An activist first lady who succeeded on her own terms

As first lady, she gave her husband crucial support when he suffered doubts before the 1964 Democratic National Convention about running for his first full term. "You are as brave a man as Harry Truman or FDR or Lincoln," she wrote in a letter. "To step out now would be wrong for your country, and I can see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future."

Her own campaigns

THAT fall, she moved into the limelight as no presidential wife had before.

She organized a 1,628-mile whistle-stop tour through eight Southern states, where the hostility among whites toward Lyndon Johnson's civil rights goals was so strong that the president was advised to stay away. A few months earlier, he had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a far-reaching law that protected African Americans' right to vote and guaranteed access to public accommodations. Lady Bird undertook the tour despite the opposition of senior campaign aides and Southern governors, who feared that her trip might push segregationists deeper into the corner of the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater.

Focusing on small towns where bigotry was most entrenched, she charmed local politicians, inviting them on board the "Lady Bird Special" to shake hands and pose for photographs. Although booed and heckled for her forthright support of racial equality, she maintained her calm. At one stop in South Carolina, she responded to the raucous insults of Goldwater supporters with a plea for tolerance, noting that the jeers were coming "not from the good people of South Carolina but from the state of confusion."

After a bomb threat in Florida, the train safely arrived in New Orleans, the final stop. She was greeted by a multiracial crowd and President Johnson, who publicly thanked her for the gutsy campaigning that had reached half a million Southerners. Reflecting on the headline-making event, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham later concluded that Lady Bird's high visibility had been vital: "She talked with authority," Graham said, "because she belonged there."

Emboldened by this success, Lady Bird launched an ambitious program of tree and flower plantings in the nation's capital. She saw conservation and beautification as part of her husband's Great Society agenda to improve the quality of life in America's crumbling cities.

"A little beauty, something that is lovely, I think, can help create harmony, which will lessen tensions," she once said.