page_title: Lady Bird Johnson
section_title: Health problems and death
hierarchical_section_title: Lady Bird Johnson / Later life / Health problems and death
caption_attribution_description: Laura Bush welcomes Lady Bird Johnson and her daughter, Lynda Johnson Robb, on their visit to the White House.
context_page_description: Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson was an American socialite and the First Lady of the United States as the wife of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. She also served as the Second Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963.
  Notably well-educated for a woman of her era, she 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. She bought a radio station, and, later, a television station which generated revenues that made the Johnsons into millionaires.
  As First Lady, she broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour.
  Johnson was an advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways. The Highway Beautification Act was informally known as "Lady Bird's Bill." She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honors bestowed upon a US civilian.
context_section_description: In 1986, 13 years after her husband's death, Lady Bird's health began to fail. She suffered her first fainting spell that year while attending a funeral, and entered St. David's Community Hospital for observation. She also injured her left knee in a fall the day before her hospitalization. In August 1993, she suffered a stroke and became legally blind due to macular degeneration. In 1999, she was hospitalized for a second fainting spell. In 2002, she suffered a second, more severe, stroke, which left her unable to speak normally or walk without assistance. In 2005, she spent a few days in an Austin hospital for treatment of bronchitis. In February 2006, Lynda Johnson Robb told a gathering at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, that her mother was totally blind and was "not in very good health." In June 2007, she spent six days in Seton Hospital in Austin after suffering from a low-grade fever.
  Lady Bird Johnson died at home on July 11, 2007, at 4:18 PM (CDT) from natural causes at the age of 94, attended by family members and Catholic priest Father Robert Scott.
  At the funeral service, her daughter Luci Baines Johnson gave a eulogy, saying, "A few weeks before Mother died, I was taking visiting relatives to the extraordinary Blanton Art Museum ... Mother was on IV antibiotics, a feeding tube, and oxygen, but she wasn't gonna let little things like that deter her from discovering another great art museum. What a picture we were - literally rolling through the museum like a mobile hospital."
  Three weeks before Lady Bird's death, the rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, which had been her second home for more than 50 years, had announced to his parishioners that she had given $300,000 to pay off the church's mortgage.
  Lady Bird's funeral was a public event. On July 15, 2007, a ceremonial cortège left the Texas State Capitol. The public was invited to line the route through downtown Austin on Congress Avenue and along the shores of Lady Bird Lake to pay their respects. The public part of the funeral procession ended in Johnson City. The family had a private burial at the Johnson family cemetery in Stonewall, where she was buried next to her husband, who had died 34 years earlier. Unlike previous funerals for first ladies, the pallbearers came from members of the armed forces.
  She was the first former First Lady to die in the 21st century. She is also the third-longest-living First Lady, after Bess Truman, who lived to be 97, and Nancy Reagan, who surpassed her by 40 days.
caption: Lady Bird with her daughter Lynda Johnson Robb and First Lady Laura Bush on 19 October 2005
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