Legacy MattersHer caretaker nurse thought the little toddler, Claudia Alta Taylor, was a "purty as a lady bird".
“I was a baby and in no position to protest,” Mrs. Johnson said of her nickname.
So Ladybird was how she was known all her life. As a young girl in a one room schoolhouse, as the 21-year-old bride of Lyndon Johnson whose first campaign for Congress she helped finance with a loan from her father against her inheritance and later as a businesswoman using part of her inheritance to buy a KTBC, a small radio station in Austin, Texas.
Her investments were sound. When sold in 2003 (they were in a blind trust when Johnson was President) they reaped about $105 million making Ladybird, the first wife of a president to become a millionaire in her own right.
Dallas News obituary
"Mrs. Johnson is every bit as complex a character as Lyndon Johnson," said her biographer, Jan Jarboe Russell of San Antonio. "Future historians will find her to be a treasure house" once her unedited diaries and tapes are made public.
As both a contrast and a complement to her husband, Mrs. Johnson used the mostly social position of first lady as a meaningful vehicle for change, embracing leadership roles to beautify America, win acceptance of racial equality in her native South and nurture children's early learning through the Head Start program.
"She's really a breakaway first lady ... she's a precursor to feminism," said Ms. Russell, who spent four years on her 1999 book, Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson. "She was a strong and persistent American woman who helped us say goodbye to the '50s."
No one alive at the time can forget that she was in the motorcade when President John Kennedy was shot or the photograph of her standing beside her husband as he took the oath of office.
"I feel like I am suddenly on stage for a part I never rehearsed," she told Texas first lady Nellie Connally at the time.
Aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field, Mrs. Johnson tried to express her feelings. "I said, 'Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be vice president, and now, dear God, it's come to this.' "
Following the assassination, the country was turbulent with racial unrest, the Vietnam war and convulsive social change, yet Ladybird as First Lady was a soothing presence with her grace and a gentle touch and a far more influential advisor to her husband than we ever knew.
Robert Caro, the biographer of her husband said, "She conducted herself, often in the most difficult circumstances, with a graciousness and dignity and total devotion to her husband that was heroic,"
Her greatest legacy was the beauty she brought to the roadsides and highways of America. Her love of the wildflowers of Texas, her commitment to natural beauty became a national cause for conservation as she championed the Highway Beautification Act.
Washington Post obituary, Champion of Conservation, Loyal Force Behind LBJ, photo by David Kennedy.
She died at 94 at home of natural causes.
New York Times obituary by Enid Nemy
“It has been a wonderful life,” she told Ms. Carpenter in 1992. “I feel like a jug into which wine is poured until it overflows.”