Lady Bird laid to rest next to husband
by USA Today on Jul. 16, 2007, under Nation/WorldFamily, friends pay tribute at LBJ Ranch
The funeral cortege for Lady Bird Johnson travels along the Town Lake Hike & Bike Trail and Colorado River in Austin, Texas. Thousands of admirers, many clutching bundles of the wildflowers Johnson loved, lined the streets in Austin. At right, Melita Abrego (front) and Michele Monreal toss rose petals on the hearse.
STONEWALL, Texas – Lady Bird Johnson was laid to rest Sunday beside her husband, reuniting them under the shade of gnarled live oak and pecan trees near the calm Pedernales River where they once walked together.
In a 20-minute service after a weekend of tributes, the former first lady, who died Wednesday at 94, was buried to President Johnson’s right in the family cemetery on the LBJ Ranch 70 miles west of Austin.
Their reunion beneath a modest pink granite headstone came more than three decades after the 36th president died in 1973.
“Most Americans remember Lady Bird Johnson as being the wife of Lyndon Johnson,” said her only grandson, Lyndon Nugent.
“Those of us who knew Lyndon Johnson would readily concede that anyone who could put up with him for so many years had already accomplished many great things,” he said.
Sunday’s burial was a coda to a weekend of remembrances. Nearly 12,000 people filed by Johnson’s casket Friday and Saturday during a vigil at the LBJ Library and Museum at the University of Texas in Austin.
Tributes to Johnson have focused on her environmental activism and her penchant for planting wildflowers.
But former Johnson White House press secretary Bill Moyers prompted un-funereal applause Saturday when he described the first lady campaigning in the South after her husband signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Hecklers greeted her at every event. There were death threats. Johnson reacted with grace to every slur, he said, showing “how to cultivate the beauty in democracy, the voice raised against the mob, the courage to overcome fear, the convictions as true as steel.”
On Sunday, military bearers carried Johnson’s casket through an iron gate in the cemetery’s low stone wall.
Her daughters Lynda Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson, their arms entwined, led family members up to the simple pine casket, its knots blanketed in pink roses. They bowed in prayer as Lynda gave her mother one last flower, a single red rose she laid atop the casket.
Luci Baines Johnson hugs her granddaughter at the burial service. At right stand Lynda Johnson Robb and her husband, Charles Robb.
