Lady Bird Johnson

Lady Bird Johnson financed her husband's first congressional campaign with $10,000 of her own inheritance, and the investment paid off in ways far beyond politics: with money from that same inheritance she bought a struggling Austin radio station, KTBC, in 1943 and built it, through her own management, into the financial foundation of the Johnson family's wealth. Born Claudia Alta Taylor in Karnack, Texas, she earned two degrees from the University of Texas and brought a sharper business sense to the marriage than Lyndon Johnson's folksy image ever let on, running the station's books herself for years before handing it off.

As First Lady she made highway beautification her signature cause, pushing for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which restricted billboards and junkyards along federal highways and funded roadside plantings — legislation Congress nicknamed "Lady Bird's Bill" and that Lyndon Johnson later admitted he signed partly because she had worn him down. During the hostile 1964 campaign over the Civil Rights Act, she toured eight Southern states alone aboard a whistle-stop train, the Lady Bird Special, defending the legislation in person to crowds that sometimes jeered her off the platform.

After leaving the White House she kept working on the cause that outlasted her political years, co-founding the National Wildflower Research Center near Austin in 1982, later renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in her honor. She died in Austin in July 2007 at 94, having spent more than four decades after the presidency turning a campaign about roadside litter into a durable environmental institution.