 The 14th, 2003, we're taping this afternoon Betty Tilson, who was an aide to Mrs. Johnson in the White House, and my memory is that the letter she wrote for Mrs. Johnson so impressed the president that he wanted her to come down and work for him when he left office and come and work in the federal building and then in the LBJ Library. So she's been with the Johnson's for what year? 1963, 40 years almost. And she's still working for the Johnson family and for Mrs. Johnson and the LBJ Foundation. Betty, 1963, that was shortly after the president became president or were you in the White House before you came? I was in the White House before. I actually started in the last six months of the Eisenhower administration and in the social correspondence office that answered letters to the First Lady and the president that weren't about matters of real concern and worked through the Kennedy administration. And when the Johnson's came to the White House, it became a different White House, I think. I remember early on Mrs. Johnson came down to our office and told us to write the very best letters we could and to be as responsive as we could because that might be the only contact that a person would have with the government. And they invited the staff up into the family quarters, which I hadn't experienced before. And I think one of the things that I remember most vividly about those years is that my children was in Vietnam and I had three small children and I would arrive at work and leave work with here in chance of LBJ. How many boys did you kill today? And it just infuriated me that people didn't support the president at any rate with Miss Johnson's programs and all that he did to help people. My admiration for them just grew and grew and grew. And as she said, he asked if we would move to Texas and if I would work for him. After they left the White House, well, we had never been to Austin. And we flew down on Air Force One on one of their trips down here in mid-December. And we really liked the city and I loved the idea of working for those two people. And so we decided that we would leave Washington, which had been my home since I was born. I came down here with them on Inauguration Day and stayed down here. I think it was a week or two. And then my husband had recently gone to work for the Veterans Administration after retiring from the Army. And there was some problem about them paying moving expenses down here. Well, I told President Johnson I really had to go home and take care of my family and get ready for the move. Well, some time passed and he became impatient. And he said, well, I will pay for the move. But I want you to get rid of everything that you don't absolutely have to have. Pack it yourselves. And so four children, my mother, my husband, and I drove down in two cars. We stayed at the guest house the first week we were down here. And I remember President Johnson bringing toys over for the children and two huge boxes of candy, which he obviously wanted opened then and there because Mrs. Johnson wasn't around to see him eat it. Anyway, the day finally came to move into the house. And I believe our moving bill was $1,497. And the President called me into the office and counted out the money. It was in hundreds. Some of it was in small bills and some of it was in dollar bills. And then he had this big hangdog look on his face. And he said, I had to borrow this on my life insurance policy. He was so terribly generous though. And remember another time that we were invited to dinner at one of Austin's landmark restaurants, the old Nighthawk Steakhouse. And I think there were about eight of us around the table. And President Johnson had a huge platter of onion rings that he was lustily eating. My husband was sitting next to Mrs. Johnson at the other end of the table. Mrs. Johnson asked him, asked the President, please pass the onions down to Don. And then she whispered in his ear, please eat them all. I don't want Lyndon to have any more. And I know it's been said many times that they were better together than they were apart. And she watched over his health so much, gently nudging most of the time. And President Johnson loved to tease. I remember one time at the ranch, I was sitting among a circle of people that included Dean Rusk. And President Johnson used to like to have business lunches in the suite at the Federal Building. But he didn't like the sandwiches that were being brought in. And he looked me straight in the eye and he said, you could cook for eight or ten people. And Mrs. Johnson said something like, Lyndon. And I said, Mr. President, I really keep pretty busy doing my own job. But he, and that he just laughed. He almost never gave compliments directly. You would hear them second hand from somebody. And I remember one day he told me to drive out to the ranch that he had a lot of work to do. But I knew that he was real pleased about something I'd done. I don't remember what now. But I got out to the ranch. And instead of working, we got into the helicopter and flew over to the Krim Ranch where we had a delightful afternoon. And he asked me if my mother, who took care of my children, also prepared the meals at night. And I explained to him that she had had a nervous breakdown and had been hospitalized twice. And getting dinner on the table for all those people was too much for her to handle. So I cooked when I got home. Well, he never asked me to stay late after that. And he got a real sad look on his face. And he just, he had so much compassion for people and I mean for all people everywhere. And he loved to give gifts at Christmas and sometimes a bonus or two every month and while. After the vantage point came out, I remember particularly. But one day, and I guess I shouldn't mention her by name, after the library was built, President Johnson was spending a whole lot more time at the library than he was at the Federal Building, where some of the staff still office. And she wrote him a letter and said that we were all bored. Well, that letter infuriated him and he carried it around in his pocket. Tom Johnson told me for two or three months. And one day he took his side and he showed me the letter. And I tried to explain that we weren't bored because God knows we had enough to do. But that we missed him and the excitement that his presence always brought into the office. And he seemed satisfied by that. But we didn't get our Christmas presents that year until February. Well, too soon that giant of a man was gone. I learned, I think, the greatest lesson of my life for Mrs. Johnson. Then because she focused on how grateful she was for all the years they had together, what they had experienced, and came back to the office almost immediately and sat for months responding to condolence letters, she would rarely weep. Well, when my husband died and it was a Saturday morning and he got up and said he was feeling better than he had in a long time, he turned the tape player on and played some platters music that we had loved early in our marriage, Twilight Time, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. And we danced and we had pictures all over the bedroom wall of our children. And I said a lifetime of memories and he said, oh, and aren't we lucky to have had them. And we went to the hardware store and he had a massive heart attack and was gone. But her example just helped me so much to get through that. I think my life would have been in shards had I not witnessed that because at other funerals and things I'd been to, people just went into themselves or cried incessantly. And I wanted to be an example to my children as she had been to Linda and Lucy. And she was the greatest teacher. You would have had to have a lobotomy not to learn from her graciousness, her intelligence, her insight, and her patience. I never once heard her lose her temper in the office. If you did something wrong, you knew it by hearing her say, next time let's do it this way. And she was also the most courageous person I think I knew. It took courage to make beautification her platform in the White House. And she was ridiculed and made fun of. And then when she came back to Austin, she established the Wildflower Center on her 70th birthday. And earned more criticism for that while the world has turned around in its thinking. And every spring we get letters from people telling us how beautiful the road sides are or how Washington is just alive with color. And the taxicab drivers give all the credit to Mrs. Johnson. And I got to travel with her. After President Johnson died, I worked with her on her speeches. And I got to travel with her. And especially when she was promoting the book she co-authored with Carlton Lee's called Wildflowers Across America. And we crisscrossed the country. She also took me twice, I think, up to the Mayo Clinic when she went to have her annual checkup because I was having some health problems. And I remember one night we were in the hotel room sitting on the couch with our feet propped up on the coffee table, a bowl of popcorn at hand, watching nine to five, which was a comedy about working women. And it had a sequence, kind of a dream sequence of a marijuana type. And I don't know that she understood that part of it, but she sure did laugh. And she was ever, always and forever, for years, she told the staff that she was going to slow down and she was going to retire. And she kept going and she said that she would give the center