The Passage of Power (107 page)

Press conferences were held, of course—large press conferences: more than two hundred reporters, about a score of them from foreign countries, staying in Austin hotels, were periodically loaded into buses and driven out to the ranch—but they could hardly have been more informal. Many of the announcements made at them concerned the budget: Johnson’s first priority was not only to get it down below Harry Byrd’s $100 billion limit, but to demonstrate to
Byrd and his conservative allies that he was going to run the government frugally. Standing on the lawn outside the house after giving a group of reporters and photographers a tour, he suddenly told an aide, “Run in there and ask them to bring me that order I was working on,” and read aloud an executive order he was about to issue setting
new maximum limits for employment in each of the various government agencies at the June 30 end of the current fiscal year, levels that, taken together, would reduce the overall number of federal employees below the figure in effect when he had assumed office. The order directed agency heads to immediately report the steps they were taking to effect those reductions, and to inform him immediately of target levels they would establish for the following fiscal year. And it told the agency heads that quarterly reports were to be made to him for his personal approval, beginning on April 1. “Finally, once I have given my approval to your new targets, they are not to be exceeded without my explicit approval,” the order concluded. To make sure the reporters got the point, he added that “We are trying conscientiously to show the thrift we talked about in the message to Congress.”

A more informal, spur-of-the-moment setting for an announcement of a major new government policy could hardly be imagined, reporters said. Except that, two days later, there was one even more informal—and more dramatic as well. This time, the full press corps was being given a tour of the ranch, three large buses squeezing through the cattle guards on the narrow roads, frightened sheep leaping into the air in panic as the buses passed—with Lady Bird as the tour guide on one bus, Lynda Bird on the second, and foreman Malechek on the third. When Lynda Bird’s bus made a wide turn off one of the ranch roads, she quipped,
“There
go the winter oats”; Lady Bird’s bus became mired in soft ground as it made a turn, and everyone had to climb out so the driver could maneuver out of the field. Late that afternoon, there was a Jetton barbecue, with hundreds of pounds of spareribs sizzling over hickory-fire grills that had been set up on the lawn between the ranch house and the Pedernales, guests sitting on bales of hay and acrid smoke curling through the live oaks.
Dean Rusk and other men in blue suits were blinking away tears and rubbing their eyes; McGeorge Bundy couldn’t rub his—with his briefcase in one hand and a greasy rib in the other, he didn’t have a hand free. As one account put it, “Newspapermen from Europe and the Orient, as well as the White House press, discovered that pork ribs are delicious—finger-licking good—when consumed without benefit of silverware.” A country music band was playing. And then suddenly the guitars stopped, and ranch hands were carrying out a portable lectern bearing the presidential seal and a microphone, and placing it, somewhat shakily, atop one of the bales, and the President, in khaki windbreaker, whipcord slacks and boots, was stepping behind it, and the newsmen had to, as one wrote, try
“in
vain to cope simultaneously with ribs, beer, pens and notebooks” because hard, substantial news was being delivered. Johnson introduced Secretary Freeman (in a suit), who, having evidently finally gotten the message, announced that he had reduced the number of requested jobs at
Agriculture by four thousand. Then, after defending his decision to close thirty-eight defense bases, Johnson announced there would be more closings in the future. Secretary McNamara, he said, had, at his direction, appointed a board to intensify a study of various bases
“with
a view to eliminating those not needed.” While he
sympathized with congressmen and senators who didn’t want local bases closed, he said, “every congressional district must understand that they are going to be reviewed from time to time. We are not going to be satisfied with the status quo.” And then, following the business, came show business. The President walked over to the side of the house—where, the newsmen suddenly noticed, a tall black horse was tethered. Swinging up into the saddle, Johnson trotted a few steps while the photographers snapped away.

He added a bit of comic relief, calling over Pierre Salinger. The portly press secretary was already self-conscious because Johnson had insisted that he wear the short khaki windbreaker he had ordered for him, and Salinger was aware that the garment was particularly unflattering to a person of his girth. Johnson didn’t put him any more at his ease now, telling the reporters jokingly,
“I
gave Pierre that jacket he has on today because it is too large for me to wear.” And then he had another horse brought out, and told Salinger to get up on it. This was not good news for Pierre, but Johnson insisted. Salinger climbed aboard. Johnson reminded him to put his feet in the stirrups. Salinger’s horse was a small, shaggy piebald. Astride it, next to the tall President on his tall mount, the rotund press secretary might have been Sancho Panza. Wheeling his horse and putting it into a canter, Johnson
“rode
off into the sunset,” as the
New York Times
put it, with Salinger, trying to keep up, “clutching hard at any part of his horse he could grab,” still astride—“when last seen.”

“It
is not to be believed,” a French correspondent murmured.

American journalists agreed.
“Members
of the press had never seen anything like it,” the
Times
reported. “The President of the United States held a news conference with a haystack as a rostrum. In the background, smoke drifted up from barbecue pits where Texas beef sizzled. After the conference, the President rode off on a horse.”

Before cantering away into the distance, Johnson had let photographers snap their fill. What photo editor could resist? The pictures, some of Johnson alone, some with Salinger beside him, were on front pages all across the country, pictures of a President on horseback erect and commanding, every inch the western rancher, the self-made man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and who, no matter how high he had risen, still had his roots firmly in his native soil—the very antithesis of the Washington wheeler-dealer (or, for that matter, of the touch football players at Hickory Hill).

I
N THE CREATION
of an image, reviewers—the press—are crucial, and they received a full helping of Texas hospitality.

Selected reporters, correspondents from the country’s major newspapers, were driven over the bumpy roads of the ranch, with the President, a “jolly brown giant,” in the words of one reporter, in his brown boots, khaki whipcord pants, khaki shirt, khaki windbreaker and tan Stetson, at the wheel of the big white Continental convertible.

The car was fitted out with a bullhorn which, at the touch of a button on the dashboard, emitted a loud moaning sound—
Oo-ooh-gah, Oo-ooh-gah
—like that of a bull in distress. Suddenly veering off the dirt track, the President would nose the Lincoln up to one of the Herefords, sounding the horn to try to get the bull to move. If it wouldn’t, he would sometimes inch the car so close that its bumper touched the big, stolid animal, chewing solemnly on its cud. He would sound the horn again. The Hereford, alarmed at last, would amble away. Johnson would sound the horn in triumph. Or he might stop the car, step out and engage the bulls on foot. Noting that the Speaker of the House was next in line for succession to the presidency if Johnson died,
Tom Wicker wrote that this
“entertainment
arouses in those who see it visions of John McCormack in the White House.”

Or he might point out its fine points (“See that flat back?”) or go up to a bull, kick its hindquarters (“That’s where the best steaks come from”). “But that’s not why I bought him,” he would explain with a grin, lifting up the bull’s tail to display his huge testicles. “This one’s a steer,” he would say of another animal, giving his explanation that “A steer is a bull who has lost his social standing.” He would tell hilarious anecdotes: getting out of the car and raising a Hereford’s tail, he recalled a Swedish Minnesota congressman named
Magnus Johnson who hadn’t, he said, been very bright; once, during an impassioned debate on the House floor, Magnus had shouted, “What we have to do is take the bull by the tail and look the situation in the face.”

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 re-elected,” 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.”