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Lady Bird Johnson, Laura Bush both helped husbands' careers
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| Contributor | The Sunset Provision |
| Last Edited | The Sunset Provision Jul 15, 2007 09:31pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Monday, July 16, 2007 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Their husbands hailed from different political parties, and the two women grew up on opposite sides of their vast home state.
But Lady Bird Johnson and Laura Bush were both instrumental in their husbands' rise to power. And each endured harsh criticism of the White House over a faraway American war - Johnson for Vietnam and Bush for Iraq.
"It's got to be a very wearing ordeal for either family to endure the kind of disapproval and unhappiness that the American people visit on the presidents of unpopular wars," said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas in Austin whose expertise is the presidency.
During Vietnam, Lady Bird Johnson often spoke her private thoughts into a tape recorder. Transcripts of her comments were published in the 2001 book "Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965," edited by historian Michael Beschloss.
"How much can they tear us down?" she wondered as criticism of the war heightened. "And what effect might it have on the way we appear in history?"
It may be years before the public learns more about Laura Bush's feelings on the Iraq war, said Bruce Schulman, a professor of political history at Boston University and author of "Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism."
In the Johnson administration, the president's wife was "at the emotional center of Johnson's world as things started to fall apart, as he was hunkered in at the White House," Schulman said.
Lady Bird Johnson also seemed to be a moderating force for her husband's rhetoric. "When he was tending to say something that may have been too extreme or pointed, she would reel him in," Schulman said.
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