First lady, first environmentalist

0 Comments | USA TODAY, December, 2007 | by Kathy Kiely

When she became first lady after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson felt as if she were "on stage for a part I never rehearsed," she wrote in A White House Diary, her best-selling memoir.

She seized the opportunity to launch a crusade that literally changed the nation's landscape. "She was probably the first environmentalist to live in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt," said Harry Middleton, the first director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library.

Armed with nothing more than her powers of persuasion and the considerable influence she exercised over the nation's 36th president, Johnson set to work to eliminate blight and promote natural beauty across America.

By the time she died on July 11 at 94,...