Briar Patch
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The show begins with the Grand Entry, a parade of hundreds of horses and contestants led by the Harris County Sheriff's Mounted Patrol. The action begins with the relay races. About fifty horsemen tear about the Astrodome in a gutsy, exciting race that leaves the audience ready for bear. They get their money's worth in the Rodeo Cowboy Association contests—bareback and saddle-bronc riding, calf roping, bull dogging, barrel racing, and bull riding. The awards to the champions are presented the last Sunday of the rodeo.
Traditional to the Houston show are the calf scramble (boy against little beast with the winning boys receiving certificates for the purchase of a calf), the chuckwagon races (six-horse wagons in hell-bent-for-leather chases), and finally the serenade by the star.
This last event is the crowd drawer. Appearing on a rotating, blue satin stage atop a dirt floor have been the likes of Johnny Cash, Roy Rogers, and the 5th Dimension. After the singing, the star rides (by horse if he's able, by car otherwise) around the ring for the audience to see up close. At this point the people with the front row seats would gladly swap tickets with someone in left field, since frenzied children, frantic for a better view of the conquering heroes, trample everyone in the front rows. The 1973 show will feature Charlie Pride, Merle Haggard, Sonny James and Donna Fargo—all of country fame; and, Rick Nelson, the 5th Dimension, Englebert Humperdinck, the Jackson Five and Sonny and Cher—not "country" so they must be "Western," as in Hollywood.
Suggestions: Don't sit too close if you mind children climbing on you; don't sit too far back unless you have a telescope. Dress Texan again. The wives of the officials wear the Diors of the Western world.
PART WAY WITH LBJ
It was a cold, icy day late last year when the civil rights papers of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration were opened to the public. Many of the famous and near-famous Americans invited to the ceremony were delayed by the weather, and the published agenda was deviated from several times, both because of such natural causes and because of some unscheduled intervention.
As we sat in the audience it seemed somehow appropriate that a seminar entitled "Equal Opportunity in the United States" should not hew to schedule, and that we as a seminar should have to backstep, rearrange, advance, retreat, regroup and advance again, just as we as a nation have moved in civil rights.
The cast that came to Austin was as impressive a collection of political dignitaries as has been assembled in many years. The seminar had something of the air of a reunion of old classmates, where the award to "The Graduate Who Has Made the Most Impact on Our Times" was given to former President Lyndon Johnson, whose name and record were unfailingly lauded by black and white speaker alike, including a few from whose lips such words would not have come quite so trippingly to the tongue back when Mr. Johnson was president.
President Nixon did not come out so well at the seminar, with speaker after speaker attacking his record in civil rights and with only President Johnson himself offering some measure of understanding for the current President's position. Even Mr. Johnson's softer words were somewhat charged, however, and bore strong resemblance to the sort of comradeship the commander of a navy destroyer might feel toward the commander of the enemy submarine on which he was dropping depth charges.
In a deviation from his published text, Julian Bond, the young black legislator from Georgia, looking like a sleek model out of the Sears catalogue and speaking like a black Adlai Stevenson, commended the president he had prodded, chided and criticized throughout the 1960's: "When the forces of events demanded it, and when politics permitted it, a human man was there when we and the nation needed him; and oh, by God, I wish he were there now."
At the close of the seminar, when Roy Innis of CORE and a young black minister named A. Kendall Smith took over the podium to attack the group for being too complacent, too "liberal" and too backward-looking, President Johnson was still given his due. "Black people still honor your record in civil rights," the Reverend Smith said, nodding to Mr. Johnson.
It remained, however, for Mr. Johnson himself to show why he loomed so much larger than President Nixon, who for all his efforts at lessening international tension and his historic trips to Peking and Moscow, still seems colorless, in much the same way that the current leaders of France pale before President DeGaulle and those of Great Britain before Winston Churchill.
Because Viet Nam casts its dark shadow across so much of his presidency, we cannot look on Mr. Johnson's record with the sort of uncritical praise that the seminar participants, with President Nixon's rather dismal civil rights record before them and with a little selective forgetfulness, were able to do. Even so, we cannot help but imagine how much gusto and earthy class the former President would have put into the trips to Moscow and Peking. But such thoughts are only vague mental longings, and foreign policy was never his strong suit, anyway. These men of politics, hard workers, gathered in Austin understood him best, and he understood them. By being adversaries throughout his term of office, but adversaries in the best, political sense of the word, they were able to put together the legislation that dismantled illegal segregation and took the first halting steps toward solving the problems of race and poverty.
President Johnson was in a mellow mood. He walked slowly, attentive to each step; his wife kept a sharp eye out for his every move and sign. He looked older, like, well, a statesman. When he entered he shook hands with everyone on the front row: former Chief Justice Earl Warren, Vernon Jordan of the Urban League, Mrs. Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Congresswomen-elect Barbara Jordan and Yvonne Burke, Julian Bond, Congressman Henry Gonzales, Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, and a gallery of civil rights leaders.
His speech was something of a valedictory address, a retrospect by a man who had come a long way—in stature, in position and in understanding. This was not the President Johnson, exhorting us by his record, that we remembered, opinion poll in his pocket. He was even downright humble. "I'm kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and didn't do more than I did. But of all the records housed here [in the LBJ library], it is the record of this work that holds most of myself within it, and holds for me the most intimate meaning."
If the rest of the participants had been rudderless and leaderless, looking back to the past and uncertain of the future, Mr. Johnson had some advice. "All is not lost, all has not been in vain. We have to reorganize and re-evaluate what we have done and where we are. We can't overcome all injustice and make this a perfect world overnight."
Mr. Johnson was concerned that while some speakers had taken the positive approach and appealed to President Nixon's great opportunity to do for civil rights what he did for China, others had claimed that he was out to dismantle all that President Johnson had accomplished. To Mr. Johnson, that wasn't the sort of problem you sat around and mumbled about among yourselves. Why, you got out and did something about it!
"If they are going to dismantle all of this work we've done, why, then we need to bring it to the attention of the nation. You all get together and go see the President. He'll see you. And don't start out by telling him that he's terrible, because he doesn't think he's terrible. Just tell him, 'Mr. President, we know you want to do what's right, and we know it's a lot easier to want to do what's right than to know what's right.' And then you tell him what's right. He'll do it."
Mrs. Johnson was standing up by the podium now, and her concern was no longer hidden. Mr. Johnson had not been supposed to speak at all, according to his physician, and here he had not only given his prepared text, he had handled a potentially serious crisis when the seminar was threatened with disruption, and then had risen to address the crowd extemporaneously. She looked terribly proud of him, but also protective and worried. The former President was not to be denied. The event was just too important to let it end on the wrong note.
And so, looking out at the crowd, his eyes twinkling but his gestures slower, more measured, he offered his help.
"I can't provide much go-go anymore, but I can provide hope and encouragement—sell a few wormy calves now and then—to see that we continue."
As he left, the group broke up again into little pockets of divided leadership. Somehow we felt that we had seen the last of the great cooperative efforts on civil rights, at least for a long while. It is as easy for us to imagine President Nixon speaking about selling "a few wormy calves" as to imagine him speaking to a collection of civil rights leaders with the same hard-won wisdom and the same sincerity as Mr. Johnson did.
President Johnson was a giant, and remains one. What he did wrong, he did royally wrong; what he did right, he did royally right. Events are out of his control now, and we seem fated to be led by less imaginative, less colorful, less real people.
As for the seminar on "Equal Opportunity in the United States," what it left was a big, hovering question mark. The legislation is passed, the departments created, the federal registrars sent, all years ago. While most of the leaders at the seminar agreed that the problem now is not so much racial as economic—with blacks, chicanos and poor whites all pretty much in the same boat—none of them knew what to do about it, and few of them had much confidence.
The only person throughout the two-day seminar who said "we shall overcome" was President Johnson. He seemed to believe it.
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