Lestat, the vampire narrator of Anne Rice's most recent book, Blood Canticle, begins the novel with a harangue against its readers.
Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, four years after the Johnsons left the White House. The longest-living first lady in history was Bess Truman, who was 97 when she died in 1982. Johnson was born Claudia Alta Taylor in 1912. A nurse called her Lady Bird, a nickname she hated, but it stuck, reports CBS News' Harry Smith. The daughter of a Texas businessman, Johnson grew up to be one of the country's most influential environmentalists.
In December 2009, Johnson revealed that he had been battling Hepatitis C (HCV) for over a decade, which resulted in slow speech and a tendency to regularly get lost in thought in the middle of a discussion. Johnson said that he learned he had the disease in 1998 but did not know how he contracted it.