It's one of the most famous photographs in American history:
Today we're talking about the woman in the bottom left-hand corner administering the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson as the 36th President of the United States on November 22, 1963. The assassination of John F. Kennedy - 57 years ago today - has left an indelible mark on the United States. As I seemingly revisit it every year, I'm still learning new things about it. Today we focus our time on Sarah Tilghman Hughes, aka the 5'1"/100-pound "Sarah T."
Sarah Tilghman was born in Baltimore on August 2, 1896 to parents whose family trees in America span back to the 1660s. After graduating from public schools in Baltimore and then Goucher College (for whom Goucher's Politics Center is named) Tilghman taught science for two years in North Carolina because, in her words, "about the only thing a girl could do at that time was to teach school." Looking for something else, Tilghman enrolled in law school at George Washington University.
To help make ends meet, Sarah worked for the Washington, D.C. Police Department, going to law school at night and working for the police department during the day, mainly helping women and children. She graduated from George Washington with an LL.B degree in 1922 - two years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote. 1922 was a big year for Sarah Hughes: not only did she graduate from law school, Sarah married classmate George Ernest Hughes (hometown: Palestine, Texas). Mr. & Mrs. Hughes moved to Dallas, where George started a private law practice.
She had trouble finding a job in Texas due to, ahem, legal firms not being terribly willing to hire a woman. In 1923 Sarah Hughes joined the law firm of Priest, Herndon, and Ledbetter, technically getting a free working space in exchange for some receptionist work.
Hughes was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in November 1930. Hughes - elected in Dallas - was the youngest of four female members of the 42nd Legislature (the three other female members were elected in Bryan, Slocum, and Texas City), the 3rd incarnation of the Texas State House of Representatives to feature at least one woman (Edith Eunice Wilmans of Dallas was the first female member of the Texas State House). Elected to the State House of Representatives three times, Hughes was the "Most Valuable Member" in her second term - the year Franklin D. Roosevelt won his first presidential election. In 1935 Texas Governor James Allred appointed Hughes to the 14th District Court in Dallas - the first female district judge in Texas (in early 1965 just three out of 412 federal judgeships were held by women) - where she served seven terms.
Though she ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1946, Hughes became national president of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs in 1952, a group that advocated for women in public office. They nominated Hughes as Adlai Stevenson's vice president in 1952 - the first woman ever considered for a Vice Presidential run, though she withdrew her name from consideration before a vote was taken, later saying, "The thing that I got the most fun out of was running for vice president of the United States. I knew I had absolutely no chance, but it was doing something I would like to see more women do."
In 1954 Sarah Hughes co-authored an amendment to the Texas state constitution with Helen Edmunds Moore - who had been elected to the Texas State House of Representatives in 1928 - that allowed women to serve as jurors in criminal trials. The amendment passed. Four years later Hughes ran for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court against Joe Greenhill, losing 50.6-49.4, or by 14,000 votes out of 1,147,751 ballots cast. It wasn't a huge setback for Hughes.
A "tough and exacting jurist," the 35th President of the United States - John F. Kennedy - appointed Hughes (who was co-chairman of the Kennedy-Johnson campaign committee in Dallas) as Texas' first female federal district judge, a new seat created in 1961, the only female district judge appointed by President Kennedy. According to Robert Caro Hughes' appointment almost didn't happen because JFK's brother and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy thought she was too old (she was in her Age 65 season) and they were trying to pack the courts with young, idealistic judges. Hughes was long-aligned with Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson, campaigning for LBJ when he ran for Senate in 1948, but Johnson acquiesced to Kennedy. However, Johnson's (and Hughes') buddy - the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, Sam Rayburn - who had accepted and approved Hughes' temporary nomination for VP - held up a bill that Bobby Kennedy wanted passed until Hughes was nominated, and ultimately confirmed by JFK as a recess appointment in 1961. The move outraged Lyndon B. Johnson, not because she made the bench, but because of the damage it did to his word, saying, "Sarah Hughes now thinks I'm nothing. The lawyer I offered the job to - he thinks I'm the biggest liar and fool in the history of the State of Texas."
Hughes had been a part of the program on October 24, 1963 in Dallas when Adlai Stevenson came to deliver a United Nations Day address that resulted in Stevenson getting hit over the head with a sign. Because, Dallas. Almost a month later, on November 22, Hughes was at a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart to receive the president in Dallas, but of course Kennedy never attended that luncheon.
Hughes already had plans to have dinner in Austin that Friday night and, after hearing that there had been "an accident," she was preparing to leave. Gathering her things at home in Highland Park at 2:15pm, just over an hour after Kennedy had passed away, Hughes called her office at the courthouse to check in and was told that U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Barefoot Sanders (whose life is interesting in its own right) wanted to speak to her. Lyndon B. Johnson needed someone to swear him in as president. There were other options but Johnson wanted Hughes because, as Hughes said, "One of them was Joe Estes, who was a so-called Eisenhower Democrat and was appointed by Eisenhower, and the other one was T. Whitfield Davidson, who had enjoined the Democratic executive committee from certifying Johnson's name when he was nominated for the Senate."
Her next step was to get to LBJ for the swearing in, and somehow find a copy of the oath of office, on the way. The original plan had been for Kennedy - once he had wrapped up his appearances in Dallas - to go to Johnson's ranch on Highway 290 between Fredericksburg and Austin. Hughes, after initially thinking she had sworn in so many people as a judge that she could just wing administering the oath of office, wondered if LBJ would go ahead to his ranch, or be sworn in back at Washington. Highland Park was about ten minutes from Love Field - where Air Force One had landed earlier that day - and she drove herself to the airport. Upon arriving at Love Field Hughes was blocked by police, but they knew her and, after verifying with Air Force One that she was there to swear Johnson in, she was waved through and found that someone had called the Attorney General - JFK's brother Robert - and gotten a copy of the oath of office.
Hughes boarded Air Force One where LBJ and his party were in the second compartment. Hughes began to get ready when Johnson said, "Mrs. Kennedy wants to be here. We'll wait for her." After a few minutes Jackie - who had already gone from Parkland Hospital to Air Force One - emerged from the rear of the plane, and stood next to Johnson. Before administering the oath to Johnson, Hughes leaned over to Jackie and whispered, "I loved your husband very much."
Hughes began:
I have learned that under tense circumstances people don't do very well at remembering long sentences and it's better to make them short. Just as soon as - and the oath of office is in the Constitution, but it does not contain the words "So help me God!" Well, every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with "So help me God!" So it was just automatic that I said "So help me God!"
She is still the only woman to have ever administered an oath of office to a president. Hughes left Air Force One before it took off for Washington and returned home where she gave interviews the rest of the afternoon. Hughes did travel to Washington for Kennedy's funeral (and was able to get in to St. Matthew's Cathedral when Judge James Noel told security Hughes was the one who swore Johnson in) and Johnson's inauguration and inaugural ball. Johnson named Hughes to the UNESCO Commission in 1963.
In 1969, Hughes ruled in Shultz v. Brookhaven General Hospital that female hospital aides and orderlies should receive equal pay as their male counterparts. The following year saw that Hughes was one of three members of a panel of federal district court judges who unanimously ruled that Texas' abortion statutes violated "Jane Roe's" right to privacy under the 9th Amendment. When the State of Texas appealed to the Supreme Court, the resulting Roe v. Wade decision confirmed that women have a fundamental right to an abortion. Two years later (and a year before the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade) Hughes oversaw Taylor v. Sterrett, which upgraded prisoner treatment in the Dallas County Jail, a place she referred to as "a factory for crime."
Hughes retired as an active federal judge in 1975 but continued as a senior judge for seven years after that, passing away in 1985 at the age of 88 and was buried at Hillcrest Mausoleum and Memorial Park in Dallas. Upon Hughes' death Lady Bird Johnson wrote:
I've known and admired (Hughes) since my university days in the 1930s, when she was a young Texas legislator. Lyndon and I enjoyed her friendship and were so proud of her and the service she gave to Texas.
