DALLAS – Texas school scholar Jade Emerson discovered herself entranced as she labored on a podcast about Lady Bird Johnson, paying attention to hour upon hour of the former first lady recounting the entirety from her youth reminiscences to advising her husband in the White House.
“I fell in love very quickly,” said Emerson, host and producer of the University of Texas podcast “Lady Bird.” “She kept surprising me.”
The podcast, which was released earlier this year, is among several recent projects using Johnson’s own lyrical voice to offer a new look at the first lady who died in 2007. Other projects include a documentary titled “The Lady Bird Diaries” that premieres Monday on Hulu and an showcase in Austin at the presidential library for her husband, Lyndon B. Johnson, who died in 1973.
Lady Bird Johnson started recording an audio diary in the tumultuous days after her husband turned into president following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The library launched that audio a couple of decade after her loss of life. It provides to recorded interviews she did following her husband’s presidency and residential films she narrated.
“I don’t know that people appreciated or realized how much she was doing behind the scenes and I think that’s the part that’s only just now really starting to come out,” mentioned Lara Hall, LBJ Presidential Library curator.
“Lady Bird: Beyond the Wildflowers” displays library guests the myriad tactics Johnson made an affect. Hall mentioned the showcase, which closes at the finish of the 12 months, has been so standard that the library hopes to combine portions of it into its everlasting show.
In making her podcast, Emerson, who graduated from UT in May with a journalism level, relied closely on the interviews Johnson did with presidential library body of workers over the many years after her husband left the White House in 1969.
“Just to have her telling her own story was so fascinating,” Emerson mentioned. “And she just kept surprising me. Like during World War II when LBJ was off serving, she was the one who ran his congressional office in the 1940s. She had bought a radio station in Austin and went down to Austin to renovate it and get it going again.”
The new documentary from filmmaker Dawn Porter, in keeping with Julia Sweig’s 2021 biography “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight” and a podcast hosted via the creator, takes audience via the White House years. From advising her husband on solution to critiquing his speeches, her affect is instantly noticed.
Porter additionally notes that Johnson was once “a fierce environmentalist” and an recommend for ladies. She was once additionally a talented campaigner, Porter mentioned. Among occasions the documentary recounts is Johnson’s excursion of the South aboard a educate named the “Lady Bird Special” earlier than the 1964 election.
With racial tensions simmering following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson despatched his spouse as his surrogate. “She does that whistle-stop tour in the very hostile South and does it beautifully,” Porter mentioned.
“She did all of these things and she didn’t ask for credit, but she deserves the credit,” Porter mentioned.
The couple’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson can nonetheless bear in mind the frustration she felt as a 16-year-old when she noticed the message putting on the doorknob to her mom’s room that learn: “I want to be alone.” Lady Bird Johnson would spend that point operating on her audio tapes, compiling her ideas from pictures, letters and different information that would possibly strike her reminiscence.
“She was just begging for the world to give her the time to do what she’d been uniquely trained to do,” said Luci Baines Johnson, who noted that her mother had degrees in both history and journalism from the University of Texas.
“She was just beyond, beyond and beyond,” she said. “She thought a day without learning was a day that was wasted.”
Emerson known as her paintings on the podcast “a huge gift” as she “spent more time with Lady Bird than I did with anyone else in my college years.”
“She’s taught me a lot about just what type of legacy I’d like to leave with my own life and just how to treat people.”
“Every time I hear her voice, I start to smile,” she mentioned.