On Valentine's Day 2013 -- which is tomorrow! -- one of history's more intense and little-known romances will go live, in a manner of speaking. Starting at 9 AM, the LBJ Presidential Library will air nearly 90 letters exchanged during a 10-week period between Lyndon B. Johnson and Claudia Alta Taylor, or as the world knows her, Lady Bird Johnson.
The letters, which will be made available on the library's web site, tell the story of the Texan couple's whirlwind courtship. What starts out typically soon veers sharply from protocol: in this story, boy meets girl, proposes days later, persists in the face of her hesitations, and eventually takes her heart, as well as the United States presidency.
To fill in the gaps, we recommend the AP's close reading of the collection, published earlier today. In the meantime, we've posted transcripts and images below of two of the letters, from a 26-year-old LBJ and the other by a 21-year-old Lady Bird. LBJ's writerly style here could be called more dogged than romantic, and Lady Bird's more conflicted, but the conclusion: that she comes to share his belief in their rightness for each other (an emotional arc well-mapped in the full set of letters) makes this exchange pretty heart-melting, wouldn't you say?