Newsroom

Lady Bird remembered at service

Saturday, July 14, 2007
by W. Gardner Selby and Jason Embry
Austin American-Statesman

Lady Bird Johnson was remembered today by aides from Lyndon B. Johnson’s era in Washington and by family members that included her two saddened yet grateful daughters.Her two-hour memorial service at the Riverbend Centre, a limestone sanctuary near the Colorado River with a view of rustling oak trees and an overcast sky, opened with a brassy fanfare and closed with black-garbed singers from three Austin churches and the Huston-Tillotson University Concert Choir performing “America the Beautiful,” followed by “The Eyes of Texas” played by the University of Texas Longhorn Band. Mrs. Johnson, a native of rural East Texas, was a UT graduate.After lying in the LBJ Library and Museum — where more than 10,000 people came to pay their respects — Mrs. Johnson’s casket was placed on the sanctuary’s stage, midway between bountiful arrangements of pink and white hydrangeas, orange and yellow chrysanthemums, peachy tulips, yellow black-eyed susans and pink roses.The sanctuary fell silent as clergy and members of Mrs. Johnson’s family began the eulogies before an audience that included former presidents and first ladies, family friends and political figures from every level of government.Some 2,000 mourners were summoned to the service mostly by telephone after Mrs. Johnson died Wednesday at age 94.They included first lady Laura Bush, former presidents Clinton and Carter and four of Mrs. Johnson’s successors as first lady: Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. Betty Ford was represented by her daughter, Susan Ford Bales. The late Patricia Nixon was represented by Tricia Nixon Cox and her husband, Ed.State leaders sitting toward the front of the sanctuary included U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, with her husband, Ray, and Gov. Rick Perry, with his wife, Anita.Tom Johnson, a onetime aide to President Johnson who went on to chair the cable news network CNN, touched on her love of books and rich conversation and her passion for beautifying highways and the American countryside.“Each and every one of us has been touched in some way by the magic that was Lady Bird,” Johnson said. “Who can ever see another field of wildflowers or native plants without thinking of her?”Harry Middleton, a speechwriter for President Johnson who served as the director of the LBJ Library and Museum from 1972 to 2002, saluted her “many-splendored personality” often reflected in a fiendish sense of humor — such as her reaction to getting her picture taken in New York with costumed members of the rock group the Village People.One member of the group was dressed as a construction worker, another as a policeman and another as an Indian. Only after she went along with a singer’s request for a group snapshot did Mrs. Johnson learn who they were.She smiled, saying: “Well, I wonder if we just made the cover of their next album.”The printed program for the service included a written message from from 26 Johnson family members spanning three generations. They gave thanks to participants for “sharing in the celebration of our mother’s, grandmother’s, and great-grandmother’s life.”“Politics was not her choice for a life,” a tribute in the program states, “but she gave her loyalty to its purposes and did it with grace, elegance, and humor.”Also in the program, Liz Carpenter, who was Mrs. Johnson’s press secretary, recapped what the new first lady told reporters after her husband became president in November 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy: “I have moved on stage to a part I never rehearsed.”Carpenter wrote: “There was no need for one,” noting Mrs. Johnson’s graceful travels across the nation on behalf of her husband’s Great Society programs, including the War on Poverty, Lucinda Robb, Mrs. Johnson’s granddaughter, told the audience that at family occasions, Mrs. Johnson always wanted any courtesy and honor extended to her to be extended to Robb’s other, less famous grandmother. She also remembered when Barry Goldwater, whom LBJ beat in 1964, spoke at the LBJ Library. Mrs. Johnson skipped the speech, she told Robb, because she was afraid Goldwater was too much of a gentleman to speak completely candidly if he saw her in the audience. Instead, Mrs. Johnson threw a private dinner for her husband’s former foe afterward.“My grandmother was the most quietly confident, least needy person I have ever known,” Robb said.Harry Middleton, the former director of the LBJ Library, recalled in his eulogy the old ballad “I’ll Be Seeing You.” If the song had been about Mrs. Johnson, it would have gone something like this, Middleton said: “I’ll be seeing you in every burst of roadside bloom. In every Head Start schoolhouse room.”He continued, “I’ll be seeing her — we all will — whenever we chance upon a coffee-can geranium sitting on a window sill. When we watch strollers on the trail around Town Lake. Whenever, indeed, we know the return of spring.”Journalist and former Johnson staffer Bill Moyers recalled when a journalist told Mrs. Johnson that he pitied her for having to follow Jackie Kennedy as first lady. “Don’t pity me,” he recalled her saying. “Grieve for Mrs. Kennedy. She lost her husband. I still have my Lyndon.”Moyers said what he most admired about Mrs. Johnson was her courage. He recalled hostile crowds she faced while campaigning with her husband in 1960, and, during the 1964 campaign after he signed the Civil Rights Act, the angry crowds she faced all around the South, which she urged her husband not to give up on.“I cannot all these years later do justice to what she faced, the boos, the jeers, the hecklers,” he said.Moyers concluded that she “served the beauty in democracy as she did the beauty in nature and the beauty in us. And right to the end of her long and bountiful life, she inspired us to serve them, too.”The last family members to speak at the service were Mrs. Johnson’s two daughters.“Mother didn’t fear death at all,” said Lynda Robb. “She wanted to talk all about what she wanted at her service.” And she wanted a celebration, Robb said.Robb called her mother her best friend, the one with whom she could share secrets and talk to about boyfriends.“Mother, the angels are here to receive you,” Robb said. “As you always told us, know that you are loved.”Luci Baines Johnson said Mrs. Johnson recalled of her life, “I made a lot of little lists and I scratched them off.”“Duty was her oxygen,” Luci Baines Johnson said, noting that her mother would give her grandchildren Christmas checks made out to the charities of their choice.“Until the day mama went to heaven, her passion was the Wildflower Center,” she said.She recalled that they spent part of almost every day together in Mrs. Johnson’s final years, whether at the family’s ranch or walking around Town Lake or at the Wildflower Center in Austin that now bears Mrs. Johnson’s name.“There is a hole in all of our hearts as we release you, mother, for we have loved every moment with you.”Following the service, state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, said he was overwhelmed by the warmth of Mrs. Johnson’s family.“She was the center of palpable love,” Watson said. “This was a woman who just enhanced everything she touched.”