Lady Bird Johnson and Her Healing Words

Vietnam veteran Don Elverd shares how his encounter with Lady Bird Johnson while recovering in a Texas hospital had a profound impact on him.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson and First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson visit with injured servicemen back from Vietnam in 1965. (Photo: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum)

A little more than 50 years ago, Don Elverd was sitting in an Army hospital near San Antonio, Texas, badly wounded. He was a 21-year-old United States Army sergeant who had served one tour of duty in Vietnam and had come home with three Purple Hearts. 

The native Midwesterner had been shot in the arm and had suffered another bullet wound that had gone through the lung. His physical wounds would take about three years to heal, his emotional wounds even longer.  

“This last one was pretty bad,” Elverd told East Wing Magazine recently in a Zoom interview from his River Falls, Wisconsin, farm, referring to the injuries that led to his third Purple Heart. 

One day in 1968 in Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, where Elverd would recover from his injuries through 1970, he and other wounded veterans recei…