Champion of Conservation, Loyal Force Behind LBJ

Four days later, Kennedy won the presidency by 112,881 votes out of 66,832,818 cast. Thanks to Johnson, he carried seven Southern states, including Texas -- "partly," biographer Russell wrote, "because of the way Lady Bird had been treated by the Mink Coat Mob."

As wife of the vice president, Mrs. Johnson was busier than ever. She was a frequent substitute for Jackie Kennedy at social events and official functions.

By 1963, rumors were mounting that Johnson would be dumped from the 1964 ticket. Kennedy set the record straight at a press conference a month before the fatal Texas trip: Johnson would be his running mate. The trip was to give the state's feuding liberal and conservative Democrats a chance to reunite after a long and fractious estrangement.

"It all began so hopefully," she said of the political fence-mending trip that took the Kennedys and Johnsons to Texas.

Her recollection of the shooting summed up the epic tragedy in simple terms. "I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the president's car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. It was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the president's body," she wrote in "Lady Bird Johnson: A White House Diary."

Later she found Mrs. Kennedy sitting alone in a Parkland Hospital hallway. She embraced the younger woman and murmured, "God help us all."

Her anguish was followed by anger. "Anger that this could happen in my country," she said, "anger worse that this could happen in my state."

In the weeks after Kennedy's death, Lyndon Johnson moved swiftly to reassure Americans he was up to the job. His wife, too, moved with decisiveness into a job she later said she "wouldn't have missed for the world but wouldn't want to pay the price of admission again."

In 1964, in a now-famous convention-eve letter, she implored her husband to seek the presidency in his own right "to prove he was worth it." Touring eight Southern states in the fall, she traveled to cities and towns that were in such racial turmoil that it was not considered safe for Johnson to visit. In November, her husband got the landslide he had sought, carrying 44 states against the Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. Barry M. Goldwater.

Despite that mandate, the next four years were not altogether happy for the Johnsons or for the nation. As cities burned and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators marched -- "Hey, hey LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?" -- and as her husband doggedly pursued the course he had set, Mrs. Johnson saw with increasing alarm that "his ability to handle the presidency as it should have been handled -- with an 18-hour driving force -- was giving out."

Not until March 31, 1968, when Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection and was withdrawing from national politics, could his wife begin to see the end. "You can endure anything almost if you know the time limit," she told The Post.

Four years later, at what she called their "forever home" -- the LBJ Ranch -- what Mrs. Johnson had feared finally occurred. Johnson suffered another massive heart attack. Given no hope for any kind of heart surgery, he took up smoking again.

Although she spent most of her time taking care of her increasingly incapacitated husband, she also served on the University of Texas board of regents and made public appearances.

Lyndon Johnson died Jan. 22, 1973, living two days longer than a potential second full presidential term. "Had he run, had he been elected, he would have been a non-serving president," Mrs. Johnson said. It would have been "catastrophic."

In the initial years after her husband's death, she became the official steward of his legacy, presiding over events at the LBJ Library in Austin, giving interviews to historians and journalists and continuing to run the family business. She also began claiming her own legacy as first lady. In speeches, she reminded audiences that 150 laws were passed during the Johnson presidency that directly benefited the environment.

She could note with pride that, thanks to the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 -- known as "Lady Bird's Bill" -- more flowers and fewer junkyards and billboards lined the nation's freeways. She also founded the Society for a More Beautiful National Capital and worked to revitalize Pennsylvania Avenue and parks throughout Washington. Just before her husband left office, Columbia Island in the Potomac River was renamed Lady Bird Johnson Park.

On her 70th birthday, she "threw my hat over the windmill and celebrated" by giving 60 acres along the Colorado River a few miles west of Austin and a pledge of $25,000 for five years to found the National Wildflower Research Center, now known as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Slowed by failing health, she clung to what she called wildflower "adventuring" through the Texas countryside every spring. "When you get to be 81," she said in 1994," you savor it even more, want to see it one more time."

In a 1994 interview, Russell asked her whether she believed in heaven. "Oh yes, I do," she said. "I do know that there is something hereafter, because all this has been too significant, too magnificent, for there not to be something after. Heaven, to me, is a mystery, a place I'll know what all this -- the events of my life -- meant."

Former Post staff writer Donnie Radcliffe contributed to this report.