Item: i95833
 
Authentic Medal of:

United States of America
Official White House Historical Association Sterling Medal
First Lady – Lady Bird Johnson
1972 FM Proof Silver Medal 38mm (33.20 grams) 0.925 Silver (1.00 oz. ASW)
LADY BIRD JOHNSON 1963 1969 FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES, Lady Bird facing 1/5 right.
Lady Bird Johnson 1913 – Placed her prestige behind efforts to preseve America’s grandeur by restoring natural beauty to nation’s roadways., White House facade atop.

You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.

Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson (née Taylor; December 22, 1912 – July 11, 2007) was an American socialite and first lady of the United States as the wife of the 36th president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963 to 1969. She had previously served as the second lady from 1961 to 1963 when her husband was vice president.

Notably well-educated for a woman of her era, Lady Bird proved a capable manager and a successful investor. After marrying Lyndon B. Johnson in 1934 when he was a political hopeful in Austin, Texas, she used a modest inheritance to bankroll his congressional campaign and then ran his office while he served in the Navy.

As First Lady, Mrs. Johnson broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour. She was an advocate for beautifying the nation’s cities and highways (“Where flowers bloom, so does hope”). The Highway Beautification Act was informally known as “Lady Bird’s Bill.” She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1988, the highest honors bestowed upon a US civilian.

John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate for the 1960 election. At Kennedy’s request, Lady Bird took an expanded role during the campaign, as his wife Jacqueline was pregnant with their second child. Over 71 days, Lady Bird traveled 35,000 miles (56,000 km) through 11 states and appeared at 150 events. Kennedy and Johnson won the election that November, with Lady Bird helping the Democratic ticket carry seven Southern states.

Reflecting later, Lady Bird said that the years her husband served as vice president and she as Second Lady was “a very different period of our lives.” Nationally, the two had a kind of celebrity, but they both found the office of Vice President to lack power.

As the Vice President’s wife, Lady Bird often served as a substitute for Jacqueline Kennedy at official events and functions. Within her first year as Second Lady, she had substituted for Mrs. Kennedy at more than 50 events, roughly one per week. This experience prepared Lady Bird for the following challenges of her unexpected years as First Lady.

On November 22, 1963, the Johnsons were accompanying the Kennedys in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated; they were two cars behind the President in his motorcade. Lyndon was sworn in as president on Air Force One two hours after Kennedy died, with Lady Bird and Jacqueline Kennedy by his side. Afterward, Lady Bird created a tape on which she recorded her memories of the assassination, saying it was “primarily as a form of therapy to help me over the shock and horror of the experience.” She submitted a transcript of the tape to the Warren Commission as testimony. LBJ advisor Abe Fortas had made notations on her document to add detail. In their plans for their trip to Texas, the Johnsons had intended to entertain the Kennedys that night at their ranch.

In the days following the assassination, Lady Bird worked with Jacqueline Kennedy on the transition of her husband to the White House. While having great respect for Jacqueline and finding her strong in the aftermath of the murder, Lady Bird believed from the start of her tenure as First Lady that she would be unfavorably compared to her immediate predecessor. On her last day in the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy left Lady Bird a note in which she promised she would “be happy” there.

As First Lady, Lady Bird started a capital beautification project (Society for a More Beautiful National Capital). It was intended to improve physical conditions in Washington, D.C., for both residents and tourists, by planting millions of flowers, many of them on National Park Service land along roadways around the capital. She said, “Where flowers bloom, so does hope.”

She worked extensively with the American Association of Nurserymen (AAN) executive Vice President Robert F. Lederer to protect wildflowers and promoted planting them along highways. Her efforts inspired similar programs throughout the country. She became the first president’s wife to advocate actively for legislation when she was instrumental in promoting the Highway Beautification Act, which was nicknamed “Lady Bird’s Bill.” It was developed to beautify the nation’s highway system by limiting billboards and by planting roadside areas. She was also an advocate of the Head Start program to give children from lower-income families a step up in school readiness.

Lady Bird created the modern structure of the First Lady’s office: she was the first in this role to have a press secretary and chief of staff of her own, and an outside liaison with Congress. Her press secretary from 1963 to 1969 was Liz Carpenter, a fellow alumna of the University of Texas. As a mark of changing times, Carpenter was the first professional newswoman to become press secretary to a First Lady; she also served as Lady Bird’s staff director. Lady Bird’s tenure as First Lady marked the beginning of the hiring of employees in the East Wing to work specifically on the First Lady’s projects.

President Johnson had initially said he would turn down the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1964, having been unhappy during his service in President Kennedy’s administration and believing the party did not want him. Although aides could not sway him, the First Lady convinced him otherwise, reassuring him of his worthiness and saying that if he dropped out, the Republicans would likely take the White House.

During the 1964 campaign, Lady Bird traveled through eight Southern states from October 6 to 9 in a chartered train, the Lady Bird Special, at one point giving 45 speeches over four days. It was the first solo whistle-stop tour by a First Lady. In the same month, Lady Bird continued her campaign tour by airplane, with stops in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Indiana, and Kentucky.

In November 1964, Johnson won a landslide victory over his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, thus being elected as President in his own right. Lady Bird became the first First Lady to hold the Bible as her husband took the oath of office on January 20, 1965 – a tradition which continues.

On September 22, 1965, Lady Bird dedicated a Peoria, Illinois, landscape plaza, with the president of the Peoria City Beautification Association, Leslie Kenyon, saying during the ceremony that Lady Bird was the first presidential spouse “who has visited our city as an official guest in our 140 years of existence.”

On September 22, 1966, Lady Bird dedicated the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, fulfilling a goal that both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had sought to accomplish. She said the dam belonged to all Americans amid an increasing concern for water that affected every American “no matter whether he lives in New York or Page, Arizona.”

In late-August 1967, Lady Bird traveled to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to attend the Expo 67, a White House aide saying she had been urged by the President to travel there since his own trip three months prior.

In mid-September 1967, Lady Bird began touring the Midwestern United States as part of a trip that one White House described as “mostly agriculture during the day and culture at night.” President Johnson was then declining in support by farmers, months before a planned re-election bid. Speaking to a crowd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on September 20, Lady Bird said problems within American cities were creating crime.

In January 1968 at a White House luncheon, Eartha Kitt, when asked by the First Lady what her views were on the Vietnam War, replied: “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” Kitt’s anti-war remarks reportedly angered Lyndon and Mrs. Johnson, and this resulted in the derailment of Kitt’s professional career.

Toward the end of Johnson’s first term, Lady Bird was anxious for her husband to leave office. In September 1967, Lady Bird voiced her concerns that a second term would be detrimental to his health. Health concerns may have been one of reasons why President Johnson decided not to seek re-election.

In 1970, Lady Bird published A White House Diary, her intimate, behind-the-scenes account of her husband’s presidency spanning November 22, 1963, to January 20, 1969. Beginning with President Kennedy’s assassination, she recorded the momentous events of her times, including the Great Society’s War on Poverty; the national civil rights and social protest movements; her activism on behalf of the environment; and the Vietnam War.

Lady Bird was acquainted with a long span of fellow First Ladies, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Laura Bush. She was protected by the United States Secret Service for 44 years.

Biographer Betty Boyd Caroli said in 2015 of Lady Bird that

She really invented the job of the modern first lady. She was the first one to have a big staff, the first one to have a comprehensive program in her own name, the first one to write a book about the White House years, when she leaves. She had an important role in setting up an enduring role for her husband with the LBJ Library. She’s the first one to campaign extensively on her own for her husband.

Writing in 1986, William H. Inman observed that Lady Bird was considered by some “the most effective First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt”, citing her battles against highway billboard forests, auto heaps, and junk piles as well as her support for American public landscapes maintaining beauty and sanity.

The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km²), the United States is the world’s third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe’s 3.9 million square miles (10.1 million km²). With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital’s federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world’s 17 megadiverse countries.

Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, and the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776. The war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. The United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, and gradually admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848.

During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery. By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, and its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish-American War and World War I confirmed the country’s status as a global military power. The United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The Rights Acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968 outlaws discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U.S. Moon landing. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world’s sole superpower.

The United States is the world’s oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy. The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), and other international organizations. The United States is a highly developed country, with the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for approximately a quarter of global GDP. The U.S. economy is largely post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world’s largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U.S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country.

Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank very high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity. The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.