DURING her years in the White House, Lady Bird Johnson, who died last week, kept a voluminous journal of the downhill trajectory of her husband’s presidency.

Mrs. Johnson documents, perhaps too copiously, the glamour and banalities of White House life — the state dinners, her highway beautification program, her wardrobe. But the diary also documents the pressures of an ambitious administration cracking under the pressures of an increasingly unpopular war.

[The article includes excerpts from the diary.]