FORMAL 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.
THE 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.”
IT 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.
SINCE 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.
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).
IN 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 pa
nts, 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.”
Mr. Johnson strides vigorously at a monstrous Hereford, waving his arms and maybe his five-gallon hat, emitting a modulated roar that comes out something like: “Whooo-oo-oosh!” Herefords are both docile and well-fed and usually they back away or seek the protective company of their kind; Mr. Johnson will break into a trot, get in front of the animal, and whoosh it again … as it lumbers away.
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.”
The Passage of Power Page 83