 Welcome, I'm Mark Uptegrove, President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. The First Lady is a public servant elected by one person, Lady Bird Johnson once said, her husband. Tonight, along with our partners, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, we will look at the singular legacy of Lady Bird Johnson, with Kate Bennett and Julia Swag. Kate Bennett is a White House correspondent for CNN, an author of Free Melania, the Unauthorized Biography, a behind-the-scenes look at the life of the most enigmatic First Lady in U.S. history. Julia Swag is an award-winning author whose latest book, Lady Bird Johnson Hiding in Plain Site, will be published in March. The book shows Lady Bird Johnson as a political actor in her own right, whose influence on the Johnson presidency and on the president as an advisor and a strategist has yet to be thoroughly appreciated, until now. Also in March, Julia will be releasing a podcast based on her book called In Plain Site, Lady Bird Johnson. This evening's conversation is moderated by LBJ Presidential Library Director, Dr. Mark Lawrence. Now, please join me in welcoming Kate Bennett, Julia Swag, and Mark Lawrence. Julia Swag and Kate Bennett, thank you so much for being here. I'm really looking forward to talking with you about First Ladies in American History and especially about Lady Bird Johnson. Julia Swag, let me ask you a question to get us started. Your background is in Latin American history, diplomatic history. What led you to write a book about Lady Bird Johnson? Thank you very much, Mark, for having me. I'm very happy to be here with you and with Kate Bennett. It's a great question and one that I get a lot. And the short answer is that I spent 15, 20 years working in Washington DC in politics and policy, focusing on Latin America, writing about history and policy. And I simply got to the point where I had observed the gender dynamic in Washington DC enough to feel that I wanted to get into the subject more directly of women and power. I had also observed the gender dynamic in Latin America and come to know some women heads of state in Latin America. And it was just stewing in me to want to leave the region behind a bit or to the side and look at American politics and history through the lens of women and power. Of course, that has to do with certain frustrations about the limitations that women experience and experienced. But really also, I wanted to teach myself something new. It was sort of just that simple. And the Lady Bird Johnson story for a historian and a historian that's used to working in archives is incredible because, one, it's obviously a story about a very significant woman in a relationship, a marriage, and a political partnership with a very powerful man, Lyndon Baines Johnson. And it's also one that is intensely documented. So the primary source material made it possible for me to really take a deep dive. And there you have it. How does your book change how we might think about Lady Bird Johnson? Well, that's a very vast, a short question that could invoke a very long answer, but I'll try to be succinct. I think the book puts her at the center of the Johnson presidency in a way that that story has really never been told before. We see in the images and we see in the sort of Johnson mythology that he's married to a woman named Lady Bird, who is present throughout his political career, but in several key areas that the Johnson presidency is most known for, whether it's Vietnam or civil rights or great society, or even the very arc, the timing, the beginning, middle, and especially the end of the Johnson presidency, Lady Bird plays a key and really obscured role. So what my book does is, and actually what her tapes do most importantly, you know, she kept an audio diary that started eight days after the Kennedy assassination and it went straight through to January 31st, 1969. And that's just an incredible treasure and gift. And she's a reporter and she's a historian. I mean, she was trained as a journalist and trained as a historian at UT. So her ability to be concise and to narrate in real time what her experience is in the White House is just mind boggling. It's 1,750,000 pages of transcript. So it is Lady Bird herself who, with her consciousness about legacy and about telling her own story, left these breadcrumbs. Hey, Bennett, you have covered the First Lady. You've written a book about Melania Trump. Where would you place Lady Bird Johnson in the longer history of First Ladies in the United States? You know, I have to say, I think people don't understand the breadth and scope of what she did and how important she was and a lot of modern First Ladies behind the scenes are oftentimes their husband's backbone, their confidant, they're the person giving the opinion. I love Lady Bird used to grade LBJ, literally give him a letter grade on his appearances. No one else could do that. And I think her legacy is one of compassion and she had to, first of all, she came into the role in such a violent way and came into the, there was a quote, people were looking at the living, but they were seeing the dead. That's how the White House staff was observing them when they came in. And that's a very difficult and unprecedented way for them to take over the administration. So I mean, I think she rose to that occasion. I think she had a husband who could be volatile and she had to work her way through that. But certainly I think she's less the flowery kind of Texas woman and more a firm and important First Lady, as Julia was just saying, in terms of the things she accomplished. And back then the First Lady's role was behind the scenes, forward facing, they were the doting wife and they were very traditional, but behind the scenes, and this goes, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt all back through the behind the scenes, they are impactful. And I wouldn't even say this about Melania Trump. People think she's, you know, trapped in the White House somewhere, SOS thing to get out on the window, but she's not. And in fact is in constant contact with the president for most of the day and is one of his most trusted advisors. Lady Bird Johnson, do you think change the institution of the First Lady or what Americans might expect of the woman who has occupied that role ever since? I see Lady Bird as the bridge in terms of how she used and occupied the platform in the office of the First Lady as the bridge from Eleanor, the really unrecognized bridge from Eleanor to Hillary Clinton. Lady Bird is the first modern letter that is post World War II First Lady to have a full professional staff in the White House. And she also was somebody, again, really rather unrecognized, who had like Eleanor did and like Hillary did a significant policy agenda. It was wrapped up in something called beautification, but it was environmentalism. And it was a building public consciousness around the environment. She had this line when she was in her 80s. I'll never forgive Lyndon's boys for making me use that word beautification. She hated it, she thought it was prissy, but it was a euphemism. And so in terms of the transformation of the First Lady's office, again, she had a policy staff, she had a press staff, she had a speech writing staff. Sometimes they were all doing everything, but they too were professional women who were juggling, who had little kids and who had husbands with careers. And they were handling all of the tensions of trying to be professional women in a very dominated, West Wing dominant space, the Lyndon Johnson White House. And I think they broke barriers in that sense as well. That's fascinating that that term beautification was pushed on her. Was that because it was simply expected that a woman would be interested in an issue like beautification but not the technical details of environmental legislation? Well, I think no. I think that environmentalism was not something that was at the center. It wasn't very mainstream. Conservationism was something that was sort of the province of more wealthy people or people that could pay for access to nature. But environmentalism as a social movement was really sort of just beginning. And it wasn't nearly as accepted. So beautification was a purpose, I mean, of course it suited. It's kind of ironic because she was such a tomboy growing up and she really didn't care about the clothing. And she wound up and we can talk about it having to get into it. But she was not into self-beautifying. She was not a person who was seen as nearly as feminine as a Jackie, for example. But the beautification word also has an environmental history to it. Because there's a city beautiful movement that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century. And even Launt Font, who designed Washington DC, used the term beautify. But beautify by the 1960s becomes feminized. She didn't like any of that. But more it was about how do we broaden the public's awareness and acceptance of environmental consciousness. And that word coming out of First Lady's mouth is a soft-pedal patina kind of dressing at the beginning. As her presidency, as her presidency, as her tenure in the White House went on, she instructed her staff to tell the press to stop using it. And she in speech after speech began to say, this is not what I mean. Let me tell you what I mean. Kate Bennett, how did Lady Bird's achievements in this area of beautification for environmentalism change, do you think? See, it's a tough nut. Tough nut to crack. Change the expectations that Americans came to hold of First Ladies in later years. Well, I mean, I think each First Lady has taken on the idea of a platform or an initiative in a different way. First Ladies in general have sort of an unfair hand dealt to them. There's no real job description. There's no salary. There's no handbook really about how to do it. So, you know, and I think it becomes a job that is as important as they make it. I think we've seen First Ladies utilize the platform as to as far an extent as they possibly can. Lady Bird being one of them likely to really make her mark and take this job and make the most of it and push through policy to push through change. We've also seen other First Ladies really not do much with it. I would cite the current First Lady as sort of, and again, it's not necessarily a good or a bad. It's just how they use the role. And I think, you know, they've had a number of present day First Ladies or the most recent ones have had a number of really important role models to look up to, one of them being Lady Bird. And I can't stress enough that the job is what they make it. It's very challenging in this current White House that has an East Wing staff of less than a dozen people. Michelle Obama had about 25, 26 staff members. Laura Bush, similar up to 30. And so, you know, it becomes a function of what it is. And if they choose not to step forward with that role or initiative, then that's where we are. I mean, I think, you know, I loved, Eleanor Roosevelt used to just anything that bothered her, she would, you know, would write a letter and she would write a letter and seem to get it done. You know, for Lady Bird, I think a lot of times the First Lady can foresee the legacy of their husband in a way they can't themselves. And for her, you know, looking at the Civil Rights Act, looking at, you know, Vietnam, looking ahead. And the recordings were all things that those are very First Lady tendencies to think about while their husbands are in the thick of it. So, you know, from a platform or initiative perspective, she was really, I think, using everything she could to make a name for herself and that lasting legacy that she was aware of. And you know, actually, can I just jump in there because this gets to the issue of the marriages behind the partnerships or the relationship between the partnerships and the marriages and how they're so interrelated. Lyndon Johnson sort of spotted Lady Bird, you know, asked her to marry him on their first date, that story. But he has, we know, an incredible eye for talent and chose Lady Bird. I'm not saying he didn't love her quite the contrary. We can talk about that later. But, you know, she had his support to take that platform and run with it. And I think that's another really interesting way of looking at these first couples and these partnerships is not just, you know, what does the First Lady make out of her undefined tabula rasa kind of moment that she inherits by virtue of being married to this guy. But how does the marriage itself and the partnership itself boost or limit what the First Lady does or doesn't choose to do? Yeah, that's so true. I mean, there are so many cases of that really. And we can, I think we could probably pinpoint the one that we're thinking of. Yeah. So let's stick with this theme for a minute. It seems to me that despite the policy contributions that several First Ladies have made, there is this strong tendency for better or for worse for people to focus attention on the nature of the relationship, the marriage. And of course the question of infidelity has often been part of this story. What do we learn of value by looking at the intimate details of the relationships between First Lady and President, but also perhaps between First Lady and their children? What do we learn by looking at that family unit? Well, I mean, would you like me to? I mean, I think each one is different. I think a common thread for most modern First Ladies is that there is infidelity in their marriages and that it becomes a hot topic to talk about. I don't think it's necessarily fair. I think the First Ladies face this weird, bizarro land where they're supposed to be, they're sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't, if they're independent and they work separately from their husband and don't sort of act as his accessory, then it's what's wrong with their marriage. But if they do, it's like, oh, she's so old fashioned, why can't she work more? It's a lose, lose a large majority of the time. You know, I will speak just having covered it of the Trump's marriage when the scandals were about coming up about the alleged infidelities. Melania Trump was mad and she did things that we don't often see from a First Lady. She did not stand next to him and sort of look while he made some mea culpa or, you know, she did not do a interview tour and, you know, Ola Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton. What she did was cancel a trip to Davos with him. She rode separately in a separate motorcade to state of the union, something a first couple has not done before. And she wouldn't walk with him across the North Lawn to get on the helicopter to go on their planned vacation. She was mad. And I think the humiliation for such a private person was far more egregious than the act of the infidelity itself. So again, it sort of depends. People can see that as, oh, wait a minute. This First Lady is very private and doesn't talk a lot. She might have something in there from a feelings perspective. Julia, how do you handle the relationship between Lyndon and Lady Bird, the nature of the marriage? Look, you know, I'm always worried about this question because I think focusing on infidelities of very powerful men diminishes the women that they're married to. And we saw with Hillary Clinton that she, as Kate said, she was really damned as she did, damned as she didn't. How dare you stay with him? That kind of question, how could you stay with him? And the way I handle it is that this woman was so much more than the element of her marriage that had to do with her husband's infidelities that I try to place it in perspective. And also my book is about the White House years. By then Lyndon was enormously dependent on her. And, you know, she stopped communicating with somebody else that was writing a biography of her. When she cut off the relationship, what she wrote was, you'll never understand Lyndon without understanding how totally intertwined the two of us are. And what you, and I kind of took my cue from that, which is, and reading and listening to all of those tapes, what you hear, and I've been married also for almost 30 years. And so I have some idea, and I'm not saying anything about my own marriage in this sense. I'm simply saying that these are complex, long-lived, multi-layered relationships. And she was, she's much more interesting to me as the person who documented his presidency got the library launched, laid out in May of 1964, the strategy memo that he followed, explaining exactly when he could plausibly step down, not in August of 64, but in March of 68, which is when he did step down, as the women who recruited a hippie architect, landscape architect from San Francisco to help her transform Washington, D.C. as the person who, I don't have the exact number, but who beat the pavement with speech after speech on women, on the environment, on civil rights, on great society. That's the person that interests me. And if she decided to compartmentalize, God bless her to, in exchange for an incredibly charismatic, riveting life with this complicated, difficult person on whom she relied and who relied on her so totally. So I think power in that relationship in some ways reverted to her for many, many reasons, but I suspect in part because she was able to pocket the hurt that she experienced and help deliver to him the White House. That's how I deal with it. So, Julia, I'm fascinated by the subtitle of your book, Hiding in Plain Sight. It seems to me that a number of biographers have made a similar point about Lady Bird Johnson. She was elusive, a little bit mysterious, hard to read. So as a biographer, how did you go about trying to break down that wall and get some sense of what was really going on inside Lady Bird Johnson's head? Well, fortunately, the deep dive that I took into her own material really helped. The diaries are long and extensive, and some of them don't give us direct insight into her, but she's very open in the diaries about what the presidency and what they, the Johnsons, and what Lyndon Johnson was going through. And when you track sort of her experience, as Kate mentioned, starting with the assassination and then the transition through the adjustment from going to second lady to first lady under such horrific circumstances, listening to her tapes because she's describing in real time what she's experiencing. You can hear very much the person, very much the emotion, very much the disciplined reporter who can put one thing aside and move on to something else. She talks about her daughters. She talks about raising them. She talks about their boy problems. She talks about the experience of having everybody, and this reminded me so much of the Obamas, everybody finally under one roof. Now, Linda was coming and going, but for the most part having everyone there together and having the family time. And the fact that she's a Washingtonian, even though she's a Texan, of course, really helped because I'm a displaced Californian, but I'm a Washingtonian. And when she went into the White House, she was the same age as I was when I started writing this book. She had two teenagers in the White House as I had two teenagers at home. We lived three miles from one another. Her geography, especially when we get to talking, when I got to looking at her work in Washington, D.C., is very much my geography. And that humanized her very much so also. I think she was very deliberate about, on the one hand, having a public persona that she created actively. And did this with images and did this with interviews and did this with her speech making, even the substantive speech making, did this by really being with Lyndon on the campaign trail and at events. I mean, they were really together a lot. So she created that persona for the public at that time. I think she was aware that extending herself too far was, she pushed the boundaries, but she never walked past them. Lyndon was the principal. And she was the CEO in a way behind the scenes. But in the material that's in her tapes, in the material that's in all of the secondary coverage and the interviews that I did, in the material that's at the LBJ library, the human being really comes through. So I just did the deep dive and immersed myself to try to do the best I could. I mean, hopefully I got some of it right. Kate, talk a little bit about the same theme and connection with the First Ladies that you've covered. How do you get behind the persona and uncover that three-dimensional human being? Well, there couldn't be more difference between Lady Bird and Melania Trump. Lady Bird was the first First Lady to hit the campaign trail by herself, but she did the whistle-stop tour that was not advised by Secret Service and challenged her, people in her face. She was unafraid to do that and really instrumental. Melania Trump, this campaign cycle made, because I was there for several of them, approximately four campaign appearances. She hadn't done a solo campaign appearance in more than four years, four years ago. So certainly in the scope of the disparity of First Ladies, there's lots of middle ground, but I mean, some First Ladies reveal themselves right away, at least in that public persona way that Julie was mentioning. I mean, we felt almost immediately like we knew Michelle Obama. She's doing push-ups on Ellen DeGeneres, she's hanging out, she's doing magazine. And privately, she's really struggling with being, as she said now in her memoir, with being the first African-American First Lady and what she was up against and the blatant racism that she faced moving her girls to a new city, protecting them. Nancy Reagan, for example, was this sort of tightly wound, frigid, upper-class woman, and she carried that into the White House. Some are easier to read than others. Melania Trump is incredibly difficult to read, not only because she doesn't really do interviews. She also doesn't talk a lot. And what I learned to do in covering her, and I've been covering her since day one, for a lot of it I had to look at what she wore, which I know is not a popular thing with First Ladies, but sometimes it reveals for her more. I think being a partner of Donald Trump for as many years and standing quietly on a red carpet or next to him next to something, she's learned to express herself with what she's wearing or what she's looking like. And that's just how she is. She's a former model. So there was a lot of that. I mean, for writing my book, I went to Slovenia and spent time there. I talked to people who knew her as a child. She doesn't have an extensive girl group of friends. She's not a very social person even when she's not in the White House. She's a very hands-on mother. I think a lot of people don't know that about her. She's very close with her parents who also live in the White House when they're in Washington. So everything about her screams private. I don't want you to know anything about me. I don't want you to know about my marriage. I don't want you to know about my kid. I don't want you to know about where I live or my politics even. People are always surprised now when she'll say something that aligns with Donald Trump. Again, I think she's wearing a white suit signaling the resistance. Quite frankly, she's just not. She's much more aligned with him than politically and otherwise, some people assume. So, I mean, I just had to really observe. It's been a challenge as a journalist because First Ladies, it's sort of this, you need me, I need you, like I'm trying to, you know, there's usually this feed off of one another that works for both the media and the First Ladies office. It hasn't been the case with Lania Trump for sure. You have to dig at what's real and what's not real, what's forward-facing, what's going on behind the scenes. You know, and that can definitely be a challenge. One of the points I'm taking from this conversation is that there are many different ways to embody this role and really many different ways to be successful in this role. Are there any sort of general lessons we might pull from this history of American First Ladies about what it is that makes a First Lady successful or is that a hopeless task because different individuals have gone about the role in such different ways? I can take a stab at that if you don't mind. I mean, it is a really, one of the things that drives me sort of bonkers about Lania Trump is that I very much respect her independence and that if she doesn't want to do something, I mean, she's not pretending that she was a lawyer or a political spouse or anything besides a model and a homemaker and a really wealthy woman. So for her to all of a sudden, you know, take up the mantle of some big policy or healthcare like Hillary Clinton is just, would be weird, right? So she's given the okay to not do what's expected of her from the West Wing. The East Wing does not communicate with this West Wing. They're two separate entities. That's also a new thing. And in a way that's sort of great because now Dr. Biden can come in and she's saying she wants to work and continue her job and who knows what her East Wing is going to look like if she's going to have offices there. So, you know, I think it's what each one makes them and to me understanding the history of their predecessors is probably sound simplistic, but it's probably the most important and really biggest North Star for them in their own tenure. Again, you know, they're photographed more than anyone in the world that people listen to them. They're that sort of quasi celebrity slash political spouse. You know, it's a very mixed up role, but harnessed correctly. It's incredibly powerful. So I don't know. I think the goal now is to make it what you want to make it, modernize it and have a thick skin. I mean, you know, that's really probably the best they can do. You know, if I could just add one little footnote to that because as you were talking, you know, when I read Michelle Obama's memoir, I was sort of scratching my head at this one line in it when she said that she had only ever been in the Oval Office during working hours once, and it was on the day of the Sandy Hook Massacre in Connecticut when President Obama was so distraught, he asked her to come in. And I'm thinking about sort of marriages and partnerships and whether they're in the White House or elsewhere, but especially in the White House, thinking about how much we know how, yes, she was hesitant about Barack Obama getting into politics running for president, but we also know how formidable Michelle Obama is and was during their White House period. So I think it's just like, there's some aspect of this was just also just ultimately unknowable, right? Lady Bird Johnson was in the Oval Office all the time. Same with Nancy. All the time, right? I mean, you could see it in the images of Okamoto and the others, you can see just how involved in the presidency she was and where the political relationship starts and the personal relationship ends, forget it, impossible to disentangle. But I just want to just say that at a certain point, Mark, and Kate, some of this is unknowable. Do we really think that Michelle Obama only once went into the White House, into the Oval Office? I mean, isn't that really plausible given everything else we know about those two people? And that's my main question is that there's a certain amount of this is unknowable because of the mystery that you really can never totally know anybody else's marriage, the public is. Right. Yeah, that's such a good point because the things we learned in hindsight even about first couples had scratchers. I mean, the difficult thing is there should be this bunker mentality and there typically is between a First Lady and a President because they're the only ones who really get what it's like to be in this weird bubble of you can't open a window and you can't walk. I mean, Michelle Obama used to walk the dogs and didn't realize that when she did it, the Secret Service would have to clear pedestrians from the entire perimeter of the White House and she stopped walking the dogs. The White House groundskeeper started walking the dogs because she didn't want to put people off. I mean, it's such a weird place and in those moments, you really probably only have your spouse or your immediate family who are sharing them with you. So, I mean, for good or for good or for bad. Yeah. Julia, let me shift gears here for a minute. We collected some questions in advance from our audience and a question that came up more than once is I think an excellent one. What surprised you most about Lady Bird Johnson as you uncovered her story? So many things, actually almost everything. I think what surprised me most about her is her discipline and her tenacity and her seriousness. Precisely because of that two-dimensional figure that I grew up having so many assumptions, incorrect assumptions about that persona that she created was so hard to penetrate. So then once you peel back the curtains and dig into the material, you see how important a strategist she is for Linda and Johnson, how much he relies on her, how incredible, how impossible it is for her to become exhausted. I mean, she was the hardest working woman in show business, her ability to juggle and the seriousness of her reporting, her commitment to legacy and to telling their story and also I think her clarity about what was going to hurt them. The two big issues in Lyndon Johnson's presidency that kind of unfolded in tandem, the civil rights story and the Vietnam story. I think she had very much, a lot of clarity about how Vietnam could derail them by Lyndon Johnson's blinders about it. Likewise with civil rights, they were both total New Deal Democrats and when she went on the whistle stop tour, what I see with New Deal Democrats is that her commitment to government helping elevate Americans, the substance behind that belief was very, very serious for her. So I'm talking about things that I discovered, but it all surprised me because even, you know, she's not, I should say in terms of the historiography, other people, what they've written about her. There's a bunch of hagiographies that were written about her in the 1960s. Then she shows up in some of the large histories of the Johnson presidency, kind of as practically as Lyndon Johnson's doormat but really sort of having a secondary role or a derided role, derided by the authors, sort of taking at face value some of the banter between Lyndon and Lady Bird, assuming that behind the banter, there was just, you know, nothing. And then the other sort of larger biographies that have been written about her also sort of didn't take this deep dive into the material. So I'm surprised at just what a formidable person she really was to sum it up. We are about to enter into unprecedented territory with a man, Kamala Harris's husband, embodying a role that historically has obviously been played only by women. Could you talk a little bit about the challenges that confront him or perhaps the American society more generally in adapting to this remarkable new moment? I mean, I think America's more than ready for it. Women certainly are. You know, Doug, he's taken, he will be the first second gentleman as the official title. Whether or not he chooses to go by that is up to him. But I mean, he's taking a leave of absence from his law practice. He's doing what a lot of female spouses do, politicians just put his career on hold for his wife, which is great to see. I mean, you know, I think the expectation is, you know, here's the thing, the second lady now, I know what she does because I get a press release whenever she, you know, the military base or goes to open a national park or what have you, but like, not a lot of people do. Dr. Biden worked in tandem with Michelle Obama, the first lady, and they had that partnership really going and grooving military families and they had a lot of the same agenda issues, but still second lady takes a big backseat to first lady. But I think more eyes are going to be on the first second gentleman, and I'm covering that as well for the next four years, his role. So, you know, again, I think it's only a matter of time before we just get used to it as we've gotten used to other things with political spouses. I mean, you know, there's no longer that need to hide. Yeah, I recently watched a Hillary Clinton documentary and she almost was like too over, like water from a fire hose kind of for in many ways. And I think it didn't sit well, she was just mercilessly attacked for all sorts of things that she had just grown up doing and were part of herself. So I think this is, we're sort of in a good place now. I mean, someone had to barge through that door. Someone had to sort of get there. And Lady Bird, of course, was one of those trailblazers, as you said, between Eleanor and Hillary. And now we're moving into a new phase. I mean, I think it's going to be fascinating to watch. I know he wants his wife to shine. I know that on the campaign trail, he always, you know, his objective wasn't for himself. It was for her. So we'll see how it goes. But I think we're ready. It's about time. Julie, any comparisons to be drawn between Jill Biden and Lady Bird Johnson? You know, I think it's, it might be too soon to say. She's not in office yet. I think, you know, clearly they're both spouses who have been married to men that were in the Senate for a very long time. And then we're in the vice presidency for a very long time. Jill Biden is, you know, similarly very hip to the ways of Washington, D.C. and politics in the campaign trail and sort of the ecosystem as they say that she's entering. She knows it very, very well. And so since she's also shared Joe Biden's political rise and career, I'm guessing that she'll have all of the savvy and awareness of her surroundings, literally. And, you know, in terms of the system she's entering that Lady Bird had when she entered. I mean, fortunately for Jill Biden, she's not coming in on the heels of such a tragedy. You know, I can't say more again because it hasn't revealed itself quite yet. But I do want to say one other thing, not about Jill Biden, but that goes back to your previous question about hiding in plain sight. And that is that the other thing that's so, so we have Lady Bird Johnson sort of there in front of us, but we haven't really, we didn't really stop to sort of ask the major questions who is she and what made her tick and what was her role and influence on the Johnson presidency. But also it's the source material hiding in plain sight that the LBJ library is one of the most incredible institutions and LBJ himself, his presidency is so amply documented that the president himself and the material has obscured, has hidden this other story. And the source material has been sitting at the LBJ library, I mean, very importantly transcribed and released in full in the last few years. So I was able to take advantage of that. But the diary, a lot of the diary was sitting around for a long time and kind of sneezed at a lot of her material, a lot of her speeches, a lot of the substance behind her environmentalism, especially the work that she did in Washington DC, sitting there in the archives, but not woven into the story of the Johnson presidency sort of taken as kind of a side thing. I mean, no offense to this discussion, but kind of as like first lady history, as opposed to sort of how does this, what does this tell us about the Johnson presidency? And I think that's another reason we chose hiding in plain sight because it tries to suggest that there's a larger story to be told. I think it's a wonderful title. And I know I speak for lots and lots of people and saying, I can't wait to see your book in March. Thank you. Ladybird Johnson hiding in plain sight. Julia Swig, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you as well to Kate Bennett, who is author of Free Melania, the Unauthorized Biography. I've really enjoyed this conversation and I really appreciate all of the insight. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Real pleasure to be with you both. On behalf of our partner, Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, thanks for joining us. And thanks to our sponsors, St. David's Healthcare and the Moody Foundation. For signed copies of Julia's book, Ladybird Johnson Hiding in Plain Sight, go to lbjstore.com. Please join us for our next program, Continued Conversations, with Lyndon and Ladybird Johnson's granddaughters Nicole Covert and Catherine Robb on December 8th at 11.30 a.m. Registration is available online. These programs are made possible by contributions from our members. If you aren't already a member of the Friends of the LBJ Library, please join us at lbjfriends.org. I'm Mark up to Grove. See you next time.