To the four pool reporters in the third helicopter, the land below, with its trees bare and meadows gray-brown in winter, was a shock; “sere and bleak” one was to call it, “so empty” another would say. “We had no idea of the emptiness.” The fifty miles west of Bergstrom had only two tiny villages—Dripping Springs and Henly. The miles of Texas Hill Country between them were interrupted only by the occasional farm or ranch house, or by stone chimneys jutting up out of debris where houses had once stood before their owners gave up and moved away. The helicopters, their engines as loud as thunder in that silent landscape, roared over it, scattering herds of sheep and goats as they neared; even some of the placid white-faced Herefords were startled into lumbering a few steps. And then, down to the right, was a slightly larger huddle of houses and stores around a courthouse. When Lyndon Johnson had been growing up in Johnson City, the hills had added to the isolation of this “island town” surrounded by a vast sea of land, the only roads out of it unpaved, rutted, often impassable in winter. The helicopters made nothing of the hills; in no more than a minute or two after Johnson City, they were over the Pedernales Valley and the little river, as brown as the land, and were approaching the Johnson Ranch, a sprawling, comfortable but not huge house, only seeming huge in that land of little houses, a freshly painted white against the muted colors of the Hill Country, with the blue of the swimming pool beside it. And from the tall flagpole in front of the house, under the American flag, hung another flag, one that hadn’t been there when he had last seen his ranch on November 21. The sky was literally cloudless on this day before Christmas—a bright and breezy day, as would be most of the thirteen days Johnson was to spend on the ranch over the Christmas break. It was that beautiful, glittering, pitiless blue sky, that “sapphire” Hill Country sky, at which his father and mother had stared day after day during those blazing Hill Country summers, looking in vain for a cloud that might mean rain, as their cotton and their dreams died in the drought. But fluttering against that sky now was a dark blue flag with a circle of white stars around an eagle holding an olive branch and arrows in his talons, the flag that meant that this house was the home of the President of the United States.
Lyndon Johnson’s changes in mood had always been violent, veering from his sad, silent spells to the periods of almost frenzied euphoria that his aides called “highs.” The depth of the depression he had been in when he left the Pedernales a month before was matched by the height of his elation now. He couldn’t contain himself. It had been a long day, but Frank Cormier of the AP and the three other pool reporters were “whisked off by helicopter” to Judge Moursund’s ranch, even deeper in the hills.
“A Johnson we had never seen emerged at the Moursund ranch,” Cormier wrote. “Gone were the low shoes,” the necktie and suit. The President was wearing hand-tooled cowboy boots, an open-necked khaki shirt and a tan Stetson, which he pushed back to “a rakish angle upon the familiar head.” Moursund had two rifles in his hands, and Johnson took one. Telling the reporters “The Judge and I are goin’ to do a little deer huntin’ and you-all can tag along if you want to,” he crammed them into the back seat of Moursund’s convertible, and they headed off across the hills, bumping along rutted trails and lurching across gullies. Spotting a grazing doe, Johnson rested his rifle on the window to take aim, but lowered the gun, saying, “I haven’t got the heart to kill her.” The hunt ended without any shots being fired, but Johnson jumped out of the car happily. “I’ve only been here an hour and I feel better already,” he said.
The next day, Christmas, a Wednesday, a brief photo session had been scheduled so that news photographers could take pictures of him on the lawn in front of the ranch—a full tour of the ranch house had been scheduled for Friday—and about fifty photographers, along with a dozen or so reporters hoping for a chance to ask a few questions during the photo session, had come out from Austin on a chartered bus. But when the picture-taking was over and they started to leave, he wouldn’t let them go. His brother, his two surviving sisters, their children and other Johnson family members—twenty-seven in all—were at the ranch for Christmas dinner, and he had them come out of the house, and lined them up, ordering them about “as though they were junior senators,” as one reporter put it, and introduced them to the press one by one.
“This is Aunt Jessie, Miz Jessie Hatcher, who did all my cooking, washing and sewing for me while I was in school in Houston.
“This is Uncle Huffman Baines. Uncle Huffman, how old are you?”
“I don’t know,” Uncle Huffman replied.
“A very sensible answer,” the President said. “He’s seventy-nine, but he looks fifty-nine, and he never had but one job in his life,” a lifetime post as a telephone company engineer, he explained. “And this is Cousin Oreole, who keeps us fit” because her house was half a mile down the road from the ranch house, and he and Lady Bird walked down to see her almost every evening. “And when you sit down to visit with her, you have to be mentally fit.” There were twenty-seven introductions to be made, with special attention to his daughters (“Her boyfriend is on his way here from Wisconsin,” he said in introducing Lucy. “I mean one of her boyfriends”). Lynda was wearing her Christmas gift from her father, a loose-fitting red shift; he reached out and bundled up the fabric, to prove, he said with a smile, that she wasn’t in a family way. Next he had the four secretaries he had brought from Washington—Marie Fehmer, Vicky McCammon, Yolanda Boozer and his new black secretary, Gerri Whittington—come out of the house, so that he could introduce them.
The photographers and reporters started to leave, but he still wouldn’t let them. “Come in and see our house,” he said, and asked Lady Bird if there wasn’t time before dinner to take the group on a tour.
Actually, dinner was ready—and had been for some time. And parts of the house weren’t in condition to be seen by journalists.
“Her mouth opened in wordless surprise and horror,” one reporter was to write. “Why … yes,” she managed to say. “But I’d just love to give them a wonderful tour when they come back Friday. The turkey is ready and the dressing is getting cold.” There was a pause while she and her husband exchanged glances. “But whatever you say, darling.”
He showed them the living room, with the enormous fireplace, and his desk (“Don’t take any pictures of the desktop. I think there are some secret documents on it”), and the framed letter to Sam Houston from his great-grandfather (“He was a Baptist preacher, and he was writing to renew a note at eight percent interest”), and the paintings, including one that he told them was his favorite, of a farm girl standing happily looking up at clouds, that was named First Rain—he didn’t tell them why it was his favorite—and they saw the only photograph in the room, the same photograph that was the only one Lady Bird had carried into the White House. He showed them the deer-head hat rack, with the deer’s nose covered with red felt for Christmas. It was holding fourteen hats, and he told them anecdotes about several. The tour continued. The sixty journalists arrived at the master bedroom. The door was locked. He knocked, and then knocked again. “Mrs. Johnson has locked the bedroom on me,” he said. She opened it a moment later; it was obvious, Time reported, that she “had just finished tidying up.”
After he showed the group the other six bedrooms, Lady Bird was observed tugging on his sleeve, but all they had seen thus far was the inside. He showed them the swimming pool, and explained the heating system, and the family graveyard, and told them who was buried there, and the Friendship Walk, relating anecdotes about various famous guests on their ranch visits. “Go pipe that music in,” he told Lynda, and the Muzak in the live oaks was turned on. “Overflowing with energy,” Cormier wrote, “the President hopped up on a stone wall” overlooking the Pedernales and “assured us” the little stream “could become a raging torrent,” told about various floods, including the one that had almost marooned Lady Bird on the ranch, and about the dam he had built across the river. Then, Cormier wrote, “with long strides
, the President led us to the family hangar … to admire a new brown and white” plane the Johnsons owned, and then to the livestock loading pens and chutes. “That’s where the cattle go out and the money comes in,” he explained.
It might, it seemed, be time to leave. The press corps started to walk toward the buses. But as Johnson turned to go inside, he had a thought. “I’ve got something for you-all if you’ll wait a minute,” he said, and sent aides hurrying off to return with large cartons containing souvenir ashtrays bearing a map of Texas with the ranch’s location indicated by a star. “Only take one,” he said. In unwrapping them, some of the reporters dropped the cellophane wrappers on the lawn, and, one was to recall, “Our final view was of our Chief Executive stooping to retrieve them.”
THEN, THREE DAYS LATER, on December 28, there was a state visit from the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Ludwig Erhard.
It began with the customary formalities that attended such visits, the nineteen-gun salute due a head of state as Erhard came down the ramp from his plane onto Bergstrom’s red carpet, the long receiving line with Johnson at its head and the state’s governor next to him, the military band playing the German and American national anthems, the honor guard parading the colors as the tall, bronzed President and the short, roly-poly, red-cheeked chancellor reviewed the ranks of rigid troops and then mounted, along with the governor, a small stand to make brief formal statements; the only disquieting notes were the cast on John Connally’s arm, his face, gaunt and pale in the bright Texas sun, and the faces of the Secret Service men, “alert and obviously concerned”—were they remembering another big plane gleaming in the Texas sun, another red carpet, another receiving line with Johnson and Connally at its head? But then the helicopters lifted off and headed west into the hills, and from the moment, twenty-five minutes later, that they touched down at the LBJ Ranch, the visit became, in the words of one reporter, “nothing remotely like” any state visit that the journalists had ever seen.
In contrast to the formalities of Washington, here, festooning the balcony over the front door of the ranch house, was bunting in West Germany’s red, yellow and black, a huge photograph of the chancellor and a sign saying “Willkommen!” After a photo and interview session for reporters with “diplomatic staffers who picked their way in shiny black street shoes across the ranch grounds,” as Newsweek put it, Johnson met with Erhard, only interpreters present, in the living room while Secretary of State Rusk, German foreign minister Gerhard Schroeder and their staffs crammed into the smaller adjoining room—much too small for the group—for staff discussions. And then Johnson drove Erhard, Schroeder and Rusk out for a tour of the ranch, and stopped the car in the middle of a meadow, and the President and chancellor discussed affairs of state while white-faced Herefords moved closer to the car. Meanwhile, accommodations were being arranged: between the main house and the guest house, the ranch had eight bedrooms but the German party numbered twenty-five, and the State Department delegation eight. Lady Bird moved out of her bedroom, Lynda and Lucy moved out of theirs into a single smaller room, other staffers moved in with ranch foreman Dale Malechek, and his wife, Jewel—beds were found for everyone, and at dinner everyone crammed around three tables in the Johnsons’ dining room.
The next day, Sunday, was spent in Fredericksburg, the community nineteen miles to the west down the Pedernales Valley that had been settled by an oxcart wagon train of Germans in 1846, after a harrowing, months-long journey through Comanche country. With its solid stone houses crowded close to the main street, the small, neat garden plots between them, and a church in early German Gothic style (“a rare bit of Nuremberg transplanted to Texas”), Fredericksburg was a tiny replica of Germany in the midst of the remote Texas Hill Country, and its residents clung to German folkways—there was an annual Saengerfest, or singing contest, and the Schuetzenbund held frequent shooting contests, and “Easter Fires” in the hills, and in its stores and streets German was heard at least as much as English. Along its main street, lined with German flags for the occasion, the names on the stores were Duecker’s, Beckmann’s, Kiehne’s and Schroeder’s, and the café was the Glockenspiel; the day’s special, the sign in its window proclaimed, was “Eisbein [pig’s knuckles] with sauerkraut.” First the President and chancellor and their staffs and security men visited the Pioneer Memorial, an octagonal replica of the “Vereins Kirche,” the church-fort built by the wagon-train pioneers. The welcoming speech by Fredericksburg’s mayor was in German—and emotional. Bring our greetings back to Germany; “that is the homeland of our forefathers,” he said. Erhard, replying, noted that Johnson had told him “that if I speak German, they will understand me better than they will understand him.” Then they went to church, where the hymns and “Silent Night” were sung in German; when, after the ceremony, Erhard told the pastor he had been surprised by that, the pastor told him that the hymns were always sung in German.
THAT AFTERNOON WAS the state dinner, held in Stonewall, a wide spot in the road between the LBJ Ranch and Fredericksburg.
“No one who was there is likely to forget that dinner,” Cormier was to recall. “The very idea of holding a state dinner in Stonewall, Texas, was daring … Barely a hamlet, Stonewall had just eight business establishments, three service stations, a café-motel, two grocery stores, a garage and a button factory—and even that listing makes it seem bigger than it really is.” The venue for the dinner was the Stonewall High School gymnasium, a converted wooden Army barracks, rather rickety, which carpenters had been hastily patching and local housewives painting for several days in a vain attempt to conceal its imperfections.
Inside, the walls had been decorated with yellow, red and black bunting, and the basketball backboards with cutouts of German eagles. The rest of the décor was Texas. The narrow stage was a diorama of the state’s symbols: Against its rear wall a corral fence had been erected with coiled lariats on its posts and a Western saddle and an Indian blanket on its top rail, from which dangled boots, spurs and a set of stirrups; propped against the fence were a wagon wheel and a banjo. Bales of hay completed the backdrop. In front of the fence, where the school’s ancient, battered upright piano usually stood, was a huge, shining concert grand piano, so large that the stage seemed to sag a little under its weight. On the floor of the basketball court thirty tables had been set with red-and-white-checked tablecloths; kerosene lanterns were the centerpieces.
The dinner was Texas: a large chuck wagon had been parked near the front door by Johnson’s favorite caterer, Walter Jetton of Fort Worth, “the Leonard Bernstein of Barbecue,” and next to it were Jetton’s barbecue spits on which, since 5 a.m., he and his sous-chefs, their Stetsons tilted back off their faces because of the heat, had been slathering his renowned special barbecue sauce onto vast expanses of meat—five hundred pounds of brisket and three hundred pounds of spareribs. The arriving guests, about three hundred natives and forty-five or fifty men in blue suits, were served the barbecue, together with hickory gravy, German potato salad, Texas coleslaw, ranch baked beans and sourdough biscuits. Then they went inside, Lady Bird escorting Erhard, Johnson behind them, “the leaders of two great nations carrying their own heaping plates” across the crowded gymnasium, filled with smoke and aroma from the barbecue spits. Dessert was a German chocolate cake baked from a recipe carried by the original pioneers, and the men in blue suits drank beer from paper cups, and, with dessert, coffee from tin cups. Strumming guitars, a country music band, the Wanderers Three, augmented to four members for the occasion, was “gathering rainbows and handing out schemes” with “a heart full of heather and a pocketful of dreams.”
And the ambiance in the little country gymnasium was Texas, too, nothing at all like a formal state dinner in the White House—and in its informality and friendliness, very much like a typical Texas “speaking,” the diplomats eating spareribs with their hands and making return trips to the chuck wagon. (Erhard’s once-heaping plate was empty by the end of the meal.) A warm buzz of t
alk and laughter filled the hall—much of it in German as Fredericksburg’s townspeople chatted happily with the representatives of the homeland. Up at the head table, Lady Bird and Erhard, despite their language differences, were talking together like old friends.
And, after dinner, the entertainment was also Texas.
The master of ceremonies was “Cactus” Pryor, “the George Jessel of Texas”; he apologized to the chancellor “because they had been unable to find a way to barbecue sauerkraut.” There was a Mexican mariachi band, square dances by the Billyettes, a precision dance team (not all that precise) from Fredericksburg High School and then German carols sung by cowgirls—the St. Mary’s High School choir in full cowgirl regalia: Stetsons, blue skirts, white blouses and red neckerchiefs—under the direction of a nun in head-to-toe black habit. They closed with “Deep in the Heart of Texas”—and that was in German, too. “Die Sterne bei Nacht sind gross und klar / Tief in das Herz von Texas …” After each couplet, the traditional four Texas claps. At the conclusion, a cowboy yell, echoed by the audience. Only after that did the explanation for the grand piano appear: tall, curly-haired Van Cliburn of Fort Worth, whom newspapers had been calling “the pride of Texas” ever since his victory in 1958 in the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. The thunderous chords of the young virtuoso’s selections from Beethoven, Brahms and other German composers filled the rickety little building.
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