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

CHAPTER 9 The Ranch as a Haven

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The Hill Country had a special effect on Lyndon B. Johnson. As he recounted time and time again in many ways, it was home to him, a place where he could shed the pressures of the presidency, breathe deeply the pure air, and see more clearly the breadth, depth, and ramifications of the issues he faced. His most difficult choices became resolvable in the physical setting he loved, near the grave sites of his ancestors, on the land that he felt to the core of his being. No other place had the emotional impact nor the steadying influence on Johnson that the Hill Country and the ranch did, and nowhere else did the president feel able to manifest the broadest range of his emotions and feelings.

This tremendous feeling for place was reflected in the way both Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson regarded the ranch. Over and over, the Johnsons referred to the Texas White House as the place where they could "recharge their batteries." The ranch provided solace and clarity, clearing the murkiness of Washington, D.C., for these two Texans, and created the climate in which they could find new perspectives from which to resolve continuing problems. Lyndon Johnson himself best framed the importance of the Hill Country and his ranch when he said, "When I come here and stay two or three days, it's a breath of fresh air; it's new strength. I go away ready to challenge the world."¹

The ranch served as a haven for Johnson, a place where he could relieve the stresses of national political life, where he could control a microworld in a comprehensive manner to which the larger world only rarely responded. "It was a real retreat for him," press aide George Reedy recalled. "He'd go [to the ranch] and spin all kinds of dreams." Even with the president's busy schedule, Johnson "usually had no set plans" when he arrived at the ranch, Yolanda Boozer recounted. He was there because he wanted to be, there because he needed the special feeling the ranch gave him.² In the Hill Country, Johnson could control daily life with the kind of mastery that he had enjoyed in the Senate but that often eluded him in the presidency. On the ranch, Johnson's penchant for managing every detail could be fulfilled; he could establish the peremptory domination of the efforts of his staff for which he was renowned. The ranch was small enough to function in this individualistic and idiosyncratic fashion, returning to the president the sense of control essential to him that seemed to spiral away as U.S. cities erupted in flames, as the war in Vietnam began to consume lives and resources at an ever-greater rate, and as Americans, particularly young ones, expressed their dismay about their society in a range of civil and often extralegal protests. A man who prided himself on his ability to use politics to control people and their behavior, as president Johnson faced a world that did not respond to reason. His ranch and the Hill Country did.

There was also an enormous and powerful personal side to Johnson's feelings about the ranch. He loved the place—loved the spectacular Pedernales River sunsets, the long walks he took along the riverfront, the serenity of the rolling Hill Country, and the proximity of friends and neighbors. The Johnson family graveyard just east of the ranch house had great meaning to him; generations of his ancestors were buried there, including his mother and father. Johnson planned to join them one day, selecting a location next to his mother among the "beautiful trees, so peaceful and quiet," as he often said. The meaning of the ranch also became clear in other ways. Johnson loved to be at the ranch for his birthday. During his presidency, he spent each birthday there with the exception of 1967. The Johnsons almost always spent Christmas at the ranch, rushing there in 1963 on December 24 so as not to miss the holiday at home. Only in 1968—during Johnson's lame duck period before the inauguration of Richard M. Nixon—did the family stay at the White House for Christmas. The emotional pull of the ranch far outweighed any other material influence in Johnson's life. Only his wife and his mother had a greater impact upon him.³

At his ranch, Lyndon Johnson felt secure in a way he did not elsewhere. Although not a man given to conventional definitions of relaxation, he found the Hill Country property able to quiet his worries in ways that no place, event, or person in the nation's capital ever could. Despite illnesses and other health worries, Johnson remained a vigorous man throughout his life. He faced innumerable crises without flinching and was so driven that he thought nothing of routinely working eighteen- and twenty-hour days. Only at the ranch could he focus that energy inward, combine it with his insight and turn it on himself. Only there could he express his thoughts and feelings, his desires and needs, with a precision that was sometimes missing elsewhere. At the ranch, Lyndon Johnson was reflective in a manner that belied the stereotypes of the press, candid in a way that defied the negative characterizations of his veracity. He was at his best on his property, his insecurities quieted by his feeling for the place.

Besides its function as a place for clear thinking, the ranch also served as a retreat. Johnson made trips to the ranch following important and stressful decisions and cataclysmic events, when he needed peace and serenity. He rewarded himself with a trip to Texas after the successful completion of many difficult negotiations; in the aftermath of nearly every major decision he made elsewhere, he jetted to the ranch in a combination of celebration, reflection, and relaxation. In the Hill Country, he could ride with his close confidant A. W. Moursand and other friends and let the tension of his position dissipate. The presidency was a kind of trap. Along with immense power and responsibility, the office meant curtailed movement and an incredible lack of privacy. Sam Houston Johnson, the president's eccentric brother, often referred to the presidency as a prison "sentence."⁴ The ranch allowed Lyndon Johnson to regain a measure of the freedom of ordinary people. There he could attempt to elude the Secret Service, fully confident that other than the irritation of the agents there would be no negative consequences. The clouds in his psyche, the enormous stress of his position brought on by the gravity of every decision, cleared away in the Texas hills, on the county roads, and along the Pedernales River.

As the public changed its initially positive perception of the Johnson administration and the popularity of the president began to decline, the ranch became even more important to the president's peace of mind. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson and his policies were very popular with the public. Despite historian Eric Goldman's contention that as many people voted against Barry Goldwater as for Johnson, Johnson's 1964 landslide victory over Goldwater illustrated the warmth the American public felt toward the man who had revived a distraught nation after the Kennedy assassination. The Great Society programs were extremely popular, as long as the nation retained both its prosperity and its basic historic optimism. But beginning late in 1965 and continuing throughout the remainder of the decade, the attitudes that had characterized the nation during the twenty years following World War II began to change, and Americans looked at their society and its institutions in a more critical fashion than ever before.⁵

As the war in Vietnam became more and more of a quagmire, the positive achievements of the Johnson administration became increasingly obscure to an ever larger segment of the press and the public. Domestic accomplishments, at the core of Johnson's vision for the United States, were overshadowed by the specter of Vietnam. For Johnson, the war became, in the words of one scholar, "a personal as well as a national tragedy." Particularly after the Tet Offensive, in early 1968, which shattered the illusion that the United States had entered a new and more positive phase in the war, the approval rating of the Johnson administration plummeted, and with it the popularity of the president. "That bitch of a war," as Johnson once referred to Vietnam, took his time and energy away from the Great Society programs close to his heart and eventually tore the nation apart as it exacted a great price from Johnson on a personal level. The children of his friends, such as Harold Woods, the superintendent of the LBJ State Park, went off to fight; Woods's son came home wounded, and Johnson felt personally responsible. He even visited the young man at the hospital in San Antonio. The war provided him with his most painful moments and forced him to grapple with a gnawing feeling that the war had diverted his presidency from its primary path. In the end, Johnson came to hate the war and saw his political demise in it. "The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine," Johnson lamented in 1968, was that "I am alive and it has been more torturous."⁶

For Lyndon Johnson, derailing his presidency on a foreign policy issue was a cruel turn of events. Even as he recognized that the honeymoon at the beginning of his presidency was a temporary situation, Johnson had reveled in it. A deep-seated need to be loved was a central feature of his character, and the early public response to his administration fulfilled that need. The positive response to the Great Society harkened back to the early days of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a parallel from which Johnson did not shy. But the warm relationship between the administration and the public did not last. Beginning in the summer of 1965, U.S. cities exploded in race riots. In Los Angeles, that summer with its Watts riot was only the beginning of a sequence of long, hot summers that rocked the positive attitude of the nation and led many to ask questions about the ramifications of the Civil Rights Movement. A backlash followed, as segments of the public that had been at best lukewarm to civil rights turned away from the movement. Their difficulty compounded by the problems of Vietnam and the domestic turmoil it spawned, the later years of the Johnson administration were a great burden for the president.

His ranch provided a consistency that did not exist for Lyndon Johnson in Washington, D.C. The Hill Country rhythms were his, instilled in him from his youth. From the ranch house, he could see the places important in his personal history—the Junction Schoolhouse, where he began his education, and a range of other places with great personal meaning. Johnson could think at the ranch, and he could see clearly what he often could not in the swirl of Washington, D.C. He could carry that clarity with him back to the nation's capital, just as he brought back the hot pork sausage made from the hogs on his ranch.⁷ His memories were there in Texas, as was the strength that had first propelled him away yet later brought him back to purchase the old ranch as a testimony to his success. The rooted feeling of belonging in a place, of finally being able to call the difficult Hill Country his own, had great resonance for Johnson.

The ongoing returns to the ranch for holidays and personal events clearly illustrated this rootedness. Although Johnson kept an extremely busy schedule, he and Lady Bird always made it back to the ranch for important celebratory occasions. It often took a great effort to reach Texas in time for important events. At certain times, such as Christmas of 1966, they arrived at the last minute. When the Johnsons arrived after dark on December 24, a fire was burning in the hearth, and the house was decorated with balsam rope along the mantelpieces in the big living room and the den and along the stair rail. Mistletoe and holly hung from the light fixtures. A great bowl of eggnog and plates of cookies sat upon the sideboard in the dining room. Christmas carols were playing on the record player. Johnson invited in the Secret Service agents and the military personnel for eggnog. In a similar instance on Thanksgiving Day in 1967, Johnson stayed in his bed with his young grandson, Patrick Lyn Nugent, for part of the afternoon. The family followed that afternoon with a drive along the pastures to take a last look at the Hill Country's fall colors. Lady Bird remembered it as a day of "sheer contentment." Having Christmas that year at the ranch required an even greater effort than in previous years. Johnson returned from a trip around the world, which included a stop in Vietnam, on December 24, and after a day the tired president and the first lady departed for the ranch.⁸ The soothing qualities of being in the family home at this important time of the year made even a worn Johnson willing to make one more trip home.

The ranch was also the place where both Johnsons became rejuvenated. The ranch offered rest and vacation as well as the camaraderie of old friends and guests, familiar surroundings, and a controlled environment. The nature of entertaining there was different; the Johnsons were far more familial with their old friends and neighbors from the Hill Country than they were with official visitors. Some Hill Country friends, such as Harold Woods, were considered part of the Johnson family, and there was always room for them at the Johnson table. Others felt at home at the ranch. Cactus Pryor's children "practically grew up at the ranch," he recounted. Charles Boatner only attended a few formal events at the ranch, but he and his sons were Christmas guests. Father Wunibald Schneider was another frequent dinner guest. At home, the nature of socialization changed from semiformal barbecues to relaxed dinners with family and friends, a level of personal interaction that the president highly valued. Even during his busiest times, Johnson always stopped to "visit," in Texas terms, with ranch workers. The ranch was his spread, and he reveled in the combined networks of sociability, kinship, and friendship there.⁹

Even when away, Lyndon Johnson felt renewed just thinking of the ranch. Its importance was clear from a number of his unorthodox actions. Chief among these was his near obsession with demanding daily weather reports from the Hill Country. When he was away from Texas, Johnson received reports of moisture—rain and snowfall. He also spoke almost daily with the ranch foreman, Dale Malechek, giving instructions and hearing what was new at the ranch. Such information reassured Johnson about the state of his ranch during his absences. From a distance, rainfall reports and daily work updates allowed the president to retain a feeling of control over activity at the ranch.¹⁰

Upon their return to the Hill Country, the Johnsons reveled in its familiarity. To them the region seemed more real than Washington, D.C., populated with authentic people instead of the stereotypically power-driven social climbers of the nation's capital. Because relaxation in a conventional sense was not Johnson's forte, the pace of life even in rural Texas remained frenetic, but for Lyndon Johnson even a fast-moving trip to the ranch was an experience he craved. He often returned to the ranch bedraggled and worn; after even a few days, he left inspired and full of the energy he and the nation needed.¹¹

One manifestation of this was a pattern of inviting special friends to the ranch at particularly beautiful times of the year. Lady Bird Johnson proposed most such activities, carefully planning guest lists and selecting the time of year. Her staff came to refer to these as weekends of "sharing the ranch at a pretty time of the year with people we enjoy," as one memorandum on the subject was titled. These were informal affairs, loosely planned around the activities the Johnsons most enjoyed: driving around the ranch, watching the deer, spending time at the lake, and if a Sunday was included, attending church in Fredericksburg. Guest lists of fifteen to twenty people were typical. Visitors included Mary Lasker, who played an important role in Lady Bird Johnson's beautification program; stalwart friends and political supporters Arthur Krim, the president of United Artists Corporation, and his wife, Mathilde Krim, a faculty member at the Weizmann Institute in Israel; and others. Sometimes the Saturday night dinner would be expanded to include a number of Texas dignitaries. Personal, yet with characteristics of formality, these private events were prize moments for the Johnsons.¹²

"Off-record" weekends also accentuated the importance of the ranch to the president. These weekends were considered private, no press coverage permitted during them. Guests for these events were often new friends, and the informal atmosphere of the activities allowed for the development of camaraderie. One such weekend gathering occurred on August 2_4, 1968. The Johnsons invited a combination of close associates such as McGeorge and Mary Bundy, Clark and Marny Clifford, and HEW Secretary Joseph Califano and his wife, Trudye; close friends such as A. W. and Mariallen Moursand and John and Nellie Connally; and important supporters such as Armand and Frances Hammer of the Occidental Petroleum Company and Edward J. Daly, chairman of World Airways, Inc. Beginning late on Friday afternoons, such events again showcased the ranch, allowed Johnson a comfortable environment in which to conduct business, and showed the president at his best on the personal level.¹³ The ability of the ranch to soothe the president and greatly add to his vast charm was apparent.

For Lyndon Johnson personally, the ranch also had a tremendous recuperative effect. After his gall bladder operation in October, 1965, Johnson spent the better part of the next two months at the ranch, planning and relaxing while running the country by telephone and communications system. Even the demands of the presidency did not detract from the qualities of the ranch that Johnson so sorely needed to restore his health. The effect of the Hill Country was soothing, a trait often noted by Lady Bird Johnson. After the last guests and the press departed from the 1963 Erhard barbecue, the first ceremonial event of the new Johnson presidency, the Johnsons boarded a helicopter for the Moursands' house. As the sun began to sink low in the sky, the view was idyllic. "We saw deer outlined against the sky . . . leaping the fences in the pastures," silhouetted against the coming darkness, as Lady Bird Johnson recounted. They called Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, and the Connallys came to the ranch. The group ended up in A. W. Moursand's hunting tower. Peering into the darkness in search of the little gleams of light that were the eyes of deer staring back at the tower, Lady Bird Johnson felt relaxed, out of the whirl for the first time since the assassination. In another instance, on one beautiful autumn day in October, 1965, the Johnsons began their day with breakfast together and went for a walk—"just the two of us," she wrote in her diary—past the dam and the birthplace, past the cemetery and the old Junction School, and on to the place where their daughters had met the school bus when the Johnsons first moved to the Hill Country in the early 1950s. Throughout the three-mile jaunt, they talked of the ranch and their plans for it. Later that evening, the Johnsons and A. W. Moursand drove to 3-Springs over what Lady Bird Johnson recalled as a "non-road that it was unbelievable a Continental could navigate" and arrived at the brink of a great bluff. There they sat on rocks above the river, and Johnson talked of his youth and his childhood, of the dreams he held then and of their meaning in the present.¹⁴ These were rare moments during the presidency; personal and intimate in ways characteristic of Johnson yet detached in an atypical fashion from the concerns of the day.

Cathartic and in some ways epiphanic, such moments characterized the meaning of the ranch for the president. Johnson could unburden himself in Texas in ways that he could not in Washington, D.C., and those close to him recognized the positive effect of the ranch on the increasingly tired president. Observers such as Yolanda Boozer watched his physical condition improve as a result of little more than a tour across his land. He loved to watch the sunset from a knoll near Llano, a small town about fifty miles as the crow flies from Stonewall. Watching the sunset revitalized him, and he "would lose his sense of fatigue," Boozer said. He loved to see the wildlife, for it too took the years away from him. As the strain of the presidency grew, he had a genuine need for such opportunities.¹⁵

As a result of Johnson's incessant mistrust of the press, most of these occasions were private—witnessed and recorded only by Lady Bird Johnson, his closest friends, and members of the Johnsons' staff. Yet such moments paint a picture of a different Johnson, an accentuated version of the man that even hostile reporters regarded as more personable during his Hill Country stays. This Johnson exhibited a vulnerability that he did not cover with bluster, as he so often did in front of television cameras and newspaper reporters in Washington, D.C. He seemed more genuine and less mythic, more concerned with what was real than with an image. On these occasions, Johnson had a personal and emotional depth that was not always apparent in his everyday communications with the media. Not self-conscious and not on display, among his closest friends and family Lyndon Johnson could express a broader range of his emotions and thoughts than was possible under more conventional presidential circumstances.

The safe feeling that the ranch provided also allowed the president a wider range of behavior than that in which he might otherwise have engaged. Johnson's fifty-eighth birthday at the ranch, on August 27, 1966, revealed his level of comfort in the Hill Country. The rain that drummed on the roof was the first of Johnson's birthday presents; nothing pleased him more than a hard Hill Country rain. The press had arrived from San Antonio by bus and were marooned in the hangar by the inclement weather. In the hard rain, the characteristic milling around outside the house was uncomfortable and pointless. Johnson dropped his characteristic guard and invited the press into the house. Reporters occupied "every possible chair, [sat] on the hearth, the piano stool, or [stood] in the corners, around the bridge table," Lady Bird Johnson recounted. Lyndon Johnson sat in his big reclining chair, with Lady Bird beside him. The president spoke for an hour, his wife remembered, "counting blessings and finding them plentiful." The event was "a purely Johnsonian performance," one newsman wrote.¹⁶ In it, Johnson exhibited both his feelings of security at the ranch and the control of events he craved. His hostility to the press—the feelings that sometimes made him uncooperative and blustering—disappeared in the environment of the ranch. No one could challenge Johnson here.

In this sense, the ranch became a magnet for the president. Lyndon Johnson believed in the power of the ranch, and this belief was the basis of a pattern that continued throughout his presidency. The ranch provided a kind of consistency for Johnson, and he returned to it many times in many ways. It pulled on him, brought him home, and he developed a pervasive faith in the recuperative powers of the place and the Hill Country around it.

A New Year's Day trip in 1966 to Enchanted Rock, about one hour's drive from the ranch, illustrated Johnson's relationship to the Hill Country. Even in the aftermath of Johnson's gall bladder surgery, efforts to begin a peace process to resolve the situation in South Vietnam had continued. On that New Year's Day, Thomas C. Mann, the former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs and the undersecretary of state for economic affairs, arrived at the ranch to report on the efforts of the five roving U.S. emissaries who had traveled to forty countries in an effort to pressure the North Vietnamese government to enter into peace negotiations. The Johnsons and Mann drove to Enchanted Rock with other officials, engaging in a conversation about the receptiveness of Mexican leaders to U.S. entreaties. The car telephone rang constantly, Joseph Califano and Bill Moyers calling repeatedly to report on the efforts of the peace-seekers. Each time the telephone rang, conversation in the car stopped until the president finished the call.¹⁷

When the party reached Enchanted Rock, the second largest granite outcropping in the United States after Stone Mountain, Georgia, the president and others climbed the great granite dome. Lady Bird Johnson worried about her husband's heart condition, but up the group went. When they finally reached the top, they found a National Geodetic Survey marker. The top of the dome offered a view of the world to the horizons. From the peak, Lady Bird Johnson felt "one owned the world in every direction!"¹⁸ This feeling of being on top of the world captured the meaning of the Hill Country for the Johnsons.

The resolution and aftermath of the threatened steel strike of 1965 offered another example of the importance of the ranch to Johnson. In the middle of the 1960s, the production of steel remained an important U.S. industry, crucial to national defense and an important basis of the industrial economy. A strike deadline set for September 1, 1965, had the potential to disrupt the functioning of the U.S. economy. A 1959 strike in the industry had been a catalyst for the recession of 1960_61, a reprise of which Johnson desperately wanted to avoid. Negotiations between the United Steelworkers of America, headed by its new president, I. W. Abel, and the steel industry had ended. On the evening of August 17, Johnson met with Abel and Califano in the Oval Office to see how far apart the two sides really were. After his staff reviewed the documents, Johnson told Califano, "I'm afraid this one's going to end up here"—in the Oval Office, adjudicated by the president. According to Califano, Johnson did not fear being compelled to resolve the dispute; in fact, he "welcomed the challenge."¹⁹

A tense two weeks followed. The gulf between labor and management remained wide, and Johnson feared the prospect that any increase in wages would cause a larger increase in the price of steel. By August 25, a strike appeared even more likely. Abel had made promises to his constituency that he intended to keep, and management officials were prepared to battle to avoid concessions to labor. On August 26, Johnson laid down the terms he thought best in a meeting that included Secretary of Commerce John Connor, Secretary of Labor William Wirtz, Treasury Secretary Joseph Fowler, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Gardner Ackley, and HEW Secretary Califano. Johnson directed Connor to advise industry representatives that a 3.2 percent increase in wages and benefits, equivalent to the 1964 numerical wage-price guidepost for economic growth, could be granted without a concomitant increase in the price of steel. Wirtz, who represented labor issues in the cabinet, thought that this would tie Abel's hands; Connor, a former Fortune 500 chief executive, had expressed private sympathy with the steel industry's claim that the 3.2 percent increase should include a rise in the cost of steel.²⁰

Johnson left the next day for the ranch to celebrate his fifty-seventh birthday. Even in the midst of a major crisis with important ramifications for the U.S. economy, he left Washington, D.C., for this customary celebratory occasion. The communications infrastructure installed at the ranch to support the presidency made it possible for Johnson to be geographically distant and still remain current with any developments in the situation. During his three days in Texas, he kept in close touch, tracking the events through Califano and others.²¹

When Johnson returned from Texas for a Monday, August 30, breakfast meeting, he began to reveal his strategy to avert the strike. The politics of his approach were typical. He utilized the skills of the individuals involved, emphasizing the cost to them if they failed to find a resolution. When necessary, he cajoled people, reminding them that if they failed, the consequences would be vast. He intimated that if he was compelled to do so, he might use provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, anathema to labor, to delay the strike for eighty days. He utilized the prestige of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower by inviting him to the White House, playing on Eisenhower's antipathy for both labor and the steel industry and subtly reminding the nation of the imperative of cooperation during wartime. The negotiating teams were made aware of Eisenhower's interest in the situation. Johnson even brought people with whom he had ongoing disagreements, in particular Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, into the process, taking advantage of the political cachet they brought to the situation. As he entrusted the negotiations to Connor and Wirtz, telling them that he depended solely on them to resolve the issue, Johnson also opened a back channel between labor and management. Clark Clifford, a close advisor of Democratic presidents who had represented Republic Steel before joining the administration, and U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, who had negotiated on behalf of the steelworkers during his career as an attorney, bypassed the formal negotiations; Johnson told them that they too were his only hope for resolution of the dispute. By turning up the pressure from a range of sources and making leaders feel personally responsible for the situation, the president gave industry and labor two choices: either agree with each other or face a president determined to make both sides pay for pushing the nation to the brink of economic calamity.²²

On August 30, labor and management representatives were sequestered in a room at the White House, given only the information that Johnson wanted them to receive, and told to get the negotiation process moving. There was only a little time left to secure an extension of the strike deadline. But within a few hours of the 1:00 p.m. beginning of the meeting, the parties agreed to an eight-day extension. The negotiations resumed, with Johnson playing an expanding role. At one point, the president pulled Abel out of the meeting and told him that if labor put the national interest first in this case, Johnson would give labor's interests primacy when the opportunity arose. Despite such offers, the two sides seemed no closer to any resolution.

A week of strained meetings that lasted into the late evening and early morning hours followed. Johnson monitored the events closely as Congress debated and passed pieces of Great Society legislation. With the talks looking deadlocked, Johnson brought everyone involved back into his office and again pleaded with them, flattered them, and cajoled them. In one instance, Johnson used a personal entreaty to further negotiations. He wanted to be at the ranch with Lady Bird for the upcoming Labor Day weekend, he told the gathered officials. It was the last real weekend of summer. The chance to spend it at his ranch was so important to him that he would agree to invite them all to his next inauguration in 1969 if they reached an agreement in time for him to go to Texas for the holiday weekend.²³ This strategy involved both flattery and intimidation; the president needed them and simultaneously reminded them of his needs. Johnson surmised that both sides had come to rely on the cabinet secretaries for leadership in the resolution of the agreement. When Johnson found out through his back channel that Wirtz and Connor, the two cabinet members, could not agree, he forced an agreement. With this accomplished, the negotiations quickly came to a successful conclusion.²⁴

On Friday, September 3, 1965, the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, word came to Lady Bird Johnson at about 4:00 p.m. suggesting that she turn on the television. Live on the national news, she saw her husband,"jubilant, calm, never looking stronger," she remembered, with Abel and R. Conrad Cooper, the chief negotiator for the steel industry, as the president announced the successful conclusion of the negotiations. The threat of the strike was over. When Lady Bird Johnson telephoned him, he said that by 7:00 p.m. he would be on his way to Texas for the Labor Day weekend.²⁵

Strategic and necessary, Johnson's attachment to the ranch played a significant role in the steel negotiations. His wish to be in Texas came to represent his desires to the negotiators, reinforced by the trip he made to the ranch in the middle of the negotiations. His suggestion that they were denying him the last big weekend of the summer took the place of insisting that the strike had to be avoided for the good of the nation. Johnson replaced the national interest with his personal needs, with something the negotiators could understand and relate to their own desires. In his way, Johnson told the negotiators that they had to resolve the issue quickly. His need for a last summer trip to the ranch served as a catalyst for this understanding.

The weeks of the steel negotiations were among the most stressful of the first two years of the Johnson presidency. In their aftermath, Johnson rushed to the ranch to unwind. He announced the end of the strike on the evening television news on all three national networks and within thirty minutes was on his way to Texas. Johnson headed back to the place he loved and needed, rewarding himself for the successful completion of a difficult task. The ranch once again served as a haven, a place where he could release the pressure of the White House and Washington, D.C.²⁶

It was also the place where Johnson went to make his toughest decisions. The most difficult choice he ever faced was the decision about running for reelection in 1968. As the war in Vietnam worsened and opposition to it grew, the popularity of the Johnson administration had precipitously declined. For a man who needed public approval as much as Lyndon Johnson, this was a hard reality. Even though in 1964 and 1965 he had acknowledged that he knew the postelection honeymoon of popularity could not last, he was visibly shaken by the response to his policies. The chant "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" that came to permeate college campuses was noxious, personally offensive, and insulting, but it was also a reflection of changing public attitudes toward this president and ultimately the presidency.²⁷ To Lyndon Johnson, who had spent his life seeking power only to arrive at its pinnacle by a fluke, the reality of growing opposition required him to rethink his personal objectives in light of the needs of the nation.

In the setting that most relaxed him and where he felt he had the most control, he made the decisions that mattered most. Johnson's big decision about whether to run again became an ongoing conversation that lasted from the middle of 1967 into early 1968. Prone to reflecting aloud, Johnson sounded out his friends on a number of occasions before he decided to go public with his decision to decline the nomination. The ranch was the setting for much of this discussion; in the Hill Country, Johnson had the people around him and the vistas he required for this, the toughest of decisions. In one of many conversations about the subject of reelection, Johnson drove around the ranch on September 8, 1967, with John Connally and Congressman J. J. "Jake" Pickle for eight hours. In Lady Bird Johnson's recollection of the day, the Johnsons had already decided he would not to run again. As was typical for a politician of Johnson's skill and experience, the question had become how to announce his decision. Connally, a close confidante of the president who had recently stepped down from the governorship of Texas, knew the stresses and strains of high office. The Johnsons had discussed the issue of running for reelection with him throughout the summer, and Connally believed that Johnson had come to a decision to which he would stick. Lady Bird Johnson remembered that Pickle was amazed and refused to believe that Johnson would not run again.²⁸

The conversation about Johnson's options continued throughout the winter of 1967_68. In another instance of the Hill Country serving as a setting for deep reflection, on January 4, 1968, Lyndon Johnson spent the entire day in his Austin office, speaking with R. Sargent Shriver; Charles Schultze, director of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget from 1965 to 1967; and Schultze's successor, Charles Zwick. After the discussions, the Johnsons and John and Nellie Connally drove back from Austin through a heavy fog, had dinner, and sat in Johnson's bedroom for more than three hours, where they again talked about whether Johnson should run for reelection. The Connallys offered sound advice, John Connally suggesting that Johnson should run only if he could look forward to being president again. Nellie Connally remarked that if Johnson decided not to run, he might feel that time had stopped, almost as if someone close to him had died. After that, she said, a wave of great relief would follow. This had been their experience after they decided John Connally would not seek the governorship of Texas again.²⁹

At the ranch he loved, Johnson was able to see more clearly, to let down his guard more thoroughly. He felt older and more tired than he had before taking over the presidency, he told Lady Bird and the Connallys, and was not sure he could give the country what it needed and deserved. How would the servicemen in Vietnam respond? Johnson wondered. How would history would judge him if he chose to withdraw? How would his friends who believed in him regard the decision? Johnson, however, had already decided. "We went round and round," Lady Bird Johnson remembered, "finding no cool oasis, no definite time for an acceptable exit."³⁰

Although the accounts of Johnson's decision not to seek reelection are few, they all reflect one salient feature. This was a decision discussed and made almost exclusively at the Texas White House and in the Hill Country. The people with whom Johnson discussed it were Texans, and the subject was discussed in the manner of Texas. Johnson's White House staff knew little of the president's intentions until a few days before the speech. Everyone, friend and foe, expected Johnson to run again. On March 31, 1968, the day of the speech in which Johnson planned to announce his decision to leave office, former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford had a meeting with the president and left expecting to run his 1968 campaign. Even Johnson's close advisor Clark Clifford was stunned. "You could have knocked my eyes off with a stick," the venerated statesman remembered his reaction to the news being, about four hours before Johnson delivered the speech. "The weight of the day and the weeks and the months had lifted," Lyndon Johnson remembered as the immediate aftermath of the speech. The evening after the decision was announced, Johnson, looking as if "he'd been pulled through a wringer," was the host for a dinner party at the ranch. Even then, he could muse about his administration, its accomplishments and shortcomings.³¹ Again the ranch held its recuperative qualities, its special ability to let the president be the human being he was capable of being. Among friends and in a place in which he felt almost complete control, Johnson could speak with a candor rarely possible elsewhere. The decision not to seek a second full term was Lyndon Johnson's secret from the world, held closely with his many friends in the Hill Country he loved.

The decision not to seek reelection also had an impact on the ranch house. Once the Johnsons were reasonably certain that they would return home to the ranch in January, 1969, remodeling for the post-presidential years began. Johnson's decision not to seek reelection and their determination to build master bedroom suites were, in Lady Bird Johnson's words, "complementary and coincident." The Johnsons had great confidence in their architectural team, led by Roy White and including landscape architect Richard Myrick and designer Herbert Wells, and this mitigated any concerns they had about building at the ranch while they continued to reside at the White House and could not regularly oversee the work.³²

Two master bedroom suites, which Lady Bird Johnson called her "forever rooms," were the core of this development program. White was given the task of designing the rooms. Lady Bird Johnson specified that her room offer a good view to the east, lots of bookshelves, and a fireplace. Lyndon Johnson could not get enough light for his suite. A domed skylight was installed in his bathroom, and the entire suite had more light than was needed. White recalled that once when he took a light-meter reading, the "hand shot off the contraption and it almost blinded you." The president's bedroom was just as well lit.³³

The construction of these new rooms during the presidency accentuated the haven-like characteristics of the ranch. The two bedroom suites were designed for the post-presidential needs of the Johnsons, another dimension of the control the president craved, and they reinforced the permanence of the Johnsons at the ranch. In the aftermath of the construction of these new rooms, the ranch—always home—was even more closely identified with the personal side of the Johnsons' lives. The never-ending process of making the ranch a home continued long after its status as homeplace was confirmed and widely accepted.

The ranch also served to lift the president's spirits during and after the cataclysmic events of 1968. The first of these events was the April 4, 1968, assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee. In Memphis to lead a march in support of striking sanitation workers, King was killed by a sniper's bullet as he stood on a motel room balcony. At the White House, Johnson later wrote, "a jumble of anxious thoughts ran through my mind, including fear, confusion, and outrage." Johnson's thoughts quickly turned to the King family, and he telephoned Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King's widow, to express his condolences. A few moments later, Johnson went on national television from the West Lobby and asked "every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by nonviolence. . . . It is only by joining together and only by working together that we can continue to move toward equality and fulfillment for all people."³⁴

Groups of people across the nation failed to heed his words. The ramifications of the assassination were instantaneous and immense; riots broke out in at least 125 U.S. cities, and in the African American sections of a number of American cities, turmoil followed. Washington, D.C., home to a large African American population, experienced considerable violence. More than seven hundred fires lit the night sky. By the next evening, the White House had become, in Lady Bird Johnson's words, "a fortress." As the rioting in the nation's capital became worse, Lyndon Johnson ordered four thousand National Guard troops into the capital to restore order. Within two days, the riots in Washington, D.C., ended, leaving at least 6 dead and as many as 350 injured.³⁵

Johnson had close ties with the Civil Rights Movement, and in the aftermath of King's assassination he invited its leaders to the White House. On the advice of the Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the president did not attend King's funeral, a decision that was widely criticized. "Once again," Johnson said, "the strange mixture of public and private capacities inherent in the Presidency prevented free action." As a private citizen, Johnson would have attended; as president, following the recommendations of his security staff, he could not. By bringing the civil rights leaders to the White House and seeking accommodation, however, Johnson could obviate criticism and avoid appearing insensitive in the aftermath of the tragic episode.³⁶

By 1968, Lyndon Johnson had a strong track record as supporter of civil rights, and at the suggestion of his White House visitors, he planned to engineer another legislative victory. Since 1966, the Johnson administration had sought the passage of a law that forbid discrimination against home buyers and renters on the basis of race. Such a measure, typically referred to as an open housing law, would go a long way toward ending segregation in housing. The African American community supported the bill, but traditionally Democratic constituencies, particularly working-class European-American ethnic communities in large cities, were adamantly opposed to it. In the Senate, the powerful Everett Dirksen of Illinois led the opposition. The bill to end discrimination in housing had been stalled for two years.

Early in 1968, advocates of open housing suddenly found a more receptive climate. Senator Dirksen withdrew his opposition to the measure, and on March 11 the Senate passed the bill. The fate of open housing rested in the rules committee of the House of Representatives, a committee Johnson called "that graveyard of so much progressive legislation." The bill stalled there, becoming a weapon in the Republican effort to unseat Johnson in 1968; campaign literature promised to protect people from "LBJ's bureaucrats." When Johnson announced his decision not to run for reelection on March 31, 1968, chances of the bill's passage again improved.³⁷

After the King assassination, Johnson felt that there was a small window during which the legislation could be passed, and he pressed for rapid action. The assassination generated tremendous sympathy for the Civil Rights Movement. For all of the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to discredit King, he remained a monumental figure, the only person in the nation who had the stature to rely on moral suasion. His commitment to nonviolence and the clear and precise nature of the words he spoke resonated with the public. Johnson believed rapid action was essential to passage of the open housing bill, before a backlash from the rioting could turn sympathy into contempt, "normal compassion," as he said, "into bitterness, retaliation, and anger." Johnson seized the opportunity and channeled all his efforts into passage of open housing legislation. "He just put everything aside," recalled Robert C. Weaver. "This is it. This is the time. And he knew how to take advantage of the cards he had." On April 10, the House voted on the bill. In the final tally, 250 voted for the measure, while 171 opposed it. The next day, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 in the East Room of the White House, dedicating it to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.³⁸

The assassination of King was a thunderous blow to the nation as well as a tragedy of immense proportions. King was perhaps the only person in the nation who could straddle the racial fissures of 1968, often the most reasonable voice in a nation seemingly gone mad. Johnson had had a volatile relationship with King. The two men, both dominant personalities, had trouble establishing a rapport. Both favored social change, but in different ways: Johnson was a tactician, using legislation and maintaining social order, while King favored direct, nonviolent action that disrupted social conventions. The two men needed each other, and for a time they worked together well, acquiring mutual respect if not always understanding. Even though Johnson remained closer to three other African American leaders—Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young of the Urban League; and A. Philip Randolph, the seventy-four-year-old venerated leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters who had merged the role of labor leader with that of independent civil rights advocate—and even though King's opposition to the war in Vietnam had strained their relations badly, the president recognized King's heroic qualities and retained tremendous respect for the slain civil rights leader.³⁹

In a time of tragedy and after the signing of the new civil rights bill, Johnson sought the brief respite that only his ranch could provide. The day after the bill signing, Friday, April 12, he left for the ranch for the weekend before continuing to Hawaii on a trip that had been postponed because of the assassination. In this instance, in the aftermath of one of the most destructive weeks in U.S. history, the ranch was once again, in Lady Bird's words, "an island of peace and rest." On Saturday, the Johnsons took a typical driving trip that included the Green Mountain Ranch, the Davis Ranch, and the lake. At about 8:00 p.m., the Johnsons flew to the West Ranch and joined the Moursands for dinner. The president and
A. W. Moursand engaged in a domino game, full of "bluffing and teasing and as much talk as skill," Lady Bird Johnson remembered. The tension of the previous week melted in the Hill Country evening, and the importance of the place and the friendships forged there seemed great. Lady Bird Johnson felt this most strongly that night. "For longer than twenty years, I have enjoyed the hospitality of this house," she recorded in her diary. The Johnsons were home by eleven, in typical rural fashion. "What a good way to spend a day—that is, in contrast to those that have gone before," Lady Bird reflected. "This was the sort of day when time stood still and I was satisfied with the present and didn't reach for anything else."⁴⁰

That ability to see the world healed and whole from the perspective of the Hill Country was the most important piece of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and his ranch. The pace of Washington, D.C., and the frenetic demands made there never offered a moment during which to find perspective. The ranch provided that commodity in abundance. It was a place the president trusted, a place where he could be and see in a way he could not elsewhere. In Johnson's way of looking at the world, the ranch offered perspective and crucial distance. The presence of friends and the control he could exercise over the workings of the property not only allowed him elusive clarity and anchored him to his sense of what was right, but they also allowed him to express an incredible degree of candor. Such candor mostly came outside of conventional reporting channels, away from the pens and cameras of the press and among only the closest of the president's friends and associates, but its importance in the president's life cannot be overstated. For Lyndon B. Johnson, the ranch was haven from the world at large, from the difficult decisions he had to make, from the political and personal opponents with whom he daily dealt. There he could set the terms of even presidential existence and could control the interaction between the myriad facets of his responsibilities. This seeming mastery gave the president a kind of personal confidence that he never felt in Washington, D.C. It washed his doubts away, made him capable of reflection in broad and meaningful ways, and reinforced his basic beliefs. It was no wonder that even the most consistent of his adversaries in his own mind—the press—found him more personable along the Pedernales River.