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Lady Bird Johnson’s audio diaries: A first lady narrates her powerful role in history

Recorded in the White House, the revealing 123 hours of tape is the basis of a new podcast and biography

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March 1, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EST
Lady Bird Johnson recording her audio diaries at the White House in 1968. (Robert Knudsen/LBJ Library) ( Robert Knudsen /LBJ Library)

Lady Bird Johnson became first lady aboard Air Force One while President John F. Kennedy’s blood was still drying on her predecessor’s pink Chanel suit.

“I realized shortly after,” she later wrote, that “nobody else would live through the next months in quite the way that I would and see the events unroll from this vantage point.”