When he went off to fight in World War II, she ran his congressional office. When Lyndon ran for Congress in 1937, she used her inheritance to stake his campaign. After an intense ten-week courtship by letter, she agreed to marry him. At loose ends after finishing a journalism degree at the University of Texas, she fell hard for Lyndon, a strapping, dark-haired law student with a boisterous personality and ambition enough for both of them. The whistle-stop tour was in many ways a culmination of Lady Bird’s political education. Photo by Stan Wayman / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images Michael Gillette, director of Humanities Texas, conducted the majority of the interviews and has edited the newly declassified transcripts into the highly readable Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History, from which some of the material for this article was drawn. Johnson Presidential Library reveals a gracious woman who continued to grow with each new challenge thrust upon her. The extensive oral history that Lady Bird did in conjunction with the Lyndon B. Maybe together we could do something to help Lyndon and then perhaps to change the viewpoint of some of those newspaper people who were traveling with me.” It was my country, and although I knew I couldn’t be all that persuasive to them, at least I could talk to them in language they would understand. “It was painted as a bastion of ignorance and prejudice and all sorts of ugly things. “I have a strong sentimental, family, deep tie to the South, and I thought the South was getting a bad rap from the nation and indeed the world,” she recalled years later in her oral history. As a native of Texas with relatives in Alabama and Louisiana, the first lady knew there was more to the South than angry white men who opposed civil rights. But Johnson wasn’t a man to shrink from a fight, and Lady Bird believed an effort needed to be made to court Southern voters. Even if every state in the region went for Goldwater, Johnson could still garner almost 400 electoral votes, far surpassing the 270 needed to win. So far ahead, the Johnson campaign could have ceded the South to the Republicans.

In September, a Gallup poll gave Johnson a 69 percent to 31 percent lead. Goldwater, an early favorite, had stumbled badly, and, with two months to go before Election Day, the momentum clearly favored Johnson, who, craving validation, wanted a margin of victory large enough to smash any doubts that he had gotten to the White House on his own steam. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which LBJ had maneuvered through Congress with skills he had learned over three decades on the Hill and by invoking the fallen president’s memory. Critics of the civil rights movement used blatantly racist language and the threat of violence to make their case. The campaign was extraordinarily negative: Democrats showed, though only once, the famous “Daisy” ad, equating a Goldwater presidency with nuclear destruction.

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