The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Most days were warm enough for him to suddenly say, “Let’s go for a boat ride.” A helicopter would whisk the President and his guests forty-five miles across the hills to Lake Travis, to the house he had built there, and then the group would roar around the lake in an eighteen-foot speedboat, with two other speedboats filled with Secret Service agents trailing it to keep other boats away.

  These outings would always end in time for the evening’s six o’clock newscast, the group usually back in the lake house well before his wristwatch alarm went off. The President would sit in a rocker in front of the television set, sipping a Scotch and soda from a plastic glass, watching the news. Lady Bird, wearing a sweater, hand-tooled cowboy boots and riding jodhpurs, would pass around platters of crackers, sausage, smoked venison and cubes of cheddar cheese with toothpicks.

  Half a dozen reporters were watching with him on the day—a Friday—that Barry Goldwater announced his candidacy for the 1964 Republican nomination. I wonder why he didn’t announce on a Sunday, Johnson said. “He’d get more space in the Monday morning papers.” When, on the set, a newscaster said, “At the LBJ Ranch, meanwhile, the nation’s business was carried forward,” he smiled broadly, and when one of the reporters asked him if Richard Nixon would get into the race, he said, “I don’t know. I don’t even know whether I will,” with a grin. They all chatted for a while, and then the President ushered his guests into two waiting helicopters and they took off into a darkening sky for a dinner of fried catfish, coleslaw, cornbread and apple pie.

  The two-week run of Lyndon Johnson on the Ranch (or, in the words of one headline, LBJ DOWN ON THE FARM) that he staged for the press had accomplishment—the budget announcements the centerpiece—as a theme, but accomplishment in an open, friendly, relaxed atmosphere. The script had homey lines—up at the lake house one evening, he was sitting in his rocker watching television with journalists when Lady Bird walked in; “Here comes the bride!” he shouted, jumping up and giving her an enthusiastic kiss—and colorful Texas idioms that he explained to the reporters. Judge Moursund, he said, was “a good man to go to the well with.” Seeing puzzled looks, he said, “When the Indians were in these hills, raidin’ and scalpin’ during my granddaddy’s time, you had to have somebody you could depend on to go with you when you had to draw water from the well.” He told them, jokingly, the recipe for the spicy deer-meat sausage they were eating: “Half pork, half venison, and all pepper.” He regaled them with stories—of his grandmother hiding in the cellar during an Indian raid and holding a diaper over her baby’s face to muffle its crying.

  He gave them gifts—gray Stetsons, among others; when Wicker dropped his in the mud, the President picked it up, pulled out a handkerchief, and wiped it off—including what were, for journalists, the most prized gifts of all: off-the-record anecdotes about his presidency, about his Cabinet members, about famous Washington figures. He did his imitations: “an incredible mimic,” one reporter wrote. “When he mimicked Dean Acheson, you could see the mustaches quivering.” He did them favors: one evening, he suddenly picked up the telephone, called Phil Potter’s editor at the Baltimore Sun, and told him what a great job Phil was doing.

  The show’s set pieces were memorable. Every evening after dinner, for example, there was the excursion down the path beside the Pedernales to Cousin Oreole’s one-room frame house, the President, wearing a peaked cap and Windbreaker against the night chill, leading the way.

  “It is an experience,” Wicker wrote. “Nights are dark in Texas and the stars tatter the velvet sky. The water pours over the dam, whispering in the vast stillness. Mr. Johnson goes ahead on the rocky road, a flashlight in his hand.… Beyond the road, in the soft darkness, there is movement, presence, a sense only. Nothing can be heard or seen, but the Secret Service agents are there, watchful in the night.”

  Rattling and banging on the locked screen door, the President would shout, “Cousin Oreole! Cousin Oreole! You in there?,” explaining to the reporters, “She’s as deaf as a post,” until the old lady finally came to the door in a gingham housedress. Generally, she would have been lying on the bed reading a Bible. The open Bible and a magnifying glass would be on the iron bedstead in the little bedroom–sitting room decorated with red plastic orioles and posters showing a younger Lyndon from his early campaigns (“For Roosevelt and Progress”), and the routine played out on this homey set was well established, with an accomplished actress in the supporting role. Lyndon would keep opening the door, saying the room was too warm; she would keep closing it, saying it was too cold. As he sat in a wicker rocking chair, she would pass around photographs of him as a boy, and tell an anecdote or two about his school days. She might admonish the newspapermen for unfair reportage (one had written that, on a previous visit, she had answered the door barefoot; “I don’t go to bed with my shoes on,” she said. “Don’t you agree that was unfair?”) and tell Lyndon his horoscope from an astrology magazine she had been reading (“It says you’ll be a good President, but won’t be reelected,” she said one evening. “The news,” Wicker wrote, “was received in silence”). The President would josh her, saying, in a loud voice, that he had heard she was “courtin’ a neighbor,” and warn her that, now that he was President, she had to be careful: “Don’t you pick up that telephone, Cousin Oreole. You might get Khrushchev.” Walking back along the path one evening, he said, “The only car that comes by her house is the mailman once a day. So she backs her car out the other day just in time to hit him.”

  And there was variety—dramatic changes of pace—in the show’s scenes. On a morning after Cousin Oreole, there were the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They, along with McNamara and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric, held a full-scale conference on the defense budget with the President in the ranch living room on the morning of December 30. When they emerged, Johnson told waiting reporters that “We had a fine meeting. It makes you very proud of your Defense Department. The Secretary and the Joint Chiefs are really on the ball this morning.” It was a bitterly cold day—below freezing with a biting wind, the first cold day of the trip—and Johnson said, “I’m sorry these Joint Chiefs came down here, these warmongers, and brought a blue norther with them.” It was Marine Corps Commandant David M. Shoup’s birthday. A cake was suddenly produced. “Let’s all sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ ” Johnson said. “It was an Executive order,” the Times reported. “The generals, Admiral McDonald, the Secretary of Defense, the photographers, six freezing reporters and the President of the United States raised their voices in the howling wind and sang.”

  And it all got great reviews.

  As always with critics there were a few dissenters, reviewers unable to overcome earlier prejudices. Describing the Erhard visit and Van Cliburn in the gym through a scornful lens, one of the European correspondents, a “highly-sophisticated” one in the words of a colleague, said that they evoked “wistful recollections”: “I couldn’t help thinking of Pablo Casals playing the cello in the East Room.” The Los Angeles Times reported that among the journalists the word “cornball” was still sometimes used to describe Johnson. But only a few. “There has been a notable lack of scoffing among the skeptical sophisticates as the new President works hard at proving … that he hasn’t taken on a lot of high-falutin’ airs since moving into the White House,” wrote the previously hostile Peter Lisagor.

  Most of the reviews were, in fact, unqualified raves whose wording showed how successful Johnson had been in creating the effect he wanted—and how successfully, also, he had impressed on them the contrast he had wanted to make clear. Driving back to Austin one evening, a reporter said, “Well, he’s not Jack Kennedy.” “No, he’s not,” another reporter said. “But then he never claimed to be.” “They are two different men, and no doubt about it,” wrote the Herald Tribune’s Kiker. “But the contrast between John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson did not really present itself in dramatic form until the new President left the White House … and came home to Texas.… The nation has a n
ew President now—a new, strong personality to get to know. Times have changed. You only had to see him get on that horse at his ranch and ride off into the sunset to realize that.” By the end of that Texas trip, Lyndon Johnson had imprinted his own stamp—“his own brand,” as Time magazine put it—on the presidency.

  The dispatches from the Pedernales projected to the country the image he wanted. Journalists who, from their observation of Johnson in Washington—obsessed with politics and power, driven by ambition, ruthless and relentless—had believed they understood him revised their opinion during those thirteen days. This was, indeed, a different Lyndon Johnson, “a Johnson we had never seen.” And this, they felt, was the real Lyndon Johnson. “Politics has been his life, and few play the game with more zest and skill,” Wicker wrote. “But the four hundred acres of the Johnson Ranch … are where Mr. Johnson has his roots. He seems a casual king as he rides the acres, perhaps not so much because he is President as because he is LBJ.” On this “hardscrabble land,” he wrote, “the President is elemental in a different fashion” from the way he is in Washington, “this big, breezy, rough-cut man of the plains, the grass and the dust, of the arid Texas hills.” Even as formerly hard-eyed a critic as Peter Lisagor now described him in adjectives like “unaffected” and “old-shoe.” The President “has been full of surprises,” the syndicated columnist told his readers. “President Johnson has delighted a host of citified strangers with his unaffected hospitality. [His] old-shoe approach shows Mr. Johnson as an earthy man of the people who loves the soil and the robust pleasures of the two-fisted outdoorsman.” “Relaxed” was an adjective suddenly in print in newspapers from coast to coast—in the New York Times (“Around the ranch house, Mr. Johnson is … relaxed, talkative, entertaining”) and the Los Angeles Times (“He is relaxed and confident here”)—and in the national magazines: Did the Times call him “relaxed”? To Time magazine, he was “the very picture of relaxation.” “Presidential home life at the ranch is a very relaxed affair,” wrote the Sun’s Potter, a “zestful, breezy western ‘open house’ brand of togetherness. ‘Ol’ Lyndon,’ as countless friends and neighbors in these parts know him, likes ranch-style beans and deer meat sausage. He likes to ride and does so with a rancher’s practiced ease.”

  The reviewers predicted the show would have a long run. “Washington’s canniest political thinkers have been astounded by the skill and swiftness with which President Johnson has moved to increase his family lovability rating,” Russell Baker wrote. “By introducing the nation to Cousin Oriole [sic], who casts his political horoscope, and Uncle Huffman Baines, that dignified septuagenarian …, the President has quickly established himself as a man of wide, warm and charming family relationships. No Republican now in the field has a relative to rebut Cousin Oriole or Uncle Huffman.” And, they said, it deserved to have a long run—because it was rooted in reality. No one could doubt the authenticity of the portrayal, the reviews said. In a magazine article he wrote some months later, after another visit to the ranch, Wicker said, “The one thing Lyndon Johnson’s critics sooner or later question, the one thing his friends inevitably have to deal with, is his sincerity—whether he is the genuine article in his folksiness … his patriotism and fervor … in the whole of his evangelistic Presidency. But there is no such question about Lyndon Johnson, rancher, Texan, Westerner.… Down on the ranch, on the old home place … LBJ is all wool and a yard wide. In tan twill and leather boots he is at home, at ease—serene as a restless Westerner can be.” This “perfect host,” this “tall, genial man,” had given the members of the Washington press corps lucky enough to have spent the vacation at the Johnson Ranch a vacation “none of them is likely to forget,” Time said. His relations with reporters in Washington may have been testy, Time said, but that wasn’t the real Lyndon Johnson. “If there was any lingering doubt that Lyndon Johnson likes his press relations on the easy going side, those doubts were removed last week.”

  WHILE LYNDON JOHNSON may have been putting on a great show, however, a show—a performance, an act—was what it was. True to life as was one point the Texas sojourn made with his journalistic audience—that he was placing his own stamp on the presidency—little connection existed between reality and the overall impression that reporters received and transmitted to their readers: that Lyndon Johnson in the Pedernales Valley, the “real” Lyndon Johnson, was a different, changed, man from Lyndon Johnson in Washington.

  No change of scene could change Lyndon Johnson. The base of his personality was that potent inherited “Bunton strain” legendary throughout the Hill Country because of the grandeur of the ambitions, and the fierceness of the pragmatism with which those ambitions had been pursued, by generations of men, all of them well over six feet in height, all of them with big ears, the burning, piercing “Bunton eye,” and the flaring Bunton temper, all of them with the “commanding presence” of the frontier hero who had made the name “Bunton” a “household word in all the scattered log cabins … of Texas”—and almost all of whose great dreams had come to nothing in the end. And that base had been hardened beyond possibility of alteration by the grimness of his youth. In fact, of all settings the Pedernales Valley, the place in which humiliation had been heaped on heredity, was the one particularly unsuited to Lyndon Johnson’s peace of mind. Every time he stepped out the front door of his big house, down the river to the left was the pathetic little frame house, so similar to the one in which he had grown up, and had watched his father fail and his mother grow ill. Directly across the river from the front door was a stretch of highway on which he had pushed the fresno. Everywhere were reminders. Taking relays of reporters on tours of the ranch, Lady Bird would indicate a line from the river up past the house to the top of the ridge almost half a mile away, and say, in her chatty, pleasant way, “There used to be a ditch there deep enough to walk elephants in.” That ditch was one feature of the ranch her husband never mentioned. The long, deep ravine had been, in a way, his father’s last stand: the gully into which, day after day, under the broiling Hill Country sun, Sam Ealy, too old for such work, had shoveled wagonloads of soil, filling it with earth and planting cotton seeds in it, over and over, as his son Lyndon had watched, only to see the soil wash away every time in the next heavy rain.1

  On Christmas Day, he and Lady Bird drove into Johnson City to deliver a poinsettia plant to his cousin Ava. There in her living room, over the threadbare sofa, was the double row of pictures. The last one—the one furthest to the right in the bottom row—was of him. The one next to it was of his father, and the next one was his grandfather, and the others were also of his forebears, and every one was a picture of a man with dark hair, pale skin, big ears, big nose, heavy eyebrows and dark, intense eyes, pictures of men who resembled his grandfather, resembled his father, resembled him—men who, almost all of them, had failed as his grandfather had failed, and his father had failed. His brother Sam Houston, telling the author that “the most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy,” paused for a moment, and in a very quiet voice said that whenever the Johnson children were back at the ranch—as he and Lyndon and Rebekah and Lucia were back that Christmas—“Daddy and Mother were there, too.” “Relaxed,” “breezy,” “serene”—the portrayal Lyndon Johnson was giving on stage during the show’s two-week run, bantering and barbecuing with reporters, was letter-perfect. But during those two weeks he wasn’t always on stage. Sometimes he was in his bedroom, with the door closed, alone or with only Lady Bird present. And sometimes, when he was in the paneled office or the small den, the doors to those rooms would be closed, and only Valenti or Jesse Kellam, general manager of KTBC and KTBC-TV, or one of his secretaries—or, sometimes, no one at all—would be with him. Behind those doors, he would be making telephone calls, in the den while sitting in the rocker, in the office in the recliner. The recliner tilted all the way back, so that most of his body might be horizontal, and the rocker tilted back, too, so he might have seemed relaxed if it hadn’t been for the way in w
hich, as he got to the point of the call, his shoulders would hunch forward and the eyes narrow above the receiver, which seemed surprisingly small in a huge, mottled hand, the left hand if the call was going the way he wanted, the right hand if the person to whom he was talking wasn’t agreeing to do what he was asking him to do. On most of these calls, his voice stayed soft, although it didn’t seem soft because of the twang in it—stayed calm, rational, reasonable. But if the journalists he was wooing had heard some of the things he was saying during these calls, “relaxed,” “breezy,” and “serene” might not have been the adjectives with which they described him.

  All his life, Lyndon Johnson had made use of any political weapon on which he could lay his hand, or which he could invent, any power that he could find or devise, as a means to attain his ends, and he had employed these weapons to the hilt, with a ruthlessness startling even to men who had believed themselves inured to the ruthlessness of politics. A President had a lot of weapons—and during those two weeks on the ranch, behind those closed doors, he was beginning to use them.

  SOME OF THE TARGETS on which he was using them were members of the journalists’ own profession, for not all of Johnson’s dealings with the press during those two weeks were on boat rides and at barbecues. Life magazine and Washington reporters may have given him a reprieve from the Bobby Baker scandal—although, as would become apparent within a very few months, not for long. But in Texas there was a reporter who hadn’t—and he wanted her stopped.

  Because for most of her professional life her articles appeared only in Texas newspapers, Margaret Mayer’s work would never become as well known as that of colleagues on eastern and national publications. But, a very enterprising reporter, she would later, as chief of the Dallas Times-Herald’s Washington bureau, become one of the first women to head the Washington bureau of a major newspaper. In 1963, forty-one years old, she was a reporter in the Times-Herald’s Austin bureau, and had become curious about the many rumors she was hearing about Johnson’s Texas Broadcasting Company and the way it attracted advertisers. “I had,” she was to say, “questions about it even before the Bobby Baker thing started”—and, as Horace Busby, a longtime friend, has to admit, “Margaret always knew the right questions to ask.” She had begun an investigation of KTBC and KTBC-TV, and when the stations’ general manager, Jesse Kellam, refused to answer her questions, she put some of them—not particularly probing ones, just general questions about the scope of the stations’ operations—in writing in a letter she sent him on December 17, a week before Johnson came to Texas. Kellam brought the letter out to the ranch on Saturday, January 4, and at 8:45 that evening the President telephoned the Times-Herald’s managing editor, Albert Jackson.