The Passage of Power (106 page)

T
HAT 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 talk 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.

F
ORMAL THE DINNER
may not have been; it was, however, a triumph. Erhard’s smile grew broader and broader with each German song; as the cowgirls were singing the carols, he leaned back, lit up a long cigar, and puffed on it for the rest of the meal, his bright blue eyes sparkling, his face a picture of red-cheeked contentment. When they got to “
Die Sterne bei Nacht,
” he
“almost
broke up with laughter,” a reporter wrote. Leaning over to Lady Bird, he said, in English,
“We
know that in Germany, too.” Johnson was carried away. He went from table to table shaking hands, on his face a broad smile that he rarely showed in public. And when he got back to the head table, the rapport between him and the chancellor was palpable. The dinner was to close with a Texas ritual, the presentation of big gray “ten-gallon” Stetsons to the guests, and Johnson, calling up the German diplomats one by one, trying hats on for size and then adjusting them to the right angle, kept up a running stream of remarks. When he got to Erhard, he remarked that the differences between the metric and imperial systems meant he was giving him a “forty-liter” hat. The audience started to applaud as Erhard turned to model it, and Erhard waved his hand in appreciation. Grabbing the chancellor’s hand, the taller Johnson raised it above Erhard’s head like a referee raising a boxer’s hand in victory. The affection from the Fredericksburg natives, who had preserved for a hundred years the language and customs of the country from which their ancestors had come, toward that country’s leader, who was right there in their town, filled the room, and they kept applauding as Johnson
and Erhard stood there, Johnson still holding the chancellor’s hand aloft, the two heads of state, one tall and tanned, the other short and rosy-faced, a study in physical contrast except for one similarity: the broadness of their smiles. And when Johnson and Erhard started to leave, they found they couldn’t for a while. The people from Fredericksburg formed a long line so that they could, one by one, shake the hand of the chancellor from their homeland and of the President, their own “native son,” as the
Fredericksburg Standard
called him the next day, who had brought him to their town.

T
HE ENTIRE STATE VISIT WAS
a triumph.

The overcrowding at the ranch was part of it.
“The
fact that you couldn’t be anything other than intimate helped the discussions” and “contributed to the good spirit,” one of the German officials told a reporter. Lady Bird was part of it—her gift for making visitors welcome and at ease: the open arms and warm smile and “Hi! Now you all make yourselves at home!” with which she greeted guests. Turning to her and bowing during his toast at the barbecue, Erhard said,
“The
homelike atmosphere she created for our talks already was a guarantee of our success. I feel at home with you.” When he left the ranch for Bergstrom that evening, she said, with that warm smile, “You all come back now, y’hear.” When he was giving his farewell talk at the airfield, the chancellor said he was sure there would be other visits. The rapport between the two leaders played a part, too. Looking at Johnson as he spoke at the barbecue, Erhard said he had found that he and the President shared
“the
same moral views, the same spirit, the same political ideas.” He had found, he said, that they “looked at the world with the same eyes.”

In his talk at Bergstrom, Erhard said that he and Johnson had considered all the major issues facing their two countries.
“All
these questions were discussed in detail, and we have been able to state full agreement and full unity of views. This is not just a diplomatic statement; it is just the truth I feel.” Landing in Bonn ten hours later, he told reporters there that he and Johnson had established a personal relationship
“that
I think you can call friendship.”

Diplomatic correspondents who debriefed Erhard’s aides and Rusk’s after the visit felt that the chancellor had described his feelings accurately. He had,
Time
reported, been
“enchanted
by all the Texas trimmings. But he was even more taken with Johnson himself.… Erhard showed with genuine feeling that he had established a personal friendship with the President, and he was obviously moved when he made his farewell.”
Newsweek
called the visit
“Stetson
Statesmanship” and the
“Sparerib
Summit”—and said
“somehow
it all worked.”

I
T HAD WORKED
in another way, too. John F. Kennedy’s state dinners had been fine wines and French cuisine. This state dinner was beer and barbecue. Beethoven and Brahms had been played this time not in the elegant formality of
the East Room but in front of lariats and a saddle and bales of hay. It was a contrast that, of course, the press noted. Recalling a state visit on which
“the
Kennedys transported Washington society down the Potomac in boats to Mount Vernon and there served outdoor dinner by candlelight while violins played,”
Douglas Kiker of the
Herald Tribune
wrote that “Now
Ludwig Erhard [gets] a barbecue at Stonewall High School, and [is] entertained by somebody named Cactus Pryor.… It is a long way from the banks of Mount Vernon.”

And it was a contrast that Lyndon Johnson wanted noted. While he had still been back in Washington, at dinner at The Elms one Sunday evening with three or four couples he had known since his early days in the capital, he had said,
“I’ve
got to be thinking about my future. I have to carry out the Kennedy legacy. I feel very strongly that that’s part of my obligation, and at the same time I’ve got to put my own stamp on this administration in order to run for office on my own.” (“Johnson talked very freely at that Sunday dinner,” one of the guests says.) During the month before he left for Texas—the first month after the assassination—the emphasis he had wanted in his Administration was continuity. But now, with a new year—1964, an election year—about to begin, the emphasis would have to change. While continuity would still have to remain a major element in it—there was still the “obligation” to “carry out the Kennedy legacy”—contrast would now be required as well; the Administration would have to bear “my own stamp.” The image of his Administration, of his presidency, of himself, would have to change.

S
INCE THE CREATION
of an image is one of the political arts, Lyndon Johnson had always been a master of it: a dramatic showman on the Texas political trails during his early campaigns. Fully aware now that his personality was not firmly defined in the mind of a national public that had not known him well before he became President (“He was very, very conscious of that,”
George Reedy says) and that to the limited extent he possessed a national image, it was of a frenzied wheeler-dealer, an arm-twister, a restless, ambition-driven politician, he set out during his two weeks on the ranch to create a different one.

The Erhard state dinner, its pattern so dramatically different from the Kennedy pattern, was a vivid announcement of a new, contrasting pattern, the scene in the Stonewall High School gymnasium a scene that established that the new presidency was going to be, in its style at least, very different from the old, the new President very different from his predecessor. And that contrast, that theme, would be reiterated through the events—at least the public events—of the rest of Johnson’s stay in Texas, in a performance, a creation of an image, that was quite a show.

The Johnson Ranch, of course, was a perfect setting in which to draw the contrast: it would be hard to imagine one less like Hyannis Port than the Pedernales Valley. And if the setting was perfect, the man at center stage made the most of it.

All during these two weeks, the big jets from Washington glided into Bergstrom out of the northeast, and the helicopters lifted off and beat their way across the hills to set down, in clouds of dust, at the
LBJ Ranch, bringing men on business of state: generals—the morning after Erhard left, the beribboned Joint Chiefs of Staff arrived with Defense Secretary McNamara for discussions on the
budget; ambassadors (
Chip Bohlen from France and
David Bruce from England for discussions about the strains Le Grand Charles was causing within the NATO Alliance); ministers (Cabinet Secretaries Rusk of State, Freeman of Agriculture, Wirtz of Labor) and undersecretaries; economists Heller and Gordon, each lugging a briefcase crammed with papers; the national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy; the director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
John McCone, who, breakfasting alone with the President, told him that despite a civil war between Greeks and Turks on
Cyprus, the seventeen hundred Americans on the island were safe and
“the
[military] situation appeared to be reasonably in hand,” and then strolled with him along the dirt road by the Pedernales, Secret Service men in the pecan groves, and when the President asked him if Premier Khrushchev had done or said anything significant during the past few days, replied, as he recalls,
“No
, that I felt that Khrushchev was” still “pretty well consumed with his internal problems and the Sino-Soviet relationship and that he had been remarkably quiet with respect to the West.” (The conversation turned to
Cuba. The latest CIA “assessment” concluded that the Russians were turning the SAM sites over to Cuba, which could be “ominous,” McCone said. “The President made no comment.”) Ted Sorensen flew down, and was driven from the Johnson airstrip to the Lewis Ranch about twenty miles away; although Christmas vacation was Sorensen’s visitation time with his three boys—he had recently been divorced, at least partly because, he was to admit, the life of a presidential speechwriter “had undermined our marriage”—the middle son, Stephen, then ten years old, recalls that in that ranch house,
“We
spent a lot of time by ourselves.… I remember him writing and writing and writing, holed up by himself in a study at one end of the house”;
the State of the Union speech was scheduled for delivery on January 8. But the business was carried on in an atmosphere very unlike that of Washington—by a Lyndon Johnson who was, to the journalists’ eyes, very unlike the one they had thought they knew.