JOHNSON CITY, Texas - The park ranger at Lyndon B. Johnson’s boyhood home is herding our little group out of Johnson’s bedroom and on toward the “sleeping porch,” but my son is lagging behind, studying the period furnishings with more interest than you’d expect they’d inspire in an 11-year-old.
“So, this is the window?” he asks, referencing a story the ranger had just told - that young Lyndon would sneak out of bed, climb out the window and crawl under the house on evenings that his legislator father had friends visiting in the parlor, so that he could eavesdrop on their political wheeling and dealing. I nod, he grins, and he hustles to catch up with our tour.
Only later did he explain what had struck him: He had never thought about any president ever being a kid, much less a kid who would break the rules. In that modest house, lacking touch screens or animatronic exhibits, history had come to life.
Which was what I’d vaguely hoped for when planning this trip in late November. My son’s sixth-grade class had just spent a week immersed in the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination but had spent little time on the man who succeeded him - despite the fact that Johnson was one of only two U.S.
presidents born in Texas. (Bonus points if you knew the other was Dwight Eisenhower, who, though associated most closely with Kansas, was actually born in Denison.)
And Johnson wasn’t just born in Texas - the lifelong Democrat grew up here,campaigned here, even spent much of his presidency governing here, from the ranch house in Stonewall dubbed the Texas White House. Today, the most important sites in his life, plus his presidential library and museum, are well-preserved and open to visitors, all within a roughly 60-mile swath of central Texas, ready to be discovered by a new generation.
“I think that, now that the [Kennedy assassination] observances have concluded, the eyes of historians will turn back to LBJ, and we’re starting to see an increase in interest in him,” says Russ Whitlock, superintendent at the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in Johnson City. The park is commemorating his presidency with a series of special exhibits over the next seven years. “When people come here, see the boyhood home, go through the exhibits, they often experience kind of this ‘aha’ moment - ‘I had no idea he did so much.’”
Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in 1908 in a farmhouse outside Stonewall, Texas. He died Jan. 22, 1973, at just 64 years of age, in his sprawling house just down the road from that cabin. In between, even when he served in Washington for more than 30 years, first in Congress and then the White House, Texas was always home.
Not only did Texas shape his identity, but Johnson shaped Americans’ ideas about Texas. Long before the Dallas Cowboys became America’s Team and someone shot J.R. on Dallas, it was Johnson - wearing his boots and cowboy hat, bringing foreign leaders to his ranch to gawk at cattle and ford the Pedernales River - who brought Texas style to Middle America.
The Johnsons deeded much of the ranch to the National Park Service in 1972, shortly before his death, with the vision of keeping it a working ranch that would be open to the public. Today, the national park is split in two. The ranch in Stonewall, connected to the Lyndon B.Johnson State Park & Historic Site, is one half, and the boyhood home and visitor center, in Johnson City proper, is the other.
We start our tour in Johnson City, where the park ranger convenes a group on the porch of the house where Johnson moved with his parents at age 5. Though the politician liked to play up his humble roots, we see immediately that by standards of the day, the Johnsons were fairly well off. The tidy frame house, a modified dogtrot style, sits on a good-size city block in the middle of town. Our guide explains that Johnson’s parents paid $3,000 for the property in 1913, the equivalent of about $300,000 today.
It’s decorated to look like it did during Johnson’s childhood, with some original furnishings and some belonging to Johnson family members, so we can begin to envision the small-town Texas upbringing that shaped Johnson’s politics.
On the back porch, where Johnson slept alongside his siblings on hot summer nights, his father, Sam, sometimes cut hair to bring in extra money when times were tight, our ranger explains. In the dining room, Johnson would sit next to the radio every night, soaking up news reports for hours. And on the front porch, Johnson’s mother - one of the few college-educated women in Blanco County - would tutor students, instilling in him a deep respect for education.
In fact, it was on that front porch, in 1937, that Johnson announced his first political campaign, the congressional race that launched him into public life.
ON TO THE RANCH
That flair for the dramatic, and for storytelling, was something Johnson employed throughout his career. That afternoon, as we begin our driving tour of Johnson’s ranch, 14 miles west of Johnson City, the audio tour we’d bought in the gift shop pointed out key sites that doubled as photo ops during Johnson’s presidency.
There’s the low-water crossing on the Pedernales River, across which Johnson loved to drive dignitaries for a grand Texas-style arrival at the ranch. There’s the one room schoolhouse that Johnson started attending at age 4; in 1965, he signed legislation here authorizing broad federal aid for education. Next to him at the news conference was his very first teacher from that schoolhouse, who had let him recite his first lessons while sitting on her lap.
Finally, after stops at Johnson’s grave and the reconstructed cabin that stands in for his birthplace, we arrive at the Texas White House. The ranch house got that name because Johnson spent about a quarter of his time as president here, grooming an image as a working rancher and salt of-the-earth Texan.
But despite the swimming pool, the chef’s kitchen and the six en-suite guest bedrooms upstairs, this was no vacation retreat. Johnson had a full office here, decorated in the same vintage turquoise leather that was in the Oval Office of the day.
The bank of three TVs in the living room? They were there so Johnson, obsessed with his public image, could watch all three network newscasts every night. In the days before cellphones, there were 72 land line phones, including one installed poolside, one at the head of the formal dining table and one on each side of the bed in the master bedroom - “so he could get to the phone no matter which side he was sleeping on,” our guide suggests.
That bedroom was where Johnson had a fatal heart attack shortly after receiving a telephone call from President Richard Nixon informing him that a cease-fire agreement had been reached with Vietnam. (The cease-fire was announced the following day.)
His wife, Lady Bird Johnson, continued to live at least part time in the house for many years, but after her death in 2007, the home was opened to the public in stages, with the master bedroom opening last.
Renovation is ongoing. Currently, the park service is restoring the second-floor suite that Lady Bird had specially decorated for John and Jackie Kennedy’s first visit to the ranch - scheduled for November 1963.
BACK IN AUSTIN
If the state and national parks bring to life the human side of the president and first lady, our visit the next day to the high-tech LBJ Presidential Library in Austin helps place us back in the 1960s, witness to his turbulent presidency. A multimillion-dollar renovation, unveiled in December 2012, has added a shiny overlay of interactive exhibits and slickly produced films to the library, first opened in 1971.
We skip the downloadable app, which for 99 cents provides a map and audio tours, in favor of our third excellent guide of the trip, a volunteer docent who happens to be a former history teacher. He guides us quickly through a timeline that covers material we’d learned during our park visits - Johnson asking Lady Bird to marry him on their first date in Austin in 1934, his early work bringing electricity to rural Texas - to bring us to the political highlights.
Though by now we’ve spent the better part of two days immersing ourselves in Johnson history, my son is still engaged. At the interactive Vietnam exhibit, he uses the giant touch screen to “play president” by deciding how to react to key events in the conflict, then comparing his choices to how the events actually played out. And when we get to the replica of the Oval Office, he studies it carefully, as if he’s trying to teleport himself back to 1965.
On the way back to the hotel, our history sojourn over, he’s quiet; I resolve to offer him a less intellectually challenging day later in the week.But before I can ask him what he thought of the trip, he volunteers a verdict: “Thank you for bringing me to see all this. I thought [Johnson] was just one of those presidents who didn’t really do anything, like Calvin Coolidge.” (Mental note: Investigate his social studies curriculum a little more closely.) “But he really did a lot.”
In middle school parlance, that’s the equivalent of a five star review. History mission, accomplished.
Travel, Pages 48 on 02/09/2014