User:Informant16/sandbox/Lady Bird Johnson

Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson (Taylor; December 22, 1912 – July 11, 2007) was the first lady of the United States from 1963 to 1969 as the wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson. She previously served as the second lady from 1961 to 1963 when her husband was vice president.

Notably well educated for a woman of her era, Lady Bird proved a capable manager and a successful investor. After marrying Lyndon Johnson in 1934 when he was a political hopeful in Austin, Texas, she used a modest inheritance to bankroll his congressional campaign and then ran his office while he served in the Navy.

As First Lady, Mrs. Johnson broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour. She was an advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways ("Where flowers bloom, so does hope"). The Highway Beautification Act was informally known as "Lady Bird's Bill". She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1984, the highest honors bestowed upon a U.S. civilian. Johnson has been consistently ranked in occasional Siena College Research Institute surveys of as one of the most highly regarded American first ladies per the assessments of historians.

First Lady of the United States
In mid-September 1967, Lady Bird began touring the Midwestern United States as part of a trip that one White House described as "mostly agriculture during the day and culture at night." President Johnson was then declining in support by farmers, months before a planned re-election bid. Speaking to a crowd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on September 20, Lady Bird said problems within American cities were creating crime.

On the morning of June 5, 1968, the Johnsons were alerted to the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, shortly after his victory in the California primary. Lady Bird was distressed by how closely the shooting followed that of Martin Luther King, Jr. and compared the two shootings with that of President Kennedy four years earlier. Lady Bird and Liz Carpenter put together wires for Ethel Kennedy and Rose Kennedy.

As the 1968 election took place, The Johnsons watched the results, with Lady Bird drifting out of consciousness as her husband stayed awake all night. The Johnsons were satisfied that Humphrey had carried Texas, which Lady Bird called "of primary concern for us" and the couple called Humphrey and his wife Muriel to express their support for a well-fought campaign. Lady Bird would later write that she "wished I could have poured across the wire the pride and respect and admiration I felt for them and the race they had run." On November 11, the Johnsons hosted President-elect Nixon and his wife Pat at the White House. Lady Bird, already acquainted with Pat from their time as Senate wives and the latter's role as presiding officer of the Senate Ladies, took her successor to the West Hall and later on a general tour.

Later life
Former President Johnson died of a heart attack in 1973, four years after leaving office. When he suffered the heart attack, Lady Bird was in a meeting, and the former president had died when she reached him. She arranged for the body to lie in state at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum the following day, and the body was laid to rest two days later. The couple's elder daughter, Lynda, said that God "knew what he was doing" when her father died ahead of her mother; she thought her father would not have been able to live without Lady Bird. After his death, Lady Bird took time to travel and spent more time with her daughters. She remained in the public eye, honoring her husband and other presidents. She entertained the wives of governors at the LBJ Presidential Library.

In the 1970s, Johnson focused her attention on the Austin riverfront area through her involvement in the Town Lake Beautification Project. From 1971 to 1978, she served on the board of regents for the University of Texas System. She also served on the National Park Service Advisory Board, and was the first woman to serve on National Geographic Society's Board of Trustees. President Nixon mentioned her as a possible ambassador in a circulated memo, but never nominated her for office.

In December 1973, after President Nixon established the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac, he notified Johnson via a telephone call.

In August 1975, after First Lady Betty Ford made comments on sex, Johnson expressed sympathy: "I know the pressures of being a First Lady, and I think maybe she got asked one question too quick."

During the 1976 United States presidential election, Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter apologized to Johnson over comments he made about her husband during an interview in which he stated he would not follow trends of "lying, cheating, and distorting the truth" set forth by former Presidents Nixon and Johnson.



In November 1977, Johnson spoke at the 1977 National Women's Conference among other speakers including Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Bella Abzug, Barbara Jordan, Cecilia Burciaga, Gloria Steinem, Lenore Hershey and Jean O'Leary.



On March 12, 1980, Johnson returned to the White House and attended a reception commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the Head Start program. In his remarks, President Carter expressed gratitude for her attending as he stated "she personifies too, as you know, the essence of what this great man did with those who worked around him", referring to her late husband.

In June 1981, officials of Dartmouth College stated that Johnson and former President Gerald Ford would serve as co-chairs of the fundraising committee for the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences. Johnson later attended the dedication of the center in September 1983.

In 1982, Johnson and actress Helen Hayes founded the National Wildflower Research Center west of Austin, Texas, as a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving and reintroducing native plants in planned landscapes. In 1994, the center opened a new facility southwest of Austin; they officially renamed it the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in 1995 in acknowledgment of her having raised $10 million for the facility. In 2006, the center was incorporated into the University of Texas at Austin. In 1988, Johnson convened with three other former first ladies—Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, and Pat Nixon—at the "Women and the Constitution" conference at The Carter Center to assess that document's impact on women. The conference featured over 150 speakers and 1,500 attendees from all 50 states and 10 foreign countries. The conference was meant to promote awareness on sexual inequality in other countries, and fight against it in America. In September 1991, Johnson unveiled a new line of English porcelain flower sculpture that drew influence from American wildflowers in the Corrigan's Jewelry at NorthPark Center in Dallas.

For 20 years, Johnson spent her summers on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, renting the home of Charles Guggenheim for many of those years. She said she had greatly appreciated the island's natural beauty and flowers.

In August 1984, Johnson publicly stated her support for the vice-presidential nomination of Geraldine Ferraro in that year's presidential election while admitting the difficulty the Mondale-Ferraro ticket faced in winning Texas.

Johnson returned to the White House for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of her husband's inauguration on April 6, 1990. Incumbent President George H. W. Bush praised her for her support of her husband and work toward beautifying landscapes.

On October 13, 2006, Johnson made a rare public appearance at the renovation announcement of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Health problems and death


In 1986, 13 years after her husband's death, Johnson's health began to fail. She suffered her first fainting spell that year while attending a funeral, and entered St. David's Community Hospital for observation. She also injured her left knee in a fall the day before her hospitalization. In August 1993, she suffered a stroke and became legally blind due to macular degeneration. In 1999, she was hospitalized for a second fainting spell. In 2002, she suffered a second, more severe, stroke, which left her unable to speak normally or walk without assistance. In 2005, she spent a few days in an Austin hospital for treatment of bronchitis. In February 2006, Lynda Johnson Robb told a gathering at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, that her mother was totally blind and was "not in very good health". In June 2007, she spent six days in Seton Hospital in Austin after suffering from a low-grade fever.

Lady Bird Johnson died at home on July 11, 2007, at 4:18 p.m. (CDT) from natural causes at the age of 94, attended by family members and Catholic priest Father Robert Scott.

At the funeral service, her daughter, Luci Baines Johnson gave a eulogy, saying, "A few weeks before Mother died, I was taking visiting relatives to the extraordinary Blanton Art Museum ... Mother was on IV antibiotics, a feeding tube, and oxygen, but she wasn't gonna let little things like that deter her from discovering another great art museum. What a picture we were—literally rolling through the museum like a mobile hospital."

Three weeks before Johnson's death, the rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, which had been her second home for more than 50 years, had announced to his parishioners that she had given $300,000 to pay off the church's mortgage.

Johnson's funeral was a public event. On July 15, 2007, a ceremonial cortège left the Texas State Capitol. The public was invited to line the route through downtown Austin on Congress Avenue and along the shores of Lady Bird Lake to pay their respects. The public part of the funeral procession ended in Johnson City. The family had a private burial at the Johnson family cemetery in Stonewall, where she was buried next to her husband, who had died 34 years earlier. Unlike previous funerals for first ladies, the pallbearers came from members of the armed forces.