Gonella, Ashton, 1929-2014

"I guess what we ought to do is start back when I went to work for the President, which was in October 1957. I went to work in Austin, Texas for him and came up here January 1, 1958. At that time he asked me if I would become one of his two personal secretaries. Mary Rather had left at that time. She had been with him for seventeen years. She had to go back to Texas to take care of her family. So I worked in his Majority Leader office in the Capitol with Mary Margaret Wylie--now Valenti--and worked through the campaign when he became Vice President up until 1962 when I left.

Then when the assassination occurred in November '63, I called the Johnson house, The Elms, to see if I could be of any help. Mrs. Johnson asked me if I would come out and help them with telephones and mail because I knew the family and the personal friends and so forth, so I did at night time and then through the days and so forth. And when she moved into the White House December 7, I started working for her as her personal secretary through January 20, 1969...

I guess back in about 1955 or '56 I was very interested in the League of Women Voters at home. I was president of the Shreveport League and was extremely interested in politics and people who made the government work. I had read about Mrs. Johnson and all of the things he did and was trying to do, and I just simply wanted to go to work for him. i had never met him nor any member of the family...

I did have a mutual friend who knew some of the Johnson staff members. They said that they would contact him and see if there were any openings or anything. In September '57 I did get a call that they were looking for people to go to Washington to work for Mrs. Johnson. So I sent in a resume and was accepted sight unseen..."

"Ashton Glassell was born Jan. 13, 1929, in Shreveport."

"Mrs. Gonella, a Chevy Chase resident, became Johnson’s personal secretary in October 1957, when he was Senate majority leader. She assisted him through his last years in the Senate, his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and his tenure as vice president, following him to the White House after John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960.

She left briefly in 1962, after receiving an appointment from Kennedy to serve as director of women’s activities for what is now the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She rejoined the White House staff as Lady Bird Johnson’s personal secretary after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

'I called the Johnson house, the Elms, to see if I could be of any help,' Mrs. Gonella said in a 1969 oral history. 'Mrs. Johnson asked me if I would come out and help them with telephones and mail because I knew the family and the personal friends.'

At the end of Mrs. Gonella’s first day, Lady Bird Johnson asked her to stay on indefinitely as her personal secretary."

"Ashton Glassell Gonella passed away at home on July 12, 2014 surrounded by her family after a battle with cancer. She was born in Shreveport, LA, to Wesley and Ashton Glassell on January 13, 1929. She graduated from Byrd High School, and attended Hockaday Junior College and Centenary College. She became interested in politics and was the president of the League of Women Voters...

After her time in the White House she briefly owned her own public relations firm, Capitol Ideas before returning to Capitol Hill as Executive Secretary for Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) and then as a professional staff member of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. In 1976, she joined the staff of the Senate Sergeant at Arms. In 1985 she transitioned her career to real estate working in Maryland and the District of Columbia until June of 2014."