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

CHAPTER 8 Eastern media and the Man from Texas:
The Ranch as a Cross-Cultural Experience

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Lyndon B. Johnson showcased his Texas ranch to illustrate its importance as a symbol of and for Americans. The ranch was both idyllic, emblematic of the country's rural past, and increasingly posh as it was renovated, coming to reflect an old-time American aristocracy. Johnson discouraged neither image, for the power and meaning of the ranch was not lost on this sophisticated manipulator of signs and symbols. Although his public pronouncements often reminded the world of the hardships, fictitious and real, of his youth, he basked in the idea of himself as a landowner, a person of substance. To Johnson, such ownership negated the insecurities of his Hill Country upbringing.

Raised in an era before the idea of individual progress developed any of its 1960s-induced tarnish, Johnson trumpeted his material and personal accomplishments. He was closely tied to an older ethic that articulated and glorified the ability of individuals to rise through their own efforts. Vaguely related to Social Darwinism, this mode of organizing the world was unabashedly hierarchical. Johnson believed that his accomplishments placed him at the top of this hierarchy; he saw the ranch as tangible evidence of his triumphs. In this respect, he took a sometimes undue pride in the ranch and its significance.

By the middle of the 1960s, Johnson's mode of thinking about such relationships had become anachronistic in America's rapidly changing society. This older manner of organizing the world represented a competitive system that seemed not only to embody the opportunity of American society but also to belie it. The enormous affluence of the nation in the post-World War II era inspired widespread optimism and innumerable schemes to level the gradations caused by the very economic system that had created the wealth some sought to redistribute. Recognizing the impact of poverty on people, Johnson paradoxically believed in "helping-hand" measures; programs such as Medicare and a range of antipoverty programs including food stamps and Head Start, designed to assure minimum levels of sustenance for all Americans, were at the core of his cherished Great Society programs. But the same sentiments that supported such programs came to be a part of a complex of values that soon denigrated individual accomplishments and made attitudes such as those of the president seem unsophisticated and sometimes uncouth.

For Lyndon Johnson, the ranch became an emblem of himself and of the nation he sought to serve. He strongly identified with the Hill Country, seeing it as a reflection of himself and himself as a reflection it—of the place in which he was raised and to which he chose to return. Johnson found great power in his rural roots, a strength he sought to transmit to the nation through his Great Society programs. Consciously and unconsciously, privately and publicly, he used the ranch to convey Hill Country sentiments: life was what an individual made of it; personal history and the struggle to overcome it contained vast power that could be translated into any area of endeavor; and American roots, particularly in agriculture and ranching, held the key to a strong healthy character.

As much as Johnson believed these sentiments and sought to communicate them, he had neither sufficient understanding of the meaning of his actions as they would be interpreted by the American press and the public nor adequate control of his public emotions to package properly this formulation for the nation. In many ways, Johnson's actions reflected a different understanding of the relationship between the presidency and the nation than the one held by the press and, through its news product, the public. Most of the public never saw the ranch. People only formed their opinion of it as it was filtered through the television and print media. Johnson expected a kind of respect and consideration from the press; in effect, he wanted to be treated as Franklin D. Roosevelt had been, covered in the manner he chose. By the 1960s, however, this coddling treatment had passed into history, with an inquisitive and aggressive press replacing its more cooperative, even docile, predecessor.¹

Johnson reacted poorly to this new relationship, for it created a barrier to his method of communication. He sought a news media that would carry his message unquestioningly, that would do the "packaging" of his image for him. When it did not, he became obsessed with the press and its power. By the 1960s, he was clearly aware of the impact of new forms of communication on politics. He saw and understood the ways in which television news and increased newspaper scrutiny changed the public's attitudes, expectations, and opinions.² Johnson sought to bend both the press and its coverage of him in his favor. When he could not, he substituted his ranch for himself as the emblem of the power of individualism and will, which he believed the nation needed.

Unlike many modern presidents, who have become increasingly carefully crafted caricatures of their roots, Johnson held a tie to his personal history that was so strong as to obviate his carefully constructed public persona on occasion. Johnson strove to use the ranch to enhance his image as a "man of the people," to demonstrate that he was a common man with faith in the nation and its people. This sentiment drew him closer to Harry S. Truman in image than to any other previous modern American president. Later, only Ronald Reagan would articulate a similar philosophy, but Reagan more resembled the fictional Forrest Gump of Winston Groom's novel and the subsequent film than the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Johnson and Truman. Johnson's transformation from an energetic but awkward schoolteacher to a national political leader was paralleled by his move from the little cabin in which he had been born to the family ranch house that he remade into the Texas White House. The process included symbolic contradictions that Johnson never resolved to the satisfaction of the public.

Johnson also used the ranch and what it symbolized to reinforce his image as a man from the country. He fashioned and sometimes fabricated his rural roots until they expressed everything this president thought was positive about the nation. The Hill Country had honed him, made him proud and tough, and given him the tools to succeed in life. On a horse, wearing a Stetson hat, Johnson fashioned himself into an American myth, born and bred in the West, making himself a competitor and, not incidentally, an optimist as a result.

His personality and the ranch were intrinsically linked. In Johnson's formulation of the world, the ranch served as both a precursor and an emblem of success. In this mythic construction, the open Texas land became a crucible, in which life skills and values were learned and sharpened. The discipline necessary to operate a ranch successfully was the same as that required in the larger world, the skills the same combination of knowledge and ingenuity. The ranch reflected those skills. The sleek look of the land, the juxtaposition of irrigation pipes and machinery with the rolling hills, signified a man who had learned his lessons and achieved his goals—an extremely useful image for a man who sat in the highest political office in the land. Johnson's emphasis on utilizing the newest conservation techniques in agriculture and ranching, on using the best knowledge, equipment, and livestock available, showed a man of substance who understood his trade. He was fortunate, in this mythic construction, to live in a land he loved, shaped and made productive by his hand.

His belief in this constructed background gave Johnson a feeling of great power, which underlay the efforts of the Great Society to forge a new and better nation. "The roots of hate are poverty and disease and illiteracy," Johnson told forty of the nation's governors in an off-the-record meeting three days after John F. Kennedy's assassination, "and they are broad in the land." This heroic posture, of a bold and valiant individual fighting against real and powerful forces, characterized Johnson's self-image. He was the man chosen by fate to guide the United States through its most difficult internal transition—through what in the 1960s seemed to be the imminent resolution of its civil rights issues. This sense of destiny gave Johnson great faith and a kind of self-righteousness. No obstacle could be allowed to stand against the forces of right. "There is nothing this country can't do. Remember that," Johnson roared at his cabinet one day in 1965, in response to Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Secretary John Gardner's pronouncement that something could not be done. It was an infectious message, which Johnson wholeheartedly believed and communicated to everyone around him. The assistant secretary of HEW, Wilbur J. Cohen, said that "domestically he was doggone close, very doggone close" to proving that anything could be accomplished.³

This optimism was a tremendous burden, particularly in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Johnson had succeeded a man martyred, a posthumous figure of epic proportions whose stature in death rose to heights it sometimes attained but never maintained during life. In his formulation, Johnson had to continue the Kennedy legacy while stepping out from the shadows as a hero in his own right. He was a different kind of person than John Kennedy, a person who represented a very different place and indeed a very different time, a reality reflected in the way Johnson looked and acted. One of the cornerstones of his difference was the Hill Country and the ranch that Johnson fashioned there.

As a result, the Texas White House became subject to a much higher level of scrutiny than had occurred during the senatorial and vice presidential years. It was the president's home, far more important than the home of a vice president or a senator, and it seemed to the nation to embody the man. To the press and the immense segment of the public to whom Johnson's symbols were mystifying, the ranch became the best avenue through which to understand the president. It was the entry point into Johnson's world, the portal through which the rest of the nation could catch a figurative and literal glimpse of the newest leader of the free world.

As a result, the ranch became the subject of tremendous media coverage and scrutiny. Each time the Johnsons traveled to Texas, it seemed that the entire Washington, D.C., press corps followed. When the Johnsons went to church in the Hill Country, the back row was always filled with members of the press. Articles with titles such as "Will LBJ Visit Ranch Often?" and "President Flies Back, `Relaxed' by Texas Stay" graced the headlines of newspapers in the first months of the Johnson presidency, as reporters sought to convey to their readers the meaning of the ranch in Johnson's life. Famed pundit Tom Wicker wrote of the ranch that there, Johnson "reveals the image of a westerner." Johnson's thirty-two years in Washington, D.C., "do not seem to have taken the West out of Lyndon Johnson," Wicker noted, "and that may be a good thing." To Douglas Kiker, a well-known newsman of the era, the ranch was "the measure of the man," the place that held reality for the president. It offered the intimacy in which to conduct presidential business, other reporters recounted, and was a tremendous attraction for foreign visitors.⁴ By the end of this publicity barrage, the public recognized that the ranch was special to Johnson and believed it to be valuable to the nation. Whether they learned to understand its meaning in a cultural sense remains unclear.

The initial press coverage of the ranch was sympathetic to the place and to Johnson's need for it. Wicker's article and others in The New York Times acted to justify his need for the ranch, implicitly validating the expense of travel there. Kiker was among the many who sought to explain that Johnson needed to be in the Hill Country to be most effective. "He feels for the people. He looks to the future. He gives visitors Texas hats, and, if they seem to like it, a link of deer meat sausage," Kiker wrote. "He is taking a hard look at the United States right now, and appears to be ready to break any precedent—if he thinks that is what is needed."⁵ Such statements reflected the success of Johnson in manufacturing the right message about himself during the first months of the presidency. Kiker and Wicker in particular, two of the most influential print journalists in the country, presented Johnson's image as the president saw himself: a heroic individual facing hard decisions, supported by the belief that the values of his experience would guide him to the right solutions.

Johnson's approach to the media had always been warmth to those members of the press whom he considered his friends and outright hostility to those he saw as his enemies. He cajoled, flattered, and attempted to intimidate the press, bargaining with reporters and trying to sway them as he sought to dominate their agenda in much the same way as he did his peers while serving in Congress. He expected reporters and newspaper editors to follow his lead, and in Texas throughout the 1950s, they usually did. When they chose properly, Johnson rewarded them with hospitality, kindness, and confidences. Some, such as Dave Cheavens of the Texas bureau of the Associated Press, were favored with invitations to visit the ranch to enjoy fishing and hunting. Throughout Johnson's presidency, cordial relations continued with friendly members of the press.⁶

By 1967, however, most members of the national press no longer Wt Johnson's definition of friendly. Thin-skinned, the president did not like even mild criticism, and by 1967, biographer Paul Conkin states, "he was conducting a virtual cold war with newspeople." Johnson tried to befriend some reporters, and they often responded to the warm and humorous side of the president. The president expected something in return for this intimacy—favorable treatment—but most reporters retained their independence when they wrote about Johnson and his administration. Ronnie Dugger, a left-leaning Texan and the editor of the Texas Observer, opens his critical biography, The Politician, by describing this very paradox. "Lyndon Johnson was the president, but he was personal," Dugger reveals. "He took you on directly with his thrust, charm, wit, charge, and parry." Johnson and Dugger enjoyed a close but extremely adversarial relationship. Among the members of the press, Dugger was unique. He was a Texan, and Johnson granted him a kind of leeway he did not allow to people from other parts of the country. They maintained a relationship while others in the media found the White House and the Johnson ranch increasingly closed to them.⁷

Johnson felt that especially during the later years of the presidency and in retirement, the press portrayed him unfairly. Beginning in 1965 with a piece by David Wise in The New York Herald Tribune entitled "Credibility Gap," Johnson's administration began to experience a critical press; according to Kennedy and Johnson aide and distinguished historian Eric Goldman, this idea "had certainly been expressed before, and the thought was in the air," but it exacerbated an already tense relationship. After that time, Johnson's relations with much of the press declined. The war in Vietnam greatly contributed to this decline, as did the collision of the new role as guardian of the public interest that the press defined for itself and the static expectation that Johnson held of the relationship between the media and the president. One of the defining moments was a CBS news special report from Vietnam broadcast on February 27, 1968. Walter Cronkite, whom Johnson regarded as the voice of the American people, visited Vietnam in the aftermath of the destructive Tet Offensive. In his television commentary he advocated an end to the ongoing escalation of American involvement in the war. "It seems now more certain than ever," Cronkite concluded, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." Johnson watched this report on videotape and saw it as a turning point. Although Johnson retained his respect for Cronkite, he regarded the newsman's pronouncement as an extremely negative view of his administration. The power of the modern press was never more apparent, and Johnson regarded it as hostile.⁸

Some of his closest associates did not agree, regarding the difficulties as resulting from the actions and expectations of both the president and the press. Harold Woods, who then administered the LBJ State Park, felt that the press "was pretty generous to [Johnson]. . . . I think it is a function of the press to ridicule the president." Charles Boatner, a long-time Johnson associate who served as city editor of The Fort Worth Star Telegram from 1947 to 1961 and was a special assistant to the vice president and assistant to the secretary of the interior, regarded the conflict between the president and the press as an interregional affair. Texas journalists clearly understood their relationship to Johnson, he said; the Eastern press corps did not. Even Liz Carpenter, a staunch Johnson defender in almost every situation, admitted that Johnson "never understood the press and its agenda and sometimes failed to cope with it adequately."⁹

The ranch became a fulcrum of the tension between the president and the press. It was Johnson's mythic place, the one that held not only his real experiences but also the dreams he had for the nation. It was his bastion, and in his view the press did not respect it either as a place or as a symbol. To reporters, the ranch was interesting from a symbolic perspective, as an explication of the president and his worldview, but it was hardly a seminal American icon worthy of the fealty Johnson demanded. The ranch was a manifestation of a president who increasingly seemed at odds with the nation and its self-appointed representatives, the press, a man whose words had to be carefully evaluated before they could be trusted.

During Johnson's presidency, the volume of press questions about the ranch grew to epic proportions. Sensing the importance of the place in Johnson's view of the world and seeking a convenient way to categorize the president, reporters sought to find out as much as they could in an effort to know the man and his land. In this quest, reporters followed topics of interest to the president. Rainfall, the president's obsession, was the subject of frequent queries throughout the presidency, as were other agricultural and ranching subjects from irrigation to market prices. The Johnsons' many building projects at the ranch also attracted media attention.¹⁰ Somehow the details of the ranch seemed to be a way to shed light on the mysteries of the Johnson presidency, to convey what passed for understanding to the public.

Even when doused with the public spotlight, the ranch provided the kind of stability that Johnson craved. In the fall of 1965, Luci Johnson's romance with Patrick Nugent attracted much attention. During the election day weekend, the Johnsons returned to Texas amid an "absolute barrage" of news stories about the romance, as Lady Bird recalled. Lyndon Johnson was "happy and relaxed," Lady Bird Johnson remembered, amid the uproar over reports that Luci Johnson and Nugent planned to ask the president and first lady for permission to marry. During the weekend, the Johnsons, their staff, Birge and Lucia Alexander, and Cousin Oriole Bailey sat down to a dinner that reminded all of them of the special qualities of the ranch, its environs, and the patterns of kinship that defined the people of the Hill Country. The scenario allowed Johnson the kind of peace he craved at a moment of great emotional intensity.¹¹

His feeling for the significance of place became one of the best-known characteristics of Lyndon Johnson's personality. Reporters, often from urban backgrounds, frequently remarked on this trait as they searched for a way to understand Johnson, and the Johnsons demonstrated their attachment to the ranch time and again, even judging people by their feelings for the land. The artist Peter Hurd and his wife, Henriette, made a positive impression on the Johnsons even though they did not like Hurd's portrait of the president. It was too large for the Johnsons' taste, Johnson's eyes too dreamy and his hands and body not quite right. "They love so many things that I do, including the land," Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary. Johnson himself even accepted a Hurd landscape after the Wasco of the portrait. After returning from the moon, astronaut Frank Borman presented Johnson with a picture of the ranch taken from space, a photograph Borman was "sure the president would want."¹² Johnson's tie to place was strong and clear, reflecting his roots and his values.

Yet there were subtle and frequent inaccuracies in this personal history that Johnson fashioned through the ranch for the press and the public. Although Johnson liked to dramatize the poverty of his youth, Lyndon Johnson's family was not genuinely and historically poor; a more realistic assessment would have placed them among the aristocracy of the Hill Country—William Faulkner characters in their intermittent prosperity and figures from John Steinbeck in their clannishness and interdependence. Lyndon Johnson did not always pull himself up by his bootstraps, as in his mythic formulation. His uncanny and prescient understanding of human beings and a measure of amorality allowed him to fashion a spectacular political career and amass a fortune, but he often bent rules in the process. He once claimed that his great-grandfather had fought at the Alamo, only to be forced to retract the contention. Over time, this personal myth-making opened his official pronouncements, such as remarks made during the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, to greater scrutiny. Often Johnson's statements, both about personal and family history and about political decisions, seemed to reek of embellishment. In the end, the perceived disparity led to a vicious joke about Johnson and his relationship to the truth. In it, Johnson is purported to have been telling the truth when he tugged at his earlobe, had his finger by the side of his nose, or stroked his chin, but not when he spoke. The inconsistencies in his pronouncements had become a crack in the facade of the presidency through which greater and greater suspicion and mistrust eventually flowed.¹³

Throughout the presidency, the media subjected Lyndon Johnson and his pronouncements to increasingly harsher scrutiny. There was ample reason to question what he said; a skilled manipulator of political meaning, Johnson, especially in remarks concerning his personal history, often lacked demonstrable veracity. The president was a master of myth-making disguised as obfuscation. Eric Goldman points to Johnson's view that he upheld American commitments in Vietnam as one example. "In a way," Goldman writes, these were American obligations; "LBJ, being LBJ, transformed those facts to all the way." From the perspective of those who worked closely with him, this was typical of Johnson. "Not only did Johnson get somewhat separated from reality," George Reedy observed; "he had a fantastic faculty for disorienting everybody around him as to what reality was."¹⁴ The rules of the presidential-media relationship also changed. Less laudatory than ever before, the press first shared the optimism of the time, then acquired the cynicism about government actions that came to dominate the nation. Johnson's ability to evade questions and manipulate facts caused concern, for to many in the press this ability did not seem a quality of American leadership.

Nor did Johnson inspire the immediate respect of the eastern media as did the patrician-class Franklin D. Roosevelt or the war hero John F. Kennedy. The twangy accented voice, the big ears, and the colloquial Texas speech and mannerisms provided Johnson no insulation from inquiry and, eventually, caricature and ridicule. Unlike Roosevelt, who was by tacit agreement never photographed or reported in his wheelchair, or Kennedy, whose marital indiscretions were overlooked at the time, Johnson found himself with a press that mocked him and sought to ferret out the truth about any inaccuracy or misstatement that came from him or his aides. Applying more stringent rules meant that Johnson was not granted the leeway that most of his predecessors in the Oval Office had enjoyed.¹⁵

Although Johnson's behavior contributed to the difficult relationship between the president and the press, larger social forces played an enormous role in defining the ground on which this battle would be waged. Reporting had become more aggressive with the advent of television, as print media fought to retain its share of the market, grappling to find a way to combat the immediacy and the visual advantages of television. Instead of simply conveying the news as they had before electronic media, newspaper reporters now had to analyze its meaning in an effort to ensure that newspapers did more than rehash the previous evening's television newscast. At the same time, the presidency as an institution began an inexorable decline in stature, a slide to which Johnson contributed and that Richard M. Nixon brought to an unequaled low. Johnson himself recognized this reality, observing that when he talked with Walter Cronkite on camera, the two were on the same level, an advantage for the reporter and a disadvantage for the president. Reporting became more direct and less sycophantic, more focused on issues and less aimed at upholding the sanctity of the presidency and the government. Johnson had long recognized the importance of new forms of media, but he had difficulty adjusting to the new tactics, strategies, and approaches of the press. They destroyed the kind of politics he knew and loved.¹⁶

The tension between the press and the president was exacerbated by conditions at the Texas White House. The ranch was isolated. The nearest hotels were sixty-five miles away in Austin; the closest place where reporters could file a story was thirteen miles distant, in Johnson City. The only way onto the ranch was by presidential leave, always on an official bus. When reporters were on the property, they had no freedom of movement. Only Walter Cronkite could come in his own vehicle, a situation that surely rankled the newsman's compatriots. Nor was this Washington, D.C., where thousands of other stories and sources were available to compete for reporters' attention. "There wasn't much for them to do," press secretary George Christian remarked. "They got tired of coming to the same place." In the Hill Country, there was only one story, and the media's access to it was limited at its very source.¹⁷

Many members of the press also followed a time-honored pattern of outsiders in Texas. On their arrival, they found Texans and Texas gracious and charming; they marveled at the speech and the manners, found the climate and vistas attractive, and enjoyed what they perceived as quaint local customs. But most members of the reporting corps came from other places, and over time the myths of Texas and its many charms wore thin. The inherent chauvinism, the sometimes unwarranted pretentiousness, and the raw arrogance of many Texans made eastern reporters long for what they considered more civilized places. Away from the two coasts, where the important events of the era happened, and with the difficulties inherent in covering stories at the ranch, many reporters ended up with negative predispositions about the state that they sometimes projected onto the president as they reported from the ranch.¹⁸

Nor was Johnson emotionally or culturally designed for the harsh glare to which the modern press subjected him. Instead he was accustomed to the Texas newsperson, who either supported or opposed any politician and whose stance was assured, whether positive or negative. Johnson had long courted such individuals, made friends with them, and in the Texas tradition, they supported or criticized him. But the national press behaved differently. Seeing themselves as an unbiased, truth-seeking vanguard, they charged forward with an arrogance spawned by the meeting of technology and power, bringing a predetermined and set view of the world to bear on the malleable realities of domestic and foreign policy in the 1960s.¹⁹

Johnson also thought and spoke in a manner far different from that of most of the reporters who covered him. Raised in the country, Johnson spoke the language of rural America—folksy, metaphorical, and sometimes crude, closer to the basics of Hill Country life. Both real and mythic, such language reinforced the image that Johnson sought to promote. Unfamiliar with such speech patterns, the press attributed many characteristic rural expressions to Johnson himself, never realizing that he had learned most of them from the people of the Hill Country. "Lyndon didn't ever say a word that his pappy didn't—and worse," Wright Patman recalled, but reporters sought to fashion Johnson as the inventor of a range of crude aphorisms. Representative Richard Bolling of Missouri remembered him as "a crude bastard—barnyard" in his speech and actions. "He didn't change when he was president," Lois Roberts, the wife of Chalmer Roberts of The Washington Post remembered. "He went right on, didn't try to clean up his language." In a classic instance of his use of language, Johnson once retorted to questions about why, as Senate majority leader, he had not challenged a speech by Vice President Richard Nixon by saying, "I may not know much, but I do know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad." John Kennedy never talked that way in public.²⁰

Johnson's language and some of his actions—such as raising his shirt to show the scar from his gall bladder surgery in 1966, swimming nude in the White House pool, and lifting his dog by the ears—seemed to segments of the press to be behavior unbecoming of an American president. Many presidents had engaged in similar behavior, particularly during the nineteenth century, but the reportorial standards of earlier eras meant that most such actions were not widely reported. Johnson was president during a time of different, more intensive media glare, when few barriers to reporting a president's foibles existed. "It was his misfortune to appear," Marshall Frady perceptively wrote in Harper's in 1969, "at a moment when he was dismissed for ebullient vulgarities that, had the same facilities for collective scrutiny been around then, would have equally ended Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln."²¹ The result was a characterization of Johnson that more accurately reflected his behavior than that of previous presidents but that on occasion made him appear uncouth.

The press often misread Johnson's actions, mistaking his "innocent robust expansiveness," in the words of Marshall Frady, for boorishness. "It was a mistake," Frady claims, "of the supercilious to react to him as a caricature," to see his outward behaviors as indicative of the depth of the man.²² Johnson contributed to the sense of the importance of such behaviors by responding to criticism as if the demeaning characterizations had the ability to wound. In the process, he gave such allegations credence that they would not have had without his response.

The result was an ongoing battle between the press and the president, who expected the respect accorded his predecessors. Each time a reporter who had previously offered positive comments about Johnson changed perspectives, the president regarded such stories as comparable to acts of treason. Dan Rather of CBS News, himself a Texan but a man of independent mind, squarely faced the ethical dilemma this situation created. Rather shared a number of Johnson's traits, such as the gnawing sense that easterners condescended to him, but even when Johnson told him that he understood the president and could help him, Rather maintained professional distance, sometimes at great cost to his advancement at the network. In the end, Johnson could not sway him any more than he could the rest of the national press corps, and he remained perplexed. Yet the president's personality and forcefulness were legendary. A generation after Johnson's departure from the White House, rumors that Johnson harangued reporters and editors for what he perceived as negative coverage persist, but scholars who study this phenomenon have come to regard this view as closer to myth than reality.²³ Undeniably, Lyndon Johnson decided that the press could not be trusted, a sentiment that translated into policy, particularly at the ranch. Reporters were kept farther from the action, frequently warehoused in the hangar, and every aspect of covering a story from the ranch became more difficult. A stalemate of negative reporting and curtailed
cooperation ensued, to the exasperation of the press and the consternation of the president.

It often seemed to Lyndon Johnson that the press did not respect him and his accomplishments. To reporters, Texas was quaint, and this man who talked in aphorisms was a curiosity. The lack of mutual understanding was obvious to everyone. "I often wonder what these Eastern reporters, these city boys, will remember about their Johnson City interlude—winding over the Caliche hills behind the President who stops to telephone instructions to a foreman about a sick cow or a cattle guard or a fence crew or seeding a pasture," wrote the prescient Lady Bird Johnson in her diary. "It must be as unintelligible as Urdu to them."²⁴

The folksy manner of the president among the people in the Hill Country was a mystery to much of the press. During his many drives around the Hill Country, the president never failed to pick up anyone he recognized who was at the side of the road. This often led to Lincoln Continental convertibles full of Hill Country people and the invariable request from Johnson for a staff member to give up a seat in the car in favor of someone else. Although Johnson told such unwilling departees that he would soon return for them, on occasion he simply forgot. One visitor, Ervin S. Duggan, a speech writer whom the president wanted to hire for a position at the LBJ Library, was entirely forgotten. After spending a number of hours in Johnson City, he returned to the Austin airport and flew back to the East Coast.²⁵

Such miscommunications typified the problems of easterners in Johnson's Texas. To some of the press and even some of his staff, Johnson's behavior in Texas seemed sophomoric, unbecoming of the chief executive of the nation. In particular, the president's habit of what could be called joyriding or cruising offended segments of the press. To those with memories of Roosevelt or loyalties to the idea of Camelot and the person of John F. Kennedy, Johnson seemed decidedly not presidential. His antics were undignified, his habits common, and he did not Wt the image that 1960s newspeople, engaging in reshaping the political terrain, believed a president should have any more than had Harry S. Truman. But Truman had kept himself in check; he displayed none of the exuberance of Johnson and much of the very traditional moralizing of the rural American middle class.

In contrast, Johnson seemed to these self-appointed shapers of the image of the presidency to be out of control. Reporters wrote of his many automobile jaunts with a combination of respect and mockery, in effect judging his policy decisions solely by his actions behind the wheel. Coverage of these events was tinged by a nostalgia that suggested that this kind of activity reminded reporters that someone from the simpler America who would condone such actions was poorly suited for presidency. A prominent sense that such behavior was beneath a president of the United States pervaded press accounts of Johnson's four-wheeled expeditions.

The coverage of the president and his ranch by the press showed a lack of understanding. Most members of the press corps that covered the president were from urban or suburban backgrounds. Few had any experience with rural America, and fewer still took the time to attempt to understand the patterns of life in the country. "They were fish out of water" in Texas, George Christian believed.²⁶ In effect, they filtered what they saw in Texas through an urban prism rather than seeking to understand the place and the president on their own terms. Patronizing coverage, exacerbated by Johnson's credibility problems, resulted.

The relationship with the press cooled quickly after Johnson assumed office and remained tenuous throughout the presidency. The mutual lack of trust was reflected in numerous encounters throughout the presidency. These ranged from the nature of coverage of events at the ranch to the interaction between reporters and staff, ranch employees, and other native Texans. Texans comprised much of Johnson's staff, and they sometimes reacted angrily to what seemed to them slander against their state. George Christian, W. Marvin Watson, Bill Moyers, and Liz Carpenter, all of whom held prominent positions in White House communications, expressed frequent distaste at the treatment of Texas and the Johnsons in the national press. Neither group understood each other, and after a certain point members of both groups ceased to try. Texans snickered at the antics of reporters, while the reporters covered Texas in an increasingly patronizing fashion. Reporters were heard to say of their time in Austin, "Let's go down to the barber shop and watch the haircuts"—a sentiment sure to offend any Texan. A man as careful in his choice of words as press secretary George Christian remarked that "some of the press were prima donnaish and didn't mix too well with some of the folks" in Texas.²⁷

The problems were apparent to all who were close to the president. In her memoir, Ruffles and Flourishes, Liz Carpenter succinctly captures the spirit of this complicated interaction. "Pardner out there it's Marlboro Country," she remarks in a tongue-in-cheek comment, but a tone of bitterness seeped in. The president's brother, the eccentric Sam Houston Johnson, regarded anti-Texan feelings as an important component of the president's trouble with the press.²⁸ This was a recurring theme throughout the presidency, but at no time was it more apparent than in the famed "beer can incident" of 1964, in which Lyndon Johnson was cast as a litterbug for purportedly throwing a beer can out of his Lincoln Continental as he drove guests around the ranch.

In her recounting of this pseudoevent, Carpenter presents a wronged president and a vindictive press. Columnist Marquis Childs had sent word that he would like to visit the ranch, and Johnson was pleased to accommodate this venerated writer with roots in Oklahoma and Texas. Johnson took Childs on a convertible ride, filling the automobile with other reporters as well. The terrain, the images, and everything else about the ranch were different from the reporters' prior experiences, which, according to Carpenter, became the source of the rumor. The "Johnson safari around the ranchlands—so strange to [the reporter's] Eastern breeding" became enlarged with each retelling, until rumors that the President tossed beer cans out the window as he drove at reckless speeds were reported in Time and Newsweek. Carpenter avers that Johnson had only a paper cup of beer on the dashboard, from which he occasionally sipped; when a female reporter complained about the speed at which he drove, he covered the speedometer with his Stetson hat. Others, including Father Wunibald Schneider, indicated that Johnson was an unlikely litterbug in any circumstance; on the Johnsons' walks, they always picked up stray beer cans and other refuse that marred the ranch and the Hill Country landscape. Carpenter believed that the stories damaged Johnson, for they occurred almost at the same time as Lady Bird Johnson began to develop the ideas that would become the national beautification program.²⁹

The incident articulated a much deeper gulf between the press and the president: they embraced different value systems that only overlapped in politics. Reporters "couldn't understand why a man would prefer pastures to Picassos," Carpenter writes. Their only response to the "joy [of] blue skies and enough rainfall [or] the beauty of a shiny, fat white-faced Hereford" was to "get out a pencil and pad and make lists of the number of ranches, ranch houses, and heads of cattle." Johnson's pleasure at the ranch was a mystery to Eastern-based reporters, and in Carpenter's view, they did not show sufficient respect for the president's values. She remained certain that reporters behaved differently when they visited the Kennedy and Harriman estates or other properties.³⁰

This perceived lack of respect became pronounced as reporters spent more time around the ranch while still learning little of its culture. Even the most simple types of ranch equipment, such as cattle guards—a series of six to eight pipes with small spaces in between suspended over a ditch or laid over a hole in the road—were unfamiliar to them. Cattle will not cross such a contraption. In one incident that left locals chuckling, Bonnie Angelo of Time magazine was warned to look out for the cattle guards. She responded: "Why? Are they handsome?" Other reporters tried to walk across cattle guards; some fell through the parallel pipes, again to the great amusement of locals. Lyndon Johnson was purported to have had the best laugh of his presidency when he received a call at the White House that informed him that someone from "Life Magazine fell into the dipping vat this morning."³¹

A patronizing dimension in the treatment of Texas and Texans also existed in the reportorial coverage. Much of this was focused on the president's relatives, especially his eccentric brother, Sam Houston Johnson, and Cousin Oriole Bailey. Reporters feasted on the quaint names and seeming backwardness of Johnson's relatives; with first names such as Ovilee and Huffmann, the relatives seemed anachronistic to a press accustomed to the sophisticated and flamboyant Kennedy clan. The stories that followed were not always favorable, and Hill Country people sometimes resented the way they were portrayed in the national press.³²

Johnson put his older relatives, particularly Cousin Oriole, on display for visitors, enhancing the widely held sense of his ties to the place. A typical visit to Bailey's followed a pattern that seemed choreographed. "Let's go see Cousin Oriole," Johnson would say many nights after dinner, and he would don a cap, zip his jacket, and grab a flashlight. The president and the accompanying crowd would "walk along in the moonlight," one observer recalled, with only the flashlight and the moon to guide them. Occasionally a ranch hand would come up to greet them or the president might stop to look at the roads, his irrigation system, an animal, or something else from the ranch. Secret Service agents blinked their flashlights to keep track of his location. Johnson passed through the guardhouse that marked the east end of his property and strode up to a small house with a screened porch. He "whams the screen door against its frame," Douglas Kiker recorded, "and shouts at the top of his voice: `Oriole. Oriole.'" Together, she and the president often watched the ten o'clock news before Johnson departed for his home.³³

Cousin Oriole was one of the many enigmas of Texas during the Johnson administration. She was "quite a lady," medical corpsman Tom Mills remembered. A shy, elderly, hard-of-hearing woman who was a practicing Christadelphian and an avid reader of the Bible, she was everyone's rural grandmother or aunt, both relic and source of wisdom. Her little home looked like that of many ordinary Americans. A television set and white wicker armchairs with padded seats accompanied the bright wallpaper. Red alabaster orioles abounded in the room, highlighted by the overhead light.³⁴ Her views made Cousin Oriole seem to belong to an earlier time.

Johnson's desire to play with the press, to slyly make fun of reporters visiting Texas, made his presentation of Cousin Oriole a litmus test of reporters' reactions. The president placed her on display for whoever was around. To Johnson, she was fun; to the reporters, she was difficult to comprehend, emblematic of rural America in a derogatory way. Their reading of her often clearly reflected their interpretation of the president. Characterizations of her varied. At one extreme, chief of protocol Lloyd Hand described her in sympathetic terms: she was "well read, literate, a little zany." Paul Conkin, Johnson's most sympathetic biographer to date, offers a different perspective. Cousin Oriole, he writes, was "elderly, ill, lonely, and unaware of patronizing smiles."³⁵ Johnson saw his cousin as representative of the American people. The press took the view that she was anachronistic, a quaint look into a simpler but essentially useless American past.

Johnson was fully capable of finding a slight in the coverage of his cousin that had not been intended. One of the most well-known Associated Press reporters, Helen Thomas, once wrote a story about Oriole Bailey that George Reedy characterized as "marvelous. . . . It had ten million votes in it easily." Johnson read the portrayal in a different manner, regarding it as patronizing slander directed at his family that made it look foolish. Reedy sought to soothe the president's feelings and smooth over the controversy. The incident again illustrated the gulf between Johnson's and the press's expectations of the nature of coverage of the presidency.³⁶

To Lyndon Johnson and the people of the Hill Country, the patterns of the world of rural America had great importance and significant meaning. The traits that defined quality individuals in rural America were different from those of the coasts, and in the Johnson administration those attributes had great power. Acceptance in a Texas-dominated administration required different sorts of rites of passage than might a similar position in a Yale or Harvard University graduate's administration.

One dimension of the difference was Johnson's emphasis on hunting as an important ritual activity. Since the coming of Europeans to the New World, hunting had played an important role in the rites of passage in rural America; the ability to secure game had long been a necessary and desirable skill. An entire culture of hunting that emphasized these skills had grown up before the twentieth century. It pervaded rural life in every region of the country. American heroes such as Daniel Boone were renowned for their prowess; local communities gauged the worth of their young men based on the skills they demonstrated in competitions that utilized the skills of the hunt. Even in the middle of the twentieth century, hunting defined people in places such as the Hill Country of Texas.³⁷

By the early twentieth century, however, hunting had developed distinct class differentiations. Hunters who fancied themselves sportsmen, usually members of the genteel upper classes, regarded the activity in a different manner than did those who hunted for subsistence or market or even those who shared the view of hunting as a sport but eschewed the ethic of conservation. State land laws and customs influenced the nature of hunting in individual states, changing a ritual activity to one of privilege. In states such as Texas, where hunting was every man's right in theory but the lack of public land led to a leasing system for private property on which to hunt and created a de facto class system, self-proclaimed sportsmen were few in number compared to those who hunted indiscriminately.³⁸

Hunting in Texas and the West was different than in the eastern states. Most western states had fewer game regulations than their eastern counterparts, and the loosely regulated hunting in such states attracted people to violate even the few rules that existed. There were reasons for such minimal restrictions. Besides a tradition that opposed state regulation, a spacious state such as Texas had relatively few people, large populations of deer and other game species, and much territory to hunt. Texas allowed practices that shocked eastern hunters. Shooting an animal from an automobile, a practice banned in heavily populated eastern states, was legal in Texas. So was hunting on Sunday; reporters were amazed, in the words of Merriman Smith, to see a stream of cars bearing Weld-dressed bucks rolling toward Hill Country towns at noon on Sunday. Even does could be hunted in Texas.³⁹ To eastern reporters and even to some hunting enthusiasts, the hunting situation in Texas seemed uncivilized.

Lyndon Johnson became a hunter relatively late in life for someone who had grown up in the Hill Country. In his youth, he was "not much of hunter," according to boyhood friend J. O. Tanner.⁴⁰ A bit squeamish by Hill Country standards, the young Johnson associated hunting with the aspects of regional life he sought to avoid. It was only after his purchase of the ranch and his admittance to the Senate club headed by Senator Richard Russell that Johnson understood the social ramifications and class dimensions of the sport. During the 1950s, an invitation to hunt at the LBJ Ranch included an offer to further develop a relationship with this rising political figure. Johnson became a competent hunter, and as Mary Rather recounted, he "couldn't bear" to shoot a deer himself, although he "did shoot them for guests."⁴¹ After 1960, an offer to visit the ranch was sometimes a reward for an accomplishment, at other times an affirmation of the status of the invitee, and always an opportunity to discuss issues with Johnson.

Many of the properties Johnson and A. W. Moursand leased for the cattle business were also used for hunting. Johnson leased "deer rights"—a Texas colloquialism for hunting privileges—from other area landowners as well. The Scharnhorst and Haywood ranches were frequent sites of Johnson hunts, and other nearby properties were used on occasion. Johnson also owned a hunting lodge on A. W. Moursand's property, and a constant stream of visitors came to use it.⁴² By the early 1960s, hunting had become an important ritual activity at the LBJ Ranch.

Visitors came through the ranch to hunt the deer that roamed the various Johnson properties. During the 1950s, senatorial colleagues came to hunt, Russell prominent among them. Johnson even taught his wife to hunt. Lady Bird Johnson had been excited when Johnson took up hunting because it was the first activity outside of politics that he seemed to enjoy, and she learned to shoot herself, becoming a crack shot. Just after the election of 1960, John F. Kennedy came to the ranch and enjoyed the hunt as he discussed his administration with his new second in command. Mercury astronauts Deke Slayton, John Glenn, and Gordon Cooper were invited for a hunting trip. Prominent individuals were welcomed, as were friends and close associates and their relatives. Political issues of all kinds were discussed in the course of such hunts, the activity and the camaraderie serving as a backdrop for consensus. On one such trip, with Lynda Bird Johnson and George Hamilton in the back seat holding rifles, Johnson and Walter Heller, head of the Council of Economic Advisors, sat in the front seat and discussed whether Johnson should reverse his stand on federal excise taxes.⁴³

Johnson's attitudes about hunting changed dramatically after the Kennedy assassination. Before the tragedy, Johnson "lived with a gun in his lap," Dale Malechek recalled. "He was forever ever ever hunting, shooting. After the Kennedy incident, I only remember him shooting a gun one time." Johnson took a different perspective in the aftermath of the assassination, one that was reflected in an exchange with Father Wunibald Schneider. "Mr. President, I'm glad I'm not a hunter," the priest said as they saw a beautiful buck. "Why?" asked Johnson. "You wouldn't let me shoot a buck like that," said Father Schneider. "No," Johnson replied, "they are not for shooting." Albert Wierichs witnessed the same change in the president. "Way back yonder, he liked to hunt," the Johnson City native recounted. "I don't think in later years he ever shot another deer."⁴⁴

At the ranch, hunting served as a way to differentiate people, to assert the primacy of the Texas experience. It became a measure of an individual; for Lyndon Johnson, hunting differentiated among kinds of people. Johnson often judged people by the way in which they handled the outdoor experience. For visitors, particularly those from the North or East, deer hunting in the Hill Country became a rite of passage, a test of the caliber of a man. "He'd invite various people which had never hunted," James Davis, who served as cook and houseman beginning in 1959, remembered. "I guess he got a kick telling them how to hunt."⁴⁵

Robert Kennedy made one such visit in 1959 that illustrated the importance of hunting as an activity that defined character. Although Johnson and the younger Kennedy later became adversaries of immense proportions, in 1959 they still sought some form of accommodation with each other. Similar kinds of hierarchical thinking combined with different backgrounds, great pride, and relatively short tempers to make the younger Kennedy and Johnson a difficult match. Still a Senate staff member, Robert Kennedy had never hunted before he arrived in Texas. Johnson sought to show his guest the joys of Texas living; hunting the abundant deer was chief among them. Johnson and members of the ranch staff tried to teach Kennedy how to handle a deer rifle, but, as Davis recalled, after the end of the lesson Kennedy still "need[ed] more instructions." When the northeasterner fired at a deer, the gun kicked and hit him in the face. Although Kennedy's shot hit the deer, Davis and the others had to complete the kill. It was a moment that highlighted the differences between a Hill Country background and experience and the younger Kennedy's more privileged background elsewhere.⁴⁶ It was certainly a memory that Johnson later relished as his relationship with the younger Kennedy deteriorated.

Most hunts on the ranch were typical Johnson productions. The fleet of Johnson convertibles was the most important ingredient; the president's entourage hunted from what was usually labeled a "motorized safari." Johnson often drove in his Lincoln with A. W. Moursand by his side, usually followed by Lady Bird Johnson in another vehicle, additional cars of reporters or other guests, and a car carrying Secret Service agents and other official personnel. Sometimes Johnson used an old red Ford converted to a "deer-hunting car"; it included a built-in bar. A station wagon driven by the ranch staff, used to carry kill to a locker plant, brought up the rear. Johnson sometimes drove the wagon, but usually not during a hunt with visitors. The convertibles were the most essential vehicles in this motorized parade because they offered the opportunity for an unobstructed shot from within. Their use became a Johnson trademark.⁴⁷

The actual shooting of an animal became a litmus test that allowed Johnson to apply mythic rural and Hill Country values to people from other parts of the country. Those who declined his offer to shoot or who acted as if they felt hunting was an inappropriate activity for the president instantly diminished in Johnson's estimation. Those who embraced hunting enthusiastically, even if without any idea of how to shoot accurately, were perceived by the president as having potential. Skilled and experienced shots received special treatment. Johnson often sought to distract such guests as they shot, increasing the degree of difficulty and making failure a certainty for all but the most experienced with firearms.⁴⁸ In the distinction he drew between those with the skill to succeed and those who lacked it, he affirmed the importance of the ranch and its meaning.

This formulation inverted the values that the national press respected. Hunting was a respectable activity, reporters believed, but a little undignified for a president. Many members of the press, raised in cities and suburbs, had little prior experience with the sport and even less of the framework in which to understand it. The assassination of John F. Kennedy produced a revulsion directed at firearms, especially rifles, and reporters reflected that newfound horror. As a result, they responded with stereotypes and clichés, grasping the notion that hunting held an important role in the way the president understood people but failing to go beyond that into full understanding. Most news accounts sounded simultaneously patronizing and bemused at the mysterious activity with which the president confronted his public.

Nor did the American political elite, with its roots in the culture of the East Coast, successfully come to grips with Johnson's predilection for the activity. To them hunting was a relic activity, more appropriate to utilitarian conservationist grandfathers than to the leadership of a changing nation. Other presidents from rural backgrounds, Truman and Eisenhower in particular, reached accommodation with the culture of the East; even those who had not been thrilled by it acknowledged its importance. Lyndon Johnson was different, and the emphasis on hunting as a ritual and a pathway to acceptance reflected his cast of mind.

In this manner, the ranch and activities associated with it became a cross-cultural experience, a place where Johnson's America, mythic and real, touched the America of the press and the two coasts. It was not always a happy meeting ground, and rarely was it a place filled with understanding and appreciation for different ways of living. Often the ranch and the activities engaged in there were indicative of tensions that swirled around the relationship between the president and the press. Even more often Johnson's trips to Texas worked to alleviate his insecurities about life among the privileged in Washington, D.C. In Texas, with a figurative gun in his hand, he could restructure relationships to cast himself as the one with the dominant skills as well as the power he held in Washington, D.C. This assertion of the importance of the ranch was reflected in the way most reporters wrote and spoke of it. As is true of so many anthropologists, their words and thoughts told their audience more about themselves than about what they saw and experienced. Filtered through the prism of their background and values, the Texas White House took on the quality of a foreign country. In many accounts, the strange customs of Texas, its people, and its president were explained in a manner only slightly different from that used to described Pakistan or Egypt.

This fundamentally patronizing characterization revealed the degree to which the ranch was the scene of an ongoing cross-cultural interaction. Texas was foreign to the national press, particularly to the White House corps that produced so much of the ranch coverage, and they treated it as such. The result was typical of cross-cultural experiences: the groups saw each other in action and gained both some measure of respect and some degree of contempt from the interchange. This deeply affected the reports of Johnson carried on television and in the newspapers. In the end, the experiences of the press at the ranch were part of the discontent and distrust that grew during the Johnson presidency. The national press ultimately perceived the ranch through the prism it brought from the East Coast. The foreignness of its portrayal was an essential component in the process that demystified the presidency and led to the fierce inquisitiveness that came to dominate the later years of the Johnson presidency. Unresolved, the struggle for symbolic control and cross-cultural communication and understanding had great consequences for Johnson and the White House.