Lady Bird Johnson

Jul 16 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HER husband called her “Bird” and, indeed, it was her quaint name, with its suggestion of the unsophisticated country, which raised eyebrows in the more snobbish political circles.

She had stepped with her money, dragging humble roots, into the court of Camelot, where her husband was the man a heartbeat away in those dreadful moments when the heart stopped.

But Lady Bird Johnson was as sharp as a needle and she knew what other people thought when Lyndon B Johnson became president of the USA after the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963.

“They look at the living and wish for the dead,” she told Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post. “I feel that I have walked on the stage for a part I haven’t rehearsed.”

Her power had come from money which was still too new to win her a place in the shining circle of John and Jackie Kennedy.

Lady Bird, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson Taylor, was born in Karnack, Texas. Her baptismal names were Claudia Alta, but one of the family’s black servants described her as being as “purdy as a lady bird” and it stuck.

Taylor was a hustler, who made a fortune by way of sharecropping, cotton and oil dealings, and a general store. If it hadn’t been for this money, he would never have been able to claim the hand of Minnie Lee Patillo, whose people were landowners with ancestry in the old Confederacy.

Lady Bird’s mother died when she was five and she was brought up by an aunt in an atmosphere of genteel southern manners.

Twenty-four hours after their meeting in Austin, Texas, the ambitious young politician, Johnson, asked her to marry him.

She then became a dedicated politician’s wife, supporting him in his many causes, leading to the fateful days when he was vice-president to Kennedy, a heartbeat away from the White House.

Lady Bird eased the rages which enveloped her husband on occasions, as he pushed through radical legislation intended to improve the conditions of the poor and the blacks. In 1968, Johnson announced that he would not be standing for another presidential term. He died in 1973. They had two children.

Back in Texas, she worked on outdoor activities and a wildflower centre was named in her honour in Austin.

Lady Bird Johnson, politician’s wife; born December 22, 1912, died July 11, 2007.