First lady Lady Bird Johnson dies at 94

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FORT WORTH, Texas – Lady Bird Johnson, widow of former President Lyndon Johnson and lifelong advocate for the beautification of her native state, died Wednesday afternoon at her Austin, Texas, home. She was 94.

Mrs. Johnson had been in poor health for several years. She had a stroke May 2, 2002, and lost her ability to speak, and she was hospitalized for undisclosed reasons several weeks ago.

“She’s lived a full and vibrant life,” daughter Luci Baines Johnson said in 2002. “I think that the life of public service has rewards that can’t be measured.”

But Lady Bird Johnson’s contributions can be measured, especially on spring days along the roads of Texas where bluebonnets and Indian paint brushes brighten the countryside. And in Washington, D.C., where cherry trees and dogwoods temper the impersonal look of the city; and along the nation’s highways, where junkyards and billboards no longer block scenic views.

Beauty was important to Mrs. Johnson. It was a salve for hard times, she said, and she taught the country to appreciate its splendor.

“Ugliness is so grim,” she once said. “A little beauty, something that is lovely, I think, can help create harmony which lessens tensions.”

When her husband embarked on his “Great Society” initiative, she was there working to include conservation and beautification in the package.

“Getting on the subject of beautification is like picking up a tangled skein of wool,” she wrote in her diary. “All the thread are interwoven – recreation and pollution and mental health, and the crime rate, and rapid transit, and highway beautification, and the war on poverty, and parks – national, state and local. It is hard to hitch the conversation into one straight line, because everything leads to something else.”

The Highway Beautification Act of 1965 became known as “Lady Bird’s Bill.”

It was the first legislative campaign ever launched by a first lady, and while that gave her a certain pride, it did not alter what she saw as her primary roles in the White House – those of mother, wife and confidante.

“I will try to be balm, sustainer and sometimes critic for my husband,” she said of her duties. “I will try to have my children look at this job with all the reverence it is due, to get from it the knowledge their unique vantage point gives them and to retain the lightheartedness to which every teenager is entitled. For my own self, my role must emerge in deeds, not words.”

She shunned comparisons with other first ladies and did not feel competitive with her beautiful and glamorous predecessor, Jackie Kennedy.

“There is not a competitive bone in her body,” Liz Carpenter, her former press secretary, once said. “She lives for one thing, and that is to be a joy and a companion to her husband and her daughters. It simplifies all of life if you have one purpose.”

She was born Dec. 22, 1912, in Karnack, deep in the East Texas woods where Southern sentiments pervaded the cotton fields and bayous. Her name was Claudia Alta Taylor, but when a maid exclaimed, “She’s purty as a ladybird,” her identification was forever altered.

She met Lyndon Johnson when she was 21 and he was a 26-year-old congressional aide in the fall of 1934.

Two and a half months later, on Nov. 17, Lady Bird told a friend, “Lyndon and I committed matrimony last night.”

While her husband began his political climb, Mrs. Johnson developed a reputation for her efficiency, graciousness and devotion. She ably ran her husband’s congressional office in 1942 during his brief stint in the Navy. In 1944, after 10 years of marriage and four miscarriages, the couple had their first child, Lynda Bird, on March 19. Luci Baines arrived July 2, 1947.

The next year, Lyndon Johnson was elected to the Senate and quickly rose in stature to become one of the most powerful majority leaders in history.

Johnson considered running for president in 1960, but his chief rival, John F. Kennedy, had worked hard to sew up votes at the Democratic convention. Kennedy offered Johnson the No. 2 spot, but Mrs. Johnson expressed strong reservations about his accepting it. She and others thought he should fight out the nomination on the convention floor. But Johnson finally took Kennedy’s offer, and his wife accepted the decision.

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Johnson was visible and effective, despite her shyness. Southern crowds responded to her folksy style and soft drawl.

“Lady Bird carried Texas for us,” Robert Kennedy remarked later.

In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and the Johnsons were catapulted into a harsh and painful national spotlight.

She became so certain the strain of Vietnam would cause the president a heart attack, she bought a black dress to keep in her closet should he not survive.

When Lyndon Johnson decided not to run again in ’68, Mrs. Johnson boldly insisted he add a phrase to his announcement. He had written, “I shall not seek” the nomination of my party. She had him add, “and I will not accept.”

On Jan. 22, 1973, Mrs. Johnson left the ranch to attend a University of Texas regents meeting. That afternoon, Lyndon Johnson collapsed with another heart attack. This one was fatal.

Mrs. Johnson received many awards throughout her life including the Department of Interior’s Conservation Service Award in 1974, the Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1988. She also served on the National Park Service’s advisory board.

Almost always when asked about her accomplishments, Mrs. Johnson would say either that there was little to discuss or that she would leave others to determine her legacy. She once told Carpenter, her former press secretary, “I will settle for an epitaph, ‘She planted three trees.”‘

She knew she had done far more.

Once asked if she believed in heaven, Mrs. Johnson told biographer Jan Jarboe Russell, “Oh, yes, I do. I do know that there is something hereafter, because all this has been too significant, too magnificent, for there not to be something after. Heaven, to me, is a mystery, a place I’ll know what all this – the events of my life – meant.”