Lady Bird Johnson: 1912 - 2007

07/18/2007

Lady Bird Johnson: 1912 - 2007

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Edgar Allen Poe

Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Johnson, died Wednesday, July 11. The tumultuous presidency of her husband often overshadowed her considerable achievements as an activist first lady, friend of early childhood, environmentalist, and founder of a multi million-dollar media business.

A story in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 12, 2007) shared these observations about her life....

"As the wife of the 36th president, Johnson was often portrayed by contemporaries and some historians as a meek woman who silently endured her husband's volcanic outbursts and infidelities. Yet she, perhaps more than any presidential wife since Eleanor Roosevelt, expanded the terrain of the first lady by taking a visible role in her husband's administration.

"Her love of nature was enshrined in law when her husband signed the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 — the first major legislative campaign begun by a first lady. Although often eclipsed by protests over the Vietnam War and civil rights — the dominant issues of President Johnson's tenure from 1963 to 1969 — her effort to replace urban blight with flowers and trees prepared the way for the environmental movement of the 1970s.

"'I think there is no legacy she would more treasure than to have helped people recognize the value in preserving and promoting our native land,' Luci Baines Johnson said in a statement.

"As her husband's key personal adviser throughout his career, she championed Head Start, the early childhood education program.

"Johnson often was compared unfavorably with her predecessor, Jacqueline Kennedy. Johnson did not wear designer clothes or introduce French chefs to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but she was the most active first lady since Roosevelt. As a businesswoman, Johnson had the foresight early in her husband's career to buy a debt-ridden Austin radio station and parlay it into a broadcast empire eventually worth millions. She was, according to biographer Jan Jarboe Russell, the only first lady to have built and sustained a fortune with her own money."

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