God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (13 page)

There is a one-room schoolhouse, where Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, one of the pillars of the Great Society; and beyond that, a walled cemetery, shaded by massive live oaks, where Lyndon and Lady Bird rest. Finally, there is the house itself, made of limestone, with a broad veranda overlooking the sweep down to the river, handsome but not majestic, the home of a Texas squire on a working ranch, with cow patties decorating the lawn. The last thing Lyndon liked to do at night was to stand on his porch, look at the stars, and pee.

On the wall beside Johnson’s desk are portraits of his two beagles, Him and Her, commissioned by Barbra Streisand. In the easy chair is a pillow embroidered with the sentiment “This is my ranch and I do as I damn please.” The living room has a bank of three television sets, one for each of the networks that existed during his presidency, and a domino table where he liked to play 42. The kitchen floor is yellow linoleum; there’s a copy of
The Joy of Cooking
on a shelf. On the back porch are a massive freezer and a beer tap. It was in the small den under the stairs that the staff gathered on November 22, 1963, to be told by the Secret Service, “You are now in the house of the president of the United States.” They had been busy preparing for the reception that night for John F. Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson was Kennedy’s opposite in so many ways. Where Kennedy was polished, Johnson was vulgar—fantastically and unself-consciously so—picking his nose, scratching his ass, eating off other people’s plates. He once held a staff meeting in his bedroom while he was getting an enema. Kennedy went to Harvard, he had a Pulitzer Prize, and his friends were movie stars. Johnson went to a teachers college in San Marcos. Kennedy was beautiful and Johnson was ungainly, with immense features—his nose, his ears, and his cock, which he named Jumbo. Kennedy seemed to be a liberal because of his background and rhetoric, but in fact he was a business-oriented conservative and a Cold Warrior. He expanded defense spending by 20 percent. Among his accomplishments were the creation of the Peace Corps, a tax cut, and a nuclear test-ban treaty, but his most enduring legacy was the Vietnam War. Kennedy was the kind of president people would have expected a Texan to be. Johnson, despite his retrograde political past, became the most progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt, and yet the Kennedy acolytes in the Eastern Establishment sneered at him. “The greatest bigots in the world are the Democrats on the East Side of New York,” Johnson complained.

The liberal tradition that Johnson embodied is practically extinct in Texas now, but so much of the country we live in was fashioned by his administration, including Medicaid, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, public broadcasting, federal aid to the arts and education, the War on Poverty, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Voting Rights Act, even the Gun Control Act. Kennedy had neither the mandate nor the skill to enact such a transformative agenda. Despite these accomplishments, Johnson’s presidency sank under the weight of the war. The Kennedy men in Johnson’s cabinet told him the only way out was forward, and Johnson was too cowed by their intellect to change course. His resentment against the “Harvards” and the Eastern Establishment socialites would sometimes flare up with a startling bitterness. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, an aide warned him that black protestors in Washington might march on Georgetown and burn it down. “I’ve waited thirty-five years for this day,” Johnson said.

Texans agonized through the Johnson presidency, sharing in his humiliation, but also enduring the mortification of his hillbilly manners and cornpone accent. The hatred heaped upon him splattered over the rest of us. LBJ was the lens through which we were viewed. And to be fair, Texans were as resentful of the Eastern Establishment as it was of us. It’s a cultural divide in this country that has never been bridged. LBJ was hounded out of office by young people, including me, who protested the war, but also hated who he was and where he came from. I wouldn’t change my opposition to that war, but I wish we had been kinder to him.

“I never said any such thing,” Johnson replied.

“Well, sir, I heard you.”

“I don’t care what you heard, I didn’t say it.”

“But Sid Davis recorded it.”

“I don’t care what he recorded, my great-grandfather didn’t die at the Alamo,” the president said.

The Alamo story hit the press, and it became a great embarrassment for Johnson, especially in Texas. At another event a few months later, when the controversy was still raging, Johnson complained that he had never gotten to finish the story: his great-grandfather didn’t die at the Alamo; he died at the Alamo Hotel in Eagle Pass.

All through the telling of the anecdote, Lady Bird chuckled. By that time, she had been a widow for nearly thirty years.

Like Lyndon, Lady Bird suffered in comparison to her glamorous predecessor. Jackie was the most famous woman in the world—chic, beautiful, and iconic in her grief—whereas Lady Bird was “a little brown wren,” as her daughter Lynda once described her. As first lady, she was best known for promoting the Highway Beautification Act, derided as “Lady Bird’s Bill” by opponents, but it was just one of two hundred laws concerning conservation and the environment that have her stamp on them. Because of her, the plague of billboards that infested our roadways was sharply diminished, and junkyards were removed or screened off. It was her noble goal to let nature shine through.

In Austin, Lady Bird was the driving force in creating the hike-and-bike trail around what is now called Lady Bird Lake—a body of water that was itself created by Lyndon, as a young congressman, when he succeeded in getting the federal government to dam the Colorado River to bring power to the Hill Country. The trail now functions as a kind of town square for fitness enthusiasts. Lady Bird had been inspired by a trip to London, where she admired the walking path beside the Thames. In the 1980s and 1990s you would often see her on the trail, wearing her bonnet, discreetly followed by her Secret Service bodyguard.

Lady Bird founded the National Wildflower Research Center (now also renamed after her) in Austin in 1982, on her seventieth birthday, and it’s largely because of her that the roadsides of Texas are so brilliantly carpeted. My father served as head of the Beautify Texas Council in the 1980s, and he worked with Lady Bird. After he passed away, I found a letter from her thanking him for the seeds for the hike-and-bike trail. I had run around that trail thousands of times and never known about that connection.

When the research center opened, wildflowers were still so uncultivated that they were difficult to propagate. Lady Bird herself would prowl the state scouting for hardy specimens. One particularly dry spring she came upon a hillside in Central Texas that was spilling over with pink evening primrose—which she describes in her book (with Carlton B. Lees)
Wildflowers Across America
as “the most exquisite and feminine of all wild-flowers!” A young man was plowing them under. Imagine how startled he must have been to see the former first lady throw herself in front of his tractor and yell, “Stop!” She rented the pasture until the flowers went to seed so she could harvest them.

She was the most self-deprecating woman in public life I ever knew. Once I was at a party in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday, given by her erudite nephew, author Philip Bobbitt, who is a law professor at the University of Texas. Lady Bird and I were seated together at dinner, and she asked me to pass the salt, which was in front of her. She was then nearly ninety and suffering from macular degeneration. The only way she could still enjoy her beloved wildflowers was by examining them with a magnifying glass. But she was game and even bemused by her condition. “Just now, during cocktails in the music room, I was trying to carry on a conversation with this gentleman,” she told me. “He was so unresponsive, although I was being my most charming self. Finally, I realized I was speaking to a bust of Shakespeare.”