1908-1919

Johnson Family Photographs
credit: Unknown

The United States was changing as it entered the second decade of the new century. The marvel of radio was uniting all its hamlets and cities as even the great transcontinental railroad could not. The companion marvel of the motion picture brought its magic to all parts of the country.

Childhood portrait of Claudia Alta Taylor
credit: Unknown

The syncopated rhythm of ragtime replaced the stately waltz. The assembly line began the transformation of industrial life. Traditionally isolationist, America initially stayed aloof when war engulfed Europe, but in 1917, the U.S. joined forces with the allies against the German Empire. An armistice in November 1918 ended the "Great War," later called World War I, that killed 8,500,000, including 53,402 Americans.

In the hill country of central Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in 1908 to Sam Ealy and Rebekah Baines Johnson. Claudia (“Lady Bird”) Johnson was born in 1912 to T.J. and Minnie Taylor, living in East Texas.

1920-1929

The disillusionment that followed the war turned the nation’s attention inward, to a decade of prosperity and social upheaval, as old conventions gave way to an exhilarating array of liberated ideas. The automobile, produced in abundance, brought a new sense of freedom, heightened by a relaxation of moral standards; that new-found freedom was reflected and celebrated in changing styles and customs and manners.

Group Photo: Johnson City High School
credit: Unknown

American writers found a new authentic American voice to record it all. Music found a new idiom in jazz and the wail of a saxophone. The heroes of the day were boxers and ballplayers and the glittering stars of the fast-growing phenomenon of the cinema. Greatest of them all was a pioneer aviator named Charles Lindbergh, who in making the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris symbolized in his solitary voyage the gallant spirit of a restless and daring time.

In the 1924 graduating class photograph, the boy who will become the high school's most prominent alumnus is fifth from the left, top row. Lady Bird traveled eighteen miles a day to go to highschool, where she was an outstanding student and graduated at age fifteen. She is sitting sixth from the left, middle row.

1929-1940

Honeymoon in Mexico after Nov. 17, 1934 Wedding in San Antonio, Texas
credit: Unknown

The bubble burst on a day history called Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and the country went into a depression. One out of every four working men was soon out of a job, and capitalism itself appeared imperiled. But for the most part, while the government experimented with social programs to rescue the economy, popular entertainment turned people's attention away from hard times. Radio offered laughter and movies, in what would be seen as their Golden Age, sold romance.

Congressional campaign poster
credit: UT Photographic Services

And in every corner of the country, the music that dominated was the big band sound of swing. Even as America fought off the domestic threat to its well-being, dangers much greater were forming farther away as Germany violated the armistice and re-armed. In the Pacific, the Japanese Empire threatened to bring all Asia under its control.

Lady Bird Taylor entered the University of Texas at Austin, where she took two bachelor degrees—in history and journalism. Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird were married on November 17, 1934, in San Antonio, Texas. At twenty eight, Lyndon Johnson went to Washington as administrative assistant to Texas Representative Richard M. Kleberg, and in 1937, Johnson ran for Congress and won.

1941-1945

Portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson in Navy Uniform
credit: Unknown

The U.S. was unprepared for war. As it awakened to the danger from abroad, the Army was obliged to train with dummy weapons and trucks took the place of tanks. For forty-four months—from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to the atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945—more than sixteen million American men and women were in uniform. On every continent, in the air, on seas, in beaches and jungles and snow, all branches of the services fought to bring an end to the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Vice President Harry S. Truman assumed national leadership on the sudden death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945.

An officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Johnson was the first member of Congress to enter the armed services after Pearl Harbor.

Lady Bird Johnson ran the congressional office while Johnson was in the service.

1946-1953

The guns were barely stilled before America was locked in a cold war with its former ally the Soviet Union, who had revealed its determination to enlarge the Communist empire through infiltration if possible, or aggression if necessary. It was a struggle that would last for half a century, until the Soviet Union's eventual collapse. The United States undertook a massive aid program to help the recovery of former wartime allies and enemies alike.

In Korea, America proved its determination to hold the line against Communist expansion during the early years of the Cold War at the cost of 54,000 American lives. World War II leader Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, presiding over the America of the 1950s with Richard M. Nixon as vice president.

Johnson launched a successful Senate campaign in 1948 and, in 1952, was picked as minority leader for the Democratic Party. Lady Bird Johnson was deeply involved in Senate auxiliary events throughout her husband's tenure.

1954-1960

1960 Democratic Presidential/Vice-Presidential Campaign Poster
credit: Unknown

The United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other across the nightmare threat of mutual extinction, both armed with unprecedented power. But even as the tension mounted through the 1950s, the weapons stayed sheathed, and under the uneasy truce of nuclear deterrence, life went on. However U.S.S.R. Premier Nikita Khruschev added a new dimension of danger to the cold war by declaring Soviet support for uprisings, which he called “wars of national liberation.”

Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration as president ushered in an era of apparent calm in the nation's life. The war in Korea, of which the country had grown increasingly weary, came to an inconclusive end by armistice. After the upheaval of war, the nation began to relax. But beneath the placid exterior problems festered. The appearance of affluence masked the fact that millions of Americans lived in poverty. The long pent-up demand by African Americans for full citizenship built, and began to erupt.

When the Democrats gained control of the Senate in 1955, Johnson became majority leader, and in 1957 he steered through the Senate a civil rights bill.

The young woman who once hoped her husband's career would not be in politics grew to enjoy fully life in the excitement of the Senate.

1960-1963

Swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson as President
credit: Cecil Stoughton

Events that foreshadowed the future dominated the early sixties—the “Cold War,” the conflict in Vietnam, civil rights protests, and the space program. Losing the nomination for president to Senator John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic convention, Johnson was invited by Kennedy to become his running mate.

Although most of Johnson’s advisers and associates opposed the idea, he accepted and was elected as Kennedy's vice president. The Cold War reached a crisis point when the U.S. discovered Soviet missiles installed in Cuba and aimed at the U.S., ninety miles away.

On November 22, 1963, a day the nation would not forget, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in a motorcade on the streets of Dallas, Texas. As wife of the vice president, Lady Bird Johnson took on many social duties requested of her by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. With Kennedy's assassination, Vice President Lyndon Johnson became president of the United States.

1964-1969

Signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
credit: Cecil Stoughton

Lady Bird Johnson receiving President John Adams' silver coffee urn
credit: Robert Knudsen

In the first month of his presidency, President Johnson declared a national War on Poverty. For the weapons to fight that war, he proposed an array of government programs. One of the first arenas of action for his administration was the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, landmark legislation that ended legal discrimination in the United States.

Initiatives of the Johnson administration moved the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. closer toward a normalization of relations than at any time since the end of World War II. "Our plan to place a man on the moon in this decade remains unchanged," the president pledged at the beginning of his administration. Johnson also pledged to continue Kennedy's Vietnam policy that gradually culminated in the war that broke America's will.

“Nineteen sixty-eight,” President Johnson wrote after leaving office, “was one of the most agonizing years any president ever spent in the White House. I sometimes felt that I was living in a continuous nightmare.”

Thrust by tragedy into the glare of public attention, Lady Bird Johnson said, “I feel as if I am suddenly on stage for a role I never rehearsed.” Asked what image she hoped to project, she responded: “My image will emerge in actions, not words.”

1969-1973

Portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson at the LBJ Ranch
credit: Frank Wolfe

Portrait of Lady Bird Johnson
credit: Frank Wolfe

After forty years in public life, capped by the presidential period of triumph and tragedy, the path for Lyndon and Lady Bird, who had walked the crowded years together, led home. “Perhaps the time will come,” the president says, “when I will look back on the splendor of the Presidency and find it hard to believe that I had actually been there. But leaving it, I know I have been there, and I know I have given it everything that was in me.”

Lyndon Johnson lived for four years and two days after he left the White House. They were the “milk and honey years,” Lady Bird called them. He became a full-time rancher, wrote the memoirs of his presidency, and watched over the construction of this Library. In every phase of its activities he left his signature, written large:

Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th president
(August 27, 1908 - January 22, 1973)

After leaving Washington, Lady Bird Johnson directed her efforts to encourage the growth and use of wildflowers and native grasses in every region of the country, both to beautify the land and save in the consumption of water. A generation after making her mark in the White House it was said of her: “She lit a fire in this country that still burns.”