LBJ's Texas White House

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Our Heart's Home" On November 22, 1963, on board Air Force One preparing to depart for Washington, D.C., a shaken Lyndon Baines Johnson stepped before his friend Judge Sarah Hughes and recited the oath of office of the Presidency of the United States. Hours before, President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, and pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital. His body and his blood-spattered widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, were aboard the plane, as were numerous Kennedy aides. The tragedy shocked the nation. It was a particularly terrible moment for Johnson and for Texas as well. Kennedy had come to the state to help heal a rift in the state Democratic Party and restore his popularity there. After the day in Dallas, the Kennedys had been expected as guests at the Johnsons' ranch in the Hill Country, slightly more than two hundred miles south of the airport where the new president stood. As the swearing in ended, President Johnson was whisked to the capital to commence his duties amid the collective mourning of the nation and the world. In an instant, a transfer of power and leadership had occurred not only in the nation but in the world as well. The suave but perplexing Kennedy—the boy president, war hero, and symbol of a renewal of the nation; the first Roman Catholic ever to hold the highest office in the land—had been replaced by a historically more common sort of president, a man of the backwoods who fashioned himself able to lead by intelligence, skill, cunning, and will. Like Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, Johnson came from humble origins; like them, he fashioned a persona that brought him success in politics sometimes at the expense of personal goals and public image. A throwback, a man of modest rural roots in an age of urban and military leaders in the White House, Johnson embodied a kind of empathy for ordinary people that belied his tough, manipulative, win-at-all-costs exterior. The source of that empathy, as well as of nearly everything else about the character of Lyndon Johnson, was the Texas Hill Country from which he came and to which he perennially sought to return. The hilly area west of Austin, called the Edwards Plateau but more commonly known as the Hill Country, had been home to his family for nearly one hundred years when he became president. Despite his claim that he was "a creation of Congress," Lyndon Johnson was truly a product of the Hill Country. Even his detractors recognized the impact of the place on the man; Robert Caro, whose caustic, scathing, and often one-sidedly negative multivolume biography of Johnson delves extensively into his personality, argues that Johnson "came out of the Hill Country formed, shaped—into a shape so hard it would never change."1 While Caro dramatically overstates the impact of his home region on Lyndon Johnson, his charge includes a kernel of truth. The Hill Country had great meaning to the thirty-sixth president of the United States. It symbolized what Johnson thought best, most meaningful, and most trying about the American experience: the ability to meet a rugged natural world on its own terms and emerge, over time and through repeated effort, equal to the task if not entirely victorious. Simultaneously, the Hill Country became a crucible for Johnson, in which he sought to prove not only his own worth but that of his family as well. This hardscrabble place and Johnson's experiences in it also accentuated every fear and insecurity in the man. This place made him, strengthened him, and gave him the traits he needed to succeed in the contentious world of national politics. Like many from similar backgrounds, Johnson recognized that any lack of fortitude on his own part could quickly lead to a return to the Hill Country in circumstances similar to those experienced by his father, turn-of-the-century politician, farmer, and businessman Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. Lyndon Johnson retained the deepest kind of attachment to the world from which he came and immense pride in his family's accomplishments. When he returned to his home place, he wanted his return to be in the style of the leader he had become. Johnson's ranch on the Pedernales River in the Hill Country, the place his wife called "our heart's home," became the primary representation of that style. Eventually known as the Texas White House, it embodied his complex relationship to his past and to the American people. Born less than a mile from the ranch, which belonged to his grandparents at his birth, Johnson grew up with emotional and psychic ties to that particular piece of land. After he and Lady Bird Johnson purchased it in 1951, the ranch came to reflect both Johnson's southern ancestry and his western aspirations. Its regional image belied Johnson's thirty years as a politician with a national identity. The ranch became a symbol of Johnson—his presidency, his roots, and his belief in the ability of people to achieve their dreams. The Texas White House reminded Americans of the rural roots of their nation at a moment when political strife and discord seemed an urban phenomenon, cities coming to embody the worst about America. The ranch reflected cherished American ideals. To foreign dignitaries, it provided a window into a dimension of American culture they could not find in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard. Wearing the ten-gallon Texas hats of lore, they encountered an outlook that was uniquely American, albeit mythically so. Johnson's ascent to the presidency showcased the ranch. It became his retreat, just as John F. Kennedy had Hyannisport and later, Richard M. Nixon had San Clemente and George H. W. Bush had Kennebunkport. Johnson's attachment to the ranch complex assured that affairs of state would be conducted there, increasing its importance as well as public awareness of it. There he made decisions of vast import: to run for the presidency in 1964 and not to seek reelection in 1968. There he came in the aftermath of solving tough crises such as the steel strike of 1965; there he came to recuperate from illness; there he rested during the nightmare of early spring and summer 1968, when the assassinations of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy seemed to mend the remaining fabric of the nation. In the iconography of the time, Johnson and his ranch were inseparable. His gangly appearance and Texas twang made him the modern incarnation of the mythic man from Texas. Reporters from the East fed this image, never understanding the man and his Hill Country, never grasping the pull of the place and the personal and political power and sustenance Johnson drew from it. During his presidency, there was no more important place than the Texas White House for the Johnsons. There they could truly come home from the fast-paced whirl and intense political life of Washington, D.C. In his heart a man of the Hill Country, the president freed himself of the burdens of Capitol Hill politics as he handled the details of the ranch. For him, it served as a hideaway and a place for renewal as well as a showplace for visiting dignitaries. Entertaining there enhanced both his power in negotiations and his sense of his role as a country gentleman. The Texas White House gave him a vantage point he did not feel he had in Washington, D.C. It was to this ranch and to his roots that Lyndon Johnson returned after he left political life in early 1969. In his retirement, the ranch became his primary focus, its daily activities serving as a substitute for the political life the dynamic leader so loved. On the Pedernales, the retired president could do what he best liked to do: run things. The ranch rejuvenated him in retirement, allowing him to exit public life with a purpose while maintaining the kinds of activities that he found most fulfilling. The press, with which he had had so much difficulty as president, misinterpreted Johnson's desire to be out of the limelight. The press regarded Johnson's reluctance to attract attention in retirement as a sign that he was worn, tired, and defeated. Johnson himself finally had the opportunity to act, talk, dress, and live as he pleased. During Johnson's years as president, visitors from all over the world were entranced by the ranch on the banks of the Pedernales. The magic of the place captured many as they watched the Texas-orange sun disappear behind the horizon, its beams shimmering on the waters of the river. Johnson's famed Texas barbecues were the talk of the international political set, his favorite musicians time and again playing country, western, swing, and popular music for an array of international leaders and dignitaries. The Texas White House captured the spirit of the man and his time, with all its double-edged promise. For that reason, the day-to-day workings of the ranch offer great insight into the character of Lyndon Baines Johnson.