The LBJ Ranch is now a national park, and one early summer day as I was driving west I decided to stop in. The bluebonnets and Indian blankets along the roadsides had faded, replaced by purple thistles and Mexican hats. Lyndon Johnson used to race down these narrow roads in his Lincoln convertible, with a scotch and soda in hand, terrifying visiting heads of state as he careened into the curves. The Lincoln was equipped with a special lever-action horn that bellowed like a rutting bull in order to capture the attention of the heifers in the pasture. Johnson would be trailed by a station wagon full of Secret Service agents, and periodically he would slow down and rattle the ice in his styrofoam cup outside his window until an agent dashed over and refilled his drink.
Johnson was the only president I can recall who really loved cars, especially convertibles. There’s a little museum at the end of the airstrip housing a 1934 Ford Phaeton, which he outfitted with a gun rack and a wet bar; the Corvette he gave his daughter Luci for her eighteenth birthday; an antique fire truck; and a little blue Amphicar, a chimerical cross between an automobile and a boat, which Johnson bought as a practical joke. He would drive his guests down to the banks of the Pedernales River and pretend that his brakes had failed as he plunged the vehicle into the water.
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.
* * *
WHEN STEVE’S NOVEL The Gates of the Alamo came out, there was a dinner for him at the LBJ Library. He and I were seated on either side of Lady Bird as George Christian, who was Johnson’s press secretary, recalled the trip LBJ had made to Korea. Johnson told the American troops stationed there that his great-grandfather had died at the Alamo. Christian was half asleep in the back of the room, but when he heard LBJ say that, he sat bolt upright. A Texan making such a claim is a bit like a Muslim saying he is descended from the Prophet Muhammad. “There were only three reporters there, and none of them seemed to take notice,” Christian said. He was relieved that the president had gotten away with a whopping lie. But one of the radio reporters, Sid Davis, had recorded the speech, and he played it for the press pool, which included several Texans. They all knew the truth.
Christian went to Lyndon and said he was in hot water because he had claimed his ancestor died at the Alamo.
“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 b
eside 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.”
* * *
PAST JOHNSON CITY, you’re in the German part of the state, with sturdy stone cottages surrounded by peach orchards and vineyards. Franciscan friars began producing wine in Texas in the 1650s. In the late nineteenth century, when aphids wiped out French vineyards, it was rootstock from Texas vines that rescued the industry. History-minded Texans look upon French wines as Texas wines with French labels on them.
Outside of Ozona, the interstate was lined with a vivid low-lying flower called a mountain pink, another of Lady Bird’s favorites, not just for its color but because it grows in the most obdurate conditions, such as roadside gravel. I felt as if I were driving through one of those early, supersaturated Technicolor movies. I turned north at Iraan, named after Ira and Ann Yates, who owned the ranch where one of the great Texas oil booms played out. Once you cross the Pecos River, pump jacks and windmills stretch to the horizon.
In 2004, someone quietly began acquiring ranches in West Texas, near Van Horn, using shell corporations to hide his identity. The fact that anybody was buying up land in Van Horn was a little puzzling, especially at the prices offered. Parched, scalped, remote, the land is certainly not prime real estate. Moreover, the state was in the middle of a punishing drought. The mystery buyer soon became one of the largest landholders in the state. But the question wasn’t so much the who as the why.
Finally, in 2005, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest men in the world, admitted to being the purchaser. He needed the land—nearly 300,000 acres by then, with more to come—to build a launching pad for rockets into space. He had become infatuated with space travel when his family moved to Houston in the 1960s, during the NASA glory era, a time when Houston called itself Space City USA. “For me, space is something I’ve been in love with since I was five years old,” Bezos told The Washington Post, after he purchased the paper in 2013. “I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, and I guess it imprinted me.”
Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, launched its first rocket from West Texas in 2011. That one crashed, but in September 2015 the company not only sent a rocket into space but managed to retrieve it in a historic vertical landing at the Van Horn facility. Bezos expects to send “test passengers” into space soon. “The vision for Blue is pretty simple. We want to see millions of people living and working in space,” he said after the successful launch. “Do we want to go to Mars? Absolutely, but we want to go everywhere.” Meantime, Elon Musk, the PayPal cofounder and the creator of Tesla, the electric automobile, has a rocket test facility near Waco and is building his own launching site for an astronomical venture, SpaceX, on the Texas Gulf Coast, near Brownsville. The Texas skies will soon be jammed with rockets.
In most of West Texas, there is really nowhere to look except up. In the hills near Fort Davis is the McDonald Observatory, where Roberta and I once got to see the rings of Saturn, and somewhere far back in time, a white dwarf. Amateur astronomers settle out here in ranchettes and build their own backyard observatories with retractable roofs. Living in West Texas is like being close to the ocean, with the sky serving as a natural point of focus for the contemplation of eternity.
On the side of I-40 you come upon Cadillac Ranch—ten vintage, graffiti-covered Caddies buried nose down in the dirt, tail fins to the sky. It is certainly the most famous art installation in the state. Stanley Marsh 3, an arts supporter and prankster, commissioned the work in 1974. He also liked to put up phony traffic signs, such as Road Does Not End and You Will Never Be the Same. Like a lot of rich Texas eccentrics, he kept exotic animals—a lion, a zebra, a camel, etc. When a developer threatened to build a suburb next to Marsh’s property, Stanley erected a billboard on his property line saying:
FUTURE HOME
OF THE
WORLD’S LARGEST
POISONOUS SNAKE FARM
* * *
JUST SOUTH OF AMARILLO is Palo Duro Canyon, a red gash in the landscape a thousand feet deep and 120 miles long, ranging from half a mile to 20 miles in width. Only the Grand Canyon is larger. Palo Duro was the heart of the Comanchería. The last band of southern Plains Indians who refused to submit to the dominion of the white colonizers gathered there, in what they believed was a divinely protected space. In 1874, a group of troopers from the Fourth U.S. Cavalry crept into the sanctuary, catching the Indians by surprise. The Indians—Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes—fled on foot. They were not pursued; instead, the soldiers rounded up the Indians’ horses and led them to slaughter—the defining moment at which the Texas frontier finally came to an end. The following year, the Comanche leader, Quanah Parker, surrendered the remnants of his depleted, starving band at Fort Sill.
In 1878, Parker was permitted to lead a small group of Indians off the reservation in Oklahoma in order to go on what would be their last buffalo hunt, in Palo Duro. The land was then owned by Charles Goodnight, the most famous rancher in Texas history. The thought that the vast canyon could belong to a single man was hard for the Indians to comprehend. In a journey of about two hundred miles, they hadn’t seen a single buffalo. Only then did they realize how thoroughly their way of life had been vanquished.
Evidently, their plight made an impression on Goodnight. He found a few stray buffalo and began breeding his own herd. They were practically the only remaining animals from the millions that once thundered across the plains. In December 1916, Goodnight invited another group of Indians to return to the canyon for what he billed as the Last Buffalo Hunt. For the occasion, he started his own film company. He wanted to chronicle the Old West, as he remembered it, for the first generation that would know it only from the movies.
In the silent film, Goodnight’s herd is seen galloping over the rim of the canyon into a narrow defile, followed by a group of Kiowa braves in feathered headdresses—old men, plump from the idle confinement of the reservation. A single buffalo is cut away from the herd and quickly surrounded by cir
cling braves who lean toward the animal as they discharge their arrows. The buffalo’s knees buckle as he takes a few final steps. Then the film cuts to the Indians dancing around the dead animal, drinking cups of warm blood as its hide is being cut away. It was the last buffalo they would ever kill.
Goodnight’s film also chronicles the end of another era—his own. Like a number of other independent cattlemen, Goodnight had assembled his first herd by rounding up stray longhorns, feral descendants of the animals brought by the Spanish conquistadors. In the economic desperation following the Civil War, longhorn cattle were selling for about two dollars a head in Texas, but they would bring as much as forty dollars in the stockyards of Chicago. The cowboy heyday began in 1867, when a herd of 2,400 steers was driven from San Antonio to the railhead in Abilene, Kansas, along what became known as the Chisholm Trail. Goodnight and his friend Oliver Loving pioneered another trail to Denver. (Their relationship was the model for Larry McMurtry’s classic bromance, Lonesome Dove.) The cowboy era essentially came to an end in 1885, when barbed wire fenced off the plains. In that meager span of eighteen years, five million cattle and a million mustangs, along with uncounted numbers of hogs and other livestock, were taken to market; great fortunes sprang up in a state that had, until then, relied upon little more than subsistence farming; but most enduringly, a myth was born that continues to define Texas in the minds of people all over the world, and especially in the state itself.
Style is the most obvious legacy of the cowboy legend: the boots, which kept the cowboy’s legs from chafing; the denim jeans that provided some protection against the constant brush of sharp grasses and thorny mesquite; and the broad-brimmed hat to shield against the sun—modest working clothes that made perfect sense for a man riding the range in 1875, but that continue to be the ensemble of choice for so many Texans whose lives are largely lived indoors. Press the jeans and add a crisp white shirt with pearl snap buttons, and you’ve got an Austin real-estate developer.