Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Driving from the West Ranch, Lyndon stopped the car at the top of a rise, and the two couples got out and looked down. Below them was the valley, with the little river meandering its way along in gentle curves. To their left as they looked at the valley was an unpainted, sagging three-room shack, not the house in which Lyndon had grown up—that had been torn down not long after the Johnsons moved out—but a structure that had been built almost on the same site, largely with boards from the old house. To the right—about a half mile to the right, also along the narrow, graveled Austin-Fredericksburg road—was the white-painted, gabled Martin house. Green meadows sloped from both houses down to the river. At the river’s edge was an orchard of about two hundred pecan trees, and on the old Johnson property a grove of wide-spreading live oak trees, their leaves a bright dark green against the paler green of the grass and the blue of the water. In their shade stood a group of small pink granite tombstones—the old Johnson family cemetery. Other live oaks—some of them two centuries old—dotted the meadows, as did a few grazing cows. Beyond the river, the gray-and-white spire of a little country church rose in the distance. It was a peaceful, bucolic scene, but when they drove down and entered the Martin house, Lady Bird had no difficulty understanding why Aunt Frank wanted to sell it. After years of neglect, the rooms were dark and dirty, the floors sagged; “to make the picture complete,” she was to recall, a colony of bats was living in the chimney. “It looked like a Charles Addams cartoon of a haunted house.” She knew she didn’t want to buy it. “Oh my Lord, no!” she thought. “I knew the old stone ranch house would take so much work to fix up. I could hardly bear the thought of it!” Evie Symington was to say that when they walked in, “Bird seemed appalled, and frankly I shared her feeling.” But, Lady Bird was to recall, “To my horror I heard Lyndon say, ‘Let’s buy it!’”

  “How could you do this to me? How could you?” Lady Bird screamed when they got home. In subsequent conversations with her husband, she tried to be firm. “You’re not going to get me out there with all those bats!” she said. Her wishes received their customary consideration, and a week or so later, the Johnsons purchased the ranch, paying Aunt Frank twenty thousand dollars, and giving her the use for her lifetime of the Johnson house in Johnson City.

  Almost as soon as the closing took place—on May 5, 1951—it became apparent to Lady Bird that her husband had bigger plans. He began talking about buying other properties along the banks of the Pedernales, not only the adjoining ranch on which he had been born and raised—watching his father go broke—but others beyond it, stretching toward Johnson City, which would make him the owner of a substantial part of the original Johnson Ranch. He quickly purchased one thirty-acre tract, but the rest of these plans would not be realized for some years, because the owners didn’t want to sell, not even the owner of the adjoining land. The sagging shack made from the boards of his birthplace was being rented to a family of Mexican field-workers. But Lyndon changed the name of the Martin property—to the “LBJ Ranch”—and began to transform it.

  Knowing what needed to be done on a ranch in that land of alternating drought and floods, of worn-out eroded soil, wasn’t hard. Water had to be provided, and controlled, the soil had to be restored to its earlier richness. But doing it was hard—impossible, in fact—for most Hill Country ranchers, for doing it was expensive, costing far more than most ranchers, including Lyndon Johnson’s father, could even think of spending. Sam Johnson had never had enough money to do it, in large part because of the way he viewed his government position. Among the reasons—optimism, an overly romantic view of life—that this idealistic Populist had gone broke was his passionate belief that the influence he had as an elected official was something to be used to help people caught in “the tentacles of circumstance,” and not only to get a road built for them or to get them government loans for seed when they were trapped by recession, but to help them personally. To secure elderly men the pensions they deserved as Civil War veterans or Indian fighters, Sam would spend a lot of time in libraries searching through old files to find their service records, and more time driving them, over rutted Hill Country roads, into Austin to apply for their pensions, and then driving them home—all to the neglect of his own affairs.

  Lyndon Johnson, of course, had an additional use for political influence: to amass wealth—first to obtain favorable rulings from the FCC that made KTBC a dramatically more effective place on which to advertise, and then to let businessmen and their attorneys and lobbyists who needed favors from the government know that the way to enlist his influence on their behalf was to purchase advertising time. So successfully had he made such sales that by 1951, that station—the station his wife had bought in 1943 for $17,500—was earning the Johnsons more than $3,000 per week. That was an enormous amount of money in the impoverished Hill Country—enough to let him do what needed to be done on the ranch. And in 1951, he and Lady Bird—and a coterie of very hard-eyed Washington lawyers—were already looking toward the acquisition of a Johnson television station (they would buy it in 1952) that would multiply those profits.

  Water was a key—water of which there was usually too little in the Hill Country, and sometimes, all at once, too much. It was a land in which, Lyndon was to remember, sometimes “the Pedernales used to run dry as a bone, not a trickle,” while crops and cattle died under a burning sun, and then suddenly heavy thunderstorms would cause fierce “gully washers” to sweep down ravines and riverbeds, washing away crops and precious topsoil, destroying barns and hard-earned farm equipment.

  The answer, for every farmer or rancher along the Hill Country’s little rivers, was to build low dams across them. The lake that would form behind a dam would provide water in times of drought, and in times of flood would hold at least some of the water that would otherwise leap the banks and wash away everything in its path. Obvious though the answer was, almost no dams were built in the Hill Country, for, as the first foreman on the new LBJ Ranch, Oliver Lindig, was to explain, a dam might cost ten thousand dollars or more, “a very expensive proposition” for someone trying to get money out of the Hill Country. But Lyndon Johnson was getting his money out of a radio station, so it wasn’t an expensive proposition for him. He tried nonetheless to bargain down Marcus Burg, a Stonewall contractor—“He tried to talk like he was a poor boy,” Burg recalls—until that stubborn Dutchman told him to “get someone else to do it.” Eventually he agreed to Burg’s price, and for two weeks Burg and a crew of six men stretched a nine-foot-high concrete dam across the Pedernales below the Martin house while Lyndon Johnson sat on the riverbank watching and chatting. The dam was “the first thing … we built,” Lady Bird was to recall. “Then the road and all the irrigation tanks followed in quick succession before we did anything to the house.” With the dam in place, enough pressure was created so that pumps could pump water up to irrigate the fields, and irrigation lines, eighty-foot-long sections of lightweight pipe, perforated so that water sprayed out either side, were linked together and run from the newly formed lake up into the fields on the hills behind the Martin house.

  With enough water for the soil, it was possible to try to restore its fertility. When Lindig, who had a college degree in agricultural management (that was one reason Johnson hired him), arrived at the ranch in 1952, he saw how difficult this would be. “This was old, old soil,” he would recall. “Highly eroded soil. Hill Country farming was a very tough business. A lot of restoration would be necessary.” But he also saw that his new employer was determined to do whatever was necessary. Crops that would build up nutrients in the soil were planted over the two hundred acres and then plowed under so that the nutrients would work more efficiently. And so that the invigorated soil would not be washed away in those thunderstorms, big bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment were brought in to terrace and contour-plow the fields. This was also a “very expensive proposition” in Hill Country terms—but not when measured against a radio station’s income. The fields were then planted with
a type of grass called “coastal Bermuda,” which was very costly but grew very fast and put down long roots to hold the soil. And finally cattle—only thirty at first—were brought in to graze, and there was a new Johnson herd on the Pedernales.

  An Austin architect, Max Brooks, was designing the restoration of the “haunted house.” Whatever her original misgivings about the project, Lady Bird had as usual dismissed them in the interests of what her husband wanted. “The ranch is Lyndon’s spiritual home … so I have a tenderness for it,” she was to say. “His roots are there for three generations. After I came to sense how completely Lyndon was immersed in the rocks and hills and live oaks of this, his own native land … I gradually began to get wrapped up in it myself.” “Horror turned to blessing and we put hand and heart to it to build it into a small, productive, operating ranch.” The heart of the house was the old section with its eighteen-inch-thick stone walls and the enormous fireplace, large enough to hold four-foot-long logs, on whose elevated stone hearth the children had once performed. Into this living room Lady Bird put antiques, and functional and roomy sofas and chairs—one with a big pillow on which was embroidered, in big letters, “LBJ”—and paintings of Hill Country scenes. And one touch that was particularly her own: a photograph of Sam Rayburn; if a guest failed to comment on the photograph, she would do so, pointing out that “there is only one picture of a person in this room.” New floors and ceilings were installed in that section, and in the white-frame additions that were already there, and new additions, painted white, were built out from it, rambling off in all directions; in a year or two, there were two master bedrooms downstairs, one for the Johnsons, one for guests, and five bedrooms—each with its own bathroom—upstairs, for guests and staff members. By 1952, down on the north bank of the Pedernales, only a half mile from the little weather-beaten shack reminiscent of the house in which Lyndon Johnson had been born, was a very different house: large, gracious, impressive, pristine white, surrounded by green fields bordered by pristine white fences. “We love it,” Mrs. Johnson would say with a happy smile. Guests had started to arrive from all over the country, to be served ribs or large hamburgers by white-hatted chef Walter Jetton, “the Leonard Bernstein of the barbecue”: wanting the hamburgers to be shaped like Texas, Lyndon had had a mold made in that shape, but he had come to feel that the shape was too asymmetrical and at lunch would wander among his visitors, telling them to “eat the Panhandle first.”

  The host would take them on tours, gunning his big car down rutted dirt paths or across fields at speeds which kept the occupants jouncing in the seats. He would drive the car right up to cows to stir them into activity; if one remained lying down, he would honk his horn at it and gun the engine, and if it still wouldn’t get up, he would nudge it with the car’s fenders until it did. He would show his guests flocks of wild turkeys strutting across a ridge; herds of white-tailed deer—once a visitor counted thirty-five in a single herd—would flee gracefully over a hill as the car approached. “Now look across yonder,” he would say. “See that church steeple over there in the valley? Where you going to find a prettier view than that?” His initials were on everything: from the pillow in the living room to a flag he designed, and which hung, beneath the flags of the United States and Texas, from an extremely tall flagpole in front of the house, a deep blue pennant with a white “LBJ” in the center, surrounded by a circle of white stars. On the two big stone pillars that flanked the entrance to the ranch were two big “LBJ”s in wrought-iron script. And on the day Marcus Burg laid the last concrete in the wide walkway from the entrance gates up to the front door, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t contain himself. “Do you have a long nail?” he asked Burg. Burg handed him one, and with it, in the still-wet concrete, Lyndon Johnson scratched, in large sprawling letters, “Welcome—LBJ Ranch.” Then, giving Burg a hug that astonished that phlegmatic man, he bent down again and wrote in small letters in a corner: “Built by Marcus Burg.”

  Lyndon Johnson was very proud of his ranch. The Symingtons were annual visitors until there was a break between the two senators in 1956, and after the ranch had become an impressive showplace, they could understand Johnson’s pride. The pride was, to this sophisticated and wealthy couple, less easy to understand in 1951 and 1952, “when it wasn’t much.”

  ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1952, with Lyndon away in South Texas, there would be a violent reminder of how destructive nature could be in the Hill Country. A line of fierce thunderstorms rolling across the vast Edwards Plateau caused what old-timers called a “hundred-year flood,” the highest waters in a century. Marcus Burg’s dam couldn’t come near containing the Pedernales. That morning, when Lady Bird had driven Lynda Bird, then eight years old, across a little concrete bridge to catch a bus to her school in Johnson City, the river had been rising, and the rains were getting heavier. Knowing the bridge would soon be under water, Lady Bird had telephoned Lyndon’s cousin Ava, who lived in the town, to pick up Lynda. The water rose high over the dam and over the shore—washing away every one of the Johnsons’ two hundred pecan trees (the live oaks, whose powerful roots stretch out horizontally far in either direction, held firm, as they had been doing for two centuries). It crept up the sloping meadow toward the Johnsons’ house. The telephone went dead. At 8:45 that evening, the lights went off and the electric clock stopped. The power line had been swept away. “Lucy and I sat in the house and watched topsoil from our neighbors’ farms just float on by, right out to the Gulf of Mexico, and livestock—cattle and horses—were swept away, too,” Lady Bird was to remember.

  Lyndon had contacted Arthur Stehling, who arrived at the Johnsons’ after a horseback ride from Fredericksburg, saying that he had been sent to take one of their cars out of the garage and drive Lady Bird and Lucy to a ranch on higher ground; it was a harrowing trip along a washed-out road lined with uprooted trees. Returning home the next day after the waters had receded, Lyndon found a bright spot in the situation. Wesley West had told him that building a dam would be useless because it would have to be anchored in the river’s banks and therefore would be washed away in a flood. Burg had assured Johnson that the dam would hold—and it had. When West telephoned the Johnson Ranch now, and asked Lyndon, “Well, where’s your dam now?” Johnson was able to reply: “Just where the Dutchman said it would be!”

  THE FLOOD was a happy memory for Lucy, too. When the lights went out, Lady Bird had lit a coal-oil lamp and read her stories. And, Lucy was to recall, “my mother heated up a can of tomato soup and spread peanut butter on saltine crackers. It is the only time in my life I remember her cooking just for me. There was no one there—no staff, no other family—except the two of us. I thought it was great fun.”

  AS SOON AS THE LBJ RANCH was in good enough shape to be shown to journalists from Washington and New York, Johnson began to invite them down, because he wanted to use the ranch to create a picture of himself in the public mind—the picture of a self-made man who had pulled himself up in life by his bootstraps, of a man who, no matter how high he had risen, still had his roots firmly in his native soil. He wanted his image to be that of a westerner, or to be more precise a southwesterner—a Texan; a true Texas image: a rancher with a working, profitable ranch.

  The image was fashioned with his customary skill. He soon had a horse—a tall Tennessee walking horse named Silver Jay—and he liked to pose astride him, wearing or waving his big gray Stetson. His clothing was in keeping—tan twill and cowboy boots, although sometimes, freed of Washington restraint, he would show up for lunch or dinner clad in a cardinal-red lounging suit or in one that led a journalist to call him “the jolly green giant.” And his tours of the ranch helped—showing off his crops and cattle to reporters while dispensing western wisdom and witticisms. He had purchased a prize bull named Friendly Mixer to sire the herd he was planning on. Driving a visitor around the ranch, he would get out of the car, and, walking over to the bull, would note his good points (“Look at that flat back”) and heavy withers. “But that’s not why I
bought him,” he would say with a grin, lifting up the bull’s tail to display his huge testicles. (Johnson might then be reminded of a Swedish congressman from Minnesota, Magnus Johnson, who had served with him in the House. Magnus was not too bright, Lyndon would say, and would, in a broad Swedish accent, tell how Magnus had once made a speech on the House floor in which he earnestly declared, “What we have to do is take the bull by the tail and look the situation in the face.”) Driving a little further, Johnson would come to a group of steers. “You fellows know what a steer is,” he would say. “That’s a bull who has lost his social standing.”