Lady Bird’s Lost Legacy
The former First Lady dreamed of beautifying roadsides. Is her dream now a lost cause?

By Lawrence Wright

Andrés Vera Martinez

At one in the morning on October 8, 1965, the House of Representatives finally voted on the Highway Beautification Act—“Lady Bird’s bill,” as Representative Bob Dole, one of the leaders of the opposition, patronizingly called it. The representatives were supposed to have been at the White House six hours earlier for a “Salute to Congress” dinner, and the gallery was filled with hungry, impatient spouses who had watched their evening plans drown in the tumult on the House floor.

The bill had already been beaten down once before by allies of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. President Lyndon Johnson was undeterred. “You know, I love that woman,” he told his cabinet about his wife, “and by God, we’re going to get it for her.” The vote finally passed, 245 to 138, and a few exhausted representatives went to the White House to present the bill as a gift to the first lady.

The obituaries for Lady Bird Johnson [in mid-July] focused mainly on her advocacy for highway beautification, largely failing to note that nearly all of the 200 laws related to the environment during the Johnson administration had her stamp on them, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and many additions to the national parks system. She worked to protect the redwoods and block the damming of the Grand Canyon.

The environmental movement was just being born—Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring the year before Johnson took office—but it found in Lady Bird its most effective advocate. She hoped to leave the country more beautiful than she found it, and there is no doubt that she did so—from her efforts at cleaning up the slums of the nation’s capital to the creation of the National Wildflower Research Center in Austin.

From the start, however, the centerpiece of Mrs. Johnson’s legacy was crippled by compromises with the billboard lobby. You wouldn’t know it from [the recent] coverage, but Lyndon Johnson realized when he signed the bill that it was a failure. “We have placed a wall of civilization between us and between the beauty of our land and of our countryside,” he reflected. “This bill...does not represent what the national interest requires. But it is a first step, and there will be other steps.”

There were no other steps.

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