[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 113 (Monday, July 16, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9258-S9259]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               BILL MOYERS' EULOGY FOR LADY BIRD JOHNSON

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, we should all be so fortunate as to live a 
worthy life and at the moment of our passing have a person with the 
talent of Bill Moyers memorialize our time on Earth. On Saturday, Bill 
Moyers, the PBS journalist who served as special assistant to President 
Lyndon Johnson from 1963 to 1978, delivered a eulogy at Lady Bird 
Johnson's funeral service Saturday. He read from a text which I will 
now have printed in the Record.
  I ask unanimous consent that the eulogy be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  [From statesman.com, July 15, 2007]

               Bill Moyers's Eulogy for Lady Bird Johnson

       Bill Moyers, the PBS journalist who served as special 
     assistant to President Lyndon Johnson from 1963 to 1967, 
     delivered a eulogy at Lady Bird Johnson's funeral service 
     Saturday. He read from this text:
       It is unthinkable to me that Lady Bird is gone.
       She was so much a part of the landscape, so much a part of 
     our lives and our times, so much a part of our country for so 
     long that I began to imagine her with us always. Now, 
     although the fields of purple, orange, and blue will long 
     evoke her gifts to us, that vibrant presence has departed, 
     and we are left to mourn our loss of her even as we celebrate 
     her life.
       Some people arriving earlier today were asked, ``Are you 
     sitting with the family?'' I looked around at this throng and 
     said to myself, ``Everyone here is sitting with the family. 
     That's how she would treat us.'' All of us.
       When I arrived in Washington in 1954, to work in the LBJ 
     mailroom between my sophomore and junior years, I didn't know 
     a single person in town--not even the Johnsons, whom I only 
     met that first week. She soon recognized the weekends were 
     especially lonesome for me, and she called one day to ask me 
     over for Sunday brunch.
       I had never even heard of Sunday brunch, must less been to 
     one; for all I knew, it was an Episcopalian sacrament. When I 
     arrived at 30th Place the family was there--the little girls, 
     Lady Bird and himself. But so were Richard Russell and Sam 
     Rayburn and J. Edgar Hoover--didn't look like Episcopal 
     priests to me. They were sitting around the smallish room 
     reading the newspaper--except for LBJ, who was on the phone. 
     If this is their idea of a sacrament, I thought, I'll just 
     stay a Baptist. But Mrs. Johnson knew something about the 
     bachelors she had invited there, including the kid fresh up 
     from her native East Texas. On a Sunday morning they needed a 
     family, and she had offered us communion at her table. In a 
     way, it was a sacrament.
       It was also very good politics. She told me something that 
     summer that would make a difference in my life. She was shy, 
     and in the presence of powerful men, she usually kept her 
     counsel. Sensing that I was shy, too, and aware I had no 
     experience to enforce any opinions, she said: Don't worry. If 
     you are unsure of what to say, just ask questions, and I 
     promise you that when they leave, they will think you were 
     the smartest one in the

[[Page S9259]]

     room, just for listening to them. Word will get around, she 
     said.
       She knew the ways of the world, and how they could be made 
     to work for you, even when you didn't fully understand what 
     was going on. She told me once, years later, that she didn't 
     even understand everything about the man she married--nor did 
     she want to, she said, as long as he needed her.
       Oh, he needed her, alright. You know the famous incident. 
     Once, trying to locate her in a crowded room, he growled 
     aloud: ``Where's Lady Bird?'' And she replied: ``Right behind 
     you, darling, where I've always been.''
       ``Whoever loves, believes the impossible,'' Elizabeth 
     Browning wrote. Lady Bird truly loved this man she often 
     found impossible. ``I'm no more bewildered by Lyndon than he 
     is bewildered by himself,'' she once told me.
       Like everyone he loved, she often found herself in the path 
     of his Vesuvian eruptions. During the campaign of 1960 I 
     slept in the bed in their basement when we returned from the 
     road for sessions of the Senate. She knew I was lonesome for 
     Judith and our six-month-old son who were back in Texas. She 
     would often come down the two flights of stairs to ask if I 
     was doing alright. One night the Senator and I got home even 
     later than usual. And he brought with him an unresolved 
     dispute from the Senate cloakroom. At midnight I could still 
     hear him upstairs, carrying on as if he were about to purge 
     the Democratic caucus. Pretty soon I heard her footsteps on 
     the stairs and I called out: ``Mrs. Johnson, you don't need 
     to check up on me. I'm alright.'' And she called back, 
     ``Well, I was coming down to tell you I'm alright, too.''
       She seemed to grow calmer as the world around her became 
     more furious.
       Thunderstorms struck in her life so often, you had to 
     wonder why the Gods on Olympus kept testing her.
       She lost her mother in an accident when she was five. She 
     was two cars behind JFK in Dallas. She was in the White House 
     when Martin Luther King was shot and Washington burned. She 
     grieved for the family of Robert Kennedy, and for the lives 
     lost in Vietnam.
       Early in the White House, a well-meaning editor up from 
     Texas said, ``You poor thing, having to follow Jackie 
     Kennedy.'' Mrs. Johnson's mouth dropped open, in amazed 
     disbelief. And she said, ``Oh, no, don't pity for me. Weep 
     for Mrs. Kennedy. She lost her husband. I still have my 
     Lyndon.''
       She aimed for the consolation and comfort of others. It was 
     not only her talent at negotiating the civil war waged in his 
     nature. It was not just the way she remained unconscripted by 
     the factions into which family, friends, and advisers 
     inevitably divide around a powerful figure. She kept open all 
     the roads to reconciliation.
       Like her beloved flowers in the field, she was a woman of 
     many hues. A strong manager, a canny investor, a shrewd judge 
     of people, friend and foe--and she never confused the two. 
     Deliberate in coming to judgment, she was sure in conclusion.
       But let me speak especially of the one quality that most 
     captured my admiration and affection, her courage.
       It is the fall of 1960. We're in Dallas, where neither 
     Kennedy nor Johnson are local heroes. We start across the 
     street from the Adolphus to the Baker Hotel. The reactionary 
     congressman from Dallas has organized a demonstration of 
     women--pretty women, in costumes of red, white, and blue, 
     waving little American flags above their cowboy hats. At 
     first I take them to be cheerleaders having a good time. But 
     suddenly they are an angry mob, snarling, salivating, 
     spitting.
       A roar--a primal terrifying roar swells around us--my first 
     experience with collective hate roused to a fever pitch. I'm 
     right behind the Johnsons. She's taken his arm and as she 
     turns left and right, nodding to the mob, I can see she is 
     smiling. And I see in the eyes of some of those women a 
     confusion--what I take to be the realization that this is 
     them at their most uncivil, confronting a woman who is the 
     triumph of civility. So help me, her very demeanor creates a 
     small zone of grace in the midst of that tumultuous throng. 
     And they move back a little, and again a little, Mrs. Johnson 
     continuing to nod and smile, until we're inside the Baker and 
     upstairs in the suite.
       Now LBJ is smiling--he knows that Texas was up for grabs 
     until this moment, and the backlash will decide it for us. 
     But Mrs. Johnson has pulled back the curtains and is looking 
     down that street as the mob disperses. She has seen a dark 
     and disturbing omen. Still holding the curtain back, as if 
     she were peering into the future, she says, ``Things will 
     never be the same again.''
       Now it is 1964. The disinherited descendants of slavery, 
     still denied their rights as citizens after a century of 
     segregation, have resolved to claim for themselves the 
     American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
     happiness. President Johnson has thrown the full power of his 
     office to their side, and he has just signed the Civil Rights 
     Act of 1964--the greatest single sword of justice raised for 
     equality since the Emancipation Proclamation. A few weeks 
     later, both Johnsons plunge into his campaign for election in 
     his own right. He has more or less given up on the South, 
     after that legislation, but she will not. These were her 
     people, here were her roots. And she is not ready to sever 
     them. So she sets out on a whistle stop journey of nearly 
     seventeen hundred miles through the heart of her past. She is 
     on her own now--campaigning independently--across the Mason-
     Dixon line down the buckle of the Bible Belt all the way down 
     to New Orleans. I cannot all these years later do justice to 
     what she faced: The boos, the jeers, the hecklers, the crude 
     signs and cruder gestures, the insults and the threats. This 
     is the land still ruled by Jim Crow and John Birch, who 
     controls the law with the cross and club to enforce it. 1964, 
     and bathroom signs still read: ``White Ladies'' and Colored 
     Women.''
       In Richmond, she is greeted with signs that read: ``Fly 
     away, Lady Bird.'' In Charleston, ``Blackbird Go Home.'' 
     Children planted in front rows hold up signs: ``Johnson is a 
     Nigger Lover.'' In Savannah they curse her daughter. The air 
     has become so menacing we run a separate engine fifteen 
     minutes ahead of her in case of a bomb; she later said, 
     ``People were concerned for me, but the engineer in the train 
     ahead of us was in far greater danger.'' Rumors spread of 
     snipers, and in the Panhandle of Florida the threats are so 
     ominous the FBI orders a yard-by-yard sweep of a seven-mile 
     bridge that her train would cross.
       She never flinches. Up to forty times a day from the 
     platform of the caboose she will speak, sometimes raising a 
     single white-gloved hand to punctuate her words--always the 
     lady. When the insults grew so raucous in South Carolina, she 
     tells the crowd the ugly words were coming ``not from the 
     good people of South Carolina but from the state of 
     confusion.'' In Columbia she answers hecklers with what one 
     observer called ``a maternal bark.'' And she says, ``This is 
     a country of many viewpoints. I respect your right to express 
     your own. Now is my turn to express mine.''
       An advance man called me back at the White House from the 
     pay phone at a local train depot. He was choking back the 
     tears. ``As long as I live,'' he said, in a voice breaking 
     with emotion, ``I will thank God I was here today, so that I 
     can tell my children the difference courage makes.''
       Yes, she planted flowers, and wanted and worked for 
     highways and parks and vistas that opened us to the 
     technicolor splendors of our world. Walk this weekend among 
     the paths and trails and flowers and see the beauty she 
     loved. But as you do, remember--she also loved democracy, and 
     saw a beauty in it--rough though the ground may be, hard and 
     stony, as tangled and as threatened with blight as nature 
     itself. And remember that this shy little girl from Karnack, 
     Texas--with eyes as wistful as cypress and manners as soft as 
     the whispering pine--grew up to show us how to cultivate the 
     beauty in democracy: The voice raised against the mob. . . 
     the courage to overcome fear with convictions as true as 
     steel.
       Claudia Alta Taylor--Lady Bird Johnson--served the beauty 
     in nature and the beauty in us--and right down to the end of 
     her long and bountiful life, she inspired us to serve them, 
     too.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, those of us who were fortunate enough to 
know Mr. Moyers understand what an extraordinary person he is. I hope 
those who read the remarks he made about Lady Bird Johnson will come to 
appreciate so much more the contributions she made in her life. She was 
a gracious and caring person. Bill Moyers' eulogy reminds us she was 
also a person of exceptional courage.
  I join America in extending condolences to Lady Bird Johnson's 
family, to the family of our former colleague, Senator Charles and 
Lynda Robb, and to all those who mourn her passing, and I yield the 
floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. REED. Mr. President, first let me associate myself with the 
comments of Senator Durbin about Lady Bird Johnson. I had the privilege 
and pleasure for many years of knowing a dear friend of their family, 
my dear friend, Warrie
  Price and her family. She was there in Austin for the services.
  Also, I had the privilege of serving with Senator Chuck Robb and 
knowing Lynda. I thank the Senator for recognizing those comments by 
Bill Moyers. When I spoke to my friend, Warrie Price, she said she had 
never heard anything as moving and as evocative and as fitting as the 
tribute by Bill Moyers.
  I thank the Senator for including that in the Record for the American 
people to consider.

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