 Okay, Lindy, why don't you start off, I thought, if you're comfortable doing that, talking about how the Bogs and the Johnsons came together and became friends or got to know each other. Okay. In 1941, Hale Bogs, my wonderful husband, was elected to the Congress and went to serve and he was the youngest member of the House at the time. He was 26 years old. I was 24, and we had a perfectly wonderful experience being in Washington. This was 1941. The atmosphere was both friendly and exciting and then becoming more and more apprehensive about World War II and all of the involvement that was brewing in the areas of legislation and, of course, the military involvement and so on. It was a glorious experience for two young people, vitally interested in politics, but we also were lonesome for our friends, our age, that we could socialize with, not just on a political basis, but on a friendly and social basis as well. Of course, among those that, when we found, were Lyndon and Ladybeth Johnson. That was 1941 and we've been friends all these years. Over the years, my admiration for both of them and each of them simply became greater and greater and greater. My love for them endured in those proportions as well. It's very nice to reminisce about them and about our years together and about the friendship that we've shared, the places we've been, the legislation we've been involved in, the great moments in history that have been there, and especially to talk about what Ladybeth Johnson has been able to do for this country. So if we'll start out in 1941, we have to remember that the country was very, very anti-war. As a matter of fact, a week before Pearl Harbor, Speaker Rabin had to take the vote three times on the floor to get the extension of the military draft passed by one vote. That was the attitude of the country. Well, shortly after that, this group of Japanese appeasers came over to visit. For some reason or other, I was very suspicious of them. Hey, I'll tease me a lot about that because he said, you always believe in everybody. Why would you be suspicious of these Japanese? I said, I don't know. I just have this peculiar feeling. For the following Sunday, we had bundled our two children, Barbara and Tom, up one in a stroller and the other one in a buggy. The weather had been terrible in Washington. And finally, I was going to be able to get out of the house with these two little creatures, and Hale was there to help me with it. And as we were going out of the door, the telephone rang. Paul Wooten, who was Mr. Journalism in Washington, and the correspondent of the New Orleans Times, Picayune, who lived in our building, called and said, turn on the radio. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor. And my first reaction was, oh, that just couldn't be. It couldn't be Pearl Harbor. It must mean the Philippines. Then I looked at Hale and said, with these babies bundled up, and said, you know, the radio in the car gets much better reception than the radio in the apartment. So let's get in the car and we'll go down and see what's happening. And we did this. And we went, of course, past the British Embassy where there was a lot of activity, a French Embassy where there was so much activity, then past the Japanese Embassy where they were actually burning their papers in the front lawn. Then we went on down and got as close to the White House as we could, and then finally to the Capitol Building. And it was a very traumatic experience. Because I used to pick up Hale at the Capitol Building when we were first there. And I loved looking at the Capitol Dome always. And especially if you went down in the late evening and the lights came on on the dome, it was just so beautiful. About the third night I was doing this, a voice next to me said, isn't it the most beautiful sight in the world? And I turned around and it was speaker Sam Rayburn. And he said, whenever I'm really tired and really frustrated, I come out here and look at the Capitol Dome and it renews my hope and renews my courage, renews my strength and I go back in and battle with those guys. And just as we were standing there looking at the Capitol Dome, the lights went off because of fear of air raids. But the next day President Roosevelt ordered them back on all the lights in Washington. And of course that was the spirit that was there with Lyndon and Lady Bird, with Hale and me, and with all the members of the Congress and the related activities and organizations. So we've been friends all these years and we've been through this war, this terrible World War II. We went through, of course, all of the ramifications of it in Pacific and Europe and everything that went on about it. Hale went on to join the Navy. The young members of Congress wanted immediately to go to war and Mr. Sam told them that that was very foolish, that the districts would go unrepresented if they had gone off to war. So it wasn't until after the term was over, because those who were in the military reserve had to go. But the war finally was over, of course, and we all came back to the Congress. And our friendship, the Johnson-Bogg's friendship, just endured and grew in all sorts of proportions and all sorts of dimensions. And our friendship, Lady Bird and I, was still such good friends today. And, of course, she was the mainstay of so many of the programs of the Johnson era. And you have to look back and recognize that we had all of the problems of integration in the South. And so the way to campaign for, when Lyndon was campaigning for the Vice Presidency, was to take a train through the South. And a group of good friends of the Johnsons, with Liz Coffinger, of course, helping in every way, went through the South ahead of the train to be able to create pockets of support, to call on the President and the wives of the governors and the mayors and the state legislatures of wherever the train was going to stop, and to try to wake up some enthusiasm and some organized support in each of those places. Well, that worked out very, very well. And so four years later, when the President was running again for the Presidency, after having, of course, become President with the assassination of President Kennedy, we had another train through the South. And the way to do that was to have it a Lady Bird special, because she could get into any of those places in the South. And what a remarkable trip that was and what a remarkable contribution she made to the country and to her husband and to the party, the Democratic Party. She was absolutely amazing. Then, of course, we get into the full Johnson administration, and we had the great so-called beautification program that Lady Bird established and ran. She may pretend to be letting other people run things, which is the way she gets some enthusiastic, but Bird runs things herself as well. And the beautification program, I was always sorry that it was called that because it sounded much more frivolous than it actually was. It was a remarkable program, a remarkable program across the board, to not only clean up cities, not only clean up neighborhoods, not only have remarkable kinds of loans and so on in order to improve neighborhoods, but it had building codes. It had not only took the government money, but it also took the big signs off of the highways, but you beautified the highways in very special ways. And the plantings, of course, were always so well selected. They stopped erosion. The roadways needed less watering, less cleanup. They were safer. And it was unfortunate that some of the people in the Congress thought of it only as a, quote, beautification program. But Bird was very, very astute about getting the bill passed. For instance, I was going to a state to talk to the Democratic women of that state. And I got a call from Bird saying, I understand you're going to such and such a state. Well, would you please call the senators and tell them that you're going to their state and that you would really like to be able to announce to the Democratic women that they have signed on to the highway bill? And of course, I followed her instructions, but that was the kind of personal diplomacy that she engaged in in order to get the program through. And all of us know the great benefits that have accrued from that program. There are so many other things that she did. Her involvement with the Head Start program and after their retirement, Lyndon still went to the Head Start programs, I think in Fredericksburg and all around the LBJ Ranch. And he brought lollipops to the children and they called him Uncle Lollipop. And their interests in the program remained with them and with Lyndon all the days of his life. Hale and Lyndon had a wonderful political kind of a partnership as well as a friendship. And it was Lyndon sometimes leaned on Hale and Heaven's knows Hale leaned on the President. But Lyndon had assigned him to both the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commission, and then later to the Eisenhower Commission on crime. And that kind of trust and friendship that existed between them was the Eisenhower Commission. Yes, that's about where you're finished. I'll talk about that later, but after that or before that? Before that, the beautification incident. I think so. She did about beautification before the Warren Commission. Yeah, you did. I think you finished the beautification. And then ready again. Going back to the, you know, to the 1960 Democratic, Kennedy Johnson inaugural program. You were chairing that? I had a very very interesting experience with the Kennedy inaugural. I was, you know, I think I was the chair of the inaugural commission. And the very, very difficult problems that we had grew out of the fact that so many people wanted to come to the inauguration. And so many people wanted to go to the inaugural ball that it was impossible to be able to be able to accommodate them all. The previous commission for the Eisenhower inaugurals had strongly advocated that there be just one great big inaugural ball. Because it didn't matter how many others you added, you were never going to take care of all the requests anyway. So we planned on this to have the inaugural ball at the D.C. Armory. And we built a great tent, but very well floored, heated tent adjacent to the armory in order to have some space in the tent where people could go and have cocktails and have incidental fun music in the tent and then come back into the ballroom for all of the grandeur and the pompous attitudes. But we had a very, very strong push by the various hotels and other venues at town. And finally had to give in to the fact that we were going to have to have multiple balls. I think we ended up with either five or six balls. I've forgotten exactly. And the difficulties were compounded by the fact that there was a horrible snowstorm. And people had to mush through the snow to pick up their tickets and so on. And I actually missed the inaugural ceremony because I was at a inaugural ball headquarters trying to appease some of the angry people who were there trying to get their tickets. I finally said to them, you know, I think we really came to witness an inauguration. Could we just be quiet long enough to see President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson sworn in? And there was a lull in the angry agitation. But that was a very, very trying experience. As it turned out, everything came along quite well. And the night of the inauguration was finished in great glory at the inaugural balls. But it was a very trying experience for the people in charge. Well, four years later I had a call from President Johnson, he was in New York for some reason, and he called me and asked me if I would be chairman of his inaugural balls. And my first reaction was, you've got to be kidding. Of course, he wasn't kidding. And I of course followed his direction and we were able to know that you had to have multiple balls and to prepare for them way in advance. And I think it all went quite smoothly and we had a very good inauguration. The cooperation with the Johnson administration, of course, was so wonderful. And Liz Carpenter was a great go-between between the East Wing of the White House and the West Wing of the White House, having worked for the Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, and then gone over to be the head of Mrs. Johnson's of Lady Bird's operation, put her in a position of cooperation, appeasement sometimes, and so on that was made for very fine organizational activity. And so many good things came out of that, not just beautification, not just head start, but many of the solid areas around appeasing the people so incensed by the Vietnam War. Really, it was a great opportunity to really emanate it from her kind of participation. I'll never forget being at Lenders' wedding at the White House. George Hamilton had been a bow of Lenders and they had been down here to New Orleans at one point. And we had had such a good time and I enjoyed George very very much. I must say that I'm crazy about Chuck Rom here. And at Lenders' and Chuck's wedding we were standing at George Hamilton and I was standing together. And in the middle of the wedding ceremony to hear the terrible protestors interrupting the wedding ceremony with that horrible yell they had, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today? And it's a memory that I will never erase because it proves to me how great both Lenders and Lady Bird were at rising above that kind of criticism and being able to go forward with everything that was good and noble and fine for this country. So nice that our friendship endured following the Great Society, following the end of the war, following all of the things that happened that were so good for the country. And we had a lovely time. When Hale's plane disappeared, Hale was campaigning with and firing young Nick Begich of Alaska and their plane, of course, was lost in Alaska and we were never able to, despite a remarkable search by the government to find the plane. Friends and family kept urging upon me a memorial service and I was very reluctant to have a memorial service because I thought if Hale and Nick were still out there hanging on someplace that it sent the wrong vibes to them. But when the Congress met in January, they declared the seat vacant and the memorial service. You could start the seat being declared vacant. Hale's seat, the seat in the Second Congressional District of Louisiana was declared vacant and there was a memorial service. A beautiful memorial service. And I, of course, wanted Lady Bird and the President to be there, but I knew he wasn't feeling well and I didn't want to impose it upon him. And I was so very upset about what I should do about it, but at any rate I called him and he came. And after all of the beauty of the service, we stood at the back of Old St. Louis Cathedral here holding both hands, looking so hard into each other's eyes. And I suppose I loved him more at that moment than all the other times when I loved him so much. But then, of course, I sort of found myself running for Congress. I don't remember making a conscious decision and it was a very interesting sort of a situation of where, of course, he was being very supportive of me. And then I went up to my home of Parish County of Plain Coupé and to Old St. Mary's Church where I'd been baptized, received my communion, been confirmed, been married, and to be able to give proper thanks, I felt in that setting. And it was Hale's birthday. And when I came back to New Orleans, everybody that I saw said, Mrs. Johnson has been trying to get hold of you. And when I called her, it was to tell me that Lyndon had died. And it just sort of brought everything together. And it was my daughter Barbara, who is deceased now, called me and said, you know, it's just like those two. Why would he die on this particular day that meant so much to you? And I said, I don't know, maybe he wanted me to remember it. But our lives sort of came full cycle. And I made my peace with the fact that all probability I'd lost both Lyndon and Hale. So I then, of course, ran for Congress and was elected, served for nine terms. And I had all of the benefit of the years of experience and the friends and the supporters and the helpers, not only within the community of the Congress but with the outside community, with the party affiliations and so on. So the influence of Lyndon Johnson on the Boggs politics was very profound. And in later years I've been privileged to go with Lady Bird to various places for holidays and always been the happiest times of my year. The last place we were able to go abroad was to Wales because Lady Bird wanted to see the beautiful flowers in Wales once more before her eye difficulties became more intense. And we hadn't been in Wales for a few hours when Lyndon arrived and said, oh, I just love Wales. I just had to come back to Wales. So we realized that that was the last time we were going to be able to go abroad together. And the way of going abroad, of getting away, of being surrounded by beauty and being able to be with friends was to go to Martha's Vineyard. And those days I will always live in my memory with the greatest fun, sweetness, affection, liveliness, intellectual stimulation of any other experience. This is in my life. Lady Bird is a tower of strength to this country. She was the real guiding light, the moral compass and the legislative and professional helper to the President, to the Vice President, to the Senator, to the Congressman, all those years. And I think that this nation owes her a tremendous debt of gratitude for all that she is and all that she's done for us. Particularly her memories of his sense of humor. One of the ongoing sort of problems, I guess you would say, that occurred in the Boggs-Johnson relationship. It was surrounded by the fact that Lyndon loved a certain kind of chicken recipe that Emma Cyprian, who was made, knew how to make it, knew how to make it. They can serve often. And he kept trying to get the recipe from Emma. And finally Lady Bird put Zephyr, the Johnson's cook, on the phone when he was Vice President. And I listened into this conversation, which was the most amusing conversation I think I've ever heard. And Emma was telling Zephyr some things about the kind of chicken you had to get and what you had to do with it and how you had to prepare it and the other things you had to put in the pot and so forth and so on. And when it was all over, and the conversation had been concluded, and I hung up and I said, Emma, you didn't give Zephyr the right recipe. And she said, if he wants my chicken, he has to come to my kitchen to get it. And it was really funny when they got to the White House. I then said, Emma, you really have to give the correct recipe to Zephyr because there's going to be times in the White House when he's going to get provoked with the White House food and want some home cooking. And she said, no way. He's got to come to my kitchen to get my chicken. I think she was the only person I ever knew who really withstood the pressure of Lyndon Johnson. You have similar memories of your black employees trying to drive through the South as President Johnson did. We certainly did. And it was very, very hard. We drove back and forth mostly because we had to transport children and so on and goods. And it was so expensive to try to go on the train. And you only got two trips a year with the expenses paid for them. So we would pile all the children and pets and so on into the car. And then we had, because travel was just so impossible for the mother-wise, we would take, we had Emma Cyprian and they had Zephyr right with them. And you had to have either friends or designated motels and hotels along the route that would take a, unfortunately in those days, would take a black person in. And there were some of the old, good family hotels that would do that. And sometimes you would drive for miles to get to the places where you were certain you would have a pleasant reception. And these were experiences that we shared that were so, so very hard. Emma, for instance, Cyprian, had been a teacher. And in her early days, you could go to what is really sort of a junior college and get a teaching certificate after two years because of course there were very limited opportunities for blacks to go to colleges and universities. And she was a teacher and was very, very, very good at her job, expanded the school years program from five months to six months and finally to nine months. Her husband, drove a bus to get the children to school and to take them home. And along came equal pay for equal education when all the young people were able to go to four year colleges and to get the regular teaching certificates of the state. And instead of being destroyed because she was going to lose her position, she was very encouraging to the young people to finish their four year experience and to get them into teaching jobs. That was very lucky for us because when she gave up her job to a young qualified four year college prepared teacher, she came to us to live with us. But it was always such a sadness to have these lovely ladies refuse admittance to places where we felt that they were much more able to enjoy and to be a part of than the people who were already in there. But at one point after the Johnson's were retired, Hale and I went by to spend our couple of nights with them at the ranch. And the first morning that we were there, the door opened to the bedroom and it was Lyndon and he said, come on out here. So I threw on a robe and I went out and he said, I got something I want you to read. So we went downstairs and sat by a window in the dining room at the ranch looking out over that beautiful country. And he wanted me to read the script for his book about the experiences of going back and forth with Zephyr and Emma, but his experiences about going back and forth with Zephyr and my comparative experiences with going with Emma. And it was such a sweet exchange to have this total understanding of these two Southerners, these two friends, two people so devoted to equal rights and civil rights. And I was so honored that he wanted me to do that. Something is blinking. I stopped blinking. Okay, okay. Speaking of civil rights and Emma and Zephyr, I'll never forget the ladybird special train ride and the big and remarkable kinds of meetings that we had all along the route. When we'd done the vice presidential train through the south, we learned a great many things and we understood that when we'd go into a town where the train was going to stop and engaged a lot of help with the people, that what we really needed to do the second time around was to leave a person there with them to continue the organization and to be a sort of a go-between between the committee for the train and the local committees. And this was one of the things that we were able to do. Of course, also on the ladybird special we had many male politicians of great stature who were going along and at the bottom we would always pick up the governor, the mayor of the city that we were going into and so on to ride and to speak from the platform in the town. And sometimes there would be a big meeting and we would leave the train and go to a town setting, a city setting. And there was a group of hecklers who had started following the train around. They had the tenor area of the train and at each stop the hecklers would be there. Finally we got into a stop in South Carolina and the hecklers were in great force. They infiltrated into almost every area of the crowd. It was an enormous crowd. And at a certain signal all began to chant and to say awful things and so on. And Ladybird was speaking and all of the men got very, very upset about this. And they all tried to calm the crowd down to fuss with the crowd to do all these things. And finally Ladybird said, I'm sorry, I was a speaker and I am going to speak. And so she goes on to the microphone and she says to the crowd, all right, you've had your say, you've had your protest, you've made your points, but now I am going to speak. I am the designated speaker for this meeting and I am going to speak and I expect you to listen. And of course the crowd calmed down and she gave her speech to of course the thunderous applause of the people who were there other than the hecklers. And it was such a great example of her determined dignity and her effectiveness. I remember one of the advanced trips ahead of the plane and I should have asked you this before I started. Was it Lorraine Gibbons? Was that her name? Lorraine Gibbons from Texas, beautiful redhead. I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't tell the story, but it was such a cute story. We had such terrible weather on the plane trips at the time of year when you had all those little storms and it was a small plane and it would go up and down. And one day it was really scary and Lorraine gets on the intercom and says to the pilot, now you just straighten this plane out, don't you know I am back here making my face up? For the next stop? You just stop bouncing us all around like this. It relieved everybody's fright of course and the dueling. I was going back to Hayles Memorial Service where it really makes the presidents come here more poignant. Is the doctor told him not to? Of course he did and I told him not to. I just knew standing there, looking into his eyes. And then we had to go outside. President Nixon didn't come, but Pat did. And the Ag News came. But I didn't know what to do and we went outside too and there was this gun salute. And the first one went off and just sort of reverberated through my body and I thought, how can I stand here for twenty more of these without crying? And just about that time all the pigeons flew off of Jackson's statue and everything. And my little five-year-old grandson pulls on me and says, Mama, how come they're shooting all the pigeons? And it relieved the whole situation remarkably. And we stood there. But you know, Lendon stood there through all of that as well. And he was not well and it was sad, so sad. But it was so like him. He was such a loyal friend. That's beautiful. And your tribute to Lady Bird was, unless you had something else that you just wondered about. You really did recover.