Hello friends, welcome, always delighted to have you along and today I'm chatting with author

Julia Swig, she has written a singular portrait of a first lady that I feel like many of us don't know that much about Lady Bird Johnson.

Her book is in fact is called Lady Bird Johnson hiding in plain sight and

when you find out more about her you're probably going to have some little brain-tangle moments.

So let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

I'm chatting today with Julius Swig,

who has written a fascinating portrait of a first lady that I feel like many Americans know very little about.

We know a lot more about people like Abigail Adams and Jackie Kennedy

and of course when the more recent first ladies but you've written a

fascinating portrait of Lady Bird Johnson. Lady Bird is not the first person I personally would have chosen to write about.

In fact, when I was hunting around for my next book topic and I wrote about foreign policy and diplomatic history and never about

first ladies. She wouldn't have been my first choice. She was in the White House in the 1960s

and married of course to Linden Johnson who we associate

with two big parts of recent American history, civil rights and the Vietnam War and American protest at home. So three components of the Johnson era and Lady Bird was his spouse and his political partner for the 30 years before he landed in the White House, which happened when he was vice president to Jack Kennedy when JFK was

a

a in November of 63. She was a total political animal, as it turns out.

I live outside of Washington DC, and Washingtonians associate her with defidels and tulips and the incredible springtime blooms that are associated with what was called beautification.

But in fact, she had a huge strategic role to play in the Johnson White House and was a pioneering

environmentalist and I didn't know either of those two things until I discovered how she recorded her own history of her time in the White House.

I'm very excited to hear more about that.

Can you give everybody who's listening a little bit more about your background and how you even stumbled into or how you came upon her recorded history.

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