A touch of old Washington could be discerned in the obituary tributes to Bess Abell, the White House social secretary during the Johnson administration and a longtime fixture on the capital scene, who died last week at her home in suburban Potomac, Maryland. She was 87.
The fond memories were deserved. Abell was only 30 and a staff assistant to Lady Bird Johnson when she was appointed to her White House post in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Social secretaries do as the title suggests: plan and conduct the incessant round of state dinners, luncheons, receptions, and miscellaneous events that punctuate the modern presidency. They combine social savvy with organizational skills and diplomacy.
Abell had all that. She smoothed over tempests and avoided mistakes, and she was versatile, too: She planned and supervised the weddings of both Johnson daughters, one that even took place within the White House.
To be sure, she did not become the social secretary by chance — and therein lies a tale. Bess Clements was the daughter of a Democratic politician from Kentucky, Earle Clements, who later became a congressman and governor and, as a senator in the 1950s, majority whip under then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. And she was married to Tyler Abell, stepson of the liberal Washington political columnist Drew Pearson, who was later the chief of protocol in the Johnson administration.
After LBJ left office in 1969, the Abells remained in Washington. She founded a successful public relations firm and later served as executive assistant to Joan Mondale, the wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale.
Readers may note that Bess Abell came of age and thrived in what amounted to a Democratic universe. She was a smart, capable, and personable woman in the man’s world of Washington in the 1950s and 1960s. But it was her father’s career that brought her into contact with the Johnsons and the wider world of the nation’s capital, and her father-in-law was a senior, politically well-connected civil servant.
In those days, the social-political life of Washington was considerably smaller and more provincial than now, and after the advent of the New Deal, its permanent establishment was dominated largely by Democrats, who controlled Congress almost without interruption until the 1990s. In that sense, Abell was something of a transitional figure. In her heyday, Republicans were still something like second-class citizens in the capital hierarchy, but in 1960s Washington, as elsewhere, the winds of change could be felt.
With the relocation of trade associations, the arrival of think tanks and political action groups, and the inexorable growth of the federal government, the balance of political power and influence began to shift slowly, and the Washington social scene followed suit. The White House was no longer the center of attention or the sole axis around which social Washington revolved. Indeed, as social secretary, Abell found herself competing in a new world with ambitious third-world embassies and a rising generation of social arbiters and trendsetters.
She was remarkably adaptable. Her predecessor in the Kennedy administration, Letitia Baldrige, had worked successfully to project an image of elegance and cultural sophistication in the White House. But Abell’s boss, Lady Bird Johnson, a gracious, intelligent woman of broad experience, faced different and more formidable obstacles as the first lady than Jacqueline Kennedy had, following on the heels of Camelot and competing with an increasingly fractious political culture.
Abell was a shrewd and accommodating hostess who flattered foreign visitors, cast a widening net for social invitations, navigated the cultural wars of the Vietnam era, and even managed to make LBJ’s political adversaries feel welcome in the White House. She once told Vanity Fair that South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond would always arrive for functions with an uninvited guest: “He would show up with Miss Pecan Princess or the Queen of the Watermelon Festival, and I’d always find a seat for her …. He could cause the president a lot of problems, so I didn’t want to make him mad.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
