LBJ's Texas White House "Our Heart's Home"

CHAPTER 3 The Senate Years:
Creating a Mythic Place from an Actual One

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The LBJ Ranch, as the Martin place soon became known, rapidly assumed genuine significance in the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. Besides providing him with a place to rest and clear his head, the ranch symbolized Johnson's aspirations and became the place he used to hone his political image. Possessed of an all-too-typical American family history of dreams linked to subsequent difficulty, Johnson departed for the U.S. Senate with a self-imposed stigma equal in size to his immense pride. The purchase and renovation of the ranch were important steps that served to erase the shortcomings of his upbringing in relationship to what he and the rest of the nation perceived as the background of most other senators. Inordinately adept at defining himself as what he believed the public wanted him to be and sophisticated at managing his image, Johnson believed he could become what he owned and could make what he owned into what he wanted to be.

The ranch had immense political potential as well. On the ranch in his home Texas Hill Country, Johnson managed a feat that bordered on the impossible for most American politicians: he reinvented himself in the space of a few short years. Johnson used the symbolism of the ranch to remake his political image into one so malleable that he could employ its different and ofttimes contradictory facets without even a hint of overlap. Under the guise of gentleman rancher in the Senate, he transformed himself from Texas politico to national leader, from man of a region to man of the nation, tied to the mythical iconography of the self-made man that the Western films of the time so dramatically represented.

Johnson's rise to national power coincided with the postwar moment, when "western" came to mean national in character. As Johnson emerged on the scene, the nation was undergoing a transformation in its values, with the West coming to be seen as the site of its creation myth, a status reflected in film and culture. From Red River in 1945 to How the West Was Won in 1962, the Western harbored national fears and aspirations. In the postwar climate, the Western disguised and replayed social, cultural, political, and other tensions, making some problems palatable and solving others in different contexts. Not only did this make the Western popular, it enhanced the meaning of western expansion as a part of the national consciousness. The American West became a parable for American society, the challenge that Americans faced in the past that offered ways to face, address, and solve new tensions in the present. Americans could return to their sipapu, their point of mythic origin, to find the tools and the strength to face the confounding tensions of the modern world. At the same time, the inexorable shift that led John F. Kennedy to be the last American president to claim northeastern origins for more than forty years began. Population, then momentum, then national culture shifted westward—to the Sunbelt, to states such as Texas and California. A new American power—based in the baking sun and not in the cold, wet Northeast—emerged. Johnson was its prototype, his ranch its emblem.

In this, Johnson plugged into a nostalgia for an older America, lost to the post-1945 world but characteristic of the American sense of self. Westernness, as embodied in the LBJ Ranch, connoted authenticity, self-reliance, and frontier spirit in an age before the nation treated such topics with cynical scorn. Johnson announced himself as an American myth in a changing society, a man who came from the region to which the nation aspired. It was a deft trick, melding the country-gentleman style of Senator Richard Russell and others with an announcement of national status that emanated from Johnson's tall Stetson hat. Here was an American truth, Johnson's ranch claimed, a reality more real than the overcoats and top hats of the Northeast. Americans embraced this idea as a rock in a changing society, melding it with the need for continuity best expressed in the everyday emphasis on business that characterized the 1950s.

Over time, the ranch served an even more important function. It allowed Johnson to remake himself from Southerner to Westerner, from a man of the old and, by the middle of the 1950s, seemingly decadent and atavistic South to a representative of the West, a region aglow with new development in the post-World War II era. This gave him an crucial asset in his reach for national prominence. In American iconography, the image of the South as a failed aristocracy was sectional; nationwide, the South retained its reputation as the most backward part of the nation, the most resistant to change and the most out of step with postwar realities. As the Dixiecrat third-party effort of 1948 demonstrated, the South firmly placed region ahead of nation and states' rights ahead of national interests in what had become an era of national goals. The southernness that had gotten Johnson elected in Texas became less useful as he became more established in Washington, D.C. He needed it to get into the inner circles of the Senate, for leadership remained a southern club, but its significance ended there. A southern image, while vital to a place in the club that Johnson strove so hard to join, was of increasingly marginal use on the national stage. As he became a leader in the Senate during the first half of the 1950s, Johnson gradually replaced his southernness with westernness, adding the so-called freedom, honor, and dignity of purported western individualism to his repertoire of imagery. A cynical student of Johnson might note that he assumed the traits widely attributed to Coke Stevenson, his opponent in the 1948 Senate race, both at the time and by subsequent biographers. The self-portrait of Johnson as a mythic "True Texan" became possible in no small part because of the ranch and its connotations.¹

This transformation was crucial to Johnson's development as a national political leader. As Johnson became first a lukewarm and later an unabashed advocate of civil rights for African Americans, he distanced himself from the South and its leaders. To do so required that he transform his image and the meaning of his ranch from what noted historian William E. Leuchtenberg has called the "taint of magnolia" to a new "horse-riding, gun-toting, shootin' 'n' huntin' Lyndon Johnson of the Hill Country."² This was a dangerous step for a politician from Texas, a state that considered itself heir to both regional traditions.

Texans have always had it both ways when it came to regional identity, but none so much so as Lyndon Johnson. They have been southerners when it suited their purposes and westerners when expedient, managing this convenient bifurcation well into the post-Vietnam era. The eight-hundred-mile wide state includes several geographies and topographies and many kinds of economic and cultural regimes. It supports both southern-style humid-climate economic practices such as cotton growing, which began in the piney woods of East Texas and reached as far west as the Balcones Escarpment in Central Texas, as well as the grazing economy that dominates the sparsely populated, dry plains of West Texas, the famed Llano Estacado of ranching lore. The trick for Texas politicians with national aspirations has always been to balance the demands of both western and southern constituencies by subtle manipulation of the differing symbols of each culture. Before Johnson, no Texas politician succeeded at this except the intractable John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, who spent thirty years in the House of Representatives and two years as its speaker before becoming Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president in 1933. Garner combined the traits of successful Texas politicians: longevity and archetypical Texas xenophobia. He played on the electorate's pervasive sense that the state had been treated badly since the end of the Civil War in order to reach national office. Garner, however, was a rare commodity. Most other Texas politicians either fell squarely in one camp or the other, like the decidedly western and self-limiting Stevenson, or were too idiosyncratic for a national position, like Governor James Hogg.³

Early twentieth-century Texans often eschewed national political leadership, feeling it morally inferior to power in the state on nationalistic and ideological grounds. Texans often saw their state as a nation, considering themselves Texans first and Americans second. They pointed to their decade as a republic and to the "choice" of their leaders to join the Union, and they reveled in their mythology of individualism and independence. If they manipulated their past to serve their ideological purposes, they were no different than residents of California or New York, extolling virtues, ignoring shortcomings, and shaping place-born myth. Texans became exceptional only in their xenophobia, in their deeply held conviction that anything Texan was better simply by virtue of its place of origin. As devotees of the doctrine of states' rights, the people of Texas were sure to elect only those who saw state leadership as more significant than a role in Washington. Before 1920, no self-respecting Texan would have traded a prominent role in Austin for one in Washington, D.C.; few even had the chance, and anyone who sought such a chance might be suspect except in the most extreme circumstances.⁴

The rise of Sam Rayburn and the ascendance of long-serving Texas congressmen and senators to congressional leadership in the Democratic landslide of 1932, however, inaugurated a new attitude among state politicians. As Democrats with many years of service in Congress, Texas representatives were the greatest beneficiaries of the Roosevelt ascendance. Garner became vice president, and Texas congressmen assumed the leadership of a number of committees important to the state. Another Texas magnate, Houstonian Jesse H. Jones, rose during the New Deal to become Secretary of Commerce in 1940. As they experienced the largesse that the New Deal provided through the various committees controlled by Texans, state politicians and their electorate began to reconsider the significance of service in Washington, D.C. As Texas's representatives in the nation's capital brought home projects that were financed through means that taxed other states more heavily than Texas, the value of national service in the formulaic understanding of Texas politicians increased.⁵

By the 1950s, Texas was the most powerful state in Congress. With Sam Rayburn as Speaker of the House, Lyndon Johnson on the rise in the Senate, and Dwight D. Eisenhower—born in Texas, raised in Kansas, and retaining an affinity for the Lone Star state—in the White House, Texas was well represented in the distribution of federal largesse. As Johnson grew more powerful, ascending through the positions of leadership in the Senate, the power of the state grew and reached an apex. D. B. Hardeman, Rayburn's principal aide, called the decade from 1951 to 1961 "the peak of Texas influence in Washington, D.C."⁶

But Texas politicians with national aspirations still had to serve two distinctly different and often antithetical constituencies. Politics within the state continued to require an antigovernment, know-nothing stance to assure success at the ballot box; anything else made initial election difficult and reelection nearly impossible. But after the beginning of the New Deal, the pose that enticed Texas voters severely limited a winning candidate once in Washington, D.C. Texas conservatism was different from forms of conservatism elsewhere in the nation. Even the rare moments of Texas liberalism were politically different, bordering more on libertarianism than on any mainstream form of the liberal thinking of the era. Successfully negotiating the national/Texas dichotomy and framing the attitudes of the state in a manner palatable to a national audience remained primary considerations for Texas politicians who sought roles of national leadership.

Lyndon Johnson developed the most successful strategy for this balancing act. Described by his many biographers as a man with malleable principles—as a liberal nationalist; as a sometime conservative; as a sometime liberal—Johnson emerged as a political chameleon who could manipulate his image in a manner more typical of the 1980s than of the 1940s and 1950s. He clearly intuited the ways in which to develop ties to powerful government and private-sector interests. He understood how to make himself useful to anyone with great power or influence. He also had great currency with ordinary people, the "plain folk" who made up the Texas electorate. He defeated the first of the great mass-media-age Texas politicians, Pappy O'Daniel, in the 1941 Senate race before O'Daniel could steal the election from him; in an even more fierce campaign and election, he probably took the 1948 Senate election away from Stevenson, a pre-electronic media politician considered the greatest Texas campaigner of all time. Johnson understood and sympathized with common people and delivered the perquisite power his position provided to them as well as to the rich and powerful. This ability to simultaneously serve different masters while appearing to maintain political independence set him apart from more typical midcentury politicians in Texas and in the nation at large.⁷

The value of the ranch as a symbol could not have been readily apparent when the Johnsons returned to Stonewall to look at their purchase late in 1951. Lady Bird's haunted-house description seemed even more appropriate than it had in 1950; nearly two more years of limited maintenance had made the already dismal condition of the property even worse. Although the Johnsons had acquired the property on March 5, 1951, their plans to renovate it were delayed by the Korean Conflict, which kept Johnson, as a member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, busy. At the end of October, almost eight months after the purchase was finalized, the Johnsons arrived at the ranch and began to assess its future. The conditions they saw would require an ongoing stream of expenditures.⁸

The arrival of Senator and Mrs. Johnson in the Hill Country gave the region a rare commodity: a homegrown celebrity to pair with Admiral Chester A. Nimitz of nearby Fredericksburg, Texas. As in many small towns and rural regions, local news was regarded with far greater importance than all but national events of the utmost gravity. When the Johnsons finally arrived at their new home, local reporters Art and Elise Kowert, owners of the weekly Fredericksburg Standard, dropped by for an extended interview. In it, Johnson revealed a complicated plan for the ranch that articulated goals of status and community and hinted at his potential national leadership.⁹

In keeping with the image he was in the midst of creating, Johnson took responsibility for the ranching and farm operations. As a young man, Johnson had done some agricultural work on his father's various enterprises, but hoeing cotton had never been something he enjoyed.¹⁰ The ranch, however, was different. Because ranching was the mythic Texas profession, the fodder of regional lore, it held special status. Owning a large tract of land signified arrival not only in Texas but in most of the nation. Despite its 245.82-acre size, which made it a small spread by Texas standards, Johnson's ranch permitted him to appear as a member of the landed gentry and attached an importance even to manual tasks such as fixing fences that agricultural field labor never enjoyed.¹¹

Ranch work also strengthened the ties between Johnson and his Hill Country neighbors. By discussing his need to fix fences with the Kowerts, he took a step toward belonging in his old community. He also discussed technical needs and planned improvements with C. A. Stone, the Gillespie County agricultural agent; Stone too had to keep his fences in shape, had to worry about early frost, had to rely on neighbors for advice. The house the Johnsons had purchased was close enough to the original family homestead and graveyard that Johnson could make the case that he had come home. This was no dalliance, his demeanor and attitude in the interview seemed to say. He was home, near to the land his family had cultivated, near to where his ancestors were buried.¹²

The ranch helped him to heal any remaining old wounds and to return home not only as a success but as one of the community. The Johnsons had been the most proud—and in some ways the most arrogant—of the people of the Hill Country. To their neighbors, they seemed unable to accept the limits of the region and its communities, unable to live within the bounds created by harsh environmental conditions and limited available technologies. The Johnsons strove for more; that they succeeded and failed with equal frequency cast aspersions on their character. But ownership of the ranch property, as one of two leading political officials who represented the state, created an aura that Johnson craved. His roots and experiences in the Hill Country drove him to need local affirmation, a commodity the ranch could provide.

Johnson's plans for the LBJ Ranch were impressive by the standards of the region. In November, 1951, he had seventy-five acres planted in winter wheat and another twenty-five in clover. He expected to break and seed another one hundred acres in clover before winter. He had recently purchased twenty-five head of Delaine sheep from a Johnson City man and planned to add thirty head of cattle in the near future. Peach trees to complement the existing pecan trees were also on the agenda for the ranch.¹³

The ranch had more symbolic than economic value in the early 1950s. The Johnsons made their money in media, and radio and television stations remained the primary source of their income. The ranch was, in the words of biographer Paul Conkin, "an indulgence . . . open only to people of wealth."¹⁴ It had been purchased to furnish an image as well as to allow Johnson to return to his home country as a success. As an economic endeavor, the ranch was a poor substitute for other Johnson ventures. The return on ranching enterprises was so meager that a spread many times larger than the acreage on the Pedernales River would not produce enough to support a family.¹⁴ But owning the ranch property did make Johnson one of the people of the Hill Country, affording him the country home so crucial to his view of the accouterments of successful national politicians. The value of the image of the ranch far exceeded any monetary benefit for the Johnsons.

Johnson kept a close eye on his ranch even from Washington, D.C.
A. W. Moursand, his close friend, regularly wrote to keep Johnson abreast of affairs at the ranch. Mundane details of such things as cattle branding, the hiring of handymen for outlying properties, weather reports, and similar matters were staples of their correspondence. Although loath to make decisions about personnel changes from far away, Johnson made his wishes clear. Always a hands-on manager, whether in politics or in his personal affairs, he ran his ranch from afar. "I am not completely happy with everything that goes on and has gone on at the farm," he responded to Moursand in 1954, with a telling description of the property, but he indicated that changes would have to wait until he was again in residence.¹⁵

At least for the Fredericksburg Standard article, Lady Bird was designated "chief" of the house and grounds. This aspect of the renovation of the property was far more daunting than transforming the land into a working ranch. The house and the grounds were in horrible condition. Electrical wiring was exposed, the roof continuously leaked during rainstorms, and planking on the upstairs porch was rotten. A simple and battered picket fence surrounded the house, and vestiges of the days before indoor plumbing, including a boxed-in well beyond the southwest corner of the fence, remained.¹⁶ The house and the grounds clearly required major renovation and ongoing care.

Lady Bird's initial efforts involved the grounds. Early in November, she and an Austin landscape architect marked for removal trees from the live oak and pecan grove between the house and the river. A tree surgeon arrived to take out the dead limbs. Grapevines came out, and consistent upkeep of the property began. The front lawn was seeded with Saint Augustine and carpet grass, and a fountain in the middle of the yard was removed because it no longer functioned. A new approach road to the house was laid out. Lady Bird ordered the plaster removed from the exterior walls of the building to reveal the limestone underneath. Through his attorney, Everett Looney of Austin, a long-time associate, Johnson secured water rights to impound two hundred acre-feet of water each year to irrigate his acreage and had a dam built to create a small swimming hole. Located in front of the house, the swimming hole also provided a lakelike view from the porch, another of the amenities that Johnson sought. The Johnsons had a raft built and moored with chains in deep water. The first steps in redeveloping the property had begun in earnest.¹⁷

The house itself was a much bigger and longer-term problem. It clearly required daily care and a hands-on presence. Everything about the old Martin place revealed fifteen years of declining maintenance. Little had been done to the buildings since the 1920s, when the state of the art in facilities was decidedly different than it was during the 1950s. Although the Martins had installed the best available plumbing and fixtures for their day, by the early 1950s these were quaint anachronisms; many years later, Lady Bird Johnson wished she had kept the old claw-foot bathtubs and pull-chain commodes that had been in the house before the renovation. Although Lyndon Johnson typically wanted everything accomplished immediately, he had to return to Washington, D.C., when Congress reopened session in January, 1952. The renovation of the house was "put on the back burner," Mrs. Johnson recalled.¹⁸

The transformation of the property proceeded after Lady Bird's relocation to the Hill Country in February, 1952. Along with the two Johnson daughters—Lynda, then eight, and Lucy (later Luci), about Wve—she came, as she said, "pretty reluctantly."¹⁹ In a reprise of Rebekah Baines Johnson's experience in almost the same place forty years before, she was alone in her husband's homeplace. By the 1950s, there were many fewer Johnson relatives along the Pedernales. Perhaps the lack of nearby relatives was a blessing; the Johnson clan and its coarse behavior had been a source of consternation for Johnson's genteel mother. Lady Bird had other reasons to be unsure about the move. She loved her house in Washington, D.C., and had not even completed its redecoration. As always, however, she made do. Without her husband, Lady Bird threw herself into the renovation of the property.²⁰

The catalyst for the house renovation was the hiring of architect Max Brooks of the Austin firm of Kuehne, Brooks, and Barr. Brooks brought in an associate architect from his company, a young man named J. Roy White, who became a close and valued friend of the Johnsons and the primary architect for all of the work on the house and grounds in the course of the subsequent thirty years. White was the firm's period-detailing expert, specializing in mantels, porches, cabinets, and similar features. Lady Bird Johnson described White as "one of my life-long best friends," a tribute from one with as many close friends as she, and he served the Johnsons for the remainder of his life.²¹

When White arrived, the house "had never seen an architect," Lady Bird Johnson remembered. Built by local country people, it had been designed in what has been deemed the vernacular American style. Made of indigenous materials and conceived on a different scale than the Johnsons required, additions had been built throughout the first half of the twentieth century in the haphazard way of rural America. Its rooms were more functional than aesthetic, and they were decorated in a dated but typical rural manner. The living room was "dark and not inviting," in Mrs. Johnson's estimation, with panel wainscoting, "putty-colored" walls, and dark oak beams. She suggested as a way to begin that they rip off the wainscoting and paint the room—beams, ceiling, and walls—white. This would remove the gloominess she felt in the room and serve as a prelude to full-scale renovation.²²

From February until July, 1952, the house underwent comprehensive renovation. Every room was redone. Walls and partitions were added, floors and floorboards replaced with oak, and brick repointed and replaced. Bathrooms were added and redone, closets were built into bedrooms, and the porches were restored. Marcus Burg, a Stonewall builder, took over the work after another contractor abandoned the project, and with his foreman, Lawrence Klein—a native of the Pedernales Valley who had once been a student at the Junction School—in control of day-to-day affairs, the work proceeded. Klein was familiar with the property, for he had
undertaken a number of maintenance projects at the house after Clarence Martin's death. As the lead on-site person, he managed the project to completion.²³

On July 12, 1952, the Johnsons moved into the refurbished house. The family did not own enough furniture to fill their new house, so Lady Bird Johnson purchased an entire household of furniture from an elderly woman in Washington, D.C., and had it shipped to the ranch. The house glistened from the renovation; its floors sparkled with fresh varnish, the walls shone with fresh paint, and the outside porches no longer sagged. With "cattle grazing in front and the pretty green fields in the background," the ranch presented "quite a picturesque scene," Josepha Johnson wrote her brother. The two Johnson daughters, Lynda and Luci, soon learned to swim in the river their father had dammed. The old Martin place had become every inch the house of a U.S. senator, exuding power and importance. Only its location tied it to the people and experiences of the Pedernales Valley. In August of 1952, Lyndon Johnson marked the property as his own. In the wet cement of a walkway near the south gate, he took a sharp stick and wrote, "Welcome to the LBJ Ranch."²⁴

With the completion of the renovation of the house, Lyndon Johnson had defied the axiom of American author Thomas Wolfe and returned home. Except in geographic terms, that home was not the place it had been. Instead it was an image, a sense of self that Johnson carefully crafted. Mobility had characterized the first fifteen years of his political career. The Johnsons had lived in apartments and houses in Austin and Washington, D.C., bouncing among them with regularity. They were all transitory places—certainly to Lyndon Johnson and in all likelihood equally so to his wife, who had to set up her home time and time again and endured the brunt of the frequent moves. The purchase of the property along the Pedernales River ended this motion for the Johnsons. All other addresses, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, would be temporary by contrast.

Although Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson had both grown up in small rural towns, the return to country life was different for them. For most of the preceding twenty years, they had lived in Washington, D.C., or in Austin, where conveniences were close at hand and they were surrounded by people. Friends, political acquaintances, and business associates could reach them in an instant. Early in his Washington, D.C., career, Lyndon Johnson was notorious for bringing home dinner guests without informing his wife. The ranch was different; it was quiet and remote, and any activity that occurred had to be generated by the Johnsons. Something as simple as a loaf of bread required a round trip of more than twenty miles, and the only connection to the outside world besides the road was the telephone. The pace of life was decidedly slower, and in the manner of rural people, when visitors came they stayed much longer than their urban counterparts. The rhythms of the ranch were different, and for the Johnsons, the new residence required adjustment. Certainly Lady Bird in particular must have experienced moments of loneliness, particularly during Lyndon's frequent absences.

There were also natural hazards with which to contend along a remote river. On September 11, 1952, hard rain pelted the Hill Country, continuing through the night and into the next day. Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to deliver speeches in the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, and because Lady Bird was not well, Mary Rather, one of the staffers, was sent to the ranch. Rather drove Johnson to his commercial flight in San Antonio on the morning of September 12. On her return, she found she could not cross the high waters of the Pedernales River to reach the ranch. She returned to Fredericksburg and tried to cross a bridge there, but it too was closed. Floodwaters isolated the ranch.

Lady Bird and her daughter Luci were by themselves at the ranch. Eight-year-old Lynda had gone to school on the bus that morning, and Luci was delighted to be alone with her mother. She soon sensed that her mother was concerned by the rain and the rising river. When the telephone went out, the worry became apparent. The water crept up through the grove below the house and began to cross the road about fifty feet from the house; Lady Bird spoke of saddling a horse and riding to higher ground. Soon "Cousin Oriole" Bailey, who lived nearby, came sloshing through calf-deep water in her boots. Other neighbors seeking shelter followed. The Johnsons' house was at a higher elevation than those of most of their neighbors. By the time Lady Bird Johnson served everyone tomato soup and cheese sandwiches in the afternoon, the flood had begun to crest. Late in the afternoon, Lyndon Johnson returned. He flew from San Antonio to the nearby Wesley West ranch, and a light plane took him to the LBJ Ranch, landing in an open stretch of field. His five-year-old daughter thought her father had come to rescue everybody.²⁵

The flood crested overnight, and the next morning Mary Rather returned to assure that everyone was unhurt and to assess the damage. Many of the pecan and live oak trees in the grove in front of the house had been uprooted, and flood debris was strewn across the lower reaches of the property. Foreman Julius Matus's car and the butane tank at his West Quarters had been swept downstream by the flood. Lady Bird Johnson told Mary Rather that the water had reached within a few feet of the fence in the front yard. Most of the bottomland fences on the main ranch property were destroyed. A number of the neighbors, whose homes were closer to the river than the ranch house, experienced even more significant flood damage.²⁶

The people near the Johnson ranch at Stonewall were not the only ones to suffer during this flood. Along the Pedernales River in Gillespie County alone, floodwaters damaged an estimated fifteen thousand dollars worth of property. At Stonewall, more than twenty-three inches of rain fell in a twenty-four-hour period, raising the river forty feet.²⁷ But rural people were accustomed to such disasters, and the presence of the Johnsons in the Hill Country during the flood and Lady Bird's characteristic graciousness and hospitality during difficult times helped assure their place in the loose rural community. The senator's family had experienced one of the difficulties of Hill Country life with their neighbors, and Lady Bird's grace in a pressure-packed situation helped persuade local people of the family's permanence in the region. As a result, the Johnsons became more a part of the community.

Lyndon Johnson had other expectations for his ranch. As he rose in the Senate, from whip to minority leader to majority leader in the brief span of five years, the ranch became a significant part of the image he projected to state and national constituencies. With the completion of the renovation of the property and cleanup of the flood damage, the ranch became an important showcase for Johnson. He brought political friends and allies—as well as those he sought to cultivate—to the ranch. Once there, he always showed them around, brought them back to the house, and completed the business that had led to the visit in the living room or den, if it had not been conducted during the tour of the ranch. With a considerable sixty-five-mile distance to Austin and spare bedrooms in the house, many visitors stayed the night at the Johnson ranch.²⁸

Informal but staged entertainment also was offered during the 1950s. The primary form of gala entertaining that Johnson enjoyed was the western barbecue, the first of which was presented in 1953.²⁹ As did many of the other formalized activities that Johnson treasured, barbecues linked his heritage in the Hill Country with his aspirations as a politician and a leader. These meals became mythic, more so as the Johnsons found the caterers, musicians, and entertainers on whom they depended to make these productions serve his purpose.

Johnson liked a western atmosphere, Richard "Cactus" Pryor, a comedian, long-time KTBC employee, and Texas wit who later served as master of ceremonies for many social functions at the ranch, recalled. Coal-oil lanterns and checkered tablecloths, bales of hay, old iron washtubs full of melted butter in which to dip corn on the cob, and other western-style accouterments were typical. The servers were dressed in western clothes. The ranch grounds were manicured for these parties. After a few events were held in other locations, the Johnsons ultimately decided on the grove of trees on the north bank of the river—about two hundred yards east of the house and against the river's banks—as the best location for the barbecues. Once the right place had been selected, barbecues became a frequent event.³⁰

Johnson was feeling his way toward the best combination of uses, actual and mythic, for the LBJ Ranch. The rest of his family lived there when he was not in Washington, D.C., and when Congress was not in session so did Lyndon Johnson. He was in residence almost half of 1953 and 1954.³¹ Johnson engaged in ranching in a limited way, as much for the meaning of the activity as for any profit that derived from it. Ranching had begun to take on an entirely symbolic significance, becoming a representation of an acceptable national image for an aspiring senator as well as a source of his power. At the ranch, Johnson was in control. From the instant that the first visitor arrived, he drove guests around and showed them what he wanted them to see. Under the guise of showing visitors his spread, Johnson could do what he did best: talk to someone one-on-one and obtain the acquiescence he craved.

Johnson continued to refine his leadership skills in the Senate. The decline of the Truman administration after 1950 provided an opportunity for him. The Democratic majority leader, Scott Lucas of Illinois, and the whip, Francis Myers of Pennsylvania, both lost their seats in the November election. Their losses and the small Democratic majority cleared the way for an inexperienced senator, not up for reelection in 1952, to become the new whip. Johnson stood ready, and with support from his friend Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, he won the seat.³²

The powerless and thankless post of whip became the catalyst for transforming Johnson's approach to politics and his understanding of his role as a senator. Prior to winning the post, Johnson felt he primarily represented his Texas constituency; afterward, he felt more responsibility for Senate Democrats and, in a minor way, for the functioning of the Senate and the party as a whole. The post gave Johnson a claim on the party. He had served it in its time of need. It also solidified his reputation in Texas as a major power broker. In the end, the whip position gave Johnson a national position that allowed him to broaden his horizons realistically and made the ranch and the image it created even more important to him.

His political fortunes seemed to run inversely to those of his party. When the Republicans won control of the Senate in the 1952 election, Johnson became the minority leader of the Senate. This was another post with relatively little power that Johnson was able to expand, and his performance garnered the respect of his Democratic colleagues. When Tom Connally, the senior senator from Texas, retired before the 1952 election, Johnson replaced him as the senior Texan in the Senate and used his position to bind the new senator, Price Daniel, to him. Johnson developed a reputation as a powerful strategist and a consensus builder among Democrats and received equal recognition for skilled political maneuvering on the other side of the aisle.³³

When the Democrats recaptured the Senate in 1954, Johnson ascended to the position of majority leader. The Democrats held a one-vote margin of forty-eight to forty-seven. The one vote remaining belonged to Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a ranch owner and an independent who had once been a severe critic of Johnson. He had abandoned the Republican Party two years before and had nearly registered as a Democrat earlier in 1954. Morse lost his committee appointments and his positions of leadership when he left the Republican Party, and Johnson, in return for his support, in effect returned his seniority to him.³⁴ This was one of the many steps Johnson took to consolidate power and Senate support in the majority leader's chair.

Johnson's position as a majority leader responsible for a minute plurality required relentless intensity, and from January, 1955, when the new Congress convened, Johnson gave such an effort. The physical toll on him was enormous, and his personal habits did not help. He smoked at least three packs of cigarettes each day, drank more alcohol than usual, missed lunch every day he did not have an engagement, and frequently did not take time for dinner. Inexplicably, he also gained considerable weight, reaching 225 pounds. As the session neared an end in early July, it caught up with the forty-six-year-old Johnson. On the way to Huntland, George Brown's Virginia estate, for the Fourth of July weekend, Lyndon Johnson suffered a major heart attack.³⁵

The heart attack was the most severe health crisis of his life, and it forced significant changes in the way he lived and operated. Johnson almost died the night of the heart attack, instructing his wife to tell his tailor to hold most of an existing clothing order but to "go ahead with the blue suit. We can use it no matter what."³⁶ The next day, the chances of his survival remained equal to those of his passing away, and he spent the next five weeks in the hospital. He turned Senate leadership over to his handpicked whip, Senator Earle Clements of Kentucky, and returned to the Texas ranch to regain his health.

Johnson's Werce desire to lead and his physical problems were uncomfortably juxtaposed. He was young to suffer a major heart attack, even by the standards of an era when hard-living men of his age often succumbed to health problems, but he had not yet achieved what he set to accomplish. Lady Bird and his physician agreed that if he returned to the Senate he would not behave any differently than he had in the past. They were also sure that, as Dr. James Cain, his personal physician, remarked, if Johnson "were sitting on the porch at the LBJ ranch whittling toothpicks, he'd have to whittle more toothpicks than anybody else in the country." They correctly assessed that politics had been Johnson's life and that as a still relatively young man, he would have little reason to live without them.³⁷

The enforced regime at the ranch greatly strengthened Johnson. Discharged from the hospital on August 7, 1955, long after the congressional session ended, he told reporters that he would be "as good as new in January," when Congress reconvened. On August 27, his birthday, he flew to Fredericksburg to return to the ranch. Mary Rather remembered him as "the thinnest thing you had ever seen, and his clothes were just hanging on him." But back in the Hill Country, away from the pace of Washington, D.C., and Congress, he could build up his strength.³⁸

The months at the ranch after the heart attack were notable for the changes in Johnson's behavior. His official physician, Lt. Comdr. J. Willis Hurst, gave specific instructions for Johnson's recuperation. The senator was to have no worries. Lady Bird played an important role in monitoring his affairs. "Whatever Lyndon did, Lady Bird did," Rather recalled. Awakening to the sound of a Jersey cow mooing to be milked each morning, Johnson often had breakfast under the trees on the lawn. He became a fanatic about his diet during his recuperation, losing more than 40 pounds until he reached 177 pounds. Johnson also became closer to his family than ever before, playing cards with his school-age daughters and delighting in getting to know them. Willard Deason, his college friend and long-time employee, noted that he "had time to talk and visit with them," instead of simply kissing them and running on to the next of the never-ending series of political meetings and events. "He moved into a more nearly normal family relationship," Deason remembered. Johnson "realized the value of having hours" with the two girls.³⁹

The enforced rest at the ranch was also a catalyst for the next stage of its renovation. A gloomy attitude had descended over the family, and Lady Bird Johnson noted that "it was very clear one might as well spend what one had and not wait for later, because there might not be any later." One of the first additions was a large kidney-shaped swimming pool and a cabana, an addition planned before the heart attack but built in 1955 primarily to help Johnson maintain a regular exercise routine. He sat in a lawn chair and watched the large hole become a pool. When it was completed and Johnson wanted to swim, he would order everyone into the pool to join him.⁴⁰

He did not rush back to politics, although those who spent time with him knew that he thought about it. He had to decide whether to return to Washington or to resign and stay at the ranch. Despite his health, Johnson knew better than anyone what drove him. Everyone around him was aware that the heart attack would not in and of itself create limits for a man as driven as Lyndon Johnson. He would not work less hard because of the illness, a reality that forced him to choose between his health and his profession. At some point Johnson made his choice. As his health improved, his political activity increased. Although the addition of a telephone and a walkie-talkie radio by the pool helped keep him in an outside hammock, the communications equipment also meant that he was back into his mode of constant political maneuvering. He made only two speeches that fall. One introduced Sam Rayburn; the other was an important thirteen-point, New Deal-style policy address titled "A Program with a Heart" that he made before fifteen hundred people in a packed gymnasium in Whitney, Texas, in October. That speech announced his return to politics and raised his standing throughout the state.⁴¹

As Johnson's health continued to improve, telephone calls went out to national news correspondents. After the middle of October, magazine and newspaper reporters were frequent visitors to the Pedernales Valley. On October 15, 1955, television and radio personality Arthur Godfrey; Frank "Scoop" Russell, vice president of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC); William S. White, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from The New York Times; and Gerald Griffin, Washington, D.C., correspondent for The Baltimore Sun arrived at the ranch to spend the weekend. Their visit indicated that Johnson planned a return to Washington, D.C., in the very near future.⁴²

As Johnson recovered, politicians began to visit the ranch, and sometimes it seemed as if the Senate was in the process of moving its chambers to Stonewall, Texas. Democratic senators Stuart Symington of Missouri, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Kerr Scott of North Carolina, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, George Smathers of Florida, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Robert Kerr of Oklahoma all came during the fall of 1955, as did Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. By Thanksgiving, Republicans had joined the procession; the Republican Senate whip, H. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, and his wife joined the Johnsons for the holiday weekend.⁴³

Even during his recuperation, Johnson showed his penchant for using the ranch as a strategic asset. Just prior to the visit by Stevenson and Rayburn on September 28, 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a severe heart attack. After a speech by Stevenson in Austin, he, Rayburn, Grace Tully—a former secretary to Franklin D. Roosevelt who had become a Johnson staff member—and Newton Minow—a Stevenson political advisor who would later become chairman of the Federal Communications Commission—drove to the ranch. They arrived late at night, expecting to find the Johnsons asleep, but the recuperating Johnson had stayed awake to greet them. It was a moonlit night with a gentle breeze, Mary Rather recalled. The guests arrived after 10:30 p.m., and Johnson stayed up and talked with them for more than an hour.⁴⁴

Typically, Johnson sought to keep the press at a distance during Stevenson's visit. He wanted to make sure that reporters did not think that he, Stevenson, and Rayburn were "plotting how to take over the government while Ike [was] dying," Minow remembered. George Reedy advised him to allow the press on the ranch to cover the visit, but Johnson demurred. He even sought to have them removed from the fence at the edge of the ranch, but Reedy prevailed on him not to contest the press there. Reedy told a distraught Lady Bird Johnson that while he "was pretty good with the press, [he could not] keep them off of a public highway." By morning, Johnson had devised a new strategy. Rather than bar the press, he planned an early breakfast and invited his guests and the reporters who followed them on a tour of the ranch, dispelling any notions of a secret cabal. The ranch backdrop diffused the political tension surrounding Eisenhower's illness.⁴⁵

By the time Johnson returned to Washington, D.C, when the congressional session opened in January, 1956, the ranch had acquired an important place in American politics. Johnson's illness and his position as majority leader had made the ranch a place to which other Democratic politicians felt the need to come to pay a sort of homage. In particular, with the election year of 1956 approaching and the Democrats in dire need of Johnson's political skills, the power Johnson had consolidated in the majority leadership was a necessity to any aspiring Democratic presidential candidate. To receive access to that power required going along with Johnson. Even the powerful and idiosyncratic Estes Kefauver recognized the importance of Johnson's support. During Kefauver's visit, Johnson awoke the Tennessee senator at 4:30 a.m. for a deer-hunting jaunt. When Kefauver responded slowly, Johnson yelled, "I was about to come out for someone else for President if you don't get down here in ten minutes." Kefauver understood the veiled threat contained in the jest; within ten minutes, he and Johnson were in the heated pool on their way to a morning of deer hunting.⁴⁶

The time at the ranch reinforced the physical limitations of the property to both Johnsons. "Never will a home be finished," Lady Bird Johnson lamented, and with her husband's predilection for rapid decision making and his need to have the place in constant motion, the construction, improvement, and renovation of the ranch and house were ongoing. During the spring of 1956, Johnson asked his brother-in-law, Birge Alexander, to prepare plans for a new addition, a single-story structure to be appended to the east end of the property. Built later that year, it included the expansion of the master bedroom; of Rebekah Johnson's bedroom and bathroom; of the Johnsons' dressing room; and of the Gay room, the upstairs parlor. This addition made the house noticeably more spacious and comfortable.⁴⁷

Johnson's long stay at the house also made other deficiencies more apparent. The lack of office space was one major problem. During Johnson's recuperation period, the living room began to change into an office. Mary Rather's desk sat in the southeast corner, and after a while, Lady Bird's desk was claimed by another secretary. By 1957, the living room more resembled a working office than part of a home. Telephones rang constantly, and the room was crowded and hectic. It was clear that formal office space was essential.⁴⁸

At the Johnsons' request, J. Roy White designed an office addition for the west side of the house, atop the location of the old hand-dug cistern. Workmen filled in this last vestige of life before indoor plumbing as they began construction of the twenty-eight-foot by twenty-eight-foot structure. Designed to accommodate three desks and a couch, the office had a number of aesthetic features. The beautiful, hand-oiled knotty pine walls were especially attractive, but as long-time ranch foreman Dale Malachek noted, Lyndon Johnson maintained "a highly functional office." Aesthetics were incidental.⁴⁹

The renovated ranch became an essential part of the image and reality of Johnson's rise to national leadership. As he had done with the whip post, he made the majority leader's position far more important than it had been in more than a decade by his consolidation of power. The "Johnson Treatment," as his ability to persuade, cajole, manipulate, and outmaneuver other senators came to be known, heightened his effectiveness.⁵⁰ The seemingly endless pilgrimages of politicians to Texas during his illness accentuated the significance of the ranch. The LBJ Ranch had become as well known and as central to American politics as the retreat of any senator. All of this contributed to Johnson's idea of himself as a national leader instead of a regional politician.

The ranch became the symbol of this transformation, which was crucial to any aspiration to higher office that Johnson harbored. Born and bred a southerner, a Texan descended from the historic oligarchic traditions of the state, Johnson faced twin image problems with a national audience. Although westerners had begun to assume the presidency, beginning with Iowan Herbert Hoover and followed by Missourian Harry S. Truman and Kansan Dwight D. Eisenhower, there had not been a southern president since immediately following the Civil War, and that president, Andrew Johnson, ascended as the result of an assassination and almost lost his office at the hands of an angry Congress. Lyndon Johnson's rise to statewide power required him to play the part of a southern politician, as in his first Senate speech, an anti-civil rights diatribe that filled eight pages in the Congressional Record. But the rhetoric he used and the issues he supported in state elections became a liability on the national scene.⁵¹ Johnson began to counter those limits when, as minority leader, he allied the Democrats with Eisenhower against the rabid right wing of the Republican party, but the subtleties of such a stance were largely lost on the voters of the nation. Johnson remained a Texan—a nationality unto itself—and a southerner in the eyes of most Americans.

The post-World War II era damaged the already marginal stature of the South in American society. Since the end of the Civil War, the rest of the nation had regarded the South as the defeated section and the most backward region of the country. Its people were the poorest in the nation, the industrialization that brought economic prosperity to the North by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed slowly in the South, and southerners were generally perceived as quaint and anachronistic. After World War II, questions of race relations also figured into an increasingly negative image of the South. Although Americans were generally ambivalent about civil rights for African Americans, the war against fascism spurred such comprehensive changes in American society that the old rules about the limits on different races no longer reflected the understanding of the majority of the nation. The trenchant South stood against such changes, its stand reinforced by its Dixiecrat swing in 1948. That stand isolated the South in the national political culture, but the region was still a valuable prize for aspirants to national office.

The West had a different image, much closer to the one Johnson sought to project. Westward expansion had become the American creation myth, reinforced in film and legend as the region's history melded with the sentiments of the nation in the 1950s. The West seemed new and invigorated, individualistic and expanding, with the promise of prosperity for everyone. In the immediate postwar era, the region was booming. During the war, people moved to California and the West Coast to work in the defense plants, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers passed through on their way to the Pacific Theater; afterward most stayed and many more came. A ten-dam package for the upper Colorado River—the Colorado River Storage Project—promised enough water and electrical power to fuel an economic boom as far north as Utah and the western slope of Colorado.⁵² The population of western states grew, infrastructure benefited from developments such as the interstate highway system, and the region seemed on its way to full status in the national partnership. The West seemed destined to recapitulate the promise of the nation.

The West held the future, the South the past, and Johnson sought a future in national politics. The LBJ Ranch became a symbol as well as a home, transforming Johnson from someone tied to the Old South into an individual affiliated with the mythic West and with all the promise contained in that concept. In this reinvention of self, Johnson mirrored the "galvanized Yankees" and the recalcitrant southerners who left rather than accept new circumstances and resettled in far West Texas and the West after the Civil War. They too seized the chance to reinvent themselves and shed the burdens of their past; they too enjoyed an opportunity to remake their lives in a wide-open geographic and cultural setting rather than a limited, regional context.

A number of Johnson's actions in the late 1940s and early 1950s reflected not only his symbolic westernness but another current within the man: the egalitarian strain that had been so evident in Cotulla. In one instance, the little Texas town of Three Rivers refused to allow a local burial service for a Mexican American soldier who had been killed in the Philippines during World War II and whose remains were repatriated in 1949. Johnson took the side of the man's family, arranging interment in Arlington National Cemetery after the town refused to accommodate the family even under pressure from the senior U.S. senator of the state. According to
D. B. Hardeman, Johnson was outraged by the conduct of the town and took its behavior as a personal affront. The ceremony, in which the soldier, Felix Longoria, was posthumously awarded full military honors, was his way of rectifying what he saw as a wrong.⁵³ Although detractors regarded the burial as a cynical publicity stunt, the incident reflected Johnson's deep-seated personal beliefs about honor, loyalty, and obligation to those who sacrifice, which the country associated with its westward experience.

The ranch became the most important symbol of Johnson's reinvention. Perhaps he recognized how well the western image played in Texas. He was certainly aware of the significance of the history and imagery of the region during the 1950s. Coke Stevenson, his opponent in the 1948 Senate race, was the type of flinty, hard-eyed person that had become the westerner in the American mind, and this persona played extremely well in Texas politics. With the advent of the era of great and glorious Western movies, often featuring the actor John Wayne, a ranch became a symbolic and culturally familiar setting to Americans. On television and on the movie screen, the West became the crucible of American values, the ranch the setting in which these values were forged and honed.⁵⁴ Johnson's ownership of a ranch—part relic, part myth—enhanced his position and prestige with an electorate that increasingly took its values from mass media.

Beginning in 1954, with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, et al. decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, race became a primary factor in American politics. The migration of African Americans to the North as a result of the two world wars and their expanded presence in northern cities, as well as technological changes in cotton-growing and cotton-picking, made racial questions, previously regarded as a sectional concern, into national issues. After the breaking of the color line in major-league baseball by Jackie Robinson in 1947 and the desegregation of the military, ordered by Truman in 1948, protection for segregation in statute slowly but inexorably crumbled. The Brown decision was the culmination of a long series of court cases that in effect isolated southern politicians, forcing them to go headlong into the massed forces of change.⁵⁵

Johnson's astute political sense and his native sympathies allied him with the changes of the postwar era. Although in the first years after his election to the Senate he had acted as if he were a "true southerner" in order to ingratiate himself with Richard Russell and the Senate club, his rise to power mirrored an emerging political independence. Some northern liberals thought of him as a populist, socially liberal in the nonpolitical sense of the word but trapped by the conventions of his state and office. Despite the stance opposing civil rights that he had taken since 1937, Johnson could see the changes coming in race relations. He had also supported the concept of opportunity for all people for a long time. He had grown up poor and feeling left out, and as his experience as a teacher in the "Mexican" school in Cotulla showed, inclusion was one of Johnson's goals.⁵⁶ As the national political climate surrounding race relations grew increasingly charged, the ranch became an important vehicle for assuring Johnson's national status and his claim to a heritage that was not rigidly southern.

The most prominent feature of Johnson's majority leadership was the way in which he held the political center. Particularly on matters of race, he successfully negotiated a path between McCarthyite Republicans and Dixiecrats on one side and northern liberals such as Senators Paul Douglas and Hubert H. Humphrey on the other. This position took him far from the mentorship of Senator Richard Russell, a diehard segregationist from Georgia, and helped Johnson establish a national bearing. Johnson's identification with the West became increasingly apparent in the middle of the 1950s. He and Tennessee's two senators, the maverick Kefauver and Albert Gore, Sr., were the only southern senators who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto, formally titled the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, an election-year ploy by southern senators in 1956 to associate civil rights with subversion.⁵⁷

Positioning himself for a run at the presidency in 1960, Johnson played a strategic game. He opposed the manifesto by privately arguing that it would only drive African American voters in crucial northern states into the Republican Party; he was proven correct in the 1956 elections, when larger numbers of African American voters supported the Republicans than at any time since the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. This kind of pragmatism, instead of a hotheaded emotional response to the Brown decision, reflected his national aspirations and his increasingly western affiliations and image. Southern senators did not hold his actions against him. They recognized that he had to play a leadership role and that he had aspirations to national office. Sitting on the porch of his ranch, Lyndon Johnson had fewer commitments to the political past and could see the future more clearly than could many of his more senior peers in the U.S. Senate.

Johnson's orchestration of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 demonstrated his pragmatism in the most difficult of venues. Senate rules allowed individual senators almost infinite ways to delay legislation, and on the subject of race southern senators felt backed up to the wall. As a result, civil rights legislation was often stillborn in the Senate. Johnson later considered the passage of the 1957 bill his greatest legislative achievement, but his detractors among civil rights supporters thought he gutted what might have been a miracle. Again, his success depended on finding the middle so thoroughly missing in Congress when the subject of race came up in. In his pragmatic way, Johnson defined the issue in political terms. If the Democrats did not pass a civil rights bill during the session, Johnson believed, they would pay for it at the polls in the 1958 elections. He quietly circulated the word that the Senate would pass a civil rights bill during the session, and southern senators needed to decide what kind of bill they could grudgingly accept.⁵⁸

Again Johnson acted in the definitive manner of a mythic western rancher, a man given not to emotion but to sheer determined pragmatism. The bill that passed the House on June 18 provided for a new commission on civil rights and a new assistant attorney general specifically to handle civil rights issues. In Part III, the bill's most controversial section, the Justice Department was granted the power to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively gutted at the end of the nineteenth century, by filing injunctions against states and school districts that did not comply with the Brown decision. This put the force of possible physical federal intervention behind the Supreme Court ruling. Such a weapon held over the South threatened to isolate the region, Johnson told southern senators, and he effectively forged a compromise in early July after a week of difficult maneuvering and countless Senate amendments. The bill that finally passed, and that Eisenhower reluctantly signed, was emasculated in the view of its critics, but it was a start.⁵⁹

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 confirmed the trend that had begun with Johnson's purchase of the ranch. In one dramatic gesture, Johnson gave up a twenty-year career as a segregationist, a career of playing to his vocal but narrow home-state constituency. With the Senate majority leadership and the passage of the bill, he ceased to be a regionally oriented Texas politician. With the ranch to prove his credentials, he made himself into a national figure based in western myth. Johnson forged an interregional political consensus that held the center, enhancing his national aspirations and lining Johnson up with the future rather than the past. Although he seemed more involved with the politics than the morality of civil rights, Johnson was the only legislator in the United States who could have constructed the coalition to pass even the watered-down bill of 1957. Despite the limitations the compromise created, Eisenhower signed the bill. Much of the South refused to accept the new dictates. Two days after the bill became law, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas ordered the National Guard to prevent nine African American students from enrolling in Central High School in Little Rock. Federal intervention ensued.⁶⁰

In no small part, Johnson was able to negotiate this compromise as a result of his changing image. Although he still depended on the conservative Texas electorate for his Senate seat, Johnson was beyond its reach. By the time he needed to run for reelection in 1960, he planned to be searching for higher office as well. The Texan had become a national Figure with an image tied to the West. He was the Hill Country rancher who led the Senate, the man whose honey jars at his ranch bore the LBJ Ranch logo and who bought silver beaver Stetson hats, three hundred at a time, to give to important visitors. Southern politicians seem not to have resented greatly the transformation of their old ally, although in a number of instances Russell and other powerful southerners threatened Johnson by reminding him of the electorate in Texas. Johnson's political pragmatism worked well during this era. His experience in the Senate and his ability to seem simultaneously to represent many points of view gave him great currency.⁶¹

His ranch and its meaning played an important part in solidifying Johnson's national image as he planned his path to national office. As the South erupted in conflict in the aftermath of the Brown decision and with the emergence of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Montgomery bus strike of 1955, Johnson publicly became even more of a westerner. He spent considerable time at the ranch even after his recovery from the heart attack. His public interests changed, as he published articles about the specific problems ranchers faced and about the need for greater public understanding of ranching. More and more often, Johnson was photographed on horseback or in a Stetson hat and boots.⁶² This image accentuated the centrist stance he favored as majority leader, allying him with a different set of concerns than those of the South.

The ranch had also become home to the Johnsons, a place to which both loved to return. Buying and improving the ranch enabled Lyndon Johnson to "have a big comfortable house that meant a lot to him," Lady Bird Johnson recalled in 1972, "to his spirit and to his heart." Johnson himself was even more explicit when he remarked that he found it "almost necessary to return to Texas" after time in the nation's capital. "This country," he remarked of the Hill Country in 1957, "has always been a place where I could come and fill my cup . . . and recharge myself for the more difficult days ahead." The Johnsons continued to spend as much time at the ranch as they could. After Congress adjourned in August, 1953, the Johnsons spent Five months at the ranch. After the 1954 recess, the family again lived along the Pedernales River until Congress reconvened after the new year. In 1955, the heart attack kept Johnson there throughout the fall, and in 1956 and 1957, he spent most of the months of August, September, and October and about half of November and December there. The couple felt at home along the shimmering river. "I am enjoying the ranch," Johnson wrote in 1957," the swimming pool and the dove hunting," but he also added an increasingly complex communication system to facilitate his long-distance political maneuvering.⁶³

The ranch also became a social setting for the Johnsons, a place where they loved to entertain not only politicians and social leaders but friends and family as well. They showered their friends with hospitality, bringing an unending stream of people to visit and spend a night or two at the ranch. Lyndon Johnson hated to be alone, and the steady flow of names recorded in the ranch guest book reflected not only that but also the range of political and personal friends and acquaintances of the Johnsons. Beginning in 1956, the register showed more friends than politicians, but as always with Johnson, these categories overlapped considerably. The Johnsons held a continuous string of social affairs, most small and personal, to complement the occasional barbecues and other functions for larger audiences.⁶⁴

The ranch was also the location of important family functions, such as Rebekah Baines Johnson's seventy-sixth birthday celebration on June 26, 1957. The aging mother of the senator already was aware she had cancer. In her long life, she had seen her cherished oldest son rise to positions of unforeseen national power and yet retain his filial commitment to her. She had watched over him throughout his life, and the two maintained an ongoing correspondence. As she aged, Lyndon Johnson reversed their roles and took care of her. The birthday celebration, limited to close friends and family, was an example of this.⁶⁵

The ranch also became a place where the family could relax, where Lyndon Johnson had control of every aspect of life in the manner he desired. Johnson's heart attack in 1955 highlighted the importance of the ranch. In its aftermath he was forced to relax, to breakfast on the porch or in the trees by the river, to—in the words of aide George Reedy—"spin his dreams," and the experience reminded Johnson that the ranch was more than a symbol. Before the heart attack and despite his evident feelings for the place, the ranch was as much for show as it was for inhabiting in any genuine way. As Lyndon Johnson recuperated and became reinvigorated there, his ties to the place and region were both strengthened and transformed as a result.

As Johnson's power and significance in politics grew and as the routine at the ranch became established, the Pedernales River became the location of a range of official functions. The first official visitor was President Adolfo Lopez Mateos of Mexico, who came during a ten-day state visit to the United States and Canada. Sharing a rural background and an interest in teaching with Johnson and regarding the Texan as a likely future national leader, Lopez Mateos sought out Johnson in the mid-1950s. After Lopez Mateos's election as Mexican president in 1958, Johnson visited the new leader in Acapulco, and the two men developed a friendship; "they had gotten along astonishingly well," George Reedy, who began working for Johnson in 1951 and became his press secretary at the White House, remembered. A stop at the Texas ranch to reciprocate Johnson's visit was important enough to Lopez Mateos to make it part of the state trip. After a state dinner in Washington, D.C., in October, 1959, Lopez Mateos went to Canada and then returned to Mexico via Texas, where the climax of the tour was to be a Hill Country barbecue at the Johnson ranch.⁶⁶

The preparations for a party of such proportions and significance required greater expertise and organization than any previous endeavor at the ranch. Throughout Johnson's years in the Senate, and particularly after he became majority leader, the ranch had served as a backdrop for a range of political and political-social events. The parade of important politicians who arrived in Texas to pay their respects during Johnson's recuperation from his heart attack set a new tone for the symbolic meaning of the ranch. At first, the barbecues Johnson offered were trials, offered to constituencies that would be thrilled for the invitation and likely to overlook any shortcomings. Others were ceremonial events, chances to be seen for both Johnson and his invitees. One such planned event, a barbecue Johnson wanted to offer for outstanding college students as part of his effort to respond to the launches of Sputnik I and Sputnik II by the Soviet Union, offered him a public relations coup and a chance to cultivate future supporters, as well as an opportunity to develop the barbecue procedures for future use. His staff canvassed caterers throughout the Hill Country in an effort to Find the best barbecue for the money, seeking to build relationships that could be useful in designing affairs of state. For the students, an invitation to the home of the majority leader of the U.S. Senate was a significant honor, and even if a few things might go wrong, such a night would remain memorable.⁶⁷

By the time the planning for the Lopez Mateos visit to the ranch began, the staff had a great deal of experience with both state events and barbecues. But planning for the visit of a foreign head of state required additional measures. Lady Bird Johnson played an active role in the arrangements, selecting both the location of the barbecue and the menu. After the guest list was finalized and the visit protocol established, Johnson's staff had to work out arrangements for the president's retinue and the Mexican press that would accompany the president. Questions of security had to be addressed. New phone lines had to be added, the proper wines selected—Justo Sierra, Lopez Mateos's aide, thought that his president would prefer an American claret over an imported wine—and numerous other details handled. Sierra informed George Reedy that the Mexican press regarded their president's informal visit with Johnson as the most meaningful part of the trip. The other formal events were of far less significance, in their cultural understanding of politics. The needs of the American press had to be addressed as well, and with the shortage of space in Johnson City, the question of their location loomed large.⁶⁸

The arrival of President Lopez Mateos in Texas was a gala event. On Sunday, October 18, 1959, the airplane carrying the president and his party landed at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas. The welcoming committee included Senator and Mrs. Johnson, Governor and Mrs. Price Daniel, Mayor and Mrs. Tom Miller of Austin, and Col. Frank E. Marek, the
commanding officer at the Air Force base. After a ceremonial greeting, the president and his party were escorted to helicopters for the short jaunt to the Hill Country. Lopez Mateos; Johnson; Daniel; Mexican ambassador Antonio Carillo Flores; Sim Gideon, the general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority; and Mexican Brig. Gen. José Goméz Huerta were passengers on the first of six helicopters required to take the party to the ranch. The one-hour flight toured the highland lakes of the Hill Country and the many dams along its waterways. By early afternoon the party arrived at the ranch.⁶⁹

The barbecue began shortly after the arrival of Lopez Mateos. Held in the oak grove on the north bank of the Pedernales, near the low-water dam, the event showcased the Texas Hill Country, the ranch, and Johnson's growing political importance and aspirations. Johnson opened the program, speaking briefly and introducing President Lopez Mateos, who praised the "Good Neighbor" policy in which the U.S. government engaged. Lopez Mateos's assistant translated his remarks into English for most of the audience. After the brief program, the guests sat down to eat barbecue in the tents. The event was a full-fledged state affair, with a guest list that included former president Harry S Truman, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Secretary of the Treasury Robert S. Anderson, and four other official U.S. representatives. "The whole thing was typically Texas," wrote Wes Izzard of The Amarillo Daily News, as the fusion of the various ingredients of Johnson's personality, aspirations, and image showed the press the image Johnson wanted to put forward.⁷⁰

Late in the afternoon, after the barbecue and the departure of the press and most of the guests, Johnson took Lopez Mateos on a tour of his ranch. Across the pastures of grazing cattle, by the old pecan and live oak trees, the two men rode and talked. This was a highlight for both—Johnson showing who he was and creating the setting in which he most liked to do business and Lopez Mateos establishing ties to the man he expected to be the next president of the United States. A formal dinner with a few guests followed. After a leisurely breakfast the next morning, the Mexican president and his entourage departed for Austin. The Johnsons joined the group there for lunch and escorted them to Bergstrom Air Force Base for their departure to Mexico City. This ended a weekend that Hill Country old-timers called "the biggest celebrity laden event in the 114 years history of these parts."⁷¹

The Lopez Mateos visit increased the stature of both Johnson and his ranch. "Friendship—warm and genuine—downed all the language barriers," one newspaper reporter wrote. The Mexican president told his countrymen that his "crusade of good will" had been a success. American officials concurred. "Congratulations on a job exceedingly well done," U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Robert C. Hill wrote to George Reedy on October 29, 1959. "President Lopez Mateos returned to Mexico with the feeling that they had received an extremely fine reception in Texas and that Senator Johnson's hospitality should go about bringing a better understanding in Mexico about Texas." Hill also wrote Johnson that the visit to the ranch was "a truly significant climax to [Lopez Mateos's] very successful visit to the United States." Truman described the Johnsons as "perfect hosts," a sentiment that clearly touched Johnson. The Johnson ranch had been the home of first a regional politician and then a national leader. After the Lopez Mateos visit, the ranch was a national showcase, the place that helped persuade the nation that Texas was truly one of its states, a place worthy of the candidate for national office that Lyndon B. Johnson planned to become.⁷²

There were obvious and subtle signs of Johnson's changing aspirations. At the Lopez Mateos barbecue, a banner reading "Lyndon Johnson sera presidente" ("Lyndon Johnson for President") hung in the trees. The Senate had become stale to Johnson. He had accomplished all he could in the club of peers, and as the Democrats sought to reacquire the White House in 1960, they became less interested in the kind of bipartisan accomplishments at which Johnson excelled and more in the obstructionism that preceded an expected reconquest of the White House by the party out of power. Johnson's growing number of critics successfully boxed him into a narrow role, defying his legendary power, and he began to see his effectiveness limited. The Senate ceased to be fun in the way it had been earlier in the decade, and Johnson set his sights higher and contemplated his chances.⁷³

The ranch had symbolic significance for Johnson, but a run at national office would require physical changes there as well. The catalyst for these changes was the Lopez Mateos visit. The travel arrangements for the visit were an immense problem, not only because of the difficulty involved in getting the Mexican president and his entourage to the ranch but also with regard to the sleeping arrangements, the transportation of the press, communications, and other issues. In 1959, the ranch was not set up to accommodate national events. Although Johnson had scaled his career beyond Texas politics, the ranch was still designed for regional affairs. But soon after the Lopez Mateos visit, a new standard for the ranch was established. Symbolic of its new level of significance was the construction of a 3,570-foot airstrip, where Johnson could land his newly purchased airplane.⁷⁴

The Lopez Mateos visit also confirmed Lady Bird Johnson's suspicion that the family had been living "too modestly." All the ranch had to quarter the visiting head of state, his wife, and Eva, their seventeen-year-old daughter, was a suite of three bedrooms and one bath. While this was acceptable for typical dignitaries and friends, for heads of state and other distinguished visitors the accommodations were insufficient. Plans for expansion were soon underway. Lady Bird Johnson later recalled that Lopez Mateos's visit hastened a project that the Johnsons would have undertaken in the near future in any event.⁷⁵

In many ways, the Lopez Mateos visit to the LBJ Ranch provided a catalyst for the next stage of its transformation. By the end of the 1950s, the ranch had become an important political icon for Johnson, a symbol of what he had become politically and a representation of what he had left behind. The purchase of the property began as a way to initiate Johnson into the Senate club, to make him a peer in the chamber of peers. Perhaps building off of the regional success of Coke Stevenson, who seemed to the Texas public the embodiment of a western man, Johnson expropriated that set of symbols for his own use. By the time he returned to the Senate after his heart attack, the ranch had become the home of an important national politician, the majority leader of the Senate. The parade of political figures who had visited during Johnson's recuperation attested to that. By the end of the decade, with Johnson's political aspirations expanding to meet his broadening horizons, the ranch had become a place with national meaning.

The Lopez Mateos visit illustrated the great importance of the ranch as a symbol as well as its shortcomings for the next stage of Lyndon Johnson's career. Lady Bird Johnson once sighed, "Never will a home be finished," and—in part because of Johnson's restless spirit and in part because of the continuing redefinition of his political goals—she was quite correct. The Lopez Mateos visit was the end of one era and the beginning of another. The LBJ Ranch had become a place of national significance rather than merely the home of a regional leader, and as such, it would have to be remade both physically and symbolically. Remaking the ranch went hand in hand with Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to design a political persona that would sustain a run for national office.