President’s Daughter Married at National Shrine, 1966

This day in 1966 saw the first wedding in the Great Upper Church of Washington, D.C.’s National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, when Luci Baines Johnson married Patrick Nugent. The daughter of then-President Lyndon, she converted to Catholicism the day after her eighteenth birthday. Described as “the social event of 1966,” there was much speculation over where the wedding would be held. The New York Times declared that the Shrine would be the perfect choice, insisting that there was no place in Washington “that could offer a setting for a bridal spectacular like the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.” The historian of the Shrine calls it “the greatest publicity coup in the shrine’s history.”