Master of the Senate (87 page)

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.”