Liz Carpenter

Her lighthearted memoir of her time in the White House, Ruffles and Flourishes, published in 1969, was a national best-seller. Often called the "funniest woman in politics", she was in demand as a public speaker until her death.

• Name — Liz Carpenter • Birth Name — Mary Elizabeth Sutherland • Born — 1 September 1920 • Birthplace — Salado, Texas, U.S. • Died — 20 March 2010 • Place of death — Austin, Texas, U.S. • Occupation — Author, presidential advisor • Education — University of Texas • Children — 2

Carpenter was born in her great-grandparents' antebellum home, the Robertson Plantation, in Salado in southern Bell County, Texas. In 1936, the 24-room Robertson House was declared a state historic monument. In 1967, a plaque was unveiled to indicate that Carpenter had once lived there. Another memorial to Carpenter is on the campus of Salado College, founded by her great-grandfather, Elijah Robertson. At the age of seven, she moved with her family to Austin.

In 1942, Carpenter began covering the White House and Congress for the Austin American-Statesman. For the next eighteen years, she reported on presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy as a Washington reporter. She was still a working reporter at the time of the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, California. She soon joined the staff of Lyndon B. Johnson in his campaign for Vice President in 1960 and traveled on his foreign missions as a press spokeswoman. After Kennedy's election, she became the first woman executive assistant to the vice-president. Carpenter was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. She drafted the fifty-eight words that Johnson used on his return to Washington: • This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help and God's. Following Johnson's succession to the presidency, Carpenter became the first professional newswoman to be press secretary to a first lady for Lady Bird Johnson (1963–1969), for whom she also served as staff director. Carpenter also assembled several other staffers as an informal "White House Humor Group" to add humorous remarks to the President's speeches, at Johnson's request. After the Johnson Administration ended in 1969, she published Ruffles and Flourishes, her account of her White House experiences. She was a vice president of Hill and Knowlton in Washington after leaving the White House. In 1971, she was one of the founders of the National Women's Political Caucus and co-chair of ERAmerica, traveling the country to push for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the International Women's Year Commission, by President Jimmy Carter to serve as Assistant Secretary of Education for Public Affairs, and by President Bill Clinton to serve on the White House Conference on Aging. Carpenter was a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors from 1977 to 1983.

• Illustration — Liz Carpenter (left) with Cactus Pryor (right) in 2003 Her books include: Unplanned Parenthood, Random House 1994; Getting Better All the Time, Simon and Schuster 1986, as well as countless articles and forays on the lecture circuit. Start With a Laugh, gives humorous advice on speech writing, was published by Eakin Press and launched at the opening of the National Women's Museum: An Institute for the Future in Dallas. Her most recent book, Presidential Humor, Bright Sky Press 2006, was a compilation of quips and quotes from "George the First to George the Worst." Carpenter wrote an article for the Reader's Digest in the early 1980s, about enjoying life having recovered from an illness, closing the article with the poem "Warning" by British poet Jenny Joseph, which had the opening lines "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me". This led to the poem's fame spreading across the US through adoption by the greetings card industry and eventually the development of the Red Hat Society.