Lady Bird Johnson:It is doubtful whether the former US president Lyndon Johnson's political career would ever have prospered without the extraordinary personal and business skills of his wife "Lady Bird", who has died of respiratory failure aged 94.
She is the only presidential spouse in American history to have set out to create a fortune to further her husband's electoral ambitions.
Starting with an investment of $17,000 in 1942, she transformed an ailing Texas radio station into a multi-million dollar communications empire. Later, she took over the management of her family's cotton estates. She also intervened more directly at critical points in her husband's legislative life, at one point running his congressional office and organising his postwar re-election bid while he was serving in the wartime US navy.
When, in November 1963, the assassination of President John F Kennedy took Johnson to the White House, Lady Bird played a major role in persuading her hostile southern compatriots to accept his civil rights reforms, repeatedly disarming jeering crowds with her Texas drawl. "You may not agree with what I have to say," she would begin, "but at least y'all will understand the way I say it."
On the face of it, the Johnsons were an ill-matched couple. He was a rough country boy, prone to sudden rages and deep depressions. She was the demure, highly intelligent daughter of a Texas cotton farmer and store owner. Her mother, a cultivated woman who enjoyed opera, read voraciously and campaigned for women's voting rights, died when her daughter was five, and her father and aunt - along with the family servants - took over her upbringing. She acquired her nickname after a nursemaid said she was as "purty as a lady bird".
She graduated from high school at 15, and spent two years at St Mary's Episcopal school for girls in Dallas. From there she moved to the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated in 1933, aged 20, but decided to stay on for another year to secure a degree in journalism. She never got it. Instead, she encountered a brash, 26-year-old congressional aide on a brief visit home from Washington. Lyndon Johnson pursued Lady Bird with a torrent of letters, telegrams and phone calls. Eventually, he turned up at her house to declare: "We either get married now or we never will." They had known one another for 10 weeks, but she married him the following day.
The couple settled in Washington but Johnson's congressional boss was finding him too much of a handful and the newlywed was fired. Fortunately, President Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal was just coming on stream, and Johnson managed to pull enough strings to become Texas director of the National Youth Administration. He used the position to build a statewide network of political contacts and, in 1937, decided to run for Congress.
Johnson had no means of bankrolling his campaign until Lady Bird set the pattern that was followed for the rest of their life together; she gave her husband $10,000 dollars of her mother's bequest.
That seed money started Johnson on his road to the White House. As she plunged into this venture, she suffered a series of miscarriages. Eventually, she produced two healthy daughters but a later pregnancy also ended in a miscarriage. Amid these personal traumas, Lady Bird was stomping around Texas, campaigning for her husband's 1948 bid for a seat in the US senate. Though he scraped home by only 87 votes, his overwhelming personality soon gained him the minority leadership. When the Democrats won control of the senate in the 1954 midterm elections, Johnson became the chamber's youngest-ever majority leader.
After Johnson's death in 1973, Lady Bird concentrated on one of her lifelong concerns, the American environment. She had used her considerable influence as first lady to secure the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, removing many of the roadside billboards then disfiguring the US landscape. In her later years, she helped to found a national wildflower centre (now named after her) and served on innumerable committees concerned with environmental improvements. Her daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines, survive her, as do seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
Claudia Alta 'Lady Bird' Johnson, born December 22nd, 1912; died July 11th, 2007