Lyndon
Johnson tried to have sex with his black secretary Gerri Whittington immediately
after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act
Photos of Gerri Whittington: https://www.google.com/search?q=gerri+whittington+lbj&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=7khlU_jgDIOzyAT72YLQDA&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1231&bih=880
“Gerri’s
last trip to the Texas White House would be on the weekend of July 4, 1964.
Lyndon was always so casual and relaxed at the ranch, which, much more than the
real White House, he considered his own space, where he could do as he pleased.
According to his aides in
earlier years, this included nocturnal wanderings with a flashlight into staff
bedrooms. What happened behind those doors is known only to those staff
members whose rooms he entered, but it was certain that others would know he
was there. There was little likelihood that the president of the United States
could wander about in the night - even in his own home - without someone
hearing him and drawing his or her own conclusion. Regardless of his motive,
this kind of behavior would be highly offensive to someone like Gerri, who
valued her reputation as much as anything in life. This was something Lyndon
apparently didn’t understand…. So he probably gave it little thought before he showed up at Gerri’s
room one night after everyone had retired. Gerri thought she handled it quite well. Without waiting to
learn why he was there, she told LBJ she wasn’t feeling well, and although it
was nothing serious, just her time of the month, she had to get to sleep. With
that, she nixed the possibility of anything from chitchat to- well, Lyndon did
have a reputation, although with Gerri he had always acted appropriately. He
left, and that’s the way it was. Mulling it over later, she thought perhaps he
just wanted to talk. But this was not the right time or place. She
realized, however, that her calm and quiet brush-off did not assure it would
not happen again, and she wanted to make sure it didn’t. When the president and
entourage returned to Washington after the holiday weekend, Gerri avoided the
president while she thought it over. She told me she had considered resigning,
but hoped it wouldn’t come to that….At the end of the week, when she finally
came face to face with the president in the secretaries’ office, he commented
(with some exaggeration and maybe a little sarcasm), “Did you decide to come to
work - haven’t seen you over here in a week or so?” The secretary keeping the
president’s diary that day noted the comment, as well as some good-natured
banter with the other secretaries.Gerri felt she may have made her point by her
absence.”
[Simeon Booker, Shocking
the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, pp.
244-245]
Email to Robert Morrow on 5/8/14 from
Myra McPherson
I wrote
this in 1974!! With lbj saying 'move over. This is your president' . Source ,
Carl Rowan was quoted by name, the woman was not.
Look It Up! The Power Lovers: an intimate look at politicians and their
families.
Myra MacPherson
202-256-6659
Author:
The Scarlet Sisters: Sex Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age
www.myramacpherson.com
Twitter:
@scandalsisters
See the book the Power Lovers, pp. 184-185 by Myra
McPherson for the LBJ crawling in bed with flashlight anecdote
On 12-31-63 Lyndon Johnson helped to integrate
the Forty Acres Club by bringing Gerri Whittington to a New Year’s Eve party
there. This was six months before LBJ tried to “integrate” Gerri at the LBJ
Ranch
“New LBJ Library Director to Show
LBJ History Through Modern Lens” – Nov. 21, 2019
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/public-affairs/news/new-lbj-library-director-to-show-lbj-history-through-modern-lens
QUOTE
One
evening, LBJ decided on a whim that he wanted to attend a party held at the
Forty Acres Club, Lawrence explains: “The problem was that the club was
segregated and some of LBJ’s aides worried that he would mire his presidency in
controversy if he went there.”
“But
Johnson had other ideas. He deliberately walked into the club arm-in-arm with
one of his secretaries, an African-American woman named Gerri Whittington,”
says Lawrence. “From that day onward, the Forty Acres Club was desegregated.”
Lawrence’s
admiration for LBJ is rooted in both the President’s charisma, as well as his
commitment to social justice, and he hopes his enthusiasm for that history
reverberates in his role as the new director of the LBJ Presidential
Library, beginning in January 2020.
UNQUOTE
LBJ and Gerri Whittington integrating the Univ.
of Texas’s Forty Acres Club on 12/31/63 – the same night LBJ made his
revelations to Madeleine Brown
https://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/53207381610/lbjs-historic-night-out
On December 31, 1963, Lyndon Johnson had been President of the United
States for just over a month. Forty days earlier, John F. Kennedy had
been assassinated in Dallas, Texas and LBJ was now entering 1964 – a
Presidential election year – as the incumbent President, albeit an accidental
one.
After several somber, tense, and exhausting weeks, LBJ was spending the
Holidays at the LBJ Ranch in the Texas Hill Country. On that New Year’s
Eve, many members of President Johnson’s staff gathered at the Forty Acres Club
in Austin, Texas to celebrate a birthday party for LBJ aide Horace Busby. President Johnson wanted to join the festivities, but a tired Lady
Bird wasn’t interested in going out, so LBJ gathered his secretaries at the LBJ
Ranch and boarded a helicopter for the short flight into Austin.
Austin and its main businesses in the early 1960s were no different than
any other city in the Segregated South. Although the party for Busby was
being held at the Forty Acres Club on the campus of the University of Texas,
the hangout’s strict code of segregation had previously led to
controversy. In 1962, an African-American official from President
Kennedy’s newly-formed Peace Corps was denied service at the Forty Acres Club,
which led to a minor boycott and the resignations of several University of Texas
staff members who had held club memberships. Still, segregation was
strictly enforced, just as it was in restaurants, bars, hotels, bus
stations, playgrounds, cemeteries, and basically anywhere that one group of
people might come into contact with another group of people throughout the
South.
When President Johnson and the secretaries that he had brought along with
him to the party arrived at the Forty Acres Club, the simple fact that the
President of the United States was about to attend a gathering at a segregated
business could have caused a major national controversy. It was still
early in LBJ’s Presidency and the fact that Johnson was from the South had
worried civil rights leaders when JFK tapped Johnson as his running mate in
1960. Up to that point, LBJ had not yet done anything as President to
neutralize the fears of liberal Democrats who mourned President Kennedy’s
assassination as the loss of potential civil rights legislation.
Everyone inside the Forty Acres Club recognized that the President was
about to arrive when Secret Service agents entered the building and began
scanning the guests and taking up positions. Music was playing, cocktails
were being served, conversations were cascading throughout the room, but there
was also a sense of dread amongst those on LBJ’s staff who realized that the
President’s decision to frequent a segregated nightclub in Austin would likely
require some major explaining when the news got out.
And then, when Lyndon Johnson walked into the Forty Acres Club, it became
clear that he might not be the President that some worried he may be. As he
entered the strictly segregated club, the President of the United States was
arm-in-arm with one of his secretaries – Gerri Whittington. One of the guests,
Ernie Goldstein turned to LBJ aide Bill Moyers and asked, “Does the President
know what he’s doing?" Moyers didn’t
hesitate. He responded, "He always knows what he’s
doing." Whittington asked Johnson a similar question.
"Mr. President,” she asked as they headed inside the club, “do you know
what you are doing?" Johnson didn’t hesitate. "I sure
do. Half of them are going to think you’re my wife, and that’s just fine
with me.”
Gerri Whittington was an African-American woman and in the final hours of
1963, the President of the United States had taken it upon himself to integrate
the Forty Acres Club in Austin.
Nobody had suggested it. Nobody had demanded it. Nobody had
expected it. There were no focus groups convened and no polling data was
consulted. Political calculations had nothing to do with it. It was
as simple as Lyndon Johnson wanting to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his staff
– a staff which included an African-American woman. On the last night of
1963, Lyndon Johnson brought a black friend to what had been a strictly
segregated, all-white club because he wanted to, but he also did it because he
realized that he was now the most powerful man in the world and it was
something that he could do. As LBJ said in other
situations, “Well, what the hell is the Presidency for?" On that
last night of 1963, LBJ showed that the Presidency was for breaking down
barriers and beginning the journey that made a big, brash Texan from the Hill
Country the man who did more for Civil Rights than any other President besides
(maybe) Lincoln.
Gerri Whittington, who had been asked to join LBJ’s secretarial staff in
the White House shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated, continued to
work in the White House for President Johnson until the day he left office and
flew home to retirement in Texas. She was the White House’s first black executive
secretary and one of her fondest memories wasn’t desegregating the Forty Acres
Club with LBJ, but the day in June 1967 when President Johnson steppped out of
the Oval Office with Thurgood Marshall and shared the news that he was
appointing Marshall as the first black Supreme Court Justice. Other than
the President and Marshall, Whittington was the first person to know of the
historic nomination.
As for the Forty Acres Club, the rigid segregationist policy that had
previously been the rule literally disappeared overnight. The very next
day, January 1, 1964, a curious party-goer from the night before called the
club to see if it might have been an aberration or a one-time concession to the
power of the Presidency. When he asked if black guests were now allowed
at the Forty Acres Club, he was told, "Yes, sir. The President of
the United States integrated us on New Year’s Eve.”
LBJ 6 months later tried to have sex with Gerri
Whittington at the LBJ Ranch. She turned him down and later insisted on being
transferred out the White House to the Pentagon so she could get away from
Johnson.
QUOTE
Desegregation
Shortly after he became President, LBJ integrated the Forty Acres Club,
faculty club for the University of Texas, in Austin. He simply walked into the
club’s dining room with a handsome black woman [Gerri Whittington] on his
staff. “Mr. President,” said the woman rather nervously beforehand, “do you
know what you are going” “I sure do, LBJ assured her. “Half of them are going
to think you’re my wife and that’s just fine with me.” After LBJ’s appearance
the club abandoned its age-old segregationist policy.
UNQUOTE
[Paul Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, p. 317]
LBJ comparing his penis to a rattlesnake with
CBS television team
QUOTE
Of a Kennedy aide he once said: “He doesn’t have sense enough to pour
piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel.” After becoming
President he contemplated getting rid of FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover and then
decided it would be too difficult to bring off. “Well,” he said
philosophically, “it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out,
than outside pissing in.” And once, driving around his ranch with a CBS television
team, he stopped to urinate in the underbrush. “Aren’t you afraid a rattlesnake
might bite it?” asked a CBS cameraman. “Hell,” snorted Johnson, “it is
part rattlesnake.”
UNQUOTE
[Paul Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, p. 319]
Alexis Coe article on Gerri Whittington 4/2/25
[“When
a President Knew Diversity Was a Superpower,” Alexis Coe, Harpers Bazaar,
April 2, 2025]
When
a President Knew Diversity Was a Superpower
QUOTE
Oh,
I think someone is playing with me," Gerri Whittington cooed into the
phone after the caller identified himself as "the president." In
1963, Whittington's skepticism was well-founded. The nation writhed in Jim
Crow's iron grip, its laws etching the violent subjugation of Black Americans
into every facet of life—and the White House no exception. Whittington had met
President Lyndon B. Johnson, but there was no reason for him to call her at
home; they’d hardly interacted during her tenure as secretary to one of the
late John F. Kennedy's special assistants.
This
moment, plucked from the 800-hour trove of LBJ's clandestine recordings,
captures a seismic shift: The "reassignment" he proposed would make
Whittington the first Black secretary to a president in 187 years of American
history. Johnson's stunned reaction upon learning she lived more than 30
minutes from the White House betrayed a dawning awareness of the insidious
reach of segregation. He sent a car.
Whittington
would be a living, breathing testament to his administration's complex, often
contradictory, yet unwavering commitment to racial equality. When Senators,
lobbyists, and activists came to the Oval Office door, they'd find unmistakable
evidence that Jim Crow's reign was crumbling—and a stark reminder that LBJ's
executive order reinstating segregation mere days earlier was no ironclad
edict. It was a tool he wielded in the public arena, a calculated move
prioritizing political gain to ensure enduring change.
By
Christmas 1963, Whittington's presence was quietly dismantling segregation
across LBJ's Texas haunts. She slept in the 'Carnation Room' in the main house,
alongside white visitors, at the “'Texas White House,” dined with the First
Family at their ranch table, occupied a pew in their all-white church, and even
trod the rugged Hill Country hunting grounds. Each step she took—from the
ranch's threshold to the church's aisle—was a calculated stride toward
equality.
“You
integrated that club,” Johnson crowed to Whittington after they rang in 1964 at
Austin's notoriously segregated 40 Acres Club. “He knew exactly what he was
doing,” Bill Moyers later recalled—and so, with quiet determination, did
Whittington.
"It
was a revelation to me," Whittington reflected, as it was to Paula
Okamoto, wife of Yoichi Okamoto, the official White House photographer. Okamoto
inquired if Whittington was "foreign." "No, I'm a Negro,"
she replied, noting she felt no hostility.
By
1964, Johnson was desperate to advertise Whittington, but with uncharacteristic
restraint, he eschewed the blunt instrument of a press conference in favor of
soft power propaganda. In early January, Whittington stepped into America's
living room as a guest on CBS's long running game show, "What's My
Line?" The President's cunning was vindicated as the blindfolded panel
floundered, unable to conceive of a Black woman in such a position of power.
Meanwhile, the studio audience, who could be, sat in stunned silence, the words
"Secretary to President Johnson" blazoned behind Whittington.
"You're
just as charming as we've been led to believe that White House secretaries to
be," host John Daly remarked at the end of her appearance, carried immense
weight. This seemingly mundane comment normalized Whittington. She was no token
or exception, but as a professional equal to her white counterparts. In doing
so, it subtly challenged viewers' preconceptions about race and capability.
This approach, more than any grandstanding or overt politicking, served to
quietly but profoundly shift perceptions.
The
understated nature of Whittington's groundbreaking role was, ironically, its
most radical aspect. Johnson's genius lay in presenting her normalcy as a fait
accompli, though he never lost sight of its strategic value. "He didn't
ask me anything," Whittington recollected, "but he told me." He
confided in her his preference for Roy Wilkins over Martin Luther King, Whitney
Young, and James Farmer.
And
when these luminaries graced the Oval Office, Whittington's presence was
carefully choreographed—a living tableau of progress. "And I took pictures
with them," she recalled with a hint of bemusement. She posed with
Thurgood Marshall, the first Supreme Court Justice, as well. "I don't
recall what they said. I don't think they said anything." The silence
spoke volumes about the complexities of representation.
In
a twist of fate that seems almost scripted, Whittington and Marshall exited the
stage of life in tandem. After a stroke at 38 and a battle with cancer, she
passed away on January 24, 1993, at 61—the same day as Justice Marshall. Their
intertwined destinies, from White House photograph to final curtain, serve as a
poignant coda to an era of tumultuous progress.
LBJ's
1965 Executive Order 11246 mandated government employers "hire without
regard to race, religion and national origin.” Six decades later, in 2025,
President Trump has inverted this legacy. He wields diversity, equity, and
inclusion (DEI) as a political weapon to dismantle progress. But purging DEI
initiatives from the government is only one part of an insidious plan to erase
progress from public consciousness, leaving the National Museum of African
American History and Culture particularly vulnerable among the imperiled
Smithsonian institutions. The contrast between LBJ's expansive vision and
Trump's regressive agenda highlights the fragility of hard-won progress in
America's ongoing struggle for equality.
Under
Trump, Whittington, about whom little has been written, faces erasure. She has
no obvious champion; there are no direct descendents, though she put many
members of her extended family through college with a medical settlement. And
by the time she sat for oral history interviews, the patina of age had settled
over her memories. Like many secretaries, her memories centered on the
tangible—photographs, which seemed to be her particular domain among the
clerical staff.
When
probed about pivotal moments in civil rights history—the Senate invoking
cloture on the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, its signing ceremony in the Rose Garden,
or Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech—Whittington's memory
faltered. "I don't remember anything," she confessed, adding with a
touch of self-deprecation, "Isn't that funny?" Her narrative,
punctuated by significant omissions, echoes the selective recall common to
presidential employees, especially those in close proximity to the
executive-in-chief. And her amnesia wasn't absolute; she distinctly recalled
being the sole representative from the president's office.
This
is my secretary," Johnson had said by way of introduction to an African
Ambassador aboard the presidential yacht the USS Sequoia after she’d left the
White House, a simple statement laden with historical weight.
Gerri
Whittington's legacy defies easy categorization. Her presence in the White
House was both revolutionary and quotidian, epitomizing 1960s America's complex
progress. She carried nuclear codes and photographed civil rights icons, yet
struggled to recall—and sometimes chose not to—the landmark moments she
witnessed. Whittington's fragmentary, human story shows how history unfolds in
quiet moments, as perceptions shift when barriers fall silently. Her life,
brushing against her era's titans yet largely unsung, exemplifies how countless
individuals, by simply occupying previously forbidden spaces, reshaped a
nation.
UNQUOTE
LBJ 6 months later tried to have sex with Gerri
Whittington at the LBJ Ranch. She turned him down and later insisted on being
transferred out the White House to the Pentagon so she could get away from
Johnson.
QUOTE
Desegregation
Shortly after he became President, LBJ integrated the Forty Acres Club,
faculty club for the University of Texas, in Austin. He simply walked into the
club’s dining room with a handsome black woman [Gerri Whittington] on his
staff. “Mr. President,” said the woman rather nervously beforehand, “do you
know what you are going” “I sure do, LBJ assured her. “Half of them are
going to think you’re my wife and that’s just fine with me.” After LBJ’s
appearance the club abandoned its age-old segregationist policy.
UNQUOTE
[Paul Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, p. 317]
