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Transcription: [00:00:02]
Aright folks gather round this is Lady Bird Johnson. This uhm image is from a time cover from 1964 it was published, in August.

[00:00:12]
Uhm, she had just been First Lady for about 9 months at that time. And the article focused on how she was different from Jackie Kennedy.

[00:00:23]
Eh, when you compare the two of them side by side uhm, a lot of the comparisons were more favorable towards Jackie. She was elegant, she was cosmopolitan, she was well-styled, she was young and energetic.

[00:00:38]
And then you get Lady Bird Johnson who was, an elegant, poised woman. But she was -- one of the newspaper articles of the time described her as very "beige", in comparison to Jackie Kennedy, uhm. But she was poised, she was vey typical of a upper middle class suburban housewife who, pe-spent her time at the clubs uhm doing social causes and things like that.

[00:01:06]
This portrait shows her, and uhm it was on the cover of Time Magazine and it was done by a Ukrainian artist whose name I cannot pronounce but it's Borris "Archskebafskof"?

[00:01:20]
Uhm he worked for Time Magazine, not exclusively but he had two hundred covers with the magazine from 1941 to just before his death in 1965 so he was very prolific,

[00:01:34]
during the time period that he was active as an artist. Uhm, to go more about Lady Bird Johnson, you will see influences of her work all around Washington D.C.

[00:01:45] She was a - pioneer or - a innovator for wildflowers and native plants.

[00:01:54]
Her- Best known for the Highway Beautification Act, which reduced the number of billboards on the sides of the roads and also encouraged areas to plant native wildflowers.

[00:02:04]
One of the ways that she, kind of argued for this was you don't have to mow wildflowers. And one of the things that she thought was Vermont should look like Vermont with Vermont native plants and Vermont sceneries, and Texas should look like Texas with Texas native plants and Texas sceneries.

[00:02:20]
And so here in Washington, D.C. she uhm, as First Lady she organized the Society for a More Beautiful Capital.

[00:02:31]
And together in 4 years they planted 2 million bulbs of daffodils, and some of these daffodils are currently blooming if you drive along the Rock Creek Patomic Parkway just as you come past

[00:02:45]
that steep embankment over by Pea Street and the Rose Park. Those are part of her result, uhm they planted several cherry blossom trees down on Hanes point. Prior to that they had only been on the title base and in the central downtown areas.

[00:03:01] And uhm she was also responsible for a grove of evergreen trees we planted along the G.W. Parkway. Shortly or, a short distance away from where those evergreen trees are planted on the G.W. Parkway is the Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park which is actually visible from Hanes Point,

[00:03:20]
and you can see it so it's - she really did leave an impact on D.C. as a First Lady, and, the rest of the country.

[00:03:28] Uhm, some of the other things that she did as First Lady that really set her apart was she was the first First lady to have both a Press Secretary, a Chief of Staff and an outside liaison with Congress and through these people she helped to manage her husband's --

Transcription Notes:
Updating capitalization and breaking out "Lady Bird" into two words. Inserted additional timestamps.