Lady Bird Johnson

Lady Bird Johnson was born Clau-dia Alta Taylor in 1912, in the small town of Karnack, Texas, close to where the Old South and the West meet. When she was little her black nursemaid said that she was “as pretty as a ladybird” and the name stuck.

Her mother died when she was 5, and she was brought up by her father, a Texan farmer turned businessman. She took two degrees, in arts and journalism, at the University of Texas at Austin. Soon after graduation, in 1934, she met Johnson, a congressional secretary, and remarked: “There’s something about Lyndon that simply takes your breath away. I knew I had met something remarkable, but I did not know quite what.” They were amused to find that they had the same initials – and would pass them on to their daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. In two months they were married. In the excitement Johnson forgot the wedding ring, and the ceremony was held up while a friend rushed to a cheap jewellery store for a tray of rings for the bride to try on.

Their first home was a one-bed-room flat in Washington, and Lady Bird discovered a trait that was to remain with LBJ all his life. In mid-afternoon he would contact half a dozen political cronies and say: “Call up your lovely girl [wife] and come over for dinner.” Having rounded them up he would inform his wife. Her family had always had servants and so she had no practical experience in cooking when she married. Her first purchase was a cookery book.

From childhood Lady Bird was clever with money. An uncle spotted her financial shrewdness and gave her books on business and accountancy. From the start of her marriage she took charge of the Johnson family finances. This continued into the White House years and afterwards. The arrangement suited Johnson, who preferred not to be distracted from his passion – politics – and he never concealed his respect for his wife’s way with money.

He would say, “Bird is the person that every man in the world would like to have as his trustee.” He would say in later years, not altogether jokingly, that he was not getting all the spending money that he deserved.

In 1937 Lady Bird borrowed $10,000 from her father to finance her husband’s successful bid for Congress. In 1941-42, while LBJ was serving with the US Navy in the Pacific, she ran his congressional office. She dealt with 300,000 constituents, with only a part-time helper, Nellie Connolly, whose husband became Governor of Texas and was wounded during the Kennedy assassination.

From the earliest days of their marriage Johnson consulted Lady Bird on political issues. Although she did not have a political background, she was perceptive and had an abundance of common sense. She was also the person he most often talked to first and last on his political decisions, and her words were often decisive.

Realising that an independent income was essential to support her husband’s political career, Lady Bird went into business. She began by purchasing a run-down Texas radio station that was heavily in debt and losing $2,000 a month. The first thing she did was to buy scrubbing brushes and a bucket to have the filthy entrance cleaned up. Within six months the station was showing a profit, and Lady Bird began to acquire radio and TV stations in Texas and Oklahoma. Ten years before her husband became President her investments, plus an inheritance of 3,000 acres in Alabama, were worth more than $20 million. Hundreds of lush acres in Texas, which became known as the LBJ ranch, were developed with guest quarters, a swimming pool and an airstrip. Tennessee walking horses and picturesque longhorned western cattle were brought in.

In 1959 Johnson was defeated by JFK for the Democratic presidential race. At the convention Lady Bird told friends that it was the saddest day of her life when her husband then decided to become Kennedy’s running-mate. It was well known on the Washington social circuit that the Kennedy and Johnson families disliked and distrusted each other. But both were professionals; hatchets were buried and both families entered the electoral fray. In 71 days of campaigning Lady Bird visited 11 states and covered 35,000 miles, which included one air accident and one overturned car.

After the elections Kennedy did his best to keep the Johnsons abroad and out of the way, arranging vice-presidential visits to Asia, Africa and Europe. As Lady Bird gained confidence she emerged as a vivacious, elegant, slim brunette with Spanish-style good looks, a serene personality and boundless energy, while never losing her Deep South accent.

A few days after becoming First Lady she began a diary, dictating it at odd moments into a tape recorder. It was published in 1970 as White House Diary. Johnson insisted that if there was any bad news he should be woken in the night.

He was a poor sleeper, and Lady Bird recorded that she came to dread the almost inevitable 4am call, after which Johnson would recount to her all the problems of state.

Sleepless nights were also caused by Johnson’s doubts about standing for election after fulfilling the unexpired period of the Kennedy presidency.

After one of their nighttime discussions Lady Bird walked on the White House lawn and then wrote him a letter in which she compared him to his presidential predecessors. “Beloved, you are so brave a man as Harry Truman or FDR or Lincoln. You can find some peace, some achievement amidst all the pain. You have been strong, patient, determined beyond any words of mine to express.

“I honour you for it . . . to step out now would be wrong for your country, and I see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future. Your friends would be frozen in embarrassed silence and your enemies jeering . . . In the last analysis I can’t carry any of the burdens you talked of – so I know it’s only your choice. But I know you are as brave as any of the thirty-five. I love you always, Bird.”

Her letter was answered soon afterwards when the Democratic Party nominated Johnson for the presidential race. He was returned as President with a far bigger vote than Kennedy.

The stylish tone set by the glamor-ous Jackie Kennedy in the White House was hard to follow. She was less formal in entertaining and dropped white-tie dinners. Instead of ballet in the East Room, some world leaders were whisked off to the LBJ ranch with deer steak barbecues.

Lady Bird was a generous hostess but she was careful. The White House staff were used to seeing her at night, switching off the lights to save the Government’s electricity bills. One night she did it so diligently that she found herself, in her nightdress, locked out of her bedroom and unable to get back until her security staff was summoned.

One of her most popular activities during her time at the White House was the Lady Bird Johnson campaign for a More Beautiful Capital with the planting of trees, flowers and shrubs in the Washington area.

Conservation became one of her chief interests after LBJ’s death in 1973. In 1982, on her 70th birthday, she established a National Wildflower Research Centre to spread flowers and native plants to parks, roadsides and derelict sites across the nation. For her services President Reagan presented her with the Congressional Gold Medal, the first to a First Lady.

Despite his dependence on his wife, Johnson was suspected of having had affairs on the side – though not on the scale of JFK. In a TV interview a year after Johnson’s death, Lady Bird hinted that her husband had gone astray: “I hope that I was reasonable, and that if all these ladies had some good points that I didn’t have, I hope I had the good sense to try to learn a little bit by it,” she said.

During Johnson’s presidency the Administration became increasingly mired in the Vietnam War, and within three years he increased US forces there from 20,000 to half a million. The pressures of the war, which seemed to have no resolution, and the deep divisions within the nation clearly took their toll on the President, who had suffered a severe heart attack in 1955. Lady Bird became convinced that another term of office would kill her husband.

Having pleaded with him to fight the 1964 presidential election, she now took the opposite line and pressed him not to run for the next. His decision was a well-kept secret, and in March 1968 Johnson, at the end of a televised speech on the Vietnam War, stunned the world by announcing: “I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

In her diary Lady Bird wrote: “Lyndon’s speech had been, I believe, nobly done, and was, in its way, almost as dramatic as our entrance into the job.”

She is survived by her daughters.

Lady Bird Johnson, US First Lady and conservationist, was born on December 22, 1912. She died on July 11, 2007, aged 94