Nearly 14 years after her death, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor Johnson’s legacy, to most who know anything about her at all, has been boiled down to wildflowers alongside Texas highways. In Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, Julia Sweig makes the convincing case that Johnson’s role in history is far more complex, interesting, and significant, even central to many of the events of the 1960s that continue to shape our culture and politics.
An accomplished historian and journalist, Sweig makes full use of more than 850 audio diary recordings, comprising 1.75 million words, that Lady Bird made between 1963 and 1969. Holt Rinehart published a heavily edited volume of transcripts of the diary in 1970, but it was not until 2013 that the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin began releasing them publicly.
