LBJ and Daughters of Charity

(Photo used with permission of the Daughters of Charity Provincial Archives)
Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty in his now-famous speech. Three years later, on June 21, 1967, he celebrated the birth of his first grandchild, Patrick Lyndon Nugent, at Seton Hospital in Austin, Texas, where the baby was born to his daughter, Luci Baines Johnson Nugent. Before entering the facility, the President was warmly congratulated by another “president,” Sr. Josephine Aitchison, D.C., head of the hospital, as memorialized in this photograph from the hospital newsletter. Today, we are reminded that both Johnson and the Daughters of Charity, in their own way, waged war on poverty, a challenge the Daughters have undertaken since 1633.