A beautification, to my mind, is far more than a matter of cosmetics. To me, it describes the whole effort to bring the Natural World and the manmade world into harmony, to bring youthfulness, delight, to our whole environment and that, of course, only begins with trees and flowers and landscaping. That is it from a film created about the johnson family. Lady bird johnson talking about beautification, her signature issue as first lady. She was a natural campaigner, successful businesswoman and savvy partner to her husband, Lyndon Johnson. Good evening. Theght, we will tell you story of Claudia Taylor johnson known as lady bird, the wife of our 36th president. Here to tell her story are Cokie Roberts, political commentary for abc news and npr, also the author of two books, founding mothers and ladies of liberty. Betty boyle curly is an expert and working on a biography of Lady Bird Johnson. I want to start with the beginning, where we were 50 years ago this week, this is an administration birthed in national tragedy. What were the immediate challenges for the brand new first couple in the first terrible days after the assassination of kennedy. It was enormous. Nobody knew if it was a widespread plot so the country was in terror for a period of time and they had to be both taking over and making sure that there was a peaceful transition of power without seeming to take over because of the image of being pushing the kennedys out of the way so they had to be very, very careful in how they handled it and Lyndon Johnson was very lucky he had lady bird to help him with that because she had a good ear for knowing exactly what to say and when to say it. In particular, what did she do during those first weeks . She said she felt she was on stage for a part she never rehearsed but it would be hard to find a first lady better prepared than she was and she immediately started taking notes. We have her short hand notes while she was still waiting to hear whether president kennedy died and on the way back on the plane she started making plans for putting her Radio Station into some sort of blind trust so they would not be accused of profiting from it so she really took over very fast. She was a good study. I like to just play off of that idea of her taking notes because this was an administration which documented itself extensively. There was a daily diary she recorded of herself. There were also the Lyndon Johnson phone tapes which many people fabulous. Who love political history are aware of and there was a naval Television Crew that followed first couple around and documented. Is this new to this administration or had this been going on for a while with president s . I think the amount of documentation is new. She didnt record every day because some days were too full but she would she had a little recording machine and on days that were too busy, she would stuff brown envelopes with menus or lists of people she had seen and would get an hour or so some day and sit down and record so the recordings are still being transcribed. Theyre wonderful. Her white house diary which people may have read is i think 800 pages but thats only an eighth of what she has on those tapes so were waiting for the rest of it to come out. There were before this recordings, of course. We have kennedy recordings. We have roosevelt recordings. But John Quincy Adams wife wrote when she was first lady the autobiography of a nobody which tells you something about her state of mind at the time so there was i think most first couples have an awareness of the magnitude of the job but Lady Bird Johnson had such a sense of history that she understood, she said she dared herself to keep a diary and she understood that was something special. Throughout this program we will see some of the video from the naval crew that followed the couple around to document their days in the white house and hear some of the quotes. This is Lady Bird Johnson on november 22, 1963, recording that first tragic day that brought them into the white house. Mrs. Kennedys dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked. That immaculate woman, it was caked with blood, her husbands blood. She always wore gloves, like she was used to them and that was somehow one of the most poignant sights, exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if i couldnt be of somebody to come in and help her change and she said, oh, no, thats all right, perhaps later ill ask for Mary Gallagher but not right now and then was something, for a person that gentle, that dignified, had an element of fierceness. She said, i want them to see what they have done to jack. It was decided that he should be sworn in there in dallas as quickly as possible. There, in the very narrow confines of the plane were jackie on his left, her hair falling in her eyes but very composed and then lyndon and then i was on his right. Judge hughes with a bible in front of him and a cluster of secret Service People and congressmen wed known a long time. Lyndon took the oath of office. What are you hearing there that people should understand be Lady Bird Johnson . Shes very specific. I had forgotten how she gets so many details and her description of that and before that when she talks about walking into the hospital and the kennedy car was still there and she saw this bundle of pink blossoms and the blood around it. Shes a very astute observer, wonderful. Wonderful writer and shes aware of that. She writes intentionally but shes clearly shes also clearly upset in that recording. You can hear it. And shes trying to both describe the situation but at the same time give homage to Jacqueline Kennedy, this very meticulous woman caked in blood, all of that to say, shes trying to tell you what was happening but not to in some way sensationalize it. For her following in mrs. Kennedys footsteps, Cokie Roberts referred to this sort of delicate dance of being respectful but needing to take control. What was the two womens relationship like . Well, Lady Bird Johnson, many people said, you must be this is a daunting act to follow. And she said, well, feel sorry for mrs. Kennedy, not for me, because i still have my husband. And i think she made a special effort not to imitate in any way some of the projects she considered, for example, beautifying the mall. Lyndon johnson advised her not to do that because the kennedys had done something similar but she was amazingly absent she didnt have envy of anybody. She seemed to consider the kennedys a different generation and i find her amazing in that regard that she knew that Jacqueline Kennedy was extremely popular and yet she knew that she had a lot to offer, too. She filled in for Jackie Kennedy many times. Thats something you have to keep in mind. There were lots of times mrs. Kennedy she was pregnant, she lost a baby, she wasnt well a lot of times, a lot of things she didnt want to do and mrs. Johnson filled in so she knew the role well and she was a quintessential washington political wife. She had been on the scene since the 1930s and she really knew it well and she had a cadre of other political wives who were just extraordinary women and they all gathered around her and that made that also made that transition somewhat easier. We should say at the outset, among those women who gathered around was your own mother. Can we talk about the friendship between your parents and the johnson . My father was first elected to congress in 1940. He was 26 and my mother was 24 and that was before world war ii so the rules were still there of calling. So you had to go calling and there was, you know, the Supreme Court on monday, the cabinet on tuesday im making up the days but the senate on wednesday, like that. And there was my mother, this 24yearold girl except people were older then than they are now so her first day of having to go calling and the horn honks outside and she goes running nd idown s Lady Bird Johnson and pauline gore, al gores mother, and they took her calling that first day and the friendship has been very warm ever since to the point, all through their husbands political lives and then when they both became widows they traveled together and had a wonderful time together. Were going to step back in time and learn more about the biography of the woman who became first lady on november 22, 1963. Before we do that, a reminder about your involvement. These programs are interesting because of your questions. We hope youll join in tonight. You can tweet us at cspans website. Were also taking questions from people on our Facebook Page and you can call in so, her biography. Where was she born and to whom . You cant really say a town because its a house outside the town which is really not much of a town, either. Karnak, texas, in 1912 december 1912, in a big house. One of the things i found in studying first ladies is how many of them married down. That is, they married into families considerably below theirs economically, socially, sometimes even education and it made a big impression on me to drive past the house where Lady Bird Johnson was born, the 17room house, and go 300 miles, near the louisiana border, drive 300 miles west and see the lowtotheground fourroom cabin where Lyndon Johnson was born so she came from a far wealthier background than she did. What were the important things to know about her childhood and what shaped her . I think the death of her mother. She was only 5 when her mother died in what i consider mysterious circumstances and she was a very lonely child although she said she wasnt but how would she know what any other childhood would be like. She had two older brothers but they were sent away to boarding schools. And they were a good bit older. A good bit older and they were sent away to boarding school. Tommy, the oldest brother, she said she never knew him. When he died in 1959 of pancreatic cancer, she said she cried harder than she cried in her life so it was a lonely childhood. Even her name, lady bird, the typical story is it came from a nurse but she says in her interview with mike gillette, that it was really two little africanamerican playmates, the children of hired help, who decided to call her that because they didnt like claudia but it was not considered acceptable to say she had africanamerican playmates so the nurse was brought in and it was attributed to the nurse, the lady bird. And an aunt was someone she ended up having to take care of so there she was, this little girl, all by herself, in this big house, with a father who was around but had no clue what to do with her and this sort of nutty old southern aunt and some playmates here and there but the big advantage to that was she became a world class reader. How important was it for southwestern women of that vintage to get an education . Was it unusual that she went to college . Yes, slightly, but by that time more women were going to college. Were not talking the 1920s into the 1930s so yes. It was more common than it was clearly a generation before that. Do we know why she was interested in journalism . I think for a lot of do you have an answer to that . She was interested in high school so it was an early interest and i think it was part of her plan to get out of that area, to get out of that part of texas. I also think for a lot of women, they could write, they had learned to write and that was something they thought they could do. My mother wanted to be a journalist, too. And they both ended up as politicians. The interesting thing about her approach to it, here she was from a wealthy family but she not only got a College Degree but also a teaching certificate and learned stenography. Thats what a girl did to prepare for all possibilities. But isnt it interesting that she felt the need to prepare for all possibilities with as much money as she had. Yes, because she had a good income. I figured she was inheriting about 7500 a year in the 1930s which is about what five School Teachers could make but her aim was to get out of there. She said some faraway place like hawaii or alaska. She went to the same Journalism School as walter cronkite. They had the same professor, singled out the same professor as a favorite. Cronkite said he was a good professor. I think his name was paul bolten and she hired him to head the news division, that same professor, when she bought the Radio Station. So i think we forget how very well trained she was as a journalist. How did she meet Lyndon Johnson . Well, by chance, supposedly, but it was certainly through a woman they both knew and they must have heard something about each other before. It was a september afternoon when lady bird had dropped into the womans office. Her name was jean barringer, a woman lady bird had grown up with although the woman was older than she and lyndon dropped by the same office on the same day and it was as lady bird says in one of the interviews, it was electric going from the first minute. And the love letters which have just the courtship letters which were released by the library last valentines day. Everybody should read them online. Just put l. B. J. Courtship letters and they were conducting a hot and heavy courtship there. And fast. She was not going to waste any time. She was either going to marry him or not. He was at the time a congressional aide. Right. So she knew she would be selecting a life in politics . I guess so. You could be an aide and not run but he clearly had ambitions and she was for those ambitions. You call it whirlwind but it seemed like he was very directed. He knew he wanted her from the gitgo. Was she encouraging this . Did she have any feelings about it . From her own oral history, she basically said, hold on here, as anybody would, and he essentially said, well, i mean, are you going to marry me or not because if youre not lets just not see each other and she didnt want to have him gone so she finally said, ok. Did her father approve . He liked lyndon but he thought it was too fast. They met on september 6 and lyndon showed up on halloween, so what is that, seven weeks later i mean, the time they had spent together which was about five days, i think, and he was ready to get married right then so even the father said this is too fast and the woman who introduced them thought it was too fast and the aunt thought it was too fast so, yes, against really all the family counsel, she went ahead. I think she said when she got in the car that saturday morning and they drove down to san antonio to get married, she didnt know whether she would get out on the way so she didnt make up her mind until 6 00 when she went down to the church. And was very young. 22 and he was 26 when they married. She wasnt quite 22, was she . She was just 21 because her birthday came afterwards so that was normal. That was a normal time to get married. Before we learn more about their political life, lets take a few calls. Beginning with james in oakland, california. I had two questions. One is, did Lady Bird Johnson have any contact with Jacqueline Kennedy after she was first lady . And did Lady Bird Johnson ever have doubts about the vietnam war . Thanks very much. Did they continue their contact after the Johnson White house began . Yes. The tax bill, when that was signed, when Lyndon Johnson signed that, he went with Lady Bird Johnson to the house of Jackie Kennedy in georgetown and gave her four pens, one for her, one for each of the kids and one for the library. I think during the white house years, the contact was rather formal. The johnsons certainly invited mrs. Kennedy back but she never came back while they were there. They gave gifts to the children. I know the first christmas, for example, they gave john jr. A fire engine. They reached out to her. After the white house, in the 1980s, after she was widowed, Lady Bird Johnson and Jacqueline Kennedy i guess we wouldnt say renewed a friendship, really established a friendship when they were both on Marthas Vineyard for periods in the summer. When you look at the documentary evidence, certainly she supported her husband publicly, but in her private materials, did you ever find doubts she expressed about the vietnam war . I never saw anything. She said if youre going to start a war, it has to be because of some big event like pearl harbor and to me that meant she thought they didnt have it in vietnam. It was so hard with all of the protests and it was so personal and that, i think, would put you in a position where you just want to support him no matter what. Michael in washington, d. C. Hi. I wanted to let you know that this program is fabulous. Thank you so much. Ive watched it all the way from the beginning. My first question is, did Lady Bird Johnson have any of the former first ladies that were living at the time obviously Jackie Kennedy didnt come back because she didnt come back until the nixon administration, but did she have any of the former first ladies back at the white house and was she the oldest longest living former first lady . Thank you very much. The longest living, we just discussed this, was beth truman. Beth truman made it to 95 and Lady Bird Johnson and betty ford were both 94 so its very close. The other question about, did other first ladies come back . I dont remember who else was around to come back. Ma