Claudua Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson
Moving into the White House on 8 December, 1963, Lady Bird Johnson's first months as First Lady were overshadowed by the mourning for President Kennedy and a groundswell of sympathy and interest in Jacqueline Kennedy. In consideration of this, Mrs. Johnson did not undertake a fully-blown public role. She did identify those projects and programs that her predecessor had begun which also interested her, and continued them, most especially efforts on behalf of White House history. She corresponded with Mrs. Kennedy, welcoming her advice on matters such as the placement of portraits or the purchase of china. President Johnson, by executive order, permanently established the Committee for the Preservation of the White House begun as an informal organization by the widow. What marked Lady Bird Johnson as unique among her predecessors was her own interest and study of the First Ladies. She had become familiar with many of their biographies through her numerous visits since the 1930's to the Smithsonian Institution exhibit of their gowns. She also would visit several presidential homes during her tenure and show as much interest in the objects associated with First Ladies as she did with those of Presidents. This had the effect of making her perhaps one of the few women to assume the position with a highly conscious sense of the public expectations, the limitations and the opportunities that came with it. "She's not elected," she reflected in 1987, "he is elected, and they are there as a team. And it's much more appropriate for her to work on projects that are a part of his Administration, a part of his aims and hopes for America."
She developed camaraderie with the wives of Cabinet members, aides and Congressional leaders. Mrs. Johnson arranged for programs and briefings of the still-almost exclusively female spouses of Congress. Esther Peterson, LBJ's special assistant on consumer affairs, credited the First Lady with raising the President's consciousness on the equal competence of women in public service and influencing his efforts on the advancement of women. On a public scale, this translated into Mrs. Johnson addressing the need for women's increased activism in civic affairs. "They can push and prod legislators. They can raise sights and set standards," she remarked in her first major speech, to the 1964 graduating class of Radcliffe College. "If you achieve the precious balance between a woman's domestic and civic life, you can do more for zest and sanity in our society than by any other achievement…"
A strong and vocal advocate of women seeking higher education, she was the recipient of honorary degrees from Middlebury College, the University of Texas, Austin (Doctor of Letters), Texas Women's University (Doctor of Laws), Williams College (Doctor of Humane Letters) and Southwestern University (Doctor of Humanities). The professional achievements of women became a touchstone of Mrs. Johnson's tenure, illustrated by her series of sixteen "Women Do-er" luncheons from 1965 to 1969. Over an afternoon meal, she would ask a women leader on a contemporary social issue to address a group of other women who worked in the same or inter-related fields, and then prompt a cross-audience dialogue. She also insisted that ordinary women who were not professionals in that given field be invited, to have their perspective included. The speakers ranged from Dr. Mary Bunting, the first woman on the Atomic Energy Commission to Judge Marjorie Lawson of the D.C. Juvenile Court.
Lady Bird Johnson recalled that it was while she listened to her husband's 1964 State of the Union Address to declare "unconditional war on poverty" that she determined to involve herself in some element of this. It came definitively in her work with the Office of Economic Development chief Sargent Shriver and his vision for a program that would provide underprivileged pre-school children with early education skills and basic medical care and nutrition. Emerging from a report issued by a panel of child development experts and initially intended as an eight-week summer program, "Project Head Start" was given enormous visibility when the First Lady supported it. She not only filmed an introductory film about the program that was broadcast nationally, and visited several programs underway that summer, but when Head Start funding was threatened, she successfully intervened to save it. As National Chair of Head Start, she hoped it would prove to be "the big breakthrough we have been seeking in education…a lifeline to families…lost in a sea of too little of everything - jobs, education, and most of all perhaps - hope." The program proved extremely successful and has remained in place for over forty years, now administered by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
In her closing White House days, Lady Bird Johnson Park, a National Park Service property, was dedicated in the Washington area in honor of the larger legacy she left to the nation. Although her effort dovetailed into earlier calls by groups such as the Sierra Club and environmentalists like Rachel Carson, the global visibility of the president's wife made the increasingly serious ecological threats not just to the United States but the world an issue about which citizens from all walks of life became more conscious. In many of her speeches, she further considered the costs of an increasingly technological society to not only the earth but humanity itself.
