Sarah T. Hughes

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Sarah Tilghman Hughes (August 2, 1896–April 23, 1985) was an American lawyer and federal judge who swore-in Lyndon B. Johnson as President on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination. She is the only woman in U.S. history to swear in a U.S. President (a task usually executed by the Chief Justice of the United States).

The photo of her administering the oath of office to Johnson remains the most famous photo ever taken aboard Air Force One, as Kenneth T. Walsh, White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, said in Air Force One: A History of the Presidents and Their Planes.

Born Sarah Tilghman in Baltimore, Maryland, she was the daughter of James and Elizabeth Haughton Tilghman. After high school at the all-girl Western High School in Baltimore, she attended Goucher College in Baltimore. After graduation she taught science at Salem Academy in North Carolina for several years. She then returned to school to the study of law. In 1919 she moved to Washington, D.C., and attended The George Washington University Law School. She attended classes at night and during the day worked as a police officer. At that time she lived in a tent home near the Potomac River and commuted to the campus by canoe each evening.^[1]

Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as President by Judge Hughes

She moved to Dallas, Texas in 1922 with her husband, George Hughes, whom she had met in law school. She practiced law for eight years in Dallas before becoming involved in politics, first being elected in 1930 to three terms in the Texas House of Representatives. In 1935, she accepted an appointment as a state judge from Governor James Allred for the Fourteenth District Court in Dallas and was the state's first woman district judge. In 1936 she was elected to the same post. She was re-elected six more times and remained at that post until 1960.

As a reward for her involvement with the Democratic Party, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. She was the first woman to serve as a federal district judge in Texas. Two years later, on November 22, 1963, she was called upon to administer the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson after the assassination of President Kennedy.

Hughes was a member of the three-judge panel that first heard the case of Roe v. Wade; the panel's decision was subsequently affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States. She retired from the active federal bench in 1975, though she continued to work as a judge with senior status until 1982.

A close friend of LBJ and his family, Hughes participated in his inauguration in 1965, took part in the book-signing of Lady Bird Johnson's White House memoirs, and participated in the dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.