AUSTIN, Texas – Days after the congressional aide met the University of Texas history and journalism graduate in Austin, he boldly proposed marriage.

Claudia Alta Taylor, the 21-year-old rancher's daughter known to her friends as "Bird," was intrigued but thought Lyndon Johnson's proposal was much too impulsive. Her clearly smitten suitor, however, was persistent.

"It is an important decision," he wrote to her in one of the nearly 90 love letters the pair exchanged during their 10-week courtship in 1934. "It isn't being made in one night ... but your lack of decision hasn't tempered either my affection, devotion or ability to know what I want."