An activist first lady who succeeded on her own terms

During the early years of the Johnsons' marriage, he was the dominant force. He told Lady Bird what to wear, insisting on slim skirts and good hosiery. He expected her to entertain a dozen people for dinner at a moment's notice, and at parties he barked orders to her in a manner that made others flinch. In an oft-quoted line, he acknowledged that he sometimes asked her for political advice, but "I have a ... maid, and I talk my problems over with her too." Lady Bird seemed to take the slights in stride.

Her devotion to her husband included turning a blind eye to his lengthy affair with Alice Glass, the mistress and later wife of Charles Marsh, a wealthy Austin newspaper publisher and patron of Lyndon's since the 1930s. According to biographers, Lyndon's friendship with Glass ended in the 1960s over the Vietnam War, which Glass strongly opposed.

As other infidelities surfaced over the years, Lady Bird was often asked for comment. According to Caro, she developed a stock reply. "Lyndon loved people," she would say. "It would be unnatural for him to withhold love from half the people." This reply, Caro wrote, "was always delivered with a smile." She apparently never considered leaving him.

Lyndon Johnson suffered a major heart attack in 1955, an event that deepened their bond. Gradually, he began to treat his wife with more respect in public and to rely on her counsel. Wrote Caro: "Once, not seeing her at a public function, he demanded, with something of his old snarl, 'Where's Lady Bird?' and she replied, 'Right behind you, darling. Where I've always been.' "

In 1960, she campaigned in 11 Southern states for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. More visible in the campaign than Jacqueline Kennedy, who was pregnant at the time, she recruited two other Kennedy women, Ethel and Eunice, to join her in "Flying Tea Parties" in Texas to win over voters perplexed by the possibility of a Catholic president. When Kennedy carried Texas in the tight race, campaign manager Robert Kennedy gave the credit to Lady Bird.

She was a passenger in the presidential motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy, riding two cars ahead of her, was shot.

At Parkland Hospital, after the president was declared dead, she told his wife, "Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to become vice president, and now, dear God, it's come to this."

Later she confided to a friend, "I feel like I am onstage for a part I never rehearsed."