History Lesson 
Farewell to LBJ: A Hill Country Valediction
The land that made him takes him back, and many of the goodbyes aren't said at the funeral.
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Wayne Jackson and I were crunched up against the low stone wall that rectangled the cemetery, but we made room for Ronnie Dugger. The rest of the reporters were exchanging stories but Ronnie remained quiet. I wondered what sense he would make of it. For years, he had been coming to grips with Lyndon Johnson, mostly in The Texas Observer. Now he was writing a book about Johnson, had been for some time. Dugger is a discerning man, mentally quick on his feet but deliberate and philosophical in print, and since the fifties he had quarreled with most that Johnson had stood for. Saul came up, and we asked Ronnie to join us later at the Villa Capri. It really wasn't hard to understand the Texas liberals' long war with Lyndon. On the Potomac he may have made like FDR with his programs for the poor, but down here on the Pedernales he ran with men who put more money in a fat steer than they would in a house full of starving Mexicans.
8.
I looked at the hole they would lower him into and wondered if he had ever heard of the Smithermans. I doubted it, though he must have passed their place hundreds of times over the past 55 years. Of course they knew him, as obscure and modest neighbors know a great and public figure, but they also knew him better than that implies. Part of it, I figured, had to do with the Presidency itself. For the Smithermans and for most Americans, I felt, there was still a magic in that office. Yes, because of its incredible and growing power, but also because it was, in Clinton Rossiter's words, "a breeding ground of indestructible myth." As soon as a man stepped into that office he became a flesh and blood democratic distillation of us all. If we loved and hated him, it was because we loved and hated ourselves. And there was no question about it. Lyndon Johnson had engendered those extremes. Why, I asked myself, when I thought of LBJ I always thought of old D and Jody and Jesse?
They had moved into Blanco County back in the summer of '27, just a few months after Lyndon had left for college. He had gone off to San Marcos with $75 borrowed money, a hell of a lot less than D and Jody and Jesse had brought with them. Why, they had something like 2000 head of cattle, which they pastured on a 1280-acre lease along Flat Creek.
Funny how things turn out.
For the next 36 years—the time it took Lyndon to rise to the Presidency—D and Jody and Jesse wore themselves to a frazzle trying to make a living out there on what has to be the sorriest land since Terlingua. While Lyndon had gone from student to teacher to congressional secretary to bureaucrat to Congressman, Senator, Vice President and President, the Smithermans had gone from 2000 cows to less than 50, from 1000 acres to 300. Why, they'd even gone to sheep and goats, which made them beyond redemption as far as cowmen were concerned. About the only thing sassy they managed to bring off was marrying sisters, Jody and Jesse that is. D never married. Jody finally removed himself from the partnership and he and Hazel moved into Henly. Out on the ranch fat D spent most of his time trying to coax fig trees out of the caliche and limestone, and out in the barn frail Jesse was always raising a racket inventing contraptions like self-feeders and hayloft lifts which never got off the place. And all the time Lyndon Johnson making millions and moving in high cotton. Did they give him hell like J. Evetts Haley? Were they bitter? When he passed on the road in his Lincoln did they cuss? Why hell no, D told me one day as he fried a sausage patty to a black crisp, it was nice to see somebody get ahead. And when he became president, it kind of perked them up.
Ella Mae, Jesse's wife, started melting down beer bottles which she made into LBJ ashtrays to sell to tourists.
Jesse commenced to talk seriously about putting in a barbecue stand on 290. Why, it was bound to be a money maker. It looked like Lyndon was going to be president for nine years, and if he wasn't the best advertisement for barbecue and beer Jesse didn't know one. Might even put in a motel. Ella Mae could sell her ceramics and D could do the cooking. Jesse got so excited he poked a finger into D's chest. "I'll tell you somethin' else," he declared. "We ought to think about gettin' some Holstein cows, some milkers." He knew damn good and well people were going to keep on drinking milk. By God, the country was beginning to look up with Lyndon in there.
Well, none of it came to pass.
Not the Great Society.
Not the nine years.
Oh, Ella Mae sold a few ashtrays, but not from any Smitherman Bros. Barbecue Stand.
Jesse got sick and died and that was that.
D, in his seventies, had no heart for it or for the milkers.
And when Ella Mae got glaucoma and had to have two eye operations, she stopped melting down beer bottles.
I spent a few hours with them, the widow and the bachelor, one day back in January of 1969, shortly after Lyndon Johnson had called it quits to retire to the ranch. Ella Mae hadn't missed her ceramics. "It's a small thing to have to give up after losing a husband," she said. "Just look what Lyndon's given up."
And we did look, for there on the television screen was Richard M. Nixon, taking the oath as 37th president.
The inauguration saddened them, not because they had anything against Nixon, but because they felt so sorry for Lyndon Johnson.
"I know that seems a silly thing to say," Ella Mae said, "especially when you consider how far he has gone in the world, and from such a little place like Johnson City! But I feel for him and I can't help it. The country turned crazy on him, and he had to step down to save it. People don't seem to appreciate that."
9.
D Smitherman died in April of '72. I knew that as I stood next to the cemetery wall. But I did not know that at that moment Jody Smitherman lay in a San Antonio hospital trying to make it back from a heart attack. As Hazel was to put it, "They helicoptered him there just ahead of Lyndon."
10.
Now, just behind Lyndon, after the hearse that bore his body, came the family in limousines, and after the family came friends and business associates in limousines, and after them came buses, many buses, unloading important people, many of whom we recognized—Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie—but mostly they were VIP's of the Texas Establishment who had not made it to Washington for the more formal services. Anyone who was anybody or who wanted to be was there. One fair young man caught my eye in the forest of great coats. Although he stood taller than the men around him he was somehow subdued and lacking in stature. Perhaps it was what I knew of Ben Barnes that gave him this rather contradictory diminution.
The man whose body the military pallbearers were carrying now to the grave had singled out this young man as his political son, had coached and counseled and favored him to the point that everyone said it was a matter of time before Barnes would be governor and maybe president. It was said that the mantle of greatness had been laid upon him. But just as the young man made his first big move he stumbled, badly, and the people turned from him. I looked at him now and wondered if the men who used to buoy him up had also left him like a leper. I had never thought much of him myself, but now he fascinated. He was becoming either a very wise man or a very bitter one, depending upon his inner character, and the latter, of course, had never come to light in the days of his public apprenticeship.
11.
Before that particular young man had been favored by the departed, another had been his favorite from the time they had been novices in the pursuit of power. Now he came, tall and handsome in his maturity, to eulogize the dead man. And surely the common thought—it caught your breath—was that here, embodied in both, might well be the once and future kings.
12.
At one point in his eulogy, John Connally quoted Lyndon Johnson as having said, "I guess I've come a long way for a boy from Johnson City, Texas." Certainly Connally had come a long way himself, but I couldn't help but think, as we watched him read over his friend, that the truly stunning turn in his life was not the years between the Floresville farm and the governor's mansion, but rather those of late.
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