Look High

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Signed photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965. Photo courtesy of Becky Krystal, via the Swift family, 2007.

In 1965, Ivan Swift, my husband’s grandfather, was the Washington correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal (two years later he was part of a team from the paper that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage about strip mining in Kentucky). On Aug. 6, 1965, he was covering the signing of the Voting Rights Act. An Associated Press photographer captured President Lyndon B. Johnson speaking in the Capitol rotunda before signing the momentous legislation. Off to the commander-in-chief’s left, you can see Swift’s face, obscured by a teleprompter and other members of the crowd. Swift got his own copy of the photo with an AP caption, circled his face in red – and got the president to sign it. “You know grandpa, he was not shy,” his widow, Ruth, told me. “He was always getting things like that.” Framed and hung at the family’s Alabama farm, it has been and will be a treasured part of family history.

Story from Becky Krystal

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