Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson standing by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson as he takes the oath of office aboard Air Force One after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963.
First Lady Barbara Bush (centre) with her predecessors at the opening of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, November 1991. (From left) Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Nancy Reagan (back row), Bush, Rosalynn Carter, and Betty Ford.
Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson - known all her life as "Lady Bird" - followed one of the most beloved first ladies in history, Jacqueline Kennedy. During her husband’s administration, Lady Bird devoted her energies helping her husband to cope with the strains of his presidency, while also traveling extensively to speak in support of his Great Society program.
Background
Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22, 1912 in Karnack, a town in East Texas. Her birthplace was "The Brick House," an antebellum plantation house on the outskirts of town, which her father had purchased shortly before her birth. She is a descendant of English Protestant martyr Rowland Taylor through his grandson Captain Thomas J. Taylor, II.
She was named for her mother's brother Claud. During her infancy, her nursemaid, Alice Tittle, said that she was as "purty as a ladybird". The nickname virtually replaced her first name for the rest of her life. Her father and siblings called her Lady.
A native of Alabama, her father had primarily English ancestry, and some Welsh and Danish. Her mother was also a native of Alabama, of English and Scottish descent.
Education
Lady Bird was largely raised by her maternal aunt Effie Pattillo, who moved to Karnack after her sister's death. She also visited her Pattillo relatives in Autauga County, Alabama, every summer until she was a young woman. As she explained, "Until I was about 20, summertime always meant Alabama to me. With Aunt Effie we would board the train in Marshall and ride to the part of the world that meant watermelon cuttings, picnics at the creek, and a lot of company every Sunday."
When it came time to enter high school, Lady Bird had to move away and live with another family during weekdays in the town of Jefferson, Texas, since there was no high school in the Karnack area.
She graduated third in her class at the age of 15 from Marshall Senior High School in the nearby county seat. Despite her young age, her father gave her a car so that she could drive herself to school, a distance of 15 miles (24 km) each way.
After graduating from high school in May 1928, Lady Bird entered the University of Alabama for the summer session, where she took her first journalism course. But, homesick for Texas, she stayed at home and did not return for the fall term at Alabama. Instead, she and a high school friend enrolled at St. Mary's Episcopal College for Women, an Episcopal boarding junior college for women in Dallas.
After graduating from St. Mary's in May 1930, Lady Bird received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history with honors in 1933 and a second bachelor's degree in journalism cum laude in 1934. She was active on campus in different organizations, including Texas Orange Jackets, a women's honorary service organization, and believed in student leadership. Her goal was to become a reporter, but she also earned a teaching certificate.
The summer after her second graduation, she and a girlfriend traveled to New York City and Washington, D.C.
When Lyndon decided to run for Congress from Austin's 10th district, Lady Bird provided the money to launch his campaign. She took $10,000 of her inheritance from her mother's estate to help start his political career. The couple settled in Washington, D.C., after Lyndon was elected to Congress. After he enlisted in the Navy at the outset of the Second World War, Lady Bird ran his congressional office.
In January-February 1943, during World War II, Lady Bird Johnson spent $17,500 of her inheritance to purchase KTBC, an Austin radio station. She bought the radio station from a three-man partnership that included Robert B. Anderson, a future U.S. Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and Texas oilman and rancher Wesley West.
She served as president of the LBJ Holding Co., and her husband negotiated an agreement with the CBS radio network. Lady Bird decided to expand by buying a television station in 1952. The station, KTBC-TV/7 (then affiliated with CBS as well), was Austin's monopoly VHF franchise and generated revenues that made the Johnsons millionaires.
LBJ Holding also had two small banks, they failed and were closed in 1991 by the FDIC. But the core Johnson radio properties survived and prospered. Emmis Communications bought KLBJ-AM, KLBJ-FM, KGSR, and three other stations from LBJ Holding in 2003 for $105 million.
Eventually, Lady Bird's initial $41,000 investment turned into more than $150 million for the LBJ Holding Company. She was the first president's wife to have become a millionaire in her own right before her husband was elected to office. She remained involved with the company until she was in her eighties.
Achievements
As First Lady, Lady Bird started a capital beautification project (Society for a More Beautiful National Capital). It was intended to improve physical conditions in Washington, D.C., for both residents and tourists, by planting millions of flowers, many of them on National Park Service land along roadways around the capital. She said, "Where flowers bloom, so does hope."
She became the first president's wife to advocate actively for legislation when she was instrumental in promoting the Highway Beautification Act, which was nicknamed "Lady Bird's Bill." It was developed to beautify the nation's highway system by limiting billboards and by planting roadside areas.
She was also an advocate of the Head Start program to give children from lower-income families a step up in school readiness.
Lady Bird created the modern structure of the First Lady's office: she was the first in this role to have a press secretary and chief of staff of her own, and an outside liaison with Congress.
On August 27, 1969, President Richard Nixon dedicated a 300-acre grove of redwood trees as the "Lady Bird Johnson Grove," due to her efforts as First Lady toward preserving national resources for Americans. The grove is located just north of Orick, California, and is part of Redwood National Park. Lady Bird attended the dedication with former President Johnson.
In 1995, the National Wildflower Research Center - near Austin, Texas - was renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. She and actress Helen Hayes had founded the center in 1982.
In November 1968, Columbia Island, in Washington, D.C., was renamed Lady Bird Johnson Park, in honor of her campaign as First Lady to beautify the capital. In 1976, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac was dedicated on Columbia Island.
In 1995, she received an Honor Award from the National Building Museum for her lifetime leadership in beautification and conservation campaigns. She was also named the honorary chairwoman of the Head Start program.
Lady Bird held honorary degrees from many universities: Boston University; the University of Alabama; George Washington University; Johns Hopkins University; State University of New York; Southern Methodist University; Texas Woman's University; Middlebury College; Williams College, Southwestern University; Texas State University–San Marcos; Washington College; and St. Edward's University.
On October 22, 2012, the United States Postal Service announced the issue of a souvenir Forever stamp sheet honoring Lady Bird Johnson as a tribute to her legacy of beautifying the nation's roadsides, urban parks and trails. Five of the six stamps feature adaptations of stamps originally issued in the 1960s to promote planting in public spaces.
In 2013, Lady Bird was posthumously awarded the prestigious Rachel Carson Award. The award, presented by Audubon's Women In Conservation, was accepted by her daughter Lynda.
Lady Bird Johnson baptized at age five in the Methodist faith of her father. She later became Episcopalian. She often attended services with her husband in a Disciples of Christ parish, his faith.
Views
Quotations:
My Aunt Effie opened my spirit to beauty, but she neglected to give me any insight into the practical matters a girl should know about, such as how to dress or choose one's friends or learning to dance.
Wildflowers are the stuff of my heart!
The First Lady is an unpaid public servant elected by one person - her husband.
Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.
It's odd that you can get so anesthetized by your own pain or your own problem that you don't quite fully share the hell of someone close to you.
Where flowers bloom so does hope.
No news at 4:30 a.m. is good.
Personality
She looks plain, even common, she has rooted herself firmly in nature through her love of wildflowers, and she stands for the simple pleasures of daily existence.
Physical Characteristics:
Small of stature, she had brown hair and brown eyes.
Quotes from others about the person
Biographer Betty Boyd Caroli said in 2015 about Lady Bird: "She really invented the job of modern first lady. She was the first one to have a big staff, the first one to have a comprehensive program in her own name, the first one to write a book about the White House years, when she leaves. She had an important role in setting up an enduring role for her husband with the LBJ Library. She's the first one to campaign extensively on her own for her husband."
Interests
animals, nature, wildflowers, native plants
Connections
A friend in Austin introduced her to Lyndon Baines Johnson, a 26-year-old Congressional aide with political aspirations,working for Congressman Richard Kleberg. Lady Bird recalled having felt "like a moth drawn to a flame".
On their first date, at the Driskill Hotel, Lyndon proposed. Lady Bird did not want to rush into marriage, but he was persistent and did not want to wait. Ten weeks later, Lady Bird accepted his proposal. The couple married on November 17, 1934, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas.
After she suffered three miscarriages, the couple had two daughters together: Lynda Bird (born in 1944) and Luci Baines (born in 1947). The couple and their two daughters all shared the initials LBJ. The daughters lived in the White House during their teenage years, under close scrutiny of the media.
Both daughters held White House weddings. Lynda Bird married Charles S. Robb, who was later elected as governor of Virginia and U.S. Senator. Luci Baines married Pat Nugent and, later, Ian Turpin.
Lady Bird had seven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren at the time of her death.
Father:
Thomas Jefferson Taylor
Thomas Jefferson Taylor (August 29, 1874 – October 22, 1960), was a sharecropper's son. He became a wealthy businessman, and owned 15,000 acres (6,070 ha) of cotton and two general stores.
Mother:
Minnie Lee Pattillo
Born Minnie Lee Pattillo (1874–1918), her mother loved opera and felt out of place in Karnack, she was often in "poor emotional and physical health."
When Lady Bird was five years old, Minnie fell down a flight of stairs while pregnant and died of complications of miscarriage. In a profile of Lady Bird Johnson, Time magazine described Lady Bird's mother as "a tall, eccentric woman from an old and aristocratic Alabama family, [who] liked to wear long white dresses and heavy veils [... and who] scandalized people for miles around by entertaining Negroes in her home, and once even started to write a book about Negro religious practices, called Bio Baptism."
