenter stumped the country in the battle for an Equal Rights Amendment.

She is saddened that “the sense of rage that we felt in the early ‘70s” has largely disappeared, the camaraderie born of the ERA struggle dissipated. Women under 30 “don’t know that sisterhood . . . they don’t know they’re not going to be treated the same as their brother. But if we’re going to be truthful, we have to say to our daughters: ‘Sometime in your life, my darling, you’re going to be discriminated against.’ ”

Passed ‘Basic Training’

On the other hand, Carpenter says, “I think we have passed the basic training (as feminist), even though there’s a backsliding.” And she delights in the possibility that the next First Lady may be a first: “somebody with a briefcase.”

In her book, Carpenter tells of her dismay at her own daughter, Christy, an attorney who now negotiates shop-by-TV cable contracts in New York, telling her, “In my next life, I think I want to be a man. It just makes things so much easier--to be a man.”

Carpenter, a working mother before and after the birth of her son and daughter, still struggles with that dilemma.

“I don’t know if we ever will get rid of the guilt,” she says. “But we’ve always punished ourselves. Papas aren’t flawless. But they’ve escaped guilt.”

She laughed as she recalled, “I felt so guilty the time I sewed my son’s Cub Scout badge on upside down. He got a demerit.”

“Getting Better All The Time” is funny and it is touching, with a dollop of Texas history in the anecdotes about noted Texas ancestors, among them Carpenter’s great-great-grandmother, Sophie Lynch, who with a pistol tucked in her apron went out to ask Union soldiers to stop tearing down her fence for firewood.

We learn that Lady Bird Johnson still keeps LBJ’s clothes hanging in the closet, that guests at Walter Lippmann’s parties drank from recycled peanut butter or jelly glasses, that pianist Van Cliburn, the airline having lost his luggage, played a Constitution Hall concert in fellow Texan LBJ’s pinned-in white tie and tails.

Carpenter is a political animal who hasn’t missed a national political convention, Republican or Democratic, since 1948. In 1988, she says: “I hope I get an assignment. . . . I want one last hurrah.”

She anticipates that “Ollie North is going to be Douglas MacArthur (who, in 1952, made a bid for the GOP presidential nomination) and it’s going to be just as meager.” She recalls how in 1952, MacArthur’s camp, up against Eisenhower’s popularity, resorted to paid demonstrators, railway station derelicts “boozed up on canned heat.”

Carpenter has become aware of “the mellowing, the testing” that comes with age and of how she may use these to “do something to make the world better. I want to do something about peace . . . I know that sounds pretentious.”

In January, only a week before her malignancy was discovered, Carpenter received a telephone call from an old University of Texas schoolmate, Patterson Pepple, a widower living in Columbus, Ohio. They have developed what she calls “the dearest, most loving relationship” (he joined her in Los Angeles last week).

“You know,” Carpenter says, “holding hands at 66 is pretty nice . . . there’s a marvelous kind of empathy because both of you have suffered.” She describes herself, no punches pulled--”wrinkles, white hair, overweight”--and says, “I just think ‘Golden Pond’ love is fantastic.”

When she learned about her cancer, Carpenter said: “I went through all the emotions, the anger, the fury.” Then, the night before her surgery, she had a phone call that turned things around. It was from Betty Ford.

She remembers, “She said, ‘Liz, I know what you’re going through . . . it’s not all that big a deal, just one more challenge. Go for it.” Carpenter’s eyes fill with tears as she tells this and she says, “From then on it didn’t bother me. I just don’t look down.”

Already, she is reflecting on recent emotional events and thinking about another book.

“I don’t want this to sound too Shirley MacLaine-ish,” she says, “but, my God, you get messages.”