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Betty Sue Flowers has left the building.
After seven years as director of the LBJ Library and Museum, Flowers – the multi-talented poet, professor, mythologist, writer, editor, orator and corporate consultant – is creating a new life in New York City with her partner Bill Bradley, the multi-talented Hall of Fame basketball player, Rhodes Scholar, writer, former U.S. Senator from New Jersey and former presidential candidate.
Flowers talked about the sea change in her life one afternoon late in May, sitting in the eighth-floor conference room of the LBJ Library, just across from her old office. Flowers’ resignation, announced in February, was effective May 22nd. This day, a week later, she was still clearing out her office, still saying goodbye to colleagues, and still packing up belongings in her West Lake Hills home while planning three quick trips to New York, Paris and London.
Still up in the air was whether Flowers would be offered a plum job as U.S. Archivist. She was interviewed by the White House for the position in the spring, via interactive video, and was told she would hear back sometime before Labor Day. “I know there are other people in the running,” she said.
Despite the events swirling around her, Flowers seemed composed and in control.
“All these things are related,” she reasoned, “and if you’re following your bliss, you know what your purpose is at any given time and you do the best you can in relation to it.”
A blue-eyed, blonde beauty with a girlish smile, Flowers at 62 still turns heads when she enters a room. She is also amiable and down-to-earth – surprisingly so for a scholar with so many credentials. But it was her writing that first attracted Bradley.
“He read a speech I had made, called The Economic Mess, to the Federation of State Humanities Councils. I think he just found the perspective refreshing and he asked if we could meet.”
This was arranged. Flowers and Bradley met briefly in 1995, between flights, at the Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. “He got back in touch with me in 2000 when he was running for president and I vetted some speeches and worked on his campaign book,” she said. But it was not until 2006, she added, when she edited Bradley’s second book, The New American Story, published by Random House in 2007, that she got to know the former senator “really well.”
“We were talking every day and there was always so much to talk about.”
Sometime in this period Bradley started flying to Austin every weekend to be with Flowers “and I just thought it was time I returned the favor,” Flowers said with her signature smile.
Flowers was divorced in 2005 from John Flowers after 38 years of marriage; Bradley was divorced from Ernestine Bradley in 2007, after a long separation, ending a 33-year marriage.
Flowers and Bradley are starting their new life together in a Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park. If she lands the Archivist job, Flowers will live in Washington, D.C., and commute to New York on the weekends. If she doesn’t, there are ample professional opportunities waiting.
Flowers, for one thing, is working with a group from Oxford on a scenario about the future of the global financial system. (This globetrotting professor doesn’t think small-time.) She also has speaking engagements to meet, offers of consulting jobs to consider and her own new writings to contemplate.
Her previous works include three books of poetry and four books in collaboration with PBS’s Bill Moyers including the best-selling Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Flowers edited this book alongside Jackie Onassis in Doubleday’s New York offices (as reported by Julie Tereshchuk in the May 2004 issue of
austinwoman magazine).
Her last book, Presence, written with three other authors, explores our capabilities to sense and realize new possibilities in ourselves and our society.
Flowers said she is excited and happy about her own new possibilities but sad to be leaving Austin, her home for some 45 years. She’ll keep her foot in the door, however.
Her brother, his wife and two young children are moving into her house, she said. “It makes me happy to think of them living there but the best thing is I don’t have to move my books.” Her new title as professor emeritus at UT and her continuing interest in the LBJ Library will also sustain her ties to Austin.
Flowers earned her B.A. and M.A. at UT and her Ph.D in English Literature at the University of London.
Back at UT she became an award-winning professor of English and religion, an associate dean of graduate students, director of the Plan II Honors Program and a member of the University’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
Her appointment as director of the LBJ Library in 2002 raised some eyebrows. Flowers was not an historian or political scientist. She was a dreamer, a visionary who saw poetry as therapy and who believed in the power of myth to influence human thought and action. Could this woman be an effective administrator? The answer was a resounding “Yes.”
Larry Temple, a member of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation said that Flowers built on the legacy left at the LBJ library by her successor Harry Middleton, and “left her mark, too.” Middleton, who ran the library for its first 30 years, agreed. “She danced to her own drummer,” he said. “She got the library involved in the new area of electronics and did a fine job.”
Flowers was recognized by the National Archives and Records Administration for developing a web-based resource called The Presidential Timeline of the 20th Century. This gives the public online access to hundreds of documents, photos and audio and video clips from the 12 presidential libraries administered by the Archives.
Other initiatives launched on her watch include the overhaul of the LBJ Library’s website, bringing this into the high tech age and establishment of the Texas Forums which give citizens opportunities to participate in debates on sensitive issues. “Everything you do, you do with staff,” she insists.
Ironically, Flowers never met President Johnson, but she always felt his presence in the library and he talked to her occasionally in her dreams.
Catherine L. Robb, a local attorney and one of LBJ’s granddaughters, thinks that Flowers felt President Johnson’s “can-do” energy.
“You know my grandfather was a dreamer; he thought there were all sorts of possibilities if you put your heart and soul into it. So her dreams were in concert with what he believed.”
On Saturday, May 23rd, the first day of her new life, Flowers delivered the commencement address to Plan II Honors students in UT’s Hogg Auditorium. Among the graduates was her son, John Michael Flowers.
Bill Bradley was there, too. Later he delivered a commencement speech to graduates from the LBJ School of Public Affairs. This day, the air was filled with nostalgia and romance, bringing to mind some of the words spoken by Flowers on the 2006 PBS Mystery of Love TV documentary.
“Love is our highest destiny,” she said. “So we’re always on a quest for it. There is nothing in life that love doesn’t touch, that love doesn’t expand, that love isn’t at the root of.”