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HOUSTON - Lady Bird Johnson, who quietly served as one of the most trusted advisers to her husband President Lyndon Johnson, has died of natural causes at the age of 94, family spokeswoman Elizabeth Christian said.
The former first lady died at her Austin, Texas, home with friends and family around her, Christian said.
During their White House years Lady Bird campaigned for her Democratic husband's civil rights, environmental and war-on-poverty policies and also zealously pushed her own pet cause -- beautifying America.
She was at Johnson's side as he came under fire for escalating the Vietnam War and wholeheartedly supported his surprising decision not to seek re-election as president in 1968.
A PBS documentary said she had long feared the stress of the presidency would kill her husband and that she insisted his speech announcing his plans include the definitive phrase "I shall not seek and I will not accept" his party's nomination.
She was often the target of anti-war hecklers herself but of her years in the White House, Lady Bird recalled: "A lot of it was desperately painful but on balance, I loved it."
Claudia Alta Taylor was born in Karnack, Texas, near the Louisiana border, on December 22, 1912. She was two years old when she was given her nickname by a maid who described her as "purty as a lady bird."
She was the third child and only daughter of Thomas Jefferson Taylor, a storeowner from Alabama, and Minnie Lee Pattillo, a cultured woman from a family of Southern planters, who died when Lady Bird was only five.
She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1934 with bachelor of arts and bachelor of journalism degrees, and met Johnson, then a congressional aide, the same year.
On their first date he asked her to marry him, and although she thought at first his proposal was a joke, they were married two months later in November 1934.
Johnson was elected to the House of Representatives in 1937, and 11 years later won a Senate seat by a mere 87 votes.
In 1960, he was elected vice president on the ticket with John Kennedy and succeeded to the presidency three years later when Kennedy was killed by a sniper in Dallas. The Johnsons were two cars behind Kennedy in a motorcade when he was shot.
Johnson was elected to a full term in his own right in 1964.
During his time in office it was often Lady Bird whom he privately turned to for advice and consolation in dark political days.
Lady Bird, a nature lover, successfully lobbied for the Highway Beautification Act which encouraged wildflower planting on public land and regulation of highway billboards.
Its passage, she later said, "gave me more pleasure than anything I did in the White House years, except perhaps seeing America."
After Johnson died of a heart attack in 1973, Lady Bird shunned active party politics, saying she preferred to do "those things that I had to leave on the shelf for so long."
She lived at the ranch in Stonewall, Texas, that was the Johnsons' refuge during the White House years and devoted herself to her family, beautification projects and Johnson's presidential library.
In 1988 she was honoured for her environmental and humanitarian work, becoming the first wife of a president to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.
She also was active in running the family business, which operated radio and television stations in Austin for 60 years until 2003.
Even after a 2002 stroke that affected her mobility and speech, she attended board meetings for the company, which she founded in 1942 by buying a radio station with US$17,500 ($22,680) in inheritance money.
The Johnsons had two daughters, Lynda Bird, who is married to Charles Robb, the former Virginia senator and governor, and Lucy Baines, who is married to Ian Turpin. She had seven grandchildren -- six girls and one boy.
- REUTERS
