Posted on 07/11/2007 2:35:41 PM PDT by leadpenny
Rest in peace.
Now can the truth about JFK be revealed ?
I would prefer they tear down a few!
AUSTIN, Texas - Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady who championed conservation and worked tenaciously for the political career of her husband, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, died Wednesday, a family spokeswoman said. She was 94.
Lady Bird Johnson returned home late last month after a week at Seton Medical Center, where she'd been admitted for a low-grade fever. Her husband died in 1973.
She died at her Austin home of natural causes about 4:18 p.m. CDT. Elizabeth Christian, the spokeswoman, said she was surrounded by family and friends.
She was hospitalized with a stroke in 2002 that left her with difficulty speaking. But even after that she continued to make public appearances and in May attended an event at the LBJ Library and Museum featuring historian Robert Dallek.
In March, she listened from Texas through a conference call when President Bush signed legislation naming the Education Department headquarters building in Washington, D.C., after her late husband.
LOL!!
I was just thinking the same thing.
Her hubby was a disgrace and we suffer today from the consequences of programs that promote laziness - “War on Poverty”. Edwards is now trying to plow the way. Roosevelt start the government freebies.
Careful.
They live.
94 and she planted a lot of wild flowers around the state.
LADY BIRD JOHNSON
Lady Bird Johnson dies at 94
Former first lady leaves rich legacy as political wife, environmental activist, businesswoman.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, July 11, 2007Her marriage to a larger-than-life Texan thrust a shy, small-town girl named Lady Bird Johnson into the national spotlight. A love affair with the great outdoors kept her there.
And though nationally she was best known as the wife of Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president, Mrs. Johnson was very much a figure in her own right. She mixed Southern graciousness with a quiet, cast-iron fortitude that not only won admirers but allowed her to steer a large business enterprise and help forge a national environmental movement.
The oldest living former first lady of the United States died at 4:18 p.m. Wednesday at her West Lake Hills home at 94. The cause of death was not immediately available. She was hospitalized at Seton Medical Center on June 21 with a low-grade fever and released a week later after a series of medical tests and visits from her two daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Thousands will mourn her passing, especially in her beloved Central Texas, but even more will celebrate her rich legacy.
"We have lost America's best public example of civility and decency," said Austin attorney Larry Temple, former special counsel to President Johnson and a close friend of Mrs. Johnson's. "I wish everyone could have known her, because those who didn't missed a lot. Her goodness made everyone around her better.
"She was the model for this country on how to deal with people and how to treat people and how to comport yourself."
In recent years, as Mrs. Johnson's health declined, particularly after a stroke in 2002, the family, with her wishes, began planning public and private memorial services. Details have not been released, but those events are expected to start in a few days with a public viewing at the LBJ Library, followed by a funeral service in Austin and burial at the LBJ Ranch next to her husband's grave.
"Whenever Edwina and I see wildflowers on a roadside, or read a good book, or take a trip with our family and friends, we will remember Lady Bird Johnson," said Tom Johnson, chairman of the LBJ Foundation, former chairman of CNN and a close family friend. "Over the 41 years we shared with her, she taught us that the best gift we can give another is the gift of a great memory. Mrs. Johnson gave her family and friends so many splendid memories that we will cherish forever."
She also set an example for service, said Texas Sen. Kirk Watson, a former Austin mayor.
"Most of what we do today to enjoy our remarkable quality of life, from conservation to simply walking along our beautiful Town Lake, we owe to her legacy," Watson said. "Our actions today are the offspring of her vision."
Mrs. Johnson was an author, a businesswoman, a champion of education and conservation efforts, a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and, most of all, a supportive and loving wife. She was a tireless advocate who left her gentle fingerprints on America's history and helped shape its diverse landscape.
Her legacy includes the millions of daffodils that bloom every year in the nation's capital, that strip of serenity along Town Lake known as the hike-and-bike trail and the bursts of spring color that have made stretches of Texas highways nothing short of remarkable.
But she was more than Mother Nature's biggest ally. Like many public figures, Mrs. Johnson was more complex than the persona often presented to the world. Her ever-present graciousness and careful modesty only hinted at what friends say was an underlying strength.
"I was once asked to describe her in one phrase," Harry Middleton, former director of the LBJ Library and Museum, said in a 1995 interview about Mrs. Johnson. "And the phrase I came up with was 'grace and steel.' "
She was first lady from 1963 to '69, during some of the country's most turbulent times. President Kennedy had been assassinated, protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War were increasingly loud and violent, and the streets were filled with rioters railing against racial inequality.
Even when she was heckled because of President Johnson's unpopular policies, Mrs. Johnson handled the public hostility the same way she dealt with her husband's well-known blustery temperament. She was the epitome of decorum, and her calming influence often was credited with taking the edge off volatile situations.
"People who worked for him really preferred that she stay close," the late George Christian, President Johnson's press secretary and a close family friend, once said. "She was always one of his top advisers and had a calming influence on him. Joe Califano (special assistant to Johnson) used to say (Johnson) was 'like a caged lion' when she wasn't around. He would pace back and forth."
Mrs. Johnson was a true intellect who loved books and poetry and, above all, stimulating conversation. At home and on vacations she surrounded herself with writers, academics, politicians and thoughtful people whose discourse was far from idle chit-chat.
"The thing I admired as much as anything about her in the last decade was that she had no fear of new ideas," Temple said. "A lot of people as they get older are not interested in new ideas and new technology or new approaches to things, but she did not fear them and was never intimidated by them."
She also was funny and loved to laugh. When she got together with old friends such as Nellie Connally, who was a former first lady of Texas, or Cecille Harrison Marshall, who was Mrs. Johnson's college roommate and maid of honor, they would reminisce and giggle like schoolgirls.
"We always liked to have fun," said Marshall, who died in 2004. "When we were in college, we were just girls doing the usual things — double-dating and talking about the boys we liked. But she always did her homework first."
Mrs. Johnson had a delicious sense of whimsy; she was known to show up at great-granddaughter Tatum Nugent's pre-Halloween birthday parties dressed as a fairy godmother, complete with golden tresses; long, flowing gown; and magic wand. And she relished an adventure, whether it was climbing in a boat at age 75 to watch whales, or, when she was in her 80s, taking granddaughter Jennifer Robb to Cancún, Quintana Roo, for spring break.
"She trouped around with us when we went to see archaeological sites and told us about the times she visited there with foreign dignitaries," Jennifer Robb remembered.
Mrs. Johnson always taught her family the importance of having a good time together and took the time to do the things with them that they loved. And as the family grew, she spent more time with daughters Luci Baines Johnson, who lives in Austin, and Lynda Johnson Robb, who lives in Virginia, as well as her seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, whom she called the "meat and potatoes of life."
Since LBJ's death in 1973, she had split most of her time between her "city" home in West Lake Hills and the LBJ Ranch, which sprawls over hundreds of oak-studded acres near Stonewall. Macular degeneration had caused her eyesight to fail, arthritis made it difficult to get around, and a stroke stole her ability to speak. But her spirit and sense of wonder remained as strong as ever.
"Always, curiosity was her elixir, her tonic," said daughter Luci.
When she was robbed of the ability to read, Mrs. Johnson embraced the world of audio books. Instead of regaling her great-grandchildren with the read-aloud adventures of Harry Potter and Winnie the Pooh, she pulled them onto her lap and kissed the backs of their tiny necks, or listened to their antics as they played at her feet.
When she could no longer gaze upon a field of wildflowers, she took a magnifying glass and looked at individual blooms.
"Clouds are mighty big, and I get a lot of enjoyment by looking at them," she said on her 85th birthday, spreading her arms as she gazed skyward. "And vistas and the sounds of birds. They never interested me as much as they have (lately). Now I listen for them and try to identify the sounds. I stand very still and try to absorb it."
She continued her annual treks to Acapulco, Guerrero, in winter and Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, in summer, and often was a guest at small dinner parties given by her friends in Austin. But when she turned 85, she said she felt like a top that was winding down.
"More often she would have bad days and would say, 'I'll be there if I can,' " Middleton said. "But when she felt up to coming, she continued to be a lot of fun to be with. She enjoyed things; she laughed marvelously."
Walks in the woods
Mrs. Johnson was born Claudia Alta Taylor on Dec. 22, 1912, in Karnack, an East Texas cotton town near the Louisiana border.
Her father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, operated a prosperous cotton business and general store and proved adept at land acquisition. Her mother, Minnie Lee Pattillo Taylor, was the daughter of an aristocratic Alabama family. A cultured woman, Minnie Taylor has been described as "unconventional." She rode about the tiny East Texas cotton town in her own chauffeur-driven car and wore turban-like headpieces and long veils.
As a toddler, Claudia was nicknamed Lady Bird by a nursemaid who said she was "purty as a lady bird." Her mother died of complications after a fall that resulted in a miscarriage when Lady Bird was 5, so Effie Pattillo, a single aunt, moved to Karnack from Alabama to care for the little girl. During the summers, Lady Bird would return to Alabama to visit the rest of the Pattillo family.
She had two older brothers, now deceased, but they attended boarding school. Mrs. Johnson's childhood has been described as somewhat lonely, a time when she turned to the woods and streams of East Texas for company.
"I grew up in the country, rather alone, and one of my favorite pastimes was to walk in the woods, exploring, particularly the springtime," she said in a 1984 lecture at Southern Methodist University.
She attended public schools in a one-room schoolhouse in Fern — "It was in the middle of nowhere," she remembered — and in Jefferson. During her high school years, from Monday through Friday, Lady Bird lived with a family in Jefferson. By 14, she was driving to high school in nearby Marshall, where she graduated the next year. Her grades were almost good enough to put her at the top of her class, but she feared the graduation speech required of the valedictorian, prayed that she wouldn't earn the honor and ended up just shy of the top spot.
After two years at St. Mary's Episcopal School for Girls in Dallas, she enrolled at the University of Texas in 1930. She received a bachelor of arts degree in history in 1933 and a bachelor of journalism degree in 1934, both with honors.
A whirlwind called LBJ
The new graduate's career plans included becoming a teacher in a far-off locale such as Alaska or Hawaii or becoming a drama critic at a New York newspaper. But she ran into Lyndon Johnson before she got to Broadway, a meeting that cut short all other plans and changed forever the course of her life.
"I was astonished, amazed," Mrs. Johnson once said of that first meeting in 1934, when the two had breakfast at the Driskill Hotel and then went for a long drive. "It was just like finding yourself in the middle of a whirlwind. I just had not met up with that kind of vitality before. I wanted to stay on the edges of it. I wasn't sure I wanted to get caught up in it as a matter of self-preservation."
The aspiring drama critic was sucked into the vortex of LBJ, who proposed the day after he was introduced to her. A little more than two months later, on Nov. 17, she married Johnson, who was working as an aide to U.S. Rep. Richard Kleberg of Corpus Christi.
The bride did not carry flowers during the wedding ceremony because, although they had been discussing marriage for six weeks, she didn't say yes until that morning.
Much has been written about the wedding ring, which was bought hurriedly by one of Johnson's friends for $2.50 from Sears, Roebuck and Co. The ring he bought was inexpensive because Johnson planned to go back later and buy the wedding ring that matched her engagement ring. Mrs. Johnson wore the matching wedding set throughout her life but kept the Sears ring as a tender reminder of her rather rushed wedding ceremony.
The newlyweds made an interesting combination. Johnson was talkative and outgoing, a man who could tell a good story but who read few books, a man whose ways were often regarded as earthy at best, or coarse by those less generous.
Mrs. Johnson, on the other hand, fought her shyness, was bookish and displayed a lifelong interest in poets and poetry. Her very manner and her gentle turn of words illustrated her love of language.
Yet the union of Lyndon and Lady Bird impressed friends and associates for its depth.
"His closest friend and adviser was his wife," the late Jake Pickle, a former congressman, once said of his friend Lyndon Johnson. "Lady Bird Johnson understood her husband and he understood her as few men and women dare hope to understand and love each other."
In 1937, Johnson announced he would run for the seat representing Austin's 10th Congressional District, which had come open because of the death of James P. Buchanan.
Seed money for the campaign came from Lady Bird, who drew $10,000 from her inheritance to help launch her husband's political career. But her shyness — as well as the times — kept this political wife off the stump, and her role in the campaign was very low-key. She licked envelopes, worked the telephones and drove people to the polls.
Mrs. Johnson, as it turned out, was almost as timid as her husband was boisterous in those early years. She has said he pushed her to do more campaigning as time passed.
"Finally, I think it was somewhere in the late '40s, I made my first tentative little speeches," she said.
Running the business
LBJ's victory in 1937 opened the door to life in the political limelight. Even if she wasn't given to speechmaking, Mrs. Johnson's management abilities and political savvy were realized just as World War II began shutting down business as usual. Three days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lyndon Johnson went into the Navy. Because his assistant, John Connally, also went into the Navy, Johnson's congressional office was turned over to Mrs. Johnson, who ran it for eight months.
Shortly after all congressmen were ordered by President Roosevelt to return to their legislative posts in 1942, Mrs. Johnson used $17,500 of family money and loans to buy a debt-ridden Austin radio station. After the Johnsons persuaded the Federal Communications Commission to grant KTBC the right to broadcast 24 hours a day, the station began to grow and become successful.
When the FCC allotted one VHF television channel to Austin, the LBJ Co. obtained Channel 7. With successful radio and television ventures in Austin, the LBJ Co. expanded to other markets.
"No precise record is available as to how much Mrs. Johnson's business sense, compared with her husband's political clout, made possible such an impressive growth," Austin historian Lewis Gould wrote in a book on Mrs. Johnson. "That they were a partnership in the most meaningful and profitable sense is undeniable."
The family's fortunes also branched out into real estate, and by 1964 the Johnsons had interests in several Texas ranches, resort and residential property, and land in Alabama she had inherited from her father.
When Mrs. Johnson became first lady in 1963, her business savvy came in handy again.
"The way modern first ladies operate is the result of what Mrs. Johnson and (her press secretary) Liz Carpenter did in the 1960s," Gould said in an interview before Mrs. Johnson's death. "As important as Eleanor Roosevelt was in being an activist, she never put in the institutional framework for how first ladies operate. She ran it out of her back pocket with friends and people she brought in.
"Mrs. Johnson said first ladies need to have a staff, and so she needed a staff director in addition to a social director. First ladies run a kind of small presidency within the White House, a miniature version that really is the result of Lady Bird Johnson's business background and her organizational qualities and characteristics to make things work rationally. So Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton (and now Laura Bush) have an organizational approach to being first lady that was modeled on the one she created."
A passion for beauty
Mrs. Johnson's far-reaching projects as first lady ranged from education to the environment. And her husband's position didn't hurt her efforts. In 1965, the president told his Cabinet, "You know I love that woman, and she wants that Highway Beautification Act, and, by God, we're going to get it for her." The act, one of the first modern environmental laws, was an attempt to preserve the scenic beauty of America's highways by prohibiting construction of new billboards on scenic and rural federal-aid highways, and to require the removal of illegal billboards.
She was aware some observers found her beautification campaigns frivolous, thinking her time might have been better spent on weightier matters. And in her characteristic, self-deprecating manner, she downplayed her life's work in 1988 during a weekend when she accepted a Congressional Gold Medal for her work in establishing the National Wildflower Research Center in Austin. Congress' most prestigious civilian honor recognizes excellence in a range of fields, including the arts, athletics, politics, science and entertainment.
"I've been crazy about this all my life," she said at the ceremony. "But I always felt slightly apologetic about it. It may seem like a lightweight proposition in a world of heavyweight problems. And it is, of course.
"But I love it."
At the same time, many observers say her conservation efforts were not only untiring but historically important. They applaud her as a pioneer in the modern environmental movement.
"Lady Bird Johnson did more than plant flowers in public places," wrote Stewart Udall, former U.S. secretary of the interior. "She served the country superbly by planting environmental values in the minds of the nation's leaders and citizens."
"Having a first lady who said that the Grand Canyon should be preserved and the redwoods should not be cut down, that parks should be saved and freeways built with urban residents in mind, meant that environmental issues received a statement of legitimacy and value from the White House and the presidency," Gould wrote in "Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment."
"The result was an instilling of conservation and ecological ideas in the national mind with a skill and adroitness that put Lady Bird Johnson in the front rank among modern first ladies and women in American politics," Gould said.
Mrs. Johnson's love of the outdoors commingled nicely with her status as first lady to produce results.
"It didn't dawn on me that I could possibly be of any use," she said in 1987. "I'm not knowledgeable. I'm primarily an enjoyer, but I did find out in the White House that one individual can make a difference. That is a mighty fine place to make a difference."
Making a difference was facilitated by the fact that the president shared his wife's enthusiasm for environmental matters. Hundreds of laws relating to some aspect of the environment were signed during the Johnson presidency and billions of dollars were set aside for these programs, Gould said. Those figures meant Johnson obtained more environmental legislation than any previous president.
Although some of her accomplishments — such as the Highway Beautification Acts and the wildflower research center — were concrete, her most important legacy might be less visible.
"She made a significant and lasting contribution in terms of changing the views of people in regard to the way they looked at their land and cities," Udall said in 1969.
Her love of nature didn't confine itself to boardrooms and committee work. The outdoors and natural environment were part of Mrs. Johnson's regular day, as her once-frequent walks along Town Lake made evident, along with her picnic/poetry readings beneath the trees on the lawn fronting the LBJ Library.
Her environmental work took her from the National Geographic Society board of trustees to the Advisory Board on National Parks. She also served on the board of the American Conservation Society.
Yet her accomplishments went beyond her efforts at "beautification," a term she disliked, saying it was "prissy."
Education benefited from her touch, as seen in her work as honorary chairwoman of the Head Start early childhood education program, as a UT System regent and as a member of the President's Commission on White House Fellowships.
Mrs. Johnson, who was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree by UT in 1964, was appointed to the UT System Board of Regents in January 1971. She also held honorary degrees from Texas Woman's University, Middlebury College, Williams College, Southwestern University in Georgetown, the University of Alabama and Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University-San Marcos), Washington College, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, State University of New York, Southern Methodist University, St. Edward's University and Boston University.
Her life, even in the years after she left Washington in 1969 because LBJ decided not to run for a second term, seemed to be one procession of benefits, charitable and educational efforts and honors, including the highest civilian award given in this country, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The inscription on her 1977 award, presented by President Gerald Ford, reads: "As one of America's great first ladies, she claimed her own place in the hearts and history of the American people. In councils of power or in homes of the poor, she made government human with her unique compassion and her grace, warmth and wisdom. Her leadership transformed the American landscape and preserved its natural beauty as a national treasure."
As much as she accomplished, nothing was more dear to her heart than promoting native flora.
"Wildflowers and native plants are as much a part of our national heritage as Old Faithful or the Capitol building," Mrs. Johnson once said, "but the world in which they once flourished is now disappearing."
In 1982, on her 70th birthday, she did something about it. Mrs. Johnson founded the National Wildflower Research Center. It was renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on her 85th birthday. The 279-acre research facility and information clearinghouse educates people about the environmental necessity, economic value and natural beauty of native plants. The assets were transferred to UT in 2006.
"Man and his needs are filling up the world. . . . Those needs are important," she said, "but there is also room for beauty, for the bounty of nature itself is one of the deep needs of mankind."
Mrs. Johnson never spoke of infirmities and illnesses suffered in her later years. She always was more interested in hearing what others had to say.
Although her energy waned, her zest for life didn't. Mrs. Johnson was often seen sitting in the front row of the LBJ Library's auditorium, listening to experts, old friends and guest speakers talk about public policy and events of the day. She kept an office on the eighth floor of the LBJ Library and Museum, next door to the reproduction of her husband's Oval Office, and when she stepped off the elevator and heard her husband's voice telling museum visitors about his presidency, she felt comforted. The suite is now the First Lady's Gallery, a tribute to her life.
"I sometimes look back and almost say to myself: 'Gee, was that really me? Did it all happen to me?' It was a wonderful life," Mrs. Johnson once told a magazine interviewer. "It took vigor and forbearance and a lot of elasticity. But it was an absolutely wonderful life."
jwilson@statesman.com; 445-3668
Additional material from former American-Statesman reporter Michele Stanush.
No.
Not here.
lol.
DKG on with “the spitter” now.
I just hear
Tell me alot Lady Bird was classy lady despite the fact her husband was lousy womanizer and lousy pet owner
oh no
Rest in peace.
Rest in peace, ma’am, and God bless you eternally!
Didn’t he say it was okay to pick up Beagles by the ears?
did you update wikipedia?
Geesh ... can’t they spare the woman the indignity of being associated with l.B.J.?
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