Estes Kefauver
United States Senator from Tennessee
In office January 3, 1949 – August 10, 1963
Preceded by	A. Thomas Stewart
Succeeded by	Herbert S. Walters
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee's 3rd district
In office September 13, 1939 – January 3, 1949
Preceded by	Sam D. McReynolds
Succeeded by	James B. Frazier, Jr.
Personal details
Born	Carey Estes Kefauver (1903-07-26)July 26, 1903 Madisonville, Tennessee
Died	August 10, 1963(1963-08-10) (aged 60) Bethesda, Maryland
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Nancy Kefauver (1911-1967)
Religion	Baptist

Carey Estes Kefauver ( /ˈɛstɨs ˈkiːfɔːvər/;^[1] July 26, 1903 – August 10, 1963) was an American politician from Tennessee. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1939 to 1949 and in the Senate from 1949 to his death in 1963.

After leading a much-publicized investigation into organized crime in the early 1950s, he twice sought his party's nomination for President of the United States. In 1956, he was selected by the Democratic National Convention to be the running mate of presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Still holding his U.S. Senate seat after the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket lost to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket in 1956, Kefauver was named chair of the U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee in 1957 and served as its chairman until his death.

Early life[link]

Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee, to Robert Cooke Kefauver and Phredonia Bradford Estes. Robert Kefauver was a hardware manager. Estes attended the University of Tennessee from 1922 to 1924, receiving a bachelor of arts degree and being initiated into the Lambda Chapter of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. After a year of teaching mathematics and coaching football at a Hot Springs, Arkansas, high school, he attended Yale University, from which he received an LL.B. cum laude in 1927. For the next dozen years Kefauver practiced law in Chattanooga, first with the firm of Cooke, Swaney & Cooke, as a partner in Sizer, Chambliss & Kefauver, and later in the firm of Duggan, McDonald, & Kefauver. In 1935 he married Nancy Pigott of Glasgow, Scotland, eight years his junior, whom he had met during her visit to relatives in Chattanooga. They raised four children, one of them adopted. Mrs. Kefauver died in 1967.^[2]

Aroused by his role as attorney for the Chattanooga News, Kefauver became interested in local politics and sought election to the Tennessee Senate in 1938. He lost but in 1939 spent two months as Finance and Taxation Commissioner under the newly-elected governor Prentice Cooper. When Congressman Sam D. McReynolds of Tennessee's 3rd district, which included Chattanooga, died in 1939, Kefauver was elected to succeed him in the House.

Kefauver in Congress[link]

In the House[link]

Following his election to the House of Representatives as a Democrat, he was reelected four more times.

As a member of the House during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's time in office, Kefauver distinguished himself from the other Democrats in Tennessee's congressional delegation, most of whom were conservatives, by becoming a staunch supporter of the President's New Deal legislation. In particular, he backed the controversial Tennessee Valley Authority and was best known for his successful bid to rebuff the efforts of Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar to gain political control over the agency. As a member of the House, "Kefauver began to manifest his concern over the growing concentration of economic power in the United States",^[3] concentrating much of his legislative efforts on congressional reform and anti-monopoly measures. He chaired, for instance, the House Select Committee on Small Business, which investigated economic concentration in the U.S. business world in 1946. That same year, Kefauver also introduced legislation to plug loopholes in the Clayton Antitrust Act.

In a May 1948 article that appeared in the American Economic Review, Kefauver also proposed that more staff and money be allocated to the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department and to the Federal Trade Commission; that new legislation to make it easier to prosecute big corporations be enacted; and that the danger of monopoly should be publicized more.

The Kefauver investigation into television and juvenile delinquency in the mid 1950's led to an even more intensive investigation in the early 1960s. The new probe came about because people were increasingly concerned over violence with juveniles, and the possibility that this behavior was related to violent television programs.^[4]

His progressive stances on the issues put Kefauver in direct competition with E. H. Crump, the former U.S. congressman, mayor of Memphis and boss of the state's Democratic Party, when he chose to seek the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1948. During the primary, Crump and his allies accused Kefauver of being a "fellow traveler" and of working for the "pinkos and communists" with the stealth of a raccoon. In a televised speech given in Memphis, in which he responded to such charges, Kefauver put on a coonskin cap and proudly proclaimed, "I may be a pet coon, but I'm not Boss Crump's pet coon." After he went on to win both the primary and the election, he adopted the cap as his trademark and wore it in every successive campaign.

Kefauver was unique in Tennessee politics in his outspoken liberal views, a stand that established a permanent bloc of opposition to him in the state. Kefauver's success despite his liberal views was predicated largely on his support by the Nashville Tennessean, a consistently liberal newspaper that served as a focus for anti-Crump sentiment in the state. His constituency included many prominent citizens whose views were considerably less liberal than his but who admired him for his integrity.

Despite opposition from the Crump machine, Kefauver won the Democratic nomination, which in those days was tantamount to election in Tennessee. His victory is widely seen as the beginning of the end for the Crump machine's influence in statewide politics. Once in the Senate, Kefauver began to make a name for himself as a crusader for consumer protection laws, antitrust legislation, and civil rights for African Americans. On civil rights, he was ambivalent: he admitted later that he had difficulty adjusting to the idea of racial integration, and in 1960 he held out to the last in favor of permitting cross-examination of black complainants in voting rights cases. But he did support the civil rights program generally and was a consistent supporter of organized labor and other movements considered liberal in the South at that time.

In the Senate[link]

Overview[link]

After being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, Kefauver guided the Celler–Kefauver Act of 1950, which amended the Clayton Act by plugging loopholes allowing a corporation to purchase a competing firm's assets, through the U.S. Senate. Between 1957 and 1963, his U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee investigated concentration in the U.S. economy, industry by industry, and it issued a report exposing administrative, monopoly prices in the steel, automotive, bread and pharmaceutical industries. In May 1963, Kefauver's subcommittee concluded that within monopolized U.S. industries no real price competition existed anymore and also recommended that General Motors be broken up into competing firms.

Kefauver's Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee also held hearings on the pharmaceutical industry between 1959 and 1963 that led to enactment of his most famous legislative achievement, the Kefauver-Harris Drug Act of 1962, after Kefauver expressed shock about the excess profits that U.S. drug companies were taking in at the expense of U.S. consumers. Some of what Kefauver's hearings on the U.S. pharmaceutical industry revealed includes the following:

"Witnesses told of conflicts of interest for the AMA (whose journal, for example, received millions of dollars in drug advertising and was, therefore, reluctant to challenge claims made by drug company ads)…The drug companies themselves were shown to be engaged in frenzied advertising campaigns designed to sell trade name versions of drugs that could otherwise be prescribed under generic names at a fraction of the cost; this competition, in turn, had led to the marketing of new drugs that were no improvements on drugs already on the market but, nevertheless, heralded as dramatic breakthroughs without proper concern for either effectiveness or safety."^[5]

At that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had limited authority to require efficacy standards or disclose risks. Kevauver was accused of expanding the power of government excessively, interfering with the freedom of doctors and patients, and threatening the viability of the pharmaceutical industry. His legislation seemed likely to fail. However, at the end of 1961, European and Australian doctors reported that an epidemic of children born with deformities of their arms and legs was caused by their use of thalidomide, which was heavily marketed to pregnant women.^[6]

These positions made him even more unpopular with his state party's machine than ever before, especially after he, fellow Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas became the only three southern Senators to refuse to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto in 1956. In fact, these unpopular positions, combined with his reputation as a maverick with a penchant for sanctimony, earned him so much enmity even from other Senators that one Democratic insider felt compelled to dub him "the most hated man in Congress."

Kefauver also led hearings that targeted indecent publications and pornography. Among his targets were pin-ups, including Bettie Page, and the magazines that featured them.^[7]

Kefauver Committee[link]

In 1950, Kefauver headed a U.S. Senate committee investigating organized crime. The committee, officially known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, was popularly known as the Kefauver Committee or the Kefauver hearings. The Committee held hearings in fourteen cities and heard testimony from over 600 witnesses. Many of the witnesses were high-profile crime bosses, including such well-known names as Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, the latter making himself famous by refusing to allow his face to be filmed during his questioning and then staging a much-publicized walkout. A number of politicians also appeared before the committee and saw their careers ruined. Among them were former Governor Harold G. Hoffman of New Jersey and Mayor William O'Dwyer of New York City. The committee's hearings, which were televised live just as many Americans were buying televisions, made Kefauver nationally famous and introduced many Americans to the concept of a criminal organization known as the Mafia for the first time ever.^[8] In fact, in 1951, Kefauver appeared as a celebrity guest on the new game show What's My Line? discussing the hearings briefly with the panel, showing how popular these hearings were with early television viewers.

Although the hearings boosted Kefauver's political prospects, they helped to end the twelve-year Senate career of Democratic Majority Leader Scott Lucas. In a tight 1950 reelection race against former Illinois Representative Everett Dirksen, Lucas urged Kefauver to keep his investigation away from an emerging Chicago police scandal until after election day, but Kefauver refused. Election-eve publication of stolen secret committee documents hurt the Democratic Party in Cook County, cost Lucas the election, and gave Dirksen national prominence as the man who defeated the Senate majority leader.

1952 election[link]

Kefauver won all but three primaries, but failed to win nomination

  No primary

  W. Averell Harriman

  Hubert Humphrey

  Estes Kefauver

  Richard Russell Jr.

In the 1952 presidential election, Kefauver decided to offer himself as a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Campaigning in his coonskin cap, often by dogsled, Kefauver made history when, in an electrifying victory in the New Hampshire primary, he defeated President Harry S. Truman, the sitting President of the United States, prompting Truman to cease campaigning for renomination. Although Kefauver would go on to win 12 of the 15 primaries that were held that year, losing three to "favorite son" candidates, primaries were not, at that time, the main method of delegate selection for the national convention. Kefauver, therefore, entered the convention a few hundred votes shy of the needed majority. In the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Kefauver received 3.1 million votes, while the eventual 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, received only 78,000 votes. Yet "the Kefauver campaign for the nomination in 1952 became the classic example of how presidential primary victories do not automatically lead to the nomination itself."^[5] Although he began the balloting far ahead of the other declared candidates, Kefauver eventually lost the nomination to Stevenson, the choice of the Democratic Party political bosses. Stevenson, a one-term governor who was up for reelection in 1952, had previously resisted calls to enter the race, but he was nominated anyway by a "Draft Stevenson" movement that had been energized by his eloquent keynote speech on the opening night of the convention. He would go on to lose the general election to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in a landslide.

1956 election[link]

Kefauver narrowly lost primaries and nomination to Stevenson again

Stevenson/Kefauver ticket won only seven southern states against incumbents Eisenhower/Nixon

In 1956, Kefauver again sought the Democratic presidential nomination and, initially, he again won some presidential primaries. In the March 13, 1956, New Hampshire primary, for instance, Kefauver defeated Adlai Stevenson 21,701 to 3,806. A week later, Kefauver again defeated Stevenson in the Minnesota primary, winning 245,885 votes compared to Stevenson's 186,723 votes. Kefauver was also victorious in the Wisconsin primary.

By April 1956, "it appeared that Kefauver was on his way to a primary sweep matching the spectacular performance in 1952."^[5] Stevenson, however, was able to defeat Kefauver in the 1956 Oregon, Florida and California primaries and, overall, ended up winning more primary votes than Kefauver in 1956, before being re-nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention.

In 1956, Kefauver received active competition not only from Stevenson, but also from Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York, who was endorsed by former President Truman. Though Kefauver once again won the New Hampshire primary and upset all predictions by winning the Minnesota primary, he found himself hopelessly outmatched by Stevenson's lead in endorsements and fund raising. After a devastating loss in the California primary, Kefauver suspended his campaign.

Kefauver's hopes were rekindled, however, when Stevenson decided to let the delegates themselves pick his vice-presidential nominee, instead of having the choice dictated to them. Although Stevenson preferred Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts as his running mate, he did not attempt to influence the balloting for him in any way, and Kefauver eventually received the nomination. Stevenson went on to lose the election to Eisenhower once again, this time by an even bigger margin than in 1952.

Later career[link]

After his 1956 defeat, Kefauver was considered the front-runner for the 1960 Democratic nomination. In an attempt to gain more public exposure, Kefauver capitalized on a nascent public campaign to restrict the sale of switchblade knives at the federal level by introducing legislation in 1957 to ban the sale or possession of such knives. The senator timed his hearings on the legislation to coincide with a series of lurid articles in the Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals of the day on the use of switchblades by juvenile delinquents and gangs. At each hearing the senator would display a bizarre array of confiscated bayonets, trench knives, daggers, and switchblades, all of which he described to the press as 'switchblade knives'. However, Kefauver's switchblade bill failed, in large part due to residual bad feelings between Kefauver and other senators. In 1959, the senator let it be known that he was not going to campaign a third time for the presidential nomination. He continued to represent Tennessee in the U.S. Senate; the abandonment of presidential ambitions led to his most productive years as a senator. While he largely faded from the public eye, he earned the respect of congressional colleagues from both parties for his independence and his sponsorship of a number of important foreign and domestic legislative measures.

When he ran for reelection to a third term in 1960, his first and, it would turn out, last attempt at running for office after refusing to sign the Southern Manifesto, he faced staunch opposition for renomination from his party's still-thriving pro-segregation wing, but he won the primary decisively, 64% vs.34% for his opponent, Tip Taylor. During the general election itself, polls showed Kefauver's support to be near-nonexistent and it was later said that, on election day, no one outside of Kefauver's family could be found who would admit to having voted for him. Nevertheless, Kefauver swamped his opponent, winning nearly 72% of the vote.

In 1962, Kefauver, who had become known to the public at large as the chief enemy of crooked businessmen in the Senate, introduced legislation that would eventually pass into law as the Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act. This bill, which Kefauver dubbed his "finest achievement" in consumer protection, imposed controls on the pharmaceutical industry that required that drug companies disclose to doctors the side-effects of their products, allow their products to be sold as generic drugs after having held the patent on them for a certain period of time, and be able to prove on demand that their products were, in fact, effective and safe.

Death[link]

On August 8, 1963, Kefauver, a heavy smoker and drinker,^[9] suffered what was reported as a 'mild'^[10] heart attack on the floor of the Senate while attempting to place an antitrust amendment into a NASA appropriations bill that would have required that companies benefiting financially from the outcome of research subsidized by NASA reimburse NASA for the cost of the research. Two days after the attack, Kefauver died in his sleep in Bethesda, Maryland, of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.^[11] He was interred in the family cemetery in Madisonville. That November, President Kennedy named his widow the first head of the new Art in Embassies Program—Kennedy's last appointment.

The federal courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee was renamed the Estes Kefauver Federal Building and United States Courthouse in his honor.^[12]

Electoral history[link]

1956 United States Presidential Election (Vice President's seat)

References in Popular Culture[link]

In the 1990s NBC television show Mad About You, Paul Reiser's character often used the name "Estes Kefauver" as an answer to any question he was told to guess about.

See also[link]

• Kefauver hearings
• United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency
• Comics Code Authority

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster. The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen by Brad Lewis. (Enigma Books: New York, 2007. ISBN 978-1-929631-65-0)
• "Kefauver, Estes" in American National Biography. American Council of Learned Societies, 2000.

External links[link]

• Kefauver Committee reports
• University of Tennessee Press
• Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
• NNDB
• The Columbia Encyclopedia
• Burial site of Estes Kefauver at Find A Grave
• A film clip "Longines Chronoscope with Sen. Estes Kefauver (February 11, 1952)" is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]

v t e United States Senators from Tennessee Class 1 Cocke A. Jackson Smith J. Anderson Campbell Eaton Grundy Foster Grundy Nicholson Foster Turney Jones Johnson Patterson Brownlow Johnson Key Bailey H. Jackson Whitthorne Bate Frazier Lea McKellar Gore, Sr. Brock III Sasser Frist Corker Class 2 Blount J. Anderson Cocke Smith Whiteside Campbell Wharton Williams A. Jackson White A. Anderson Jarnagin Bell Nicholson Fowler Cooper Harris Turley Carmack Taylor Sanders Webb Shields Tyson Brock I Hull Bachman Berry Stewart Kefauver Walters Bass Baker Gore, Jr. Mathews Thompson Alexander

Lady Bird Johnson
First Lady of the United States
In office November 22, 1963 – January 20, 1969
Preceded by	Jackie Kennedy
Succeeded by	Pat Nixon
Second Lady of the United States
In office January 20, 1961 – November 22, 1963
Preceded by	Pat Nixon
Succeeded by	Muriel Buck Humphrey
Personal details
Born	(1912-12-22)December 22, 1912 Karnack, Texas, U.S.
Died	July 11, 2007(2007-07-11) (aged 94) West Lake Hills, Texas, U.S.
Resting place	Johnson Family Cemetery Stonewall, Texas
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Lyndon B. Johnson
Children	Lynda and Luci
Alma mater	University of Texas
Occupation	First Lady of the United States, entrepreneur
Religion	Episcopalian
Signature

Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor Johnson (December 22, 1912 – July 11, 2007)^[1] was First Lady of the United States (1963-69) during the presidency of her husband Lyndon B. Johnson.

Notably well educated for her time, she proved a capable manager and a shrewd investor. After marrying LBJ 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 was serving in the Navy. Next, she bought a radio station and then a TV station, which would soon make them millionaires. As First Lady, she broke new ground by liaising directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour.

Johnson was a lifelong advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways ("Where flowers bloom, so does hope") and the Highway Beautification Act was informally known as Lady Bird's Bill. She was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest US civilian honors.

Early life[link]

A portrait of Lady Bird Taylor at about age three

The Brick House, Lady Bird Johnson's birthplace and childhood home in Karnack, Texas.

Claudia Alta Taylor was born in Karnack, Texas, a town in Harrison County, near the state's border with Louisiana.^[2] Her birthplace was "The Brick House," an antebellum plantation mansion on the outskirts of town, which her father had purchased shortly before her birth.^[3] Nearly all of both her maternal and paternal forebears had arrived in the Virginia Colony during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Her father was a native of Alabama and primarily of English ancestry with small amounts of Welsh and Danish; her mother was also a native of Alabama and of English and Scottish descent.^{[citation needed]}

Though she was named for her mother's brother Claud,^[4] during her infancy, her nurse, Alice Tittle,^[5][6] commented, she was as "purty as a ladybird,"^[7][8] which is a brightly colored beetle.^[5] That nickname virtually replaced her actual first name for the rest of her life. Her father and siblings called her Lady,^[9] though her husband called her Bird, which is the name she used on her marriage license. During her teenage years, her schoolmates had called her Bird, though mockingly, since she reportedly was not fond of the name.^[9] Her father was Thomas Jefferson Taylor (August 29, 1874 – October 22, 1960), a sharecropper's son who became a wealthy businessman and the owner of 15,000 acres (6,070 ha) 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."^[6]

Her mother was the former Minnie Lee Pattillo (1874–1918), an opera lover who felt out of place in Karnack and who was often in "poor emotional and physical health."^[4] When Lady Bird was five years old, Minnie, while pregnant, fell down a flight of stairs and died of complications after miscarrying.^[4] In a profile of Lady Bird Johnson, Time magazine described Lady Bird's mother as "a tall, eccentric woman from an old and aristocratic Alabama family, liked to wear long white dresses and heavy veils [... and who] scandalized people for miles around by entertaining Negroes in her home, and once even started to write a book about Negro religious practices, called Bio Baptism." Her unreconstructed husband, however, tended to see blacks as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," according to his younger son.^[9]

Lady Bird had two elder brothers, Thomas Jefferson Jr. (1901–1959) and Antonio, also known as Tony (1904–1986). She also had two stepmothers; the second, Ruth Scroggins, who married Thomas Taylor in 1937.^[10]

She was largely raised by her aunt Effie Pattillo, who moved to Karnack after her sister's death, although Lady Bird visited her Pattillo relatives in Autauga County, Alabama, every summer until she was a young woman. As she explained, "Until I was about 20, summertime always meant Alabama to me. With Aunt Effie we would board the train in Marshall and ride to the part of the world that meant watermelon cuttings, picnics at the creek, and a lot of company every Sunday."^[11] 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."^[9]

Lady Bird was a shy and quiet girl who spent much of her youth alone outdoors. "People always look back at it now and assume it was lonely," she once said about her childhood. "To me it definitely was not. [...] I spent a lot of time just walking and fishing and swimming."^[12] She developed her lifelong love of the environment as a child growing up in the tall pines and bayous of East Texas and watching the wildflowers bloom each spring.^[13]

Education[link]

When it came time to enter high school,^[12] Lady Bird moved away from home to live with another family during weekdays in the town of Jefferson, Texas,^[14] since there was no high school in the Karnack area (her brothers had attended boarding schools in New York). Eventually she graduated third in her class at the age of 15 from Marshall Senior High School in nearby Marshall. Despite her young age, she drove herself to school in her own car, a distance of 15 miles (24 km) each way, because, she said, "it was an awful chore for my daddy to delegate some person from his business to take me in and out."^[12] 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.^[5]

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 being homesick for Texas, she did not return for the fall term at Alabama.^[15] Instead she and a high school friend enrolled at St. Mary's Episcopal College for Women,^[16] a strict Episcopal boarding junior college for women in Dallas, where she "converted to the Episcopal faith," although she waited five years to be confirmed.^[17]

After graduating from St. Mary's in May 1930, Lady Bird toyed with the idea of going back to Alabama, but another friend from Marshall was going to the University of Texas, so she chartered a plane to go down to Austin to check it out. Prophetically, as the plane landed she was awed by the sight of a field covered with bluebonnets and instantly fell in love with the city.^[18] Lady Bird received a Bachelor's of Arts degree with honors in 1933^[19] and a second bachelor's degree in journalism Cum Laude in 1934^[20] — a time when women were hard pressed to have a career of their own, let alone a college education. She was active on campus in different organizations such as Orange Jackets and believed in student leadership. Her goal was to become a reporter, but she also earned a teaching certificate.^[5] 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.^[5]

Marriage and family[link]

Her goal of a career in media was deferred when a friend in Austin introduced her to Lyndon Baines Johnson, a young up-and-coming political hopeful^[21] working as an aide to Congressman Richard Kleberg.^[5]

On their first date, which was breakfast the next morning at the Driskill Hotel and a long drive in the country, Johnson proposed. Lady Bird did not want to rush into marriage, but Lyndon Johnson was persistent and did not want to wait. Lady Bird accepted his proposal 10 weeks later.^[5] The couple married on November 17, 1934, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas.

After three miscarriages,^[5] the couple had two daughters: Lynda (born in 1944), whose husband Charles S. Robb is a former governor of Virginia and former U.S. Senator, and Luci, born in 1947,^[22] first married to Pat Nugent, then Ian Turpin. The couple and their two daughters all shared the initials LBJ. At the time of her death, Johnson had seven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.^[5]

Early politics[link]

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.^[23] The couple settled in Washington, D.C. after Lyndon was elected to Congress.^[24] After he enlisted in the Navy at the outset of the Second World War, Lady Bird ran the congressional office.^[24]

Johnson sometimes served as a mediating force between her willful husband and those he had encountered. On one occasion, after Lyndon had clashed with a young Houston reporter, Dan Rather, Lady Bird followed Rather in her car and invited him to return and have some punch, explaining, "That's just the way Lyndon sometimes is."^[25]

Business career[link]

In January-February 1943, Ladybird Johnson spent $17,500 of her inheritance to purchase KTBC,^[3] an Austin radio station that was in debt. She bought the radio station from a three-man partnership which included a future U.S. Secretary of the Navy and a future U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Robert B. Anderson.

She served as President of the company, 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, reminding him that she could do as she wished with her inheritance.^[5] The station, KTBC-TV/7 (then affiliated with CBS as well), would make the Johnsons millionaires as Austin's monopoly VHF franchise.^[26] Over the years, journalists have written about how 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.^[27][28]

Although LBJ Holding's two small banks failed and were closed in 1991 by the FDIC, the core Johnson radio properties survived and prospered. Emmis Communications bought KLBJ-AM, KLBJ-FM, KGSR, and three other stations from LBJ Holding for $105 million in 2003.^[29]

Eventually, Johnson's initial $41,000 investment turned into more than $150 million for the LBJ Holding Company.^[30] Johnson remained involved with the company until she was in her 80s.^[5] She was the first president's wife to become a millionaire in her own right.^[3]

Lady Bird Johnson in 1962

Second Lady of the United States[link]

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, due to Jacqueline Kennedy's pregnancy. Over 71 days, she traveled 35,000 miles (56,000 km) through 11 states and appeared at 150 events.^[5] Kennedy and Johnson won the election that November, with Lady Bird helping the Democratic ticket carry seven Southern states.^[5]

As the Vice-President's wife, Lady Bird often served as a substitute for Jacqueline Kennedy at official events and functions.^[31] The Johnsons were accompanying Kennedy in Dallas when he was assassinated, and Lyndon was sworn in as President two hours later.

First Lady of the United States[link]

Official White House portrait of Lady Bird Johnson, painted in 1968 by Elizabeth Shoumatoff. The dress was designed by George Stavropoulos.^[32]

As First Lady, Johnson started a capital beautification project (Society for a More Beautiful National Capital) to improve physical conditions in Washington, D.C., both for residents and tourists by planting millions of flowers.^[30] Her beliefs regarding the importance of national beautification can best be summarized in her statement that "where flowers bloom, so does hope." She worked extensively with American Association of Nurserymen (AAN) executive Vice President Robert F. Lederer to protect wildflowers and the planting of them along highways. Her efforts inspired similar programs throughout the country. She became the first president's wife to advocate actively for legislation^[3] when she was instrumental in promoting the Highway Beautification Act, which was nicknamed "Lady Bird's Bill"^[5] and sought to beautify the nation's highway system by limiting billboards and by planting roadside areas. She was an advocate of the Head Start program.^[3]

Johnson created the modern structure of the First Lady's office; she was the first to have a press secretary and chief of staff of her own and an outside liaison with Congress.^[30] Her press secretary from 1963 to 1969 was Liz Carpenter, a fellow University of Texas alumna. Carpenter was the first professional newswoman to be press secretary to a First Lady, and she also served as Lady Bird's staff director. Johnson's tenure as First Lady marked the beginning of the hiring of employees in the East Wing to work specifically for the First Lady's projects.^[26]

Lady Bird Johnson in front of the South Lawn of the White House

During the 1964 election, Johnson traveled through eight Southern states in her own train to promote the Civil Rights Act,^[30] at one point giving 45 speeches over five days.^[26] It was the first solo whistlestop tour of a First Lady.^[25]

In 1970, Johnson 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 Kennedy's assassination, Mrs. Johnson recorded the momentous events of her times, including the Great Society's War on Poverty, the national civil rights and social protest movements, her own 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, and was protected by the United States Secret Service for 44 years, longer than anyone else in history.^[33]

Honors[link]

Lady Bird Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Gerald Ford on January 10, 1977. The citation for her medal read:

"One of America's great First Ladies, she claimed her own place in the hearts and history of the American people. In councils of power or in homes of the poor, she made government human with her unique compassion and her grace, warmth and wisdom. Her leadership transformed the American landscape and preserved its natural beauty as a national treasure."^[34]

Johnson then received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1988, becoming the first wife of a president to receive the honor.^[2] In a 1982 poll taken of historians ranking the most influential and important First Ladies, Johnson placed third behind Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt for her work as a conservation activist.^[5]

In addition to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, she was honored by the naming of the Lady Bird Johnson Park on Columbia Island in Washington, D.C., which was founded as a result of her efforts as First Lady to beautify the capital.^[5] She declined many overtures to name Austin's Town Lake in her honor after she had led a campaign to clean up the lake and add trails to its shoreline; following her death, Austin Mayor Will Wynn's office said it was a "foregone conclusion that Town Lake is going to be renamed" in honor of Johnson.^[34] The lake was renamed Lady Bird Lake on July 26, 2007.^[35]

(In 1963, during the Pageant Of Peace Christmas tree lighting ceremony, the President and First lady were to be introduced by a Girl Scout. President Kennedy had recently been assassinated and the girl introduced President and Mrs. Johnson as President and Mrs. Kennedy. She gasped in horror as soon as she did it and began crying. Mrs. Johnson leaped to her feet and put her arm around the girl's shoulder and comforted her, assuring her that it was alright and to please start over with the introduction. She did it right the second time and Mrs. Johnson sat down and the lighting ceremony continued. It was a revealing moment into the First Lady's character that endeared her to all who witnessed it.)

A majestic grove of coastal redwoods, named in her honor by President Nixon in 1969, is located just north of Orick, California. "Lady Bird Johnson Grove" is part of Redwood National Park. In April 2008, the "Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Cherry Blossom Grove" was dedicated in Marshfield, Missouri. The dedication took place during the city's annual cherry blossom festival. Johnson had been supportive of the rural community and their initiative to plant blossoming cherry trees.

In 1995, she received an Honor Award from the National Building Museum for her lifetime leadership in beautification and conservation campaigns.^[36]

Johnson was also named the honorary chairwoman of the Head Start program.^[34]

She held honorary degrees from many universities: Boston University, the University of Alabama, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, State University of New York, Southern Methodist University, Texas Woman's University, Middlebury College, Williams College, Southwestern University, Texas State University–San Marcos, Washington College and St. Edward's University.^[34]

Later life[link]

A portrait of Lady Bird Johnson in the Texas Hill Country