DALLAS — Texas school scholar Jade Emerson discovered herself entranced as she labored on a podcast about Lady Bird Johnson, listening to hour upon hour of the previous first woman recounting every part from her childhood reminiscences to advising her husband within the White House.
“I fell in love very quickly,” stated Emerson, host and producer of the University of Texas podcast “Lady Bird.” “She kept surprising me.”
The podcast, which was launched earlier this 12 months, is amongst a number of latest initiatives utilizing Johnson’s personal lyrical voice to supply a brand new have a look at the primary woman who died in 2007. Other initiatives embrace a documentary titled “The Lady Bird Diaries” that premieres Monday on Hulu and an exhibit in Austin on the presidential library for her husband, Lyndon B. Johnson, who died in 1973.
Lady Bird Johnson started recording an audio diary within the tumultuous days after her husband grew to become president following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The library launched that audio a couple of decade after her dying. It provides to recorded interviews she did following her husband’s presidency and residential films she narrated.
“I don’t know that people appreciated or realized how much she was doing behind the scenes and I think that’s the part that’s only just now really starting to come out,” stated Lara Hall, LBJ Presidential Library curator.
“Lady Bird: Beyond the Wildflowers” exhibits library guests the myriad methods Johnson made an influence. Hall stated the exhibit, which closes on the finish of the 12 months, has been so standard that the library hopes to combine elements of it into its everlasting show.
In making her podcast, Emerson, who graduated from UT in May with a journalism diploma, relied closely on the interviews Johnson did with presidential library workers over the many years after her husband left the White House in 1969.
“Just to have her telling her own story was so fascinating,” Emerson stated. “And she just kept surprising me. Like during World War II when LBJ was off serving, she was the one who ran his congressional office in the 1940s. She had bought a radio station in Austin and went down to Austin to renovate it and get it going again.”
The new documentary from filmmaker Dawn Porter, based mostly on Julia Sweig’s 2021 biography “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight” and a podcast hosted by the creator, takes viewers by means of the White House years. From advising her husband on technique to critiquing his speeches, her affect is shortly seen.
Porter additionally notes that Johnson was “a fierce environmentalist” and an advocate for ladies. She was additionally a talented campaigner, Porter stated. Among occasions the documentary recounts is Johnson’s tour of the South aboard a prepare named the “Lady Bird Special” earlier than the 1964 election.
With racial tensions simmering following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson despatched his spouse as his surrogate. “She does that whistle-stop tour in the very hostile South and does it beautifully,” Porter stated.
“She did all of these things and she didn’t ask for credit, but she deserves the credit,” Porter stated.
The couple’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson can nonetheless keep in mind the frustration she felt as a 16-year-old when she noticed the message hanging on the doorknob to her mom’s room that learn: “I want to be alone.” Lady Bird Johnson would spend that point engaged on her audio tapes, compiling her ideas from images, letters and different data which may strike her reminiscence.
“She was just begging for the world to give her the time to do what she’d been uniquely trained to do,” stated Luci Baines Johnson, who famous that her mom had levels in each historical past and journalism from the University of Texas.
“She was just beyond, beyond and beyond,” she stated. “She thought a day without learning was a day that was wasted.”
Emerson known as her work on the podcast “a huge gift” as she “spent more time with Lady Bird than I did with anyone else in my college years.”
“She’s taught me a lot about just what type of legacy I’d like to leave with my own life and just how to treat people.”
“Every time I hear her voice, I start to smile,” she stated.
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