Lady Bird really had a lot of courage. If you refused to play along with racism back then, what you got in return was a lot of bullying and intimidation by racists.

I remember how it was in my school: I walked home with the only black kid and after that he was called a n***** and I was called a n*****l****. And that was in the Bay Area, in 1967.

Nowadays things seem so much better. But I think segregation fever is still there, it's just changed its stripes. The new version is called the War on Drugs and that version is so tricky to get around that it's even backed by well-meaning anti-racists.

I came looking for this week's perspective-filled, skillfully reported insiders' view of the wounded, bleeding elephant barreling about the White House these days.

I got something much better: a clarifying portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson that sweeps clean a lifetime of contempt for the man who followed the assassinated Golden Boy and got us mired in Vietnam, and for the woman at his side, whose fame has been defined almost exclusively by her fondness for roadside flora.

To find Lady Bird was the quiet operator who had Rosa Parks' back is an incredible discovery. What an enlightening gift this article is.

But now begins the long, seven-day wait for your next splendid dispatch.

Thank you Mr. Blumenthal for taking us back to that era, and reminding us what extraordinary things real, flawed - but principled - political people can do. I wasn't a fan of Johnson, but I remember his sad face coming on TV, and the feeling that, at the very least, there was a conscience at work there.

I think that's one of the most disturbing things about the current occupant: Bush's supreme lack of reflection; the easiness with which he sloughs off the sometimes devastating effects of his decisions. I may not have agreed with Johnson always, but you could sense the weight of the office, and the struggle in the man. Lady Bird was a crucial touchstone in that struggle.

Would that the current better-half had one degree of Lady Bird's moral compass. Or that Bush might lose just one night of sleep, or find one day his "heavy heart".

Wow. I'm barely old enough to remember LBJ as a scary face on TV talking gravely about "Our boys in Vee-yet Nayam" -- but I have just enough of a connection to the South to be able to really savor Sidney's piece (I can almost taste the bourbon, with water and a little ice), and to come away with a new appreciation for a Texas president who tried to do the right thing and who at least had the decency to quit when it all went terribly wrong.

There were so many amazing sentences: Her grandfather fought at Shiloh. He was the only Southern congressman to vote for an anti-lynching bill. The Mink Coat Mob. (I can't remember where I heard, or if it's just an urban myth, that passengers on a commercial flight leaving Dallas cheered the news that JFK was dead.) I can only hope the young 'uns will click on this piece and spend a few moments in a very, very different time and place.

a beautiful piece about a beautiful woman. it is also good to remember that lyndon johnson left us a civil rights legacy as well as the vietnamese war fiasco.

Next time you are in Washington, go down to that black granite open grave on the Capital Mall. Read the names. 58,195 names. Look how many died when Johnson was president. Try to imagine the number of skulls of Vietnamese civilians, all lined up in a row, forming a ring around the Mall from the Congress to the Lincoln Memorial, hundreds of thousands of them.

I don't care what causes Lady Bird championed or how charming she was. This is the great legacy of the Johnson administration. The great bloody mess that was the Vietnam War makes anything else she did to distract herself from her husband's obscene war just a silly exercise in denial.

Oh, I'm sure she may have felt bad for the American dead, and maybe even the Vietnamese, but she didn't feel bad enough about it to say anything significant to end the slaughter.

Just like now, the current First Lady, screwing up her sour face into what passes with her as a sympathetic expression, spitting out with contempt to reporters, "We mourn every death."

Sure you do. Sure you do.

Thousands of Blacks and millions of Asians were killed in SE Asia, because of the criminality of Lyndon B Johnson. Where was Ladybird then?

Civil rights for Blacks were long overdue and would have been achieved with or without LBJ. The total of Blacks and others killed would surely have been fewer if we had not invaded SE Asia, even if it took another presidency to achieve.

I don't remember LBJ or Ladybird with anything but contempt.

Good for you. Piss all over the legacy of civil rights and the great society because of Vietnam. Sure things are better in American because of Johnson, but who cares! He made a mistake! He wasn't prefect. Yes, he kept us involved in Vietnam and escallated it to a full fledged war, but every account I've read shows he agonized over it. He didn't run in 1968 because of it. And that brought us good old Red-Baiting, HUAC member, Richard, Milhouse "Watergate" Nixon. Wooo! Good thing Johnson left office.

You remember Nixon, the guy who gave many of the criminals in the current administration their start? The guy who's "Imperial Presidency" is part of the ideological basis for W's Court of Crime?

Yes, Vietnam was wrong, yes it was a tragedy. Unlike Bush, Johnson did a TON of good in his time in public service as well as Vietnam. And Vietnam was a much more complicated and complex issue than is Iraq. Painting it as one-dimensional as you do shows a great lack of understanding of the era, even if you did live through it.