Word: johnson
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...according to author Caro, she laid out his clothes, unbuttoned his shirts, put in the collar stays and cuff links, filled his fountain pens and put them in the proper pocket, filled his cigarette lighter and put a handkerchief and money in their pockets. But as Johnson climbed higher, Lady Bird found her world expanding...
...often brutal game of national politics where Lady Bird Johnson dwelt in some manner for nearly 70 years she was, said Hugh Sidey, TIME's late chronicler of the American presidency, "as close to being a Godly creature as that anguished realm ever produced." In these last years her admirers (and who was not one?) in sheer frustration at the inadequacy of language to capture her virtues would say over and over again, "Lady Bird is a saint...
...more so as details of the outrageous and roguish behavior of her husband, President Lyndon B. Johnson, emerged in tape recordings and extensive scholarship, including a volume by LBJ biographer Robert Caro, which detailed Johnson's philandering and mean and humiliating outbursts in front of others against her ideas and lifestyle, even down to how she fixed her hair and the shoes she wore...
Once, when LBJ was still the Senate majority leader, Sidey was having a late drink with him in the Johnson ranch house in Texas. Lady Bird and a staff member came down the stairs responding to LBJ's shout. They were both in pajamas and night robes. Johnson stood up, gathered them in his huge arms and began to fondle a breast of each woman. Sidey later said that Lady Bird's restraint - she did nothing, but sweetly - is what calmed him down. After the White House, when confronted with some of these stories, Lady Bird shunted all wrath aside...
Like everyone else who studied the couple, Sidey had wondered during his coverage of the Johnson saga, almost from day one, how Lady Bird stood it and never - yes, never - retaliated with anything but a serene and enduring love of the rarest kind. "I adored him," was about as far as she would go to describe her feeling which he said was "awesome in both its physical and intellectual dimensions." She found a natural force, understood that and guided it to the top. Otherwise she might have been a forgotten housewife in clunky shoes and he just another eccentric...