For Valentine's Day-LBJ and Lady Bird courtship love letters released

[ScreamingMeemie]

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/state&id=8990864

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AUSTIN, TX -- Days after the congressional aide met the University of Texas history and journalism graduate in Austin, he boldly proposed marriage.

Claudia Alta Taylor, the 21-year-old rancher's daughter known to her friends as "Bird," was intrigued but thought Lyndon Johnson's proposal was much too impulsive. Her clearly smitten suitor, however, was persistent.

"It is an important decision," he wrote to her in one of the nearly 90 love letters the pair exchanged during their 10-week courtship in 1934. "It isn't being made in one night...but your lack of decision hasn't tempered either my affection, devotion or ability to know what I want."

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The correspondence between the 26-year-old future president and the woman the world would come to know as Lady Bird are available for public review for the first time starting Thursday -- Valentine's Day -- at the LBJ Presidential Library at the University of Texas at Austin.

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WOW! 90 letters in 10 weeks? That kind of puts the private LBJ in a whole new light.

[JDPriestly]

1. Ah! The good old days.

Now you know how LBJ got anti-discrimination bills, Medicare and so many other innovative bills through Congress within less than two full terms.

He knew what he want, and he figured out how to get it, and he didn't let anything stop him.

Obama should spend more time reading up on LBJ and less on Lincoln.

LBJ achieved dramatic change without a civil war.

He was crude and difficult and made huge mistakes in Viet Nam, but he worked Congress like you'd eat mashed potatoes and gravy. Didn't even need to chew.