I listened to Bill Moyer's eulogy for Ladybird Johnson live on the radio Saturday and found the transcript this morning and was brought to tears both times not only by her beauty and his beautiful words but also by how far the Repub thugs have brought our great country down.
I will quote the part that got me the most below the fold, but here is the only link to the transript that I could find:
http://www.statesman.com/...
You have to sign up (it is free) but it is really worth it!
Mr. Moyer's describes the great threats she received and the hate she encountered when campaiging in the South for her husband (Please forgive the long quote, but I can't bring myself to cut or paraphrase any of it):
Now it is 1964. The disinherited descendents of slavery, still denied their rights as citizens after a century of segregation, have resolved to claim for themselves the American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. President Johnson has thrown the full power of his office to their side, and he has just signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 — the greatest single sword of justice raised for equality since the Emancipation Proclamation. A few weeks later, both Johnsons plunge into his campaign for election in his own right. He has more or less given up on the South, after that legislation, but she will not. These were her people, here were her roots. And she is not ready to sever them. So she sets out on a whistlestop journey of nearly seventeen hundred miles through the heart of her past. She is on her own now — campaigning independently — across the Mason-Dixon line down the buckle of the Bible Belt all the way down to New Orleans. I cannot all these years later do justice to what she faced: The boos, the jeers, the hecklers, the crude signs and cruder gestures, the insults and the threats. This is the land still ruled by Jim Crow and John Birch, who controls the law with the cross and club to enforce it. 1964, and bathroom signs still read: "White Ladies" and Colored Women."
In Richmond, she is greeted with signs that read: "Fly away, Lady Bird." In Charleston, "Blackbird Go Home." Children planted in front rows hold up signs: "Johnson is a Nigger Lover." In Savannah they curse her daughter. The air has become so menacing we run a separate engine fifteen minutes ahead of her in case of a bomb; she later said, "People were concerned for me, but the engineer in the train ahead of us was in far greater danger." Rumors spread of snipers, and in the Panhandle of Florida the threats are so ominous the FBI orders a yard-by-yard sweep of a seven-mile bridge that her train would cross.
He then goes on to describe her incredible courage in the face of such hate:
An advance man called me back at the White House from the pay phone at a local train depot. He was choking back the tears. "As long as I live," he said, in a voice breaking with emotion, "I will thank God I was here today, so that I can tell my children the difference courage makes."
Yes, she planted flowers, and wanted and worked for highways and parks and vistas that opened us to the Technicolor splendors of our world. Walk this weekend among the paths and trails and flowers and see the beauty she loved. But as you do, remember — she also loved democracy, and saw a beauty in it — rough though the ground may be, hard and stony, as tangled and as threatened with blight as nature itself. And remember that this shy little girl from Karnack, Texas — with eyes as wistful as cypress and manners as soft as the whispering pine — grew up to show us how to cultivate the beauty in democracy: The voice raised against the mob . . . the courage to overcome fear with convictions as true as steel. Claudia Alta Taylor — Lady Bird Johnson — served the beauty in nature and the beauty in us — and right down to the end of her long and bountiful life, she inspired us to serve them, too.
What a beautiful, brave and wonderful woman and leader. What a lovely tribute to her and her legacy.
I hope and I pray that among us and among those who represent us that we may find her "courage to overcome fear" and her "convictions as true as steel". In light of the real threat our current administration poses to our constitution, we need them now more than ever.