Lady Bird Johnson
Wikipedia
First Ladies of the United States for Middle School Readers
Claudia Alta (Lady Bird) Johnson (December 22, 1912 – July 11, 2007) was an American socialite and the First Lady of the United States as the wife of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. She also served as the Second Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963.
Notably well-educated for a woman of her era, she proved a capable manager and a successful investor. After marrying Lyndon B. Johnson in 1934 when he was a political hopeful in Austin, Texas, she used a modest inheritance to bankroll his congressional campaign and then ran his office while he served in the Navy. She bought a radio station, and, later, a television station which generated revenues that made the Johnsons into millionaires.
As First Lady, she broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour.
Johnson was an advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways ("Where flowers bloom, so does hope"). The Highway Beautification Act was informally known as "Lady Bird's Bill." She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honors bestowed upon a US civilian.
Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22, 1912, in Karnack, Texas, a town in Harrison County, near the eastern state line with Louisiana. 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 was named for her mother's brother Claud. During her infancy, her nursemaid, Alice Tittle, said that she was as "purty as a ladybird." Opinions differ about whether the name refers to a bird or a ladybird beetle, the latter of which is commonly referred to as a "ladybug" in North America. The nickname virtually replaced her first name for the rest of her life. Her father and siblings called her Lady, and her husband called her Bird-the name she used on her marriage license.
Her father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, was a sharecropper's son. He became a wealthy businessman, and owned 15,000 acres of cotton and two general stores. "My father was a very strong character, to put it mildly," his daughter once said. "He lived by his own rules. It was a whole feudal way of life, really."
Her mother, born Minnie Lee Pattillo, 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.
Lady Bird had two elder brothers, Thomas Jefferson Jr. and Antonio, also known as Tony. Her widowed father married twice more. His second wife was Beulah Taylor, a bookkeeper at a general store. His third wife was Ruth Scroggins, whom he married in 1937.
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. According to Lady Bird, her 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." Lady Bird was a shy and quiet girl who spent much of her youth alone outdoors.
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. During her senior year, when she realized that she had the highest grades in her class, she "purposely allowed her grades to slip" so that she would not have to give the valedictorian or salutatorian speech.
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. It influenced her to "convert to the Episcopal faith," although she waited five years to be confirmed.
After graduating from St. Mary's in May 1930, Lady Bird toyed with the idea of going back to Alabama. Another friend from Marshall was going to the University of Texas, so she chartered a plane to Austin to join her. As the plane landed, she was awed by the sight of a field covered with bluebonnets and instantly fell in love with the city. 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., where they peered through the fence at the White House. Dallek described Lady Bird as having undergone a boost in her self-confidence through her years at the college. Her time marked a departure from her timid behavior in her youth.
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 and Luci Baines. 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.
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.
Lady Bird sometimes served as a mediating force between her willful husband and those he encountered. On one occasion after Lyndon had clashed with Dan Rather, then a young Houston, Texas, reporter, Lady Bird followed Rather in her car. Stopping him, she invited him to return and have some punch, explaining, "That's just the way Lyndon sometimes is."
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, despite Lyndon's objections. She reminded him that she could do as she wished with her inheritance. The station, KTBC-TV/7, was Austin's monopoly VHF franchise and generated revenues that made the Johnsons millionaires. Over the years, journalists have revealed that Lyndon used his influence in the Senate to influence the Federal Communications Commission into granting the monopoly license, which was in Lady Bird's name.
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.
John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate for the 1960 election. At Kennedy's request, Lady Bird took an expanded role during the campaign, as his wife Jacqueline was pregnant with their second child. Over 71 days, Lady Bird traveled 35,000 miles through 11 states and appeared at 150 events. Kennedy and Johnson won the election that November, with Lady Bird helping the Democratic ticket carry seven Southern states.
Reflecting later, Lady Bird said that the years her husband served as Vice President and she as Second Lady was "a very different period of our lives." Nationally, the two had a kind of celebrity, but they both found the office of Vice President to lack power.
As the Vice President's wife, Lady Bird often served as a substitute for Jacqueline Kennedy at official events and functions. Within her first year as Second Lady, she had substituted for Mrs. Kennedy at more than 50 events, roughly one per week. This experience prepared Lady Bird for the following challenges of her unexpected years as First Lady.
On November 22, 1963, the Johnsons were accompanying the Kennedys in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated; they were two cars behind the President in his motorcade. Lyndon was sworn in as President on Air Force One two hours after Kennedy died, with Lady Bird and Jacqueline Kennedy by his side. Afterward, Lady Bird created a tape on which she recorded her memories of the assassination, saying it was "primarily as a form of therapy to help me over the shock and horror of the experience." She submitted a transcript of the tape to the Warren Commission as testimony.
In the days following the assassination, Lady Bird worked with Jacqueline Kennedy on the transition of her husband to the White House. While having great respect for Jacqueline and finding her strong in the aftermath of the murder, Lady Bird believed from the start of her tenure as First Lady that she would be unfavorably compared to her immediate predecessor. On her last day in the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy left Lady Bird a note in which she promised she would "be happy" there.
As First Lady, Lady Bird started a capital beautification project. 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."
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. Her press secretary from 1963 to 1969 was Liz Carpenter, a fellow alumna of the University of Texas. As a mark of changing times, Carpenter was the first professional newswoman to become press secretary to a First Lady; she also served as Lady Bird's staff director. Lady Bird's tenure as First Lady marked the beginning of the hiring of employees in the East Wing to work specifically on the First Lady's projects.
During the 1964 election, Lady Bird traveled through eight Southern states in her own train to promote the Civil Rights Act, at one point giving 45 speeches over five days. It was the first solo whistle-stop tour by a First Lady. President Johnson initially said he would turn down the Democratic Party nomination for president, having been unhappy during his service in President Kennedy's administration and believing the Party did not want him. Although aides could not sway him, the First Lady convinced him otherwise, reassuring him of his worthiness and saying that if he dropped out, the Republicans would likely take the White House.
Toward the end of Johnson's first term, Lady Bird was anxious for her husband to leave office. In September 1967, Lady Bird voiced her concerns that a second term would be poor for his health. health concerns may have been one of reasons why President Johnson decided not to seek re-election.
In 1970, Lady Bird published A White House Diary, her intimate, behind-the-scenes account of her husband's presidency spanning November 22, 1963, to January 20, 1969. Beginning with President Kennedy's assassination, she recorded the momentous events of her times, including the Great Society's War on Poverty; the national civil rights and social protest movements; her activism on behalf of the environment; and the Vietnam War. Johnson was acquainted with a long span of fellow First Ladies, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Laura Bush. She was protected by the United States Secret Service for 44 years, longer than anyone else in history.
Former President Johnson died of a heart attack in 1973, four years after leaving office. When he suffered the heart attack, Lady Bird was in a meeting, and the former president had died when she reached him. She arranged for the body to lie in state at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum the following day, and the body was laid to rest two days later. After his death, Lady Bird took time to travel and spent more time with her daughters. She remained in the public eye, honoring her husband and other presidents. She entertained the wives of governors at the LBJ Presidential Library.
In 1988, Lady Bird convened with three other former first ladies-Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, and Pat Nixon-at the "Women and the Constitution" conference at The Carter Center to assess that document's impact on women. The conference featured over 150 speakers and 1,500 attendees from all 50 states and 10 foreign countries. The conference was meant to promote awareness on sexual inequality in other countries, and fight against it in America.
In 1986, Lady Bird's health began to fail. She suffered her first fainting spell that year while attending a funeral, and entered St. David's Community Hospital for observation. She also injured her left knee in a fall the day before her hospitalization. In August 1993, she suffered a stroke and became legally blind due to macular degeneration. In 1999, she was hospitalized for a second fainting spell. In 2002, she suffered a second, more severe, stroke, which left her unable to speak normally or walk without assistance. In 2005, she spent a few days in an Austin hospital for treatment of bronchitis. In February 2006, Lynda Johnson Robb told a gathering at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, that her mother was totally blind and was "not in very good health." In June 2007, she spent six days in Seton Hospital in Austin after suffering from a low-grade fever.
Lady Bird Johnson died at home on July 11, 2007, at 4:18 PM from natural causes at the age of 94, attended by family members and Catholic priest Father Robert Scott.
Lady Bird's funeral was a public event. On July 15, 2007, a ceremonial cortège left the Texas State Capitol. The public was invited to line the route through downtown Austin on Congress Avenue and along the shores of Lady Bird Lake to pay their respects. The public part of the funeral procession ended in Johnson City. The family had a private burial at the Johnson family cemetery in Stonewall, where she was buried next to her husband, who had died 34 years earlier. Unlike previous funerals for first ladies, the pallbearers came from members of the armed forces.
Notably well-educated for a woman of her era, she proved a capable manager and a successful investor. After marrying Lyndon B. Johnson in 1934 when he was a political hopeful in Austin, Texas, she used a modest inheritance to bankroll his congressional campaign and then ran his office while he served in the Navy. She bought a radio station, and, later, a television station which generated revenues that made the Johnsons into millionaires.
As First Lady, she broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour.
Johnson was an advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways ("Where flowers bloom, so does hope"). The Highway Beautification Act was informally known as "Lady Bird's Bill." She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honors bestowed upon a US civilian.
Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22, 1912, in Karnack, Texas, a town in Harrison County, near the eastern state line with Louisiana. 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 was named for her mother's brother Claud. During her infancy, her nursemaid, Alice Tittle, said that she was as "purty as a ladybird." Opinions differ about whether the name refers to a bird or a ladybird beetle, the latter of which is commonly referred to as a "ladybug" in North America. The nickname virtually replaced her first name for the rest of her life. Her father and siblings called her Lady, and her husband called her Bird-the name she used on her marriage license.
Her father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, was a sharecropper's son. He became a wealthy businessman, and owned 15,000 acres of cotton and two general stores. "My father was a very strong character, to put it mildly," his daughter once said. "He lived by his own rules. It was a whole feudal way of life, really."
Her mother, born Minnie Lee Pattillo, 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.
Lady Bird had two elder brothers, Thomas Jefferson Jr. and Antonio, also known as Tony. Her widowed father married twice more. His second wife was Beulah Taylor, a bookkeeper at a general store. His third wife was Ruth Scroggins, whom he married in 1937.
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. According to Lady Bird, her 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." Lady Bird was a shy and quiet girl who spent much of her youth alone outdoors.
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. During her senior year, when she realized that she had the highest grades in her class, she "purposely allowed her grades to slip" so that she would not have to give the valedictorian or salutatorian speech.
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. It influenced her to "convert to the Episcopal faith," although she waited five years to be confirmed.
After graduating from St. Mary's in May 1930, Lady Bird toyed with the idea of going back to Alabama. Another friend from Marshall was going to the University of Texas, so she chartered a plane to Austin to join her. As the plane landed, she was awed by the sight of a field covered with bluebonnets and instantly fell in love with the city. 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., where they peered through the fence at the White House. Dallek described Lady Bird as having undergone a boost in her self-confidence through her years at the college. Her time marked a departure from her timid behavior in her youth.
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 and Luci Baines. 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.
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.
Lady Bird sometimes served as a mediating force between her willful husband and those he encountered. On one occasion after Lyndon had clashed with Dan Rather, then a young Houston, Texas, reporter, Lady Bird followed Rather in her car. Stopping him, she invited him to return and have some punch, explaining, "That's just the way Lyndon sometimes is."
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, despite Lyndon's objections. She reminded him that she could do as she wished with her inheritance. The station, KTBC-TV/7, was Austin's monopoly VHF franchise and generated revenues that made the Johnsons millionaires. Over the years, journalists have revealed that Lyndon used his influence in the Senate to influence the Federal Communications Commission into granting the monopoly license, which was in Lady Bird's name.
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.
John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate for the 1960 election. At Kennedy's request, Lady Bird took an expanded role during the campaign, as his wife Jacqueline was pregnant with their second child. Over 71 days, Lady Bird traveled 35,000 miles through 11 states and appeared at 150 events. Kennedy and Johnson won the election that November, with Lady Bird helping the Democratic ticket carry seven Southern states.
Reflecting later, Lady Bird said that the years her husband served as Vice President and she as Second Lady was "a very different period of our lives." Nationally, the two had a kind of celebrity, but they both found the office of Vice President to lack power.
As the Vice President's wife, Lady Bird often served as a substitute for Jacqueline Kennedy at official events and functions. Within her first year as Second Lady, she had substituted for Mrs. Kennedy at more than 50 events, roughly one per week. This experience prepared Lady Bird for the following challenges of her unexpected years as First Lady.
On November 22, 1963, the Johnsons were accompanying the Kennedys in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated; they were two cars behind the President in his motorcade. Lyndon was sworn in as President on Air Force One two hours after Kennedy died, with Lady Bird and Jacqueline Kennedy by his side. Afterward, Lady Bird created a tape on which she recorded her memories of the assassination, saying it was "primarily as a form of therapy to help me over the shock and horror of the experience." She submitted a transcript of the tape to the Warren Commission as testimony.
In the days following the assassination, Lady Bird worked with Jacqueline Kennedy on the transition of her husband to the White House. While having great respect for Jacqueline and finding her strong in the aftermath of the murder, Lady Bird believed from the start of her tenure as First Lady that she would be unfavorably compared to her immediate predecessor. On her last day in the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy left Lady Bird a note in which she promised she would "be happy" there.
As First Lady, Lady Bird started a capital beautification project. 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."
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. Her press secretary from 1963 to 1969 was Liz Carpenter, a fellow alumna of the University of Texas. As a mark of changing times, Carpenter was the first professional newswoman to become press secretary to a First Lady; she also served as Lady Bird's staff director. Lady Bird's tenure as First Lady marked the beginning of the hiring of employees in the East Wing to work specifically on the First Lady's projects.
During the 1964 election, Lady Bird traveled through eight Southern states in her own train to promote the Civil Rights Act, at one point giving 45 speeches over five days. It was the first solo whistle-stop tour by a First Lady. President Johnson initially said he would turn down the Democratic Party nomination for president, having been unhappy during his service in President Kennedy's administration and believing the Party did not want him. Although aides could not sway him, the First Lady convinced him otherwise, reassuring him of his worthiness and saying that if he dropped out, the Republicans would likely take the White House.
Toward the end of Johnson's first term, Lady Bird was anxious for her husband to leave office. In September 1967, Lady Bird voiced her concerns that a second term would be poor for his health. health concerns may have been one of reasons why President Johnson decided not to seek re-election.
In 1970, Lady Bird published A White House Diary, her intimate, behind-the-scenes account of her husband's presidency spanning November 22, 1963, to January 20, 1969. Beginning with President Kennedy's assassination, she recorded the momentous events of her times, including the Great Society's War on Poverty; the national civil rights and social protest movements; her activism on behalf of the environment; and the Vietnam War. Johnson was acquainted with a long span of fellow First Ladies, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Laura Bush. She was protected by the United States Secret Service for 44 years, longer than anyone else in history.
Former President Johnson died of a heart attack in 1973, four years after leaving office. When he suffered the heart attack, Lady Bird was in a meeting, and the former president had died when she reached him. She arranged for the body to lie in state at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum the following day, and the body was laid to rest two days later. After his death, Lady Bird took time to travel and spent more time with her daughters. She remained in the public eye, honoring her husband and other presidents. She entertained the wives of governors at the LBJ Presidential Library.
In 1988, Lady Bird convened with three other former first ladies-Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, and Pat Nixon-at the "Women and the Constitution" conference at The Carter Center to assess that document's impact on women. The conference featured over 150 speakers and 1,500 attendees from all 50 states and 10 foreign countries. The conference was meant to promote awareness on sexual inequality in other countries, and fight against it in America.
In 1986, Lady Bird's health began to fail. She suffered her first fainting spell that year while attending a funeral, and entered St. David's Community Hospital for observation. She also injured her left knee in a fall the day before her hospitalization. In August 1993, she suffered a stroke and became legally blind due to macular degeneration. In 1999, she was hospitalized for a second fainting spell. In 2002, she suffered a second, more severe, stroke, which left her unable to speak normally or walk without assistance. In 2005, she spent a few days in an Austin hospital for treatment of bronchitis. In February 2006, Lynda Johnson Robb told a gathering at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, that her mother was totally blind and was "not in very good health." In June 2007, she spent six days in Seton Hospital in Austin after suffering from a low-grade fever.
Lady Bird Johnson died at home on July 11, 2007, at 4:18 PM from natural causes at the age of 94, attended by family members and Catholic priest Father Robert Scott.
Lady Bird's funeral was a public event. On July 15, 2007, a ceremonial cortège left the Texas State Capitol. The public was invited to line the route through downtown Austin on Congress Avenue and along the shores of Lady Bird Lake to pay their respects. The public part of the funeral procession ended in Johnson City. The family had a private burial at the Johnson family cemetery in Stonewall, where she was buried next to her husband, who had died 34 years earlier. Unlike previous funerals for first ladies, the pallbearers came from members of the armed forces.