Master of the Senate (88 page)

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.”

O
N
S
EPTEMBER 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!”

T
HE 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.”

A
S SOON AS THE
LBJ R
ANCH
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.”

O
NE 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 the
Winston-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.