Helen White Williams, 81; Longtime Personal Assistant in LBJ Household

Helen White Williams, a longtime personal assistant in the Lyndon B. Johnson household who served as cook, maid, scheduler, travel aide, wardrobe coordinator, family confidante and surrogate mother to the Johnson daughters, has died. She was 81.

Williams died Feb. 25 of a heart attack at Washington Hospital Center.

Williams and her husband, Eugene, went to work for then-Sen. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson in 1950 after responding to a classified ad in an Austin, Texas, newspaper. The two families lived together from 1950 until 1961, when the Williamses bought their own house in Washington. They continued working for the Johnsons until President Johnson left the White House in 1969.

“She was just a surrogate mother to us, and we loved her deeply,” Lynda Johnson Robb said this week.

Robb recalled her 60th birthday celebration in 2004, a costume party where Williams arrived as Little Bo Peep. “She had such a wonderful love of life,” Robb said.

In a 1974 oral history interview with the LBJ Library, Williams recalled taking the Johnson girls to a movie theater in Washington in the 1950s and being turned away because she was black. Back home, Lynda cried as she explained to her father what had happened.

“Of course, he looked startled, and then he apologized to me, because he felt like he had gotten me into this situation,” Williams recalled. “It would always be upsetting to me to hear some black person say an unkind word about him, because I knew how sincere he was about people having equal rights.”

Johnson, in the years he was trying to steer civil rights legislation through a balky, Southern-dominated Senate, often told a story about how the Williamses and Zephyr Wright, the Johnson family’s African American cook, drove the Johnson family car on the three-day, 1,300-mile trip from Washington to Austin when Congress adjourned and then back again when lawmakers reconvened.

One year, Johnson wanted them to take the family dog, Little Beagle Johnson, but they were reluctant. After Johnson pressed Williams’ husband, he explained why. “You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along,” he said.

In his memoirs, Johnson wrote that his discovery of what his three African American employees experienced every time they drove back to Texas was, for him, an awakening to the grating indignity of discrimination.

The Williamses continued making the twice-yearly trip, but Little Beagle Johnson flew with the family.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Williams and her husband were at the LBJ Ranch preparing for a party in honor of President Kennedy and the first lady. A few hours after the assassination of the president, a private plane took them to Dallas, where they caught another flight to Washington.

Williams recalled walking into the White House and fixing coffee for Secret Service agents who had been up all night awaiting the Johnsons’ arrival and then making plans for the Johnsons’ breakfast. Friends described her as a take-charge kind of person.

Williams became a personal assistant to the first lady exclusively. “Helen, a lot of things have changed, but thank God you haven’t changed,” Williams recalled Johnson saying.

Helen White Williams, the 14th of 15 children, was born in Manor, Texas, a small town east of Austin, and graduated from Austin’s Anderson High School. She never went to college, but, as her nephew, Elmer Washington, recalled, “she was smart, she read a lot and she had opinions about everything.”

After Johnson left the White House, she worked for the State Department’s medical affairs division, which provides medical care for Foreign Service employees.

A former colleague, Terese Thomas, described her as “a whirlwind in terms of work and management. She was a masterful Texas sergeant who knew how to manage everyone at work, and then at night she became this purring kitten who loved to dance.”

Her husband died in 1982.

Williams, who retired in 1993, remained active with Zion Baptist Church in Washington and kept in touch with many of her old friends from the Johnson days.

Survivors include two sisters.