RANDOLPH AIR FORCE BASE, Texas –
On a day when a pair of Democratic Party heavyweights, former president Bill Clinton and Sen. Edward Kennedy, campaigned for their candidates in San Antonio, the daughter of a party and Texas icon delighted an appreciative audience at Randolph.
Luci Baines Johnson, the younger daughter of 36th President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson, connected emotionally with members of the Randolph Officers' Spouses' Club at a luncheon Feb. 21 in relating her experiences as a teenager growing up in the White House during the turbulent '60s and as the wife of a serviceman in Vietnam.
Ms. Johnson visited Ran-dolph at the request of Amy Clark, wife of Col. Richard Clark, 12th Flying Training Wing commander. The two met last August when Colonel Clark laid the presidential wreath on the grave of President Johnson on what would have been his 99th birthday."
Ms. Johnson said Colonel Clark added a personal touch to the ceremony.
"After presenting the wreath on behalf of President Bush, Colonel Clark told the world all he has accomplished was made possible because of the doors Daddy's public life opened up for him," she said. "Colonel Clark's speech was dignified, eloquent, tender and brilliant. There wasn't a dry eye in the cemetery. It was the best present Daddy could ever receive."
Ms. Johnson said her father "gave his all to the creation of major civil rights and education legislation so that men and women like Colonel Clark could get all the education they could master and become the best that they could be."
"Colonel Clark answered Daddy's call and his country's," she said. "The least I can do is answer his wife's request."
Ms. Johnson bonded with officers' wives as she talked about the fear she felt when she and her sister "raised infants and toddlers while their daddies were at war."
"I know what it is like to have those that you love making monumental sacrifices when your country is torn asunder over whether the war is just and how to make the peace possible," she said. "I know the fear of not knowing when your beloved will return or if they will return. What I don't know and cannot imagine is what it is like for them to have to face these decisions of deployment over and over again."
She talked about the taunts she and her family endured as her father searched for a way to honorably conclude an unpopular war.
"Many times we awakened to the voices of picketers screaming, 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?' Often these were the last words we heard on the nightly news before going to bed."
Ms. Johnson, by turns poignant and witty, took her audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride that mirrored the times - from the assassination of President Kennedy and the anguish her father endured when America's fighting men were dying in Vietnam, to experiencing the "freedom" of operating a motor vehicle chaperoned by Secret Service agents.
"Like every person old enough to remember," Ms. Johnson said, she knew exactly where she was when President Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963. She was a 16-year-old student at National Cathedral School for Girls when a girl rushed into her Spanish class with the staggering news. Her memories of the days that followed "are clearer than yesterday."
"President Kennedy was my friend and my father's boss," she said. "His assassination was my first personal exposure to violent death."
The fact she didn't know if her father was safe heightened her apprehension.
"Our headmistress announced that the president and Governor Connally, our family's dearest friend, had been shot," Ms. Johnson said. "She asked for our prayers. We prayed and were dismissed. No one mentioned whether Daddy was alive or dead. No one mentioned Daddy, period."
Ms. Johnson said the "worst of times" was followed by the "best of times." Living in the White House - which she first saw as "a place of confinement, not opportunity" - gave her "the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of being an eyewitness to history" when her father signed into law the groundbreaking Civil Rights Public Accommodations and Voting Rights bills.
"Everyone I know who was in the White House during Daddy's administration says it was a time that defined their lives," she said. "It certainly defined mine."
One of the defining times in Ms. Johnson's life in the White House was campaigning for her father when he successfully ran for president in 1964. Sending her out across the country may have been his "greatest act of courage," she joked.
"This taught me how to get out of myself - a very useful gift for every teenager," she said.
She learned how people lived and what was important to them and how to ask questions, listen and speak in public.
Ms. Johnson was one of the first volunteers in Project Head Start, one of her father's "Great Society" programs. She continued that legacy of community service in areas from education and health care to public television and the environment.
The grandmother of 10, who lives in Austin with her husband, Ian Turpin, is chairperson of the board of the LBJ Holding Company. She is also furthering the legacy of her mother, who died last summer, serving on the advisory council of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
Ms. Johnson said her legacy from her White House days were "a thousand friendships, a deep and abiding love of country and public service, a passion for learning, the recognition that the getting in life is truly to be found in the giving and the belief that I should try to live each day as if it is my last."
For more information on the Randolph Officers' Spouses' Club, visit www.randolphosc.org.