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

EPILOGUE Power and Place in American Culture

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"There's no other place, no Virgin Islands, no Miami coastline, no boat trips across the Atlantic that can do for me what this soil, this land, this water, this people, and what these hills, these surroundings can do. . . . They provide the stimulation and inspiration that nothing else can provide."¹ This was how Lyndon B. Johnson summed up the meaning of the Hill Country, the world from which he came and that his ranch came to represent to the world at large. The ranch provided him with something that no other place on the planet truly did: it helped his restless soul find peace. There this domineering man could fashion the kind of control he needed to feel secure. There the rhythms of life relaxed him and helped him see clearly. There he could be candid in a manner he could not elsewhere. The man; his genius for politics; the place that he chose to represent those politics; the meaning of that place; the way in which this meaning was transmitted to a public that first adored Johnson, then came to fear him, and finally left him shouldering the burden of its disappointment with the direction of American society—all these were intrinsically and inextricably wrapped up in the LBJ Ranch.

This ranch, known ever after as the Texas White House, receded from the public view after the ex-president's death in 1973. It remained a home to Lady Bird Johnson as well as the seat of the Johnson family cattle enterprise, but it receded from its central place in American political culture and became historic in its appeal. In accordance with Johnson's wishes, the ranch was incorporated into the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park, comprised of his boyhood home in Johnson City, his birthplace, and the Texas White House. In effect, Johnson sought to take the meaning of the ranch, the symbolism he had developed for it, and make it an integral part of his legacy. This was one more way in which the dynamic former president could influence American history.

The Texas White House is a symbolic but anomalous place in the line of presidential residences. Many of these had iconographic features similar to those of the LBJ Ranch; others became more important as a result of changing technologies. George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello were the prototypes for presidential homes; rural, spacious, and evocative, they set a standard for the image of a president's home. Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee had much in common with the Texas White House; it, too, was far from the nation's capital, a representative of a form of rural economy that had iconographic connotations. In Jackson's time, of course, the president could not easily commute from Washington, D.C., to his home and certainly could not conduct the business of his office from there. Dwight D. Eisenhower's Gettysburg farm served as a prototype for the way Johnson used his ranch. By the 1950s, air transportation had improved significantly, and Eisenhower could regularly commute to his farm. But the communications systems that Johnson installed at the Texas White House were unavailable at the Gettysburg farm. The Kennedy family estate at Hyannisport also shared characteristics with the Texas White House. Both locations had strong familial connotations, Kennedy's because of the direct line from his father and mother, Johnson's because of his aunt's and uncle's ownership of the property and his childhood memories of the ranch as the center of family holiday and celebratory activities.

Yet among presidential residences, only the Texas White House melded all these characteristics. It evoked sentiment about rural America, retained the family ties so important in expressing presidential identity, could be easily reached in the age of the jet airplane, and had the most sophisticated communications system in the world. The Texas White House became an extension of the White House, an office in a different setting. It served as a transition between an older American motif, the home-as-residence, and its modern counterpart, the home-as-extension-of-workplace. In this respect, Johnson's use of the Texas White House foreshadowed trends in larger American society, as more and more people began to work their longer hours from their homes.

Johnson's use of the Texas White House was also a precursor of the modern use of presidential homes. Richard M. Nixon's San Clemente, Ronald Reagan's ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains in California, and George H. W. Bush's Kennebunkport estate were successors to the Texas White House. All were personal residences that became presidential; all were equipped with the communications systems and technologies necessary to assure that the president was in contact with everyone he needed at all times. But only the Texas White House retained the immense cultural cachet that came with this status. As the first of a type, clearly identified with the president and his chosen way of life, visible in the media in constant and obvious ways, the Texas White House stood alone among presidential residences. It was mythic, while the others were merely real and important.

The Texas White House also served as a bridge between the different types of presidential residences, for it embodied characteristics of all the different homes. Like Jackson's Hermitage, it was a working place. The presence of Dale Malechek and his crews, the cattle in the pastures, and Johnson's predilection for showing the eastern press ranch activities made its functional attributes abundantly clear. Like San Clemente and Kennebunkport, the Texas White House was a place for leisure and recreation, a place where the Johnsons could be themselves and act as they chose. Johnson managed to maintain a measure of privacy and, indeed, idiosyncracy at the ranch that was possible only because it was his ranch. But the Texas White House also became a public symbol, as identifiably Johnson's as his vivid mannerisms and twangy speech.

The combination of media attention and the ranch's figurative and literal distance from urban life gave the Texas White House unequaled symbolic meaning and significance for the nation during the turbulent 1960s. The mythology of the ranch served to represent the transformative quality of American life, a symbolism that followed Franklin D. Roosevelt on his crutches during the New Deal, followed Harry Truman's common roots and the stories about his many failures. Johnson was not born to this ranch, the myth articulated; the dogtrot cabin nearby was his birthplace. He reached the ranch house by his own efforts, making the tale of his eight-hundred-yard journey up the road into a classic American "pull-yourself-up-by your bootstraps" story. Johnson fashioned the ranch as a symbol of plain speaking and plain living, of a rural America of networks of families and friends that was part of the mythic past for which Americans wistfully yearned. In this it became a representation of the best of American life, its simplicity, integrity, and purity.

The Texas White House also served as the backdrop for Johnson's remedies for the nation's social ills, his Great Society legislation and the many programs it fostered. Citing his experiences as a young man in rural Texas, Johnson made his personal experiences a cornerstone of the rationale for educational and social programs. The fictive poverty of his youth, to which he often referred, symbolized the need for these programs; the Pedernales River valley became the setting Johnson favored when signing these bills into law. The idyllic Hill Country Wt nicely the president's views of the remedies for the nation's problems. Its beauty offered the promise shared in the social programs of the era; the setting harkened back to a preindustrial and fictive egalitarian past. As a setting for the enactment of important legislation, the Texas White House became a resonant symbol.

Johnson masterfully used the ranch to express contradictory sentiments. As well as acting as a symbol of his personal triumph, the ranch represented common American roots, ordinary and shared origins. Johnson presented himself as a man of the people during much of his career, and the ranch accentuated that pose. He also showed this ordinary side in the White House; of all post-Civil War presidents, only Johnson and possibly Harry Truman could have spoken of animals as "mortgage-lifters." Most presidents prior to Johnson had little experience with the travails of everyday life. They were closer to George H. W. Bush in his amazement at grocery store scanners during the 1992 campaign. Despite the wealth he amassed and the preternatural drive that separated him from the mass of people, Johnson and his ranch retained a dimension of rootedness with which millions identified.

For Johnson, the ranch was also a source of power. In his own view, it defined him as a man of stature, someone who belonged in the Senate and the White House as well as at home. The ranch was visible evidence of belonging, a characteristic important to Johnson. The ranch gave him sustenance and strength, stability and comfort. In his driving jaunts around the Hill Country, sitting on rocks watching the sun set or inspecting his herds, Johnson showed an emotional depth that he masked elsewhere. He could use the ranch and its environment as a means of renewal, a way to refresh himself for yet another of the endless political battles that dominated the life of the president.

But most importantly to Lyndon Johnson, he had control in the Hill Country. Unlike Washington, D.C., the pace and rhythm at the ranch followed his desires. On his ranch he could always assert his primacy and, in the process, behave in a magnanimous manner that endeared him to visitors and the press alike. It was his place, and he could use his knowledge of rural ways to play a game of "one-upmanship" with people who visited. At Johnson's ranch, he was never bested. During his years in the White House and in retirement, this helped him establish the hierarchies so important to the way he understood the world.

The Texas White House developed a unique symbolism that resulted from the image Johnson fashioned and from the way in which it was presented to the public. The ranch came to mean, first and foremost, national heritage; in an era when the Western movie dominated the national sense of identity and when the westward experience represented the nation, the ranch linked Johnson to what he and for a long time the public saw as the quintessential American experience. Such roots and the meaning they conveyed gave Johnson power to persuade, to cajole, to enunciate as authentic his goals and dreams for the nation. The ranch represented the reality of his feelings, made them more comprehensible and more believable as a result of their ties to the Hill Country.

The ranch also represented independence in an era that increasingly valued "doing your own thing." During the 1960s, individualism came to replace interdependence as a goal for American society. While the emphasis on personal independence had always been strong in American culture, the oppositional politics of the era accentuated it even further. Even his detractors gave Johnson credit for acting as an individual, albeit one operating with a value system entirely different from theirs. In the end, the people who refused him this distinction—the press and other commentators—were those most closely allied with the concept of individual expression.

In this way, Johnson's ranch became as anachronistic as the man himself. When he built the image of himself as a westerner, when he took the ranch and indeed Texas and made a claim for their place in the nation, Johnson played off of national myths that were rife in popular culture. Westerns such as John Ford's The Searchers reflected the importance of the idea of a homeplace, a concept broadly current in Texas literature and history. No less an eminence than John Graves, Texas's writer laureate, stubbornly affirmed the virtues of a homeplace—with all its drawbacks—throughout a long and beautifully prolific life. By the time Johnson left office, however, the nation had changed, its values shifting away from the kind of place-based emphasis so crucial to Johnson. Even the Western, the basis of the very mythology that Johnson had embraced and packaged for the public, had become something new. After Little Big Man in 1970 and especially with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which debuted in 1973, the year of Johnson's death, the idea of the need for a place had been replaced by an emphasis on the need to wander. The hero had become an antihero, the place one to leave, not one to which to return. When Johnson needed the ranch most as a symbol, it had become an anachronism, a reflection of values that had receded from the national stage.

The ranch simultaneously represented a fusion of the modern world with traditional America. Its satellite dishes, communications apparatus, televisions, and telephones showed a rural world with modern accouterments, a melding of the agrarian image of Thomas Jefferson's view of the nation with the world of technology. This melding of different worlds was something to which Americans aspired: rural people sought the seeming luxury of modern communications systems, and urban people sought the peace and quiet of the country without leaving the tools of their trades behind. The ranch subtly became both—a simpler and relaxing rural locale to urban Americans and an up-to-date modern agricultural and ranching operation to rural people. That malleability characterized Johnson as well; it contributed to his success and ironically to his demise as well.

In the end, the ranch also represented a spirit, a feeling of knowing what was right not just for American society but for the world. The ranch became a symbol for being grounded, for having roots in a genuine world that differed from the head-turning pull of politics and high society. In that respect, the Texas White House represented common sense in a world that seemed increasingly devoid of it. The ranch was, over time, what Lyndon B. Johnson wanted it to be, both for the public and for himself. For the public it became the symbol of what was good about the nation, fashioned to the demands of the office of senator, vice president, and president. For Johnson, it became an articulation of his roots and his memories, the most special place on earth. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson's favorite name for the place, "our heart's home," was quite apt. It reflected what they felt about their place in the Hill Country; as they looked at the stars that shone above the shimmering Pedernales River, both Johnsons always knew that they were home.