The Lady Bird Diaries

The documentary rests on the voice of Lady Bird Johnson herself. She kept a diary throughout the presidency of her husband Lyndon B. Johnson. She kept it not in writing but on tape. What she left behind runs to a hundred and twenty three hours. The film is built entirely from that archive. There is no narrator and no interview done afterwards. Lady Bird describes events as she is living through them. She sizes up the people around her with a sharp eye. She follows the culture and the politics with the same attention. There are moments when she is inside her husband’s decisions. The film shows her not as a wife standing offstage but as a figure making calculations. Her part in the presidency is redrawn because of that. The period described is one of the turbulent stretches of modern American history. The spoken diaries take the viewer behind the scenes of those days. The hundred minute documentary was built entirely from archive. It is an American production Dawn Porter finished in 2023.