A Visit to Lyndon Johnson's Birthplace

The man with the black suitcase containing the codes for nuclear war, the Cabinet officers and the generals are gone from Johnson City, Texas, but the man and the land that shaped him remain. The birthplace of Lyndon B. Johnson is now a historical monument, cared for by the Department of the Interior, and open to tourists. TIME's Houston Bureau Chief Leo Janos joined the weekend visitors and sent this report:

THE Pedernales River shimmers under a fiery sun, but runs clear and full in the shade of the live oaks on the L.B.J. ranch. Cars, campers and minibuses drive past grazing cattle, cross the waterfall dam off Ranch Road One and turn toward the five-room cottage where the 36th President of the U.S. was born.

"Welcome to President Johnson's birthplace," a young Interior Department guide says. "We hope ya'll enjoy your visit with us. Next tour begins in seven minutes."

The minutes are spent considering the latex paint and high gloss on the polished wooden floors that have replaced whitewash and brush brooms, inevitably softening the mean reality of turn-of-the-century Texas hill-country life. Then the familiar voice of Lady Bird Johnson, tape-recorded and piped through speakers in each room, leads the group through: "You are now looking in what was the President's nursery. The small Teddy bear on the cradle was the President's favorite toy . . ."

Across the breezeway in the combination parlor-bedroom where L.B.J. was born, a small fan whirs insignificantly in the stifling midday heat. A pregnant woman, wilting outside her air-conditioned car turns to a companion and whispers, "Imagine going into labor in this heat." On a nearby wall hangs a narrative, "A President Is Born," written by Rebekah Baines Johnson and recalling "the sharp, compelling cry" in the room as "the first child of Sam Ealy and Rebekah Johnson was 'discovering America.' "

The electronic voice calls attention to objects around the house: a bedspread crocheted by Grandmother Baines, "a cherished wedding gift to us," a Bristol hanging lamp, horsehair chair and ottoman, Great-Aunt Hattie Baines Roseboro's Bible, and the pie-safe "screened to keep out the flies."

Lady Bird concludes: "A house is very much like a family album, filled with the small treasures and mementos of past events."

Outside now, the tourists study a hand-pump well that still works. The out house has not survived, a father responds to his son's loud question: "Where did L.B.J. go to the bathroom?"

Sixteen thousand tourists made the 14-minute tour of the birthplace during June. Most of them were Texans, although out-of-state license tags dot the asphalt parking lot. They come to see some history on "a ten-minute stop off the road," and politics are unimportant to a father motioning his kids closer to the historical marker while he peers into the range finder of a camera. "You don't have to be an L.B.J. fan to come here," an Oklahoman explains.

L.B.J. fans in the crowd are occasionally rewarded with a visit from the former President. He drives down from the ranch in work clothes to press the flesh, sign autographs and chat by the honeysuckle along the front fence.

The visits to the birthplace are one of Johnson's few known breaks from full-time ranching. His well-known restless energy has been channeled into the raising of chickens for egg production, laying irrigation pipe--sometimes wading waist-deep into the Pedernales to lend a hand--racing across his 330-acre spread in a radio car and barking orders about sprinklers and feed for cattle. Ranch hands respond to his call the way White House staffers once did. The former Chief Executive energetically briefs his guests not on foreign policy but on livestock prices and the weather.

To the tourists who crossed the Pedernales on a recent Sunday afternoon at the rate of one carload a minute, these are subjects in keeping with what they came to see--the severe rustic furniture, the tin drinking cups of a Texas boyhood, the hand-sewn sampler on L.B.J.'s nursery wall that says:

Come in the morning Come in the evening When you're looked for And come without warning.

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