18

The Johnson Ranch

DURING THESE TWO YEARS—1951 and 1952—Lyndon Johnson was trying to make something out of nothing in Texas, too. He was trying to make the Pedernales Valley “Johnson Country” again.

There was a lot of Johnson sweat in that valley—and a lot of Johnson tears. In the 1860s and ’70s, the Johnson Ranch had been the largest on the Pedernales, and indeed the largest in that whole area of central Texas, its corrals stretching for miles along the northern bank of the little river. The original Johnson brothers, Sam Ealy and Tom, who had ridden into the Hill Country determined to make themselves “the richest men in Texas,” had seemed for a while on the way to realizing that goal, driving huge herds north to Abilene and returning with their saddlebags filled with gold, with which they assembled even larger herds and bought land not only along the Pedernales but in Austin and Fredericksburg as well. But the last of those drives had been three-quarters of a century before. Sam and Tom were Johnsons—romantics, unbusinesslike and impractical, dreamers of big dreams, dreamers unwilling to be bothered with details, and in the Hill Country’s opinion, too “soft” for that hard land. In a very short period of time—two or three years of cattle-killing drought, Comanche horse-stealing raids, and disastrously unlucky cattle drives—they had lost everything. Tom died in 1877, according to family legend flat broke. Sam had married a Bunton, and that saved him from his brother’s fate. Eliza Bunton was a tall woman with “raven hair, piercing black eyes and magnolia-white skin” who was not only one of the very few women to ride on the long cattle drives north through Indian territory but who rode, rifle in hand, out ahead of the herd to scout. She was known for the canny bargaining with which she sold her eggs and chickens, and for an expression she was given to repeating, an expression that might have been the Buntons’ motto: “Charity begins at home.” In 1887 Eliza and Sam Ealy had scraped together enough money to move back to their beloved Pedernales, to a 433-acre tract, on which they raised a few cows but mostly cotton, near the land that had once been the Johnson Ranch. In August, 1907, their eldest son, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., had brought his bride, Rebekah Baines of Fredericksburg, to this new “Johnson Ranch,” to a little “dog-run” cabin, two boxlike rooms on either side of a breezeway—not far from his parents’ house. Their first child, Lyndon, was born there a year later, and the family lived there until 1913, when they moved fourteen miles down the river into Johnson City, an “island town” cut off from the rest of the world, a tiny huddle of houses in the midst of a vast and empty landscape. Sam Ealy Jr., the idealist and romantic—in the Hill Country’s opinion too much a Johnson with not enough of the tough Bunton practicality—dreamed of expanding this holding, of re-creating the great “Johnson Ranch.” When his parents died, their other children wanted to sell the 433 acres, for which they had been offered a good price, but Sam Jr. wouldn’t hear of selling the family heritage, and to keep it in the family, to keep his dream alive, he outbid a wealthy in-law, paying far too much for the property, and in 1919 moved back to his parents’ house, planning to raise cotton for a few years and then to start up a herd again. But in that valley the reality was the soil, which wasn’t as fertile as Sam Ealy guessed it was, not fertile enough to support cotton or cattle, and the reality was the weather, which didn’t produce enough rainfall to support either. And cotton prices fell instead of staying high, as he had been sure they would. During the years in which Lyndon was twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old, his father was going broke on the Pedernales. These were the years during which, Lyndon was to say, his family fell so rapidly “from the A’s to the F’s”—during which the Johnsons “dropped to the bottom of the heap.” His father lost the 433 acres in 1922 and fell into debt so deep that he would never be able to pay it off; he and Rebekah, and their five children—Lyndon, his younger brother, Sam Houston Johnson, and three sisters—moved back to Johnson City, into a house which he was able to keep only because his brothers, out of charity, paid the interest on the mortgage. During the intervening years, there was no Johnson Ranch on the Pedernales. When Lyndon and Lady Bird were in Texas, they lived in Austin, in a house on Dillman Street.

Now, early in 1951, Lyndon was told that his Aunt Frank—one of his father’s sisters, who had been given a man’s name because her parents had been hoping for a son, and who had married a prosperous attorney, Clarence Martin—wanted to sell her house on the Pedernales, which was on a 233-acre piece of land that adjoined the farm that Lyndon’s father had lost.

The Martin house resonated with reminders of the Johnsons’ terrible fall. A narrow two-story stone structure, originally built by a German family in about 1893, it had been bought by Martin in 1906. He was a prominent figure in the Hill Country, a member of the Texas Legislature and then a District Court judge, and he had tried to pull his brother-in-law, Sam Ealy Jr., who was two years older than he, along in his footsteps, encouraging him to run for the seat he had held in the Legislature, and, after Sam was elected to the first of his six terms, helping him in his first big legislative project, the acquisition and preservation of the Alamo. As the Johnson house, only a wood dwelling, reflected Sam’s failures, becoming more and more run-down, the Martin house, just up the road, grew grander and grander with white-frame additions to the stone structure: a large master bedroom, a music room, even an indoor bathroom, one of the first in the area, so that the Johnsons felt more and more like poor relations. The house was the gathering place for family get-togethers at Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter; at Christmas, each child would have to stand on the raised hearth of the big fireplace in Judge Martin’s living room and perform—sing a song, do a dance, or give a speech (in Lyndon’s case it was always a speech)—before he was allowed to take his present from the big pile in front of the fireplace. Feeling that Frank patronized her, Rebekah deeply resented both her sister-in-law and the judge. After Sam, forced out of the Legislature by his need to earn a living, had had to move his family back into Johnson City, they would still drive out to the Martins’ for family gatherings, and when Sam was penniless, Judge Martin got him a job with the state—a two-dollar-a-day job as a road inspector. The Martin house “was the big house on the river,” Lyndon’s cousin Ava Johnson Cox would recall. “That was how we thought of it. When we were children, Lyndon used to say to me, ‘Someday, I’m going to buy the big house.’” After Judge Martin died in 1936, the house fell into neglect and disrepair. (The Martins’ only child, Lyndon’s cousin Tom, died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of fifty-four—yet another Johnson male dead young of a heart attack.) In 1951, Aunt Frank was seventy-eight years old and ailing. Anxious to move into Johnson City, where medical help would be more readily available, she was looking for a buyer for her home. One weekend, when Stuart and Evie Symington had joined Lyndon and Lady Bird for a few days on the Wesley West Ranch, Lyndon suddenly said—without any advance notice to his wife—“Tomorrow Lady Bird and I are going down to look at a piece of property I’m thinking of buying. Would you like to go?”

Driving from the West Ranch, Lyndon stopped the car at the top of a rise, and the two couples got out and looked down. Below them was the valley, with the little river meandering its way along in gentle curves. To their left as they looked at the valley was an unpainted, sagging three-room shack, not the house in which Lyndon had grown up—that had been torn down not long after the Johnsons moved out—but a structure that had been built almost on the same site, largely with boards from the old house. To the right—about a half mile to the right, also along the narrow, graveled Austin-Fredericksburg road—was the white-painted, gabled Martin house. Green meadows sloped from both houses down to the river. At the river’s edge was an orchard of about two hundred pecan trees, and on the old Johnson property a grove of wide-spreading live oak trees, their leaves a bright dark green against the paler green of the grass and the blue of the water. In their shade stood a group of small pink granite tombstones—the old Johnson family cemetery. Other live oaks—some of them two centuries old—dotted the meadows, as did a few grazing cows. Beyond the river, the gray-and-white spire of a little country church rose in the distance. It was a peaceful, bucolic scene, but when they drove down and entered the Martin house, Lady Bird had no difficulty understanding why Aunt Frank wanted to sell it. After years of neglect, the rooms were dark and dirty, the floors sagged; “to make the picture complete,” she was to recall, a colony of bats was living in the chimney. “It looked like a Charles Addams cartoon of a haunted house.” She knew she didn’t want to buy it. “Oh my Lord, no!” she thought. “I knew the old stone ranch house would take so much work to fix up. I could hardly bear the thought of it!” Evie Symington was to say that when they walked in, “Bird seemed appalled, and frankly I shared her feeling.” But, Lady Bird was to recall, “To my horror I heard Lyndon say, ‘Let’s buy it!’”

“How could you do this to me? How could you?” Lady Bird screamed when they got home. In subsequent conversations with her husband, she tried to be firm. “You’re not going to get me out there with all those bats!” she said. Her wishes received their customary consideration, and a week or so later, the Johnsons purchased the ranch, paying Aunt Frank twenty thousand dollars, and giving her the use for her lifetime of the Johnson house in Johnson City.

Almost as soon as the closing took place—on May 5, 1951—it became apparent to Lady Bird that her husband had bigger plans. He began talking about buying other properties along the banks of the Pedernales, not only the adjoining ranch on which he had been born and raised—watching his father go broke—but others beyond it, stretching toward Johnson City, which would make him the owner of a substantial part of the original Johnson Ranch. He quickly purchased one thirty-acre tract, but the rest of these plans would not be realized for some years, because the owners didn’t want to sell, not even the owner of the adjoining land. The sagging shack made from the boards of his birthplace was being rented to a family of Mexican field-workers. But Lyndon changed the name of the Martin property—to the “LBJ Ranch”—and began to transform it.

Knowing what needed to be done on a ranch in that land of alternating drought and floods, of worn-out eroded soil, wasn’t hard. Water had to be provided, and controlled, the soil had to be restored to its earlier richness. But doing it was hard—impossible, in fact—for most Hill Country ranchers, for doing it was expensive, costing far more than most ranchers, including Lyndon Johnson’s father, could even think of spending. Sam Johnson had never had enough money to do it, in large part because of the way he viewed his government position. Among the reasons—optimism, an overly romantic view of life—that this idealistic Populist had gone broke was his passionate belief that the influence he had as an elected official was something to be used to help people caught in “the tentacles of circumstance,” and not only to get a road built for them or to get them government loans for seed when they were trapped by recession, but to help them personally. To secure elderly men the pensions they deserved as Civil War veterans or Indian fighters, Sam would spend a lot of time in libraries searching through old files to find their service records, and more time driving them, over rutted Hill Country roads, into Austin to apply for their pensions, and then driving them home—all to the neglect of his own affairs.

Lyndon Johnson, of course, had an additional use for political influence: to amass wealth—first to obtain favorable rulings from the FCC that made KTBC a dramatically more effective place on which to advertise, and then to let businessmen and their attorneys and lobbyists who needed favors from the government know that the way to enlist his influence on their behalf was to purchase advertising time. So successfully had he made such sales that by 1951, that station—the station his wife had bought in 1943 for $17,500—was earning the Johnsons more than $3,000 per week. That was an enormous amount of money in the impoverished Hill Country—enough to let him do what needed to be done on the ranch. And in 1951, he and Lady Bird—and a coterie of very hard-eyed Washington lawyers—were already looking toward the acquisition of a Johnson television station (they would buy it in 1952) that would multiply those profits.

Water was a key—water of which there was usually too little in the Hill Country, and sometimes, all at once, too much. It was a land in which, Lyndon was to remember, sometimes “the Pedernales used to run dry as a bone, not a trickle,” while crops and cattle died under a burning sun, and then suddenly heavy thunderstorms would cause fierce “gully washers” to sweep down ravines and riverbeds, washing away crops and precious topsoil, destroying barns and hard-earned farm equipment.

The answer, for every farmer or rancher along the Hill Country’s little rivers, was to build low dams across them. The lake that would form behind a dam would provide water in times of drought, and in times of flood would hold at least some of the water that would otherwise leap the banks and wash away everything in its path. Obvious though the answer was, almost no dams were built in the Hill Country, for, as the first foreman on the new LBJ Ranch, Oliver Lindig, was to explain, a dam might cost ten thousand dollars or more, “a very expensive proposition” for someone trying to get money out of the Hill Country. But Lyndon Johnson was getting his money out of a radio station, so it wasn’t an expensive proposition for him. He tried nonetheless to bargain down Marcus Burg, a Stonewall contractor—“He tried to talk like he was a poor boy,” Burg recalls—until that stubborn Dutchman told him to “get someone else to do it.” Eventually he agreed to Burg’s price, and for two weeks Burg and a crew of six men stretched a nine-foot-high concrete dam across the Pedernales below the Martin house while Lyndon Johnson sat on the riverbank watching and chatting. The dam was “the first thing … we built,” Lady Bird was to recall. “Then the road and all the irrigation tanks followed in quick succession before we did anything to the house.” With the dam in place, enough pressure was created so that pumps could pump water up to irrigate the fields, and irrigation lines, eighty-foot-long sections of lightweight pipe, perforated so that water sprayed out either side, were linked together and run from the newly formed lake up into the fields on the hills behind the Martin house.

With enough water for the soil, it was possible to try to restore its fertility. When Lindig, who had a college degree in agricultural management (that was one reason Johnson hired him), arrived at the ranch in 1952, he saw how difficult this would be. “This was old, old soil,” he would recall. “Highly eroded soil. Hill Country farming was a very tough business. A lot of restoration would be necessary.” But he also saw that his new employer was determined to do whatever was necessary. Crops that would build up nutrients in the soil were planted over the two hundred acres and then plowed under so that the nutrients would work more efficiently. And so that the invigorated soil would not be washed away in those thunderstorms, big bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment were brought in to terrace and contour-plow the fields. This was also a “very expensive proposition” in Hill Country terms—but not when measured against a radio station’s income. The fields were then planted with a type of grass called “coastal Bermuda,” which was very costly but grew very fast and put down long roots to hold the soil. And finally cattle—only thirty at first—were brought in to graze, and there was a new Johnson herd on the Pedernales.

An Austin architect, Max Brooks, was designing the restoration of the “haunted house.” Whatever her original misgivings about the project, Lady Bird had as usual dismissed them in the interests of what her husband wanted. “The ranch is Lyndon’s spiritual home … so I have a tenderness for it,” she was to say. “His roots are there for three generations. After I came to sense how completely Lyndon was immersed in the rocks and hills and live oaks of this, his own native land … I gradually began to get wrapped up in it myself.” “Horror turned to blessing and we put hand and heart to it to build it into a small, productive, operating ranch.” The heart of the house was the old section with its eighteen-inch-thick stone walls and the enormous fireplace, large enough to hold four-foot-long logs, on whose elevated stone hearth the children had once performed. Into this living room Lady Bird put antiques, and functional and roomy sofas and chairs—one with a big pillow on which was embroidered, in big letters, “LBJ”—and paintings of Hill Country scenes. And one touch that was particularly her own: a photograph of Sam Rayburn; if a guest failed to comment on the photograph, she would do so, pointing out that “there is only one picture of a person in this room.” New floors and ceilings were installed in that section, and in the white-frame additions that were already there, and new additions, painted white, were built out from it, rambling off in all directions; in a year or two, there were two master bedrooms downstairs, one for the Johnsons, one for guests, and five bedrooms—each with its own bathroom—upstairs, for guests and staff members. By 1952, down on the north bank of the Pedernales, only a half mile from the little weather-beaten shack reminiscent of the house in which Lyndon Johnson had been born, was a very different house: large, gracious, impressive, pristine white, surrounded by green fields bordered by pristine white fences. “We love it,” Mrs. Johnson would say with a happy smile. Guests had started to arrive from all over the country, to be served ribs or large hamburgers by white-hatted chef Walter Jetton, “the Leonard Bernstein of the barbecue”: wanting the hamburgers to be shaped like Texas, Lyndon had had a mold made in that shape, but he had come to feel that the shape was too asymmetrical and at lunch would wander among his visitors, telling them to “eat the Panhandle first.”

The host would take them on tours, gunning his big car down rutted dirt paths or across fields at speeds which kept the occupants jouncing in the seats. He would drive the car right up to cows to stir them into activity; if one remained lying down, he would honk his horn at it and gun the engine, and if it still wouldn’t get up, he would nudge it with the car’s fenders until it did. He would show his guests flocks of wild turkeys strutting across a ridge; herds of white-tailed deer—once a visitor counted thirty-five in a single herd—would flee gracefully over a hill as the car approached. “Now look across yonder,” he would say. “See that church steeple over there in the valley? Where you going to find a prettier view than that?” His initials were on everything: from the pillow in the living room to a flag he designed, and which hung, beneath the flags of the United States and Texas, from an extremely tall flagpole in front of the house, a deep blue pennant with a white “LBJ” in the center, surrounded by a circle of white stars. On the two big stone pillars that flanked the entrance to the ranch were two big “LBJ”s in wrought-iron script. And on the day Marcus Burg laid the last concrete in the wide walkway from the entrance gates up to the front door, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t contain himself. “Do you have a long nail?” he asked Burg. Burg handed him one, and with it, in the still-wet concrete, Lyndon Johnson scratched, in large sprawling letters, “Welcome—LBJ Ranch.” Then, giving Burg a hug that astonished that phlegmatic man, he bent down again and wrote in small letters in a corner: “Built by Marcus Burg.”

Lyndon Johnson was very proud of his ranch. The Symingtons were annual visitors until there was a break between the two senators in 1956, and after the ranch had become an impressive showplace, they could understand Johnson’s pride. The pride was, to this sophisticated and wealthy couple, less easy to understand in 1951 and 1952, “when it wasn’t much.”

ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1952, with Lyndon away in South Texas, there would be a violent reminder of how destructive nature could be in the Hill Country. A line of fierce thunderstorms rolling across the vast Edwards Plateau caused what old-timers called a “hundred-year flood,” the highest waters in a century. Marcus Burg’s dam couldn’t come near containing the Pedernales. That morning, when Lady Bird had driven Lynda Bird, then eight years old, across a little concrete bridge to catch a bus to her school in Johnson City, the river had been rising, and the rains were getting heavier. Knowing the bridge would soon be under water, Lady Bird had telephoned Lyndon’s cousin Ava, who lived in the town, to pick up Lynda. The water rose high over the dam and over the shore—washing away every one of the Johnsons’ two hundred pecan trees (the live oaks, whose powerful roots stretch out horizontally far in either direction, held firm, as they had been doing for two centuries). It crept up the sloping meadow toward the Johnsons’ house. The telephone went dead. At 8:45 that evening, the lights went off and the electric clock stopped. The power line had been swept away. “Lucy and I sat in the house and watched topsoil from our neighbors’ farms just float on by, right out to the Gulf of Mexico, and livestock—cattle and horses—were swept away, too,” Lady Bird was to remember.

Lyndon had contacted Arthur Stehling, who arrived at the Johnsons’ after a horseback ride from Fredericksburg, saying that he had been sent to take one of their cars out of the garage and drive Lady Bird and Lucy to a ranch on higher ground; it was a harrowing trip along a washed-out road lined with uprooted trees. Returning home the next day after the waters had receded, Lyndon found a bright spot in the situation. Wesley West had told him that building a dam would be useless because it would have to be anchored in the river’s banks and therefore would be washed away in a flood. Burg had assured Johnson that the dam would hold—and it had. When West telephoned the Johnson Ranch now, and asked Lyndon, “Well, where’s your dam now?” Johnson was able to reply: “Just where the Dutchman said it would be!”

THE FLOOD was a happy memory for Lucy, too. When the lights went out, Lady Bird had lit a coal-oil lamp and read her stories. And, Lucy was to recall, “my mother heated up a can of tomato soup and spread peanut butter on saltine crackers. It is the only time in my life I remember her cooking just for me. There was no one there—no staff, no other family—except the two of us. I thought it was great fun.”

AS SOON AS THE LBJ RANCH was in good enough shape to be shown to journalists from Washington and New York, Johnson began to invite them down, because he wanted to use the ranch to create a picture of himself in the public mind—the picture of a self-made man who had pulled himself up in life by his bootstraps, of a man who, no matter how high he had risen, still had his roots firmly in his native soil. He wanted his image to be that of a westerner, or to be more precise a southwesterner—a Texan; a true Texas image: a rancher with a working, profitable ranch.

The image was fashioned with his customary skill. He soon had a horse—a tall Tennessee walking horse named Silver Jay—and he liked to pose astride him, wearing or waving his big gray Stetson. His clothing was in keeping—tan twill and cowboy boots, although sometimes, freed of Washington restraint, he would show up for lunch or dinner clad in a cardinal-red lounging suit or in one that led a journalist to call him “the jolly green giant.” And his tours of the ranch helped—showing off his crops and cattle to reporters while dispensing western wisdom and witticisms. He had purchased a prize bull named Friendly Mixer to sire the herd he was planning on. Driving a visitor around the ranch, he would get out of the car, and, walking over to the bull, would note his good points (“Look at that flat back”) and heavy withers. “But that’s not why I bought him,” he would say with a grin, lifting up the bull’s tail to display his huge testicles. (Johnson might then be reminded of a Swedish congressman from Minnesota, Magnus Johnson, who had served with him in the House. Magnus was not too bright, Lyndon would say, and would, in a broad Swedish accent, tell how Magnus had once made a speech on the House floor in which he earnestly declared, “What we have to do is take the bull by the tail and look the situation in the face.”) Driving a little further, Johnson would come to a group of steers. “You fellows know what a steer is,” he would say. “That’s a bull who has lost his social standing.”

The tidbits of philosophy he dispensed to journalists were western philosophy. Working with nature was good for a man, particularly for a public official, he would explain. “Every man in public life should own a plot of land”—it gave him a practical knowledge of agricultural problems, and it rooted him in the realities ordinary Americans have to face. “All my life I have drawn substance from the river and from the hills of my native state,” he would say. When he was in Washington, he would say, “I am lonesome for them almost constantly.”

ONE KEY PART of the image—that the ranch helped him to relax and reflect, that he was a different man down there from the frenzied, driven Lyndon Johnson whom they knew in Washington—was cultivated with great assiduity. A hammock was part of it; he liked to have magazine and newspaper photographers take his picture when he was lying in it, a beatific grin on his face. “I haven’t thought one time today about what would happen if Western Europe fell,” he told Margaret Mayer, now working for the Dallas Times Herald, when she visited the ranch. “People tell me I look better than they have seen me in a long time—no circles under my eyes.” As soon as he arrived, he was a happier man, he would tell reporters, because he was back among “the best people, climate and all-the-way-around best place on earth to live.” He was back among friends, he would say; “I have the best neighbors anyone could ask for. Most of them lived right here when I grew up as a kid.” So convincing was his performance, that Tom Wicker, who had moved from theWinston-Salem Journal to the New York Times, was only expressing the universal journalistic sentiment when he wrote, after a visit to the LBJ Ranch during Johnson’s presidency, that Johnson had an “essential ease” there—“the comfort of certainty, the assurance of belonging.” On the ranch, Wicker wrote, “the President is elemental in a different fashion” from what he was in Washington: “The West dominates him—this big, breezy, rough-cut man of the plains—the grass and the dust of the arid Texas hills…. Down on the ranch, on the old home place … LBJ is all wool and a yard wide. In tan twill and leather boots he is at home, at ease—serene as a restless Westerner can be.”

The reality was very different, however; very different, and very sad.

There was a gully on the ranch, a deep crevasse that had been cut into the earth, and then worn deeper and deeper, by decades of heavy Hill Country thunderstorms. Beginning almost at the top of the ridge that was the ranch’s northern boundary, it ran diagonally southeast across the meadows that sloped toward the Pedernales and then abruptly slashed its way straight south into the river—a ravine almost a half mile long, thirty yards wide in places, fairly shallow in some spots, but in other places, where the rains had cut not only through the soil but into the rock beneath, so deep that, Lindig recalls, “If you had elephants in there, you wouldn’t have been able to see anything but their backs.” Filling that ravine was a very expensive proposition. Soil—a lot of soil—had to be purchased, trucked in, then pounded down into the ravine with heavy equipment and reshaped so that grass could be planted in it so that its roots would hold the soil in place. In order for the grass to grow in that arid country, irrigation would be necessary: the laying of pipes up from the river all along the ravine’s half-mile length; the use of big electric pumps that could pull the water all the way up to the ridge. But Johnson said he wanted to grow feed for his cattle and sheep in the gully, and by the time Lindig arrived, he had already filled the ravine in twice. The first time, a thunderstorm had struck before the grass could take hold, and washed all the soil down into the river; the second time, the grass had taken hold and seemed stable, but only until the “hundred-year flood.” When, some weeks after the flood, Lindig arrived, the gully was as deep and as wide as ever, and Johnson told his new foreman to fill it up again.

Filling the gully wasn’t necessary for any practical reason that Lindig could see, for Lyndon Johnson wasn’t growing crops on the ranch to support its operation, and feed could be purchased for a fraction of the cost of filling the gully. The cost of filling it was disproportionate to other expenditures Johnson was making on the ranch grounds. But Johnson insisted that it be filled, and it was, and it washed out again. “We finally got [the erosion] stopped, but only because we ran the irrigation pipe right over into the ditch and watered it, and fertilized it, over and over until the grass got established,” Lindig recalls. He couldn’t understand why Johnson was so insistent on filling it, but he saw that he was; “He had this fixation about gullies,” he says.

Lyndon’s cousin Ava understood, however, and so did Lyndon’s brother, who knew him so well, and who understood that the “most important” thing for Lyndon was “not to be like Daddy.” It had been a gully—one not far from this one and very similar in length and width—that had symbolized his father’s struggle to make the Johnson Ranch pay, and his failure. For Sam Johnson, it had been necessary to fill his gully—desperately necessary; a lot of cotton could be planted in it, and Sam needed all the cotton he could grow. Time and time again, in labor that must have been backbreaking for a man in his forties, Sam had taken a wagon down to the Pedernales, shoveled up into it the richest river-bottom soil he could find, and then shoveled the soil into the gully and planted cotton seeds in it—and every time, before the seeds could take root, a gully-washer had washed the seeds and soil away again. “He planted it and planted it,” Ava was to say. “And he never got a crop out of it. Not one.” For Lyndon Johnson, his ranch on the Pedernales was a place of memories. No matter where he walked, there was a reminder: the sagging “dog-run” that looked so much like the shack in which he had been born and spent much of his boyhood; the family graveyard, with the tombstones of his father and grandfather, both of whom had failed on the Pedernales; the weather-beaten little schoolhouse nearby, where as the youngest child in school he had sat on the teacher’s lap (and scrawled on the blackboard, in letters as large as he could make them: “LYNDON B. JOHNSON”). The very sky was a reminder, for his first years on his ranch—1952, ’53, and ’54—were years of a terrible drought in central Texas; he could look up at the sky—the beautiful “sapphire” Hill Country sky, that heartbreakingly empty Hill Country sky—and search for clouds that gave hope of rain, just as he had watched his father and mother look up at the sky and hope for rain.

Sometimes, he would drive into Johnson City. That little town was so unchanged; almost every house was still occupied by the same family that had been living in it when he had been growing up there, so almost every house held memories for him. Kitty Clyde Ross (now Kitty Clyde Leonard) was still living in Johnson City—Kitty Clyde, with whom, as a high school senior, Lyndon had been “in love,” but whose father was one of the merchants who had written “Please!” on the bills he sent to Sam Johnson every month and who, to break up her romance with Lyndon, had allowed another suitor to drive her around Courthouse Square in the Rosses’ new Ford sedan. (“I saw how it made Lyndon feel when that big car drove by…. I cried for him,” Ava recalls.) Truman Fawcett still lived in Johnson City, Truman Fawcett, who had been sitting on his uncle’s porch when Lyndon walked by, and who had heard his uncle say, “He’ll never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.”

He had proven Johnson City wrong, had amounted to quite a lot. But memories still shadowed his time on the ranch. And there were other shadows of the past, for often he would be visited at the ranch by his mother, and his brother and sisters, who had gone through that childhood with him.

The marks of those years remained indelible on the Johnsons. In the Family Album she wrote after her eldest son had become a national figure, Rebekah Baines Johnson portrayed her harsh life in soft colors, but a more accurate gauge of her feelings was what she did on the day—October 24, 1937—of her husband’s funeral. The night before Sam Ealy Johnson was buried in the Johnson family cemetery, she had packed her clothes and whatever else she wanted to keep, and immediately after the funeral she was driven to Austin—without returning to the house. “She went away that very night,” her eldest daughter, Rebekah, was to say. After a night in Austin, she took a train to Washington, where three of her children—Lyndon, Sam Houston and Rebekah—were living, and after a month or two there came back to Texas, first to Houston for some months, then to Corpus Christi, and finally back to Austin, where she rented an apartment. She was to live in Austin for the rest of her life. If she ever lived again in the house in which she had raised her children, it was not for very long. By January of 1938, the house had been rented. In March of that year, Lyndon Johnson wrote the tenant that his mother was reluctant to sign a long lease since “there is a very slight possibility that she will want to return to Johnson City after a year’s time,” but that he had suggested that she sign because “I seriously doubt that she will want to move back.” In fact, say both her daughter Rebekah and Sam Houston, she never did. “Mother never went back into the house after Daddy’s funeral,” her daughter said. Asked if that statement was to be taken literally, both she and Sam Houston said it was. “Mother never could stand Johnson City,” her daughter said. Sam Ealy had died without making a will—he had very little to leave, beside his gold watch and chain*; the house was mortgaged to close to its value—and in 1940, his five children relinquished to their mother any claim they might have had to the property. In 1942, Lyndon bought it from her for a token payment of ten dollars, assuming the mortgage and tax payments; this was apparently done so that she could have the rent from the house without having to make the payments.

The complexity of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and his mother would be demonstrated for the rest of his life; during the twenty years until she died of cancer in 1958, he would help support her, adding monthly payments to the income she received from Social Security and renting the Johnson City house, but except for very rare occasions, he wouldn’t write her; if, during his youth, there had been a steady stream of letters between them—his desperate for encouragement and reassurance, hers providing them with an unstinting hand—during the years since he had first gone to Washington in 1931, the correspondence continued, but with one difference: while his mother was still writing him (“I have been highly incensed all day over Drew Pearson’s hateful thrust…. Courage and forthrightness are synonomous with your name”; “You are a fighter, darling, you have right on your side; you are doing a wonderful selfless task for your government and for humanity, so keep up a brave heart, my wonderful son, right will triumph again! My dearest love, Mother”), he wasn’t writing her; almost all the letters—hundreds of letters—signed by him were written by members of his staff, for a while by Herbert Henderson, for a while by Walter Jenkins, for some years by Gene Latimer. “He used to say, ‘Write two long pages. Put in a lot of bull. Just fill it up with everything that happened this week,’” Latimer recalls. Unlike his other correspondence, these letters were not letters he read, corrected, and sent back to a staffer for rewriting; “He never sent any back that I remember,” Latimer says, and during his Senate years, after Latimer and Jenkins had learned to duplicate his signature, they were often letters he didn’t even sign. The staff was conscientious about this chore (“Next Sunday is Mother’s Day. Shall I wire her a greeting? ‘… Darling: Mother’s Day just one of three sixty-five I give thanks for you annually. Lyndon’”), but it was one in which he seemed to have very little interest. That he saw as much of her as he did was largely due to Lady Bird. Rebekah had been very hurt that her son’s wedding had been so hastily arranged that she was not invited to it, but Lady Bird understood her (“She was a college graduate and accustomed to more luxuries than she had living out there on a farm, where the going was rough”), and the two women had similar interests; when Lyndon’s mother came to Washington (the invitations were often issued by Lady Bird), the two women would visit antique shops and go “kinship hunting” in Virginia and Maryland. “We would case the county seat for a good place to have lunch, and spot the antique shops, before heading into the big old courthouse” to examine birth and marriage certificates, Lady Bird would say. The two women became friends. “I liked her so much,” Lady Bird was to say. “If I had an extra hour in Austin before I had to catch a plane or train to Washington, I would think of all the friends I could call, but I usually decided I would rather go and see Mrs. Johnson. We would sit together and talk about books, about household decorating, about family. We were very good friends, and that is probably better than loving one’s in-laws.” Lyndon’s mother often stayed overnight at the big white ranch house. Visitors from Washington, meeting the gracious, white-haired woman and seeing the affection with which she treated her grandchildren, and the rapport between her and her daughter-in-law, had a hard time understanding why, when she was around, her normally loquacious son sometimes fell into such long silences.

HIS THREE SISTERS and his brother were sometimes at the ranch, too.

All four had a nervousness, a fragility of temperament, that was striking to people who met them as adults. Three of them—Sam Houston Johnson and his two oldest sisters, Rebekah and Josefa—developed serious ulcers while they were in their early thirties.

Two of them—Rebekah and Lucia—were to live relatively stable lives. Rebekah was a tense, high-strung woman; by 1950, her mother, writing about her to Lyndon, would describe her health as “highly precarious.” She married Oscar Price Bobbitt, who went to work for the Johnson radio station as a salesman and eventually rose to be senior vice president of the Johnson television station. Lucia married Birge Alexander, who became area manager of the Federal Aviation Agency in Memphis.

The lives of the other two Johnson children were quite different. While Josefa, who was born in 1912, was still an undergraduate at San Marcos, bright, tall and strikingly beautiful, stories about what the Hill Country calls her “looseness” or “wildness” in sexual matters began to spread, and continued to spread after college. So did tales of her drunkenness; Arthur Stehling, the powerful Fredericksburg attorney who kept Gillespie County in line for Lyndon Johnson, was called on more than once to intercede after she had been brought to a sheriff’s office or police station in some small Hill Country town because of complaints about a drunken party in a hotel or motel. She was married to an Army lieutenant colonel in 1940, and Lyndon got her a job with the Texas NYA, but the job didn’t work out—that year Lyndon wrote to his mother that if Josefa refused to learn to type, other arrangements would have to be made—and neither did the marriage; by 1945, she was divorced, and more than once Horace Busby, who in 1948 was delegated to “deal with” the “Josefa situation,” had to deal with the fact that she was in a hospital alcoholic ward. Fascinated by politics, she worked in Lyndon’s 1948 senatorial campaign, and on the Texas Democratic Executive Committee in the 1952 presidential race, and the kind of stories that had followed her at San Marcos reemerged. Says a woman reporter who watched her at conventions and executive committee meetings in those years, “If there was a man to be picked up, Josefa picked him up.” The Josefa Johnson who came to the LBJ Ranch in 1951 and 1952 was a woman with trembling hands and few traces of her former beauty, and what Horace Busby was to call “a frighteningly low opinion of herself; when someone important came into the room, sometimes she would jump up and run out as if she felt they didn’t want to be bothered talking to her.”

During their boyhood, there had been a great closeness between Lyndon Johnson and Sam Houston Johnson, five years younger than he, who would say that he would never forget “those wonderful conversations (monologues, really) that ran through the long Saturday afternoons and Sundays” when he would visit his big brother at San Marcos, and would sit “listening with wide-eyed admiration as my brother” talked of his political stratagems—“even now, I can still visualize him restlessly moving back and forth … his eyes gleaming with anticipation and his deep voice tense with emotion.” This idolatry lasted into adulthood. “He worships you and will do anything for you,” their mother wrote Lyndon in 1937. “You are his hero.” But there was also a great competitiveness, and this, too, lasted into adulthood. Six-foot-one, very handsome and very charming, with a crooked, engaging grin, Sam Houston seemed to some friends to have a brilliant mind (Bill Deason says, “He was smarter ’n Lyndon in some respects”), particularly about politics, a field in which Sam Houston had the same ability Lyndon had—Sam Houston said they both got it from their father—to see several moves ahead on the political chessboard. “More than any man I have ever known he loved politics for its own sake,” Booth Mooney was to write. “His greatest pleasure was to set up intricate, devious schemes for bringing about the discomfiture of any Texas or Washington politician who dared to oppose his brother.” Graduating from San Marcos at fifteen, he received a law degree from Cumberland College in Lebanon, Tennessee, at nineteen, and it seemed for a while as if he would follow in his brother’s footsteps: when in 1935 Lyndon left his job as Richard Kleberg’s chief assistant to become Texas NYA director, he persuaded the Congressman to hire Sam Houston to succeed him.

But what Sam Houston made of that position was very different from what Lyndon had made of it. He loved to party, loved to drink, and to grandiosely pick up the check when he was out with friends. And he was always buying expensive clothes, for which he couldn’t pay. So that he would have more money, the indulgent Kleberg had him put on the payroll of his family’s King Ranch as a public relations consultant, but Sam used the money to rent an expensive apartment and hire a valet, and his debts only increased. In addition to his own money problems, Sam Houston was creating some for Kleberg. Says Russell Brown, who was a friend of both men, “He didn’t pay much attention to office business. Bills would come in, and instead of methodically compiling them and getting them paid like Lyndon used to do, he would throw them away…. He stopped paying anybody.” A school board in Kleberg’s congressional district actually filed suit to force the Congressman to pay unpaid school taxes. To cover his own debts, Sam started to write checks that bounced, one, to a custom tailor in Washington, for quite a substantial amount.

Sam Houston tried but failed to become Speaker of the Little Congress, as Lyndon had been. When he lost the election, he and some friends devised an amendment to the organization’s bylaws that gave “power over all social functions” to a five-man committee, which elected him chairman. He then organized a trip to New York for the organization’s members, obtaining free train tickets from one lobbyist, and liquor from another. The staffers nonetheless ran up bills at New York hotels so high that they couldn’t pay them, and a scandal that would have had repercussions for the staffers’ congressional bosses was only narrowly averted. The money situation within Kleberg’s office started to get uglier; there was at least one tailor’s bill, for two hundred dollars, that Sam Houston had the Congressman pay—although some members of the Kleberg family felt the bill was for one of Sam Houston’s suits. And he became involved in an angry dispute over some sexual liaison in the office—the details have been lost in time—that infuriated Kleberg’s wife. Sam left Kleberg’s office for a post—also arranged by Lyndon—as a regional director for the NYA. But the same pattern—of drinking (Sam once spoke of waking up almost every morning in an “alcoholic haze”) and debts and office romances that all seemed to end unpleasantly—repeated itself. Criminal charges were threatened by creditors who had gotten the bad checks. By 1940, Alvin Wirtz, then Undersecretary of the Interior, was trying to procure a job for Sam with the Federal Housing Administration in Puerto Rico to get him far enough away so that he could no longer embarrass Lyndon. “When [the proposed appointment] was announced in the paper, … his creditors began really protesting, and he didn’t get the position,” Brown recalls. (“Amusingly enough,” Brown says, “he said he had made a terrible mistake giving those hot checks. He should just have charged things and not paid for them, then he couldn’t have gotten into any trouble. They could just sue him but they couldn’t bring criminal charges against him. But with the hot checks they could file criminal charges.”) Sam was married that year, to Albertine Summers, a secretary to an Illinois congressman, and had two children, Josefa in 1941 and Sam in 1942, but there was soon a divorce—Albertine remarried—and he seemed to feel little responsibility for the children; in 1956 young Sam was watching the Democratic National Convention when the camera focused on a box reserved for Lyndon Johnson’s family; Sam Houston was pointed out to the boy; it was the first time he had seen his father since infancy.

After the war, Lyndon gave Sam Houston a job (“I was just a flunky,” he was to say) in his congressional office, but the drinking and irresponsibility had grown worse, and he would disappear for weeks at a time on drunken sprees. He had an affair with one of his brother’s secretaries, and in April, 1948, in Biloxi, Mississippi, they had an illegitimate child, a boy who would be named Rodney. The parents had intended to put Rodney up for adoption at birth (“the 1948 campaign was coming up, and he [Sam Houston] was afraid someone would find about me,” Rodney was to say), but his aunt Josefa, who was unable to bear children, said she wanted to adopt him, and she did. The Johnson family tried to conceal (not only from outsiders but from their mother) the fact that Josefa’s adopted baby was actually Sam’s child, but, as Rodney was to say, “I looked so much like Sam Houston that there was no concealing it”; at one family Christmas celebration, Cousin Oreole made the parentage clear even to Rebekah Baines Johnson when she said, pointing at Rodney, “Well, that’s the Bunton in the family right there.” (Rodney would die of AIDS in 1989.)

When Johnson was elected to the Senate, he put Sam Houston on his staff, but again, as Sam complained, “I was still just a flunky in Lyndon’s office.” His desk was just inside the front door, next to the receptionist’s, not in the room behind it, in which Connally, Busby, and Jenkins sat. He went to Mexico, disappeared for months and came back terribly thin; at one point he weighed only 120 pounds. Meeting him for the first time, Booth Mooney found himself looking at a man who was “so much like a shrunken version of the Senator that I would have known who he was even if he had not referred early and often in that initial conversation to ‘my brother….’” His health had broken; his ulcer seemed never to heal; he kept drinking. About the time that Lyndon and Lady Bird were buying the ranch, Sam Houston was in and out of hospitals, sometimes for treatment of alcoholism, sometimes for what appear to have been nervous breakdowns. “It was a great relief to learn that Sam Houston is under hospital care,” Rebekah Baines Johnson wrote Lyndon once. “I am so glad you put him where he can rebuild his shattered nerves.”

When Sam Houston wasn’t in a hospital, he was often at the new Johnson Ranch. Josefa, who had moved back to Fredericksburg, was often there, too, along with Rodney. So when Lyndon was there, so was his sister, about whom all the stories were told, so was his gaunt, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed brother, and so was his brother’s illegitimate son. The Hill Country was religious country—hard-shell, hellfire, revivalist, Fundamentalist, Old Testament religious. No drinking at all was allowed. “Sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster,” one of Lyndon Johnson’s high-school classmates, John Dollahite, would explain. The fierceness of the region’s prejudices and the rigidity of its intolerance led one of Johnson City’s more enlightened residents, Stella Gliddon, to call it “almost a Puritan town.” Sam Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s father, had never been a drunk, but he did like a drink, and these good people had known what would come of that. Sam Ealy “was nothing but a drunkard,” Dollahite says. “Always was.” Sam Houston’s drinking, and Josefa’s—and the other things that decent people didn’t mention—were staples of Hill Country conversation now, and Lyndon Johnson, child of the Hill Country, knew it, and knew what the Hill Country must be saying. He knew that the Hill Country, in a sneer at the Johnsons’ attempts at respectability, was calling Rodney “Little Sam Houston.” And to the Hill Country ranchers, breeding was significant, of course. During Lyndon Johnson’s youth, he had had to live with the fact that as “a Johnson” he was regarded as a member of a shiftless, no-account clan; “I don’t want you getting mixed up with those people,” the father of Carol Davis, the girl he had wanted to marry at college, had told her. Lyndon Johnson’s home now was big, gracious and gleaming white. But it was as filled with shadows as if it had been a dog-run, and relaxing there was very hard. He arose even earlier than he did in Washington; during his first years on the ranch, the rural route carrier delivered the mail to his mailbox—it was across the river, up toward Stonewall—about six-thirty, and not long thereafter Johnson would drive across the “low-water” dam and down the dirt road to pick it up; sometimes he would be waiting at the mailbox when the mailman drove up. Waking up early was, of course, routine in the country, where people went to bed early, but while Lyndon Johnson went to bed early, he didn’t sleep any better than he did in Washington, as Mary Rather realized the first time she stayed the night at the ranch. Sometime during the night, hearing a noise outside, she looked out her window. For a few moments, she couldn’t see anything in the darkness. And then she saw a tiny red glow; it brightened and faded. It was the glow of a cigarette—her boss’s cigarette. Lyndon Johnson was standing there in front of his house, smoking. “He didn’t sleep very well there either,” Ms. Rather was to say. There were, in the Hill Country as on Capitol Hill, still the terrible rages, sometimes over things whose significance to him his assistants couldn’t understand, like a coil of barbed wire left near the bottom of a tree (“That’s bad ranching,” he snarled at a ranch hand who had left it there. “You don’t want a cow to get tangled up in that. That’s bad ranching! What do you think—that I spend all this money on cows so you can give them blood poisoning, you——”) or an irrigation line running when it shouldn’t be (“You know that line’s uncapped out there? You’re washing my soil away out there! Get on it!”). There was as much urgency in Texas as in Washington; Lady Bird had filled the living room with antiques; he filled it with telephones and typewriters. A second line was run into the house, and then a third; telephones were installed in almost every room; visitors were constantly tripping over the wires. He had his desk in the living room, and now a bridge table was set up for a secretary to work at, and then a second bridge table, for a second secretary. And the telephones were snatched out of their hands as if they were all still back together in SOB 231. The wristwatch alarm was always going off to remind him of a call he wanted to make or was expecting to receive.

Even while visiting journalists were writing about how relaxed Lyndon Johnson was on the ranch, members of his staff knew that when journalists weren’t around, Lyndon Johnson’s behavior was in some areas as frenetic in Texas as in Washington. George Reedy was to write that he would sometimes embark on “a wild drinking bout. He was not an alcoholic or a heavy drinker in the commonly accepted sense of those words. But there were occasions when he would pour down Scotch and soda in a virtually mechanical motion in rhythm with the terrible tension building visibly within him and communicating itself to his listeners. The warning signs were unmistakable and those with past experience tried to get away before the inevitable flood of invective. As they found out, it was rarely possible.” Reedy wrote that “there did not appear to be any relationship between the locale and the episode. It could happen in his Capitol office; in the living room of his ranch”; other members of his staff say that it actually happened more often on the ranch, both because in Washington he felt more need to keep his guard up and not “lose control,” and because in Texas he didn’t have Bobby Baker measuring the drinks.

His behavior in Texas was similar to his Washington behavior in other ways. The journalist Hugh Sidey would write about Lady Bird: “Her constant pacification of the beast in her husband was her greatest achievement…. He caressed other women in front of her.” In Washington, there was in these public “caresses” at least some restraint. In Texas, there was less. Horace Busby was to recall sitting in the back seat of Johnson’s car while Johnson was showing the ranch to a friend of Lady Bird’s who had come to visit. Johnson was driving, with Lady Bird in the front seat at the window and the friend sitting between them. Leaning over the front seat to ask a question, Busby saw that Johnson had his hand “under the woman’s skirt and was having a big time, right there in front of Lady Bird.” (Busby says that “Lady Bird didn’t say a word,” but “after a while” the woman “slapped his hand.”) The journalist Eliot Janeway was to speak of Johnson’s “harem,” saying that “one way you could visualize Lady Bird is as the queen in Anna and the King of Siam. It worked that way; you know the scene where she sits at the table and all the babes—Lady Bird was head wife.”

*Lyndon’s sisters insisted it go to Sam Houston; Lucia told Lyndon, “Daddy wanted him to have it. We all know that.” In 1958, however, Sam Houston gave it to Lyndon. (See The Path to Power, pp. 543–44.)