LBJ and Lady Bird (File)
AUSTIN (February 13, 2013)--The entire collection of nearly 100 love letters exchanged by Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson during their 2½-month courtship in 1934 will be made available to the public for the first time beginning on Valentine's Day.
The letters at the LBJ Presidential Library at the University of Texas show an impatient Johnson, then a 26-year-old congressional aide, was eager to marry Claudia Alta Taylor, 21.
Taylor, who was known as "Bird," was a recent graduate of the university, and the future president had asked her to marry him a day after they met in September 1934.
She wrote back that she loved him but "don't know how everlastingly."
They tied the knot 10 weeks later in San Antonio and were married for 39 years.
LBJ died 1973, and Lady Bird died in 2007.
