www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/world/americas/12iht-obits.1.6625959.html
Lady Bird Johnson, the widow of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was once described by her husband as "the brains and money of this family" and whose business skills cushioned his road to the White House, died Wednesday afternoon at her home in Austin, Texas. She was 94.
Johnson was hospitalized for a week last month with a low-grade fever. She died of natural causes, surrounded by family and friends, a family spokesman said.
Johnson was a calm and steadying influence on her often moody and volatile husband as she quietly attended to the demands imposed by his career. Liz Carpenter, her press secretary during her years in the White House, once wrote that "if President Johnson was the long arm, Lady Bird Johnson's was the gentle hand."
She softened hurts, mediated quarrels, and won over many political opponents. Johnson often said his political ascent would have been inconceivable without his wife's devotion and forbearance. Others shared that belief.
After Johnson became the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1960, James Reston, the Washington columnist of The New York Times, said, "Lyndon could never have made it this far without the help of that woman."
Johnson was often compared to Eleanor Roosevelt, a first lady she greatly admired but did not resemble.
"Mrs. Roosevelt was an instigator, an innovator, willing to air a cause without her husband's endorsement," Carpenter said. "Mrs. Johnson was an implementer and translator of her husband and his purpose - a wife in capital letters."
Johnson had one major cause during the Johnson presidency, highway beautification, and her husband pushed Congress into passing legislation to further the program.
Johnson made many trips to explain her husband's programs like Head Start, the Job Corps and the War on Poverty. But, Carpenter said, she "never hesitated to admit that during the early years of their marriage, her husband expected coffee and newspapers in bed and his shoes shined and that she was happy to comply."
Johnson developed her own public projects. She was an early supporter of the environment and, in championing highway beautification, worked to banish billboards and plant flowers and trees.
Johnson was known for her even temper, although she did not always consider it an asset. "I think it might be better to blow up sometimes," she once said.
She was a stoic, rarely admitting pain, a trait her husband characterized as perhaps her only fault. She had four miscarriages but never indulged in self-pity.
Johnson financed her husband's first campaign for Congress in 1937 with a $10,000 loan against an inheritance from her mother. She began taking an active role in politics in 1941, after he lost his first bid for the Senate and returned to the House. While he was on active duty in the Navy during World War II, she managed his legislative office. From that point on, she shared his public life, representing him, speaking for him, and answering questions with unusual candor.
When Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, rather than his rival Johnson, was nominated for the presidency in 1960, a reporter asked her if she was disappointed. "I'm relieved," she said, then immediately confessed: "That isn't true. I'm terribly disappointed. Lyndon would have made a noble president."
Although she was less than enthusiastic when her husband accepted the nomination for vice president, she campaigned tirelessly and accompanied the women of the Kennedy family on many of their appearances, particularly in the South.
Once the election was won, she threw herself into the role of second lady, traveling to 33 countries in the 34 months of Johnson's vice presidency.
She was with her husband in the motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Later that afternoon, she was beside Johnson in the executive suite of Air Force One as he took the oath of office as 36th president.
It was she who suggested to Jacqueline Kennedy that she remain in the White House to wind up her affairs.
Johnson took up residence in the White House on Dec. 7, 1963, feeling, she said, "as if I am suddenly on stage for a part I never rehearsed." She converted a small corner room overlooking the Washington Monument into an office and set aside an hour a day to record her life as first lady. She wrote about 1.7 million words in her years in the White House; 800 pages of them were published in 1971 as "A White House Diary."
Although she had attended many state dinners in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Johnson made no effort to copy the style of previous first ladies. Her first state dinner, for the president of Italy and his wife, combined Italian opera and American hootenanny.
Johnson's Texas heritage was often evident in her speech. "I'll see you next week if the Lord be willing and the creek don't rise" was one expression. Her description of someone who acted without thinking was "the type who would charge hell with a bucket of water."
Johnson won election to a full term as president in 1964 with the greatest majority accorded a candidate up to that time. But as his term neared its end, he was the beleaguered and increasingly unpopular leader of a country divided over Vietnam. The war came to overshadow the legislation he had pushed through - strong measures on civil rights, Medicare, urban development, federal aid for schools, the Head Start program and the War on Poverty.
The president held to the conviction, however, that continuing the Vietnam War was a course both honorable and in the national interest.
Yet as the war grew more and more unpopular, so did the president. On March 31, 1968, he surprised the nation by announcing that he would not seek re-election.
Almost exactly a year earlier, she wrote in her diary: "I do not know whether we can endure another four-year term in the presidency. I use the word 'endure' in Webster's own meaning, 'to last, remain, continue in the same state without perishing.' I face the prospect of another campaign like an open-end stay in a concentration camp."
Johnson's survivors include her 2 daughters, 7 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
Johnson was born Claudia Alta Taylor on Dec.22, 1912 in a big red-brick house in the East Texas town of Karnack (population 100). The youngest of three children and the only girl, she acquired the name Lady Bird as a toddler after a nursemaid described her as "purty as a lady bird."
"I was a baby and in no position to protest," Johnson said of her nickname.
Geoffrey Kelly, an editor at the International Herald Tribune who began his career in newspapers in South Africa at the age of 16, died in Hong Kong on June 29 after suffering a heart attack. He was 63.
Kelly, who was known for his easy smile and relaxed manner around the newsroom, worked as a reporter and editor at a string of newspapers around the world, including a 17-year stint with the Los Angeles Times. Most recently, he worked for the International Herald Tribune in Hong Kong and Paris.
The son of a newsman, Kelly got his start as a reporter at the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1964, he began work at the Northern Virginia Sun in Arlington, Virginia, later moving on to a series of reporting and editing jobs in New Jersey, Kentucky and California before arriving at the Los Angeles Times in 1987. He also served with the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he edited an Army newspaper.
In addition to his wife, Kari Howard, he left behind a son, Lucas.
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