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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Who would have thought, say in 1960, when John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson sent Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge to the sidelines and beckoned Mr. Connally to Washington as their Secretary of the Navy, that it would be President Nixon, not President Kennedy or President Johnson, who would set John Connally up for a run at the White House? Not even our knowledge then that Connally was a counterfeit Democrat would have prepared us for such a turn of events.
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Maybe that was premature, putting Connally in the White House when we still had a Texas President to put in the ground. Well what of him, this Lyndon Johnson who yet made such sounds in the earth? The Graham cracker generalities that the Rev. Billy Graham was serving up over his grave did not hit home. What occured to me then (and I hold to it now) is that not since Andrew Jackson had a President contained such an abundance of both virtue and flaw. In his character and manner and sympathies, Lyndon Johnson was in that great rough-hewn line of succession that began with Old Hickory and found such full expression in our towering genius, Abraham Lincoln. It was passed down, in part, to Theodore Roosevelt and then to Truman, this rude kind of humanity, but of all of them, LBJ was the closest to Jackson.
It doesn't surprise me that Jackson's great friend and spiritual brother was Sam Houston. If Houston was a colossus in buckskin, LBJ was the colossus in khaki. It is uncanny how alike they were. Houston was in Texas because of President Jackson's bidding, and their intent was empire. Sam Houston came to Texas on borrowed money and made a pot while becoming President of the Republic. His sins were human ones. Lyndon Johnson went to Washington on borrowed money and made a pot while becoming President of the United States. His sins were human ones.
They wanted everything, and they went out and got it, power, money, land, a place in history among the titans. Everything but love in their own time and on their own terms.
Both Houston and Johnson were larger than life incarnations of Western Man. They believed, by God and by their own prowess and passions, that everything was possible in this world. Chaotic men of massive contradictions, they ruled with rage as well as reason, and left in their wake both good fortune and calamity.
Both fell from power because the people turned against them, Houston for trying to prevent a war, Johnson for pursuing one. Both retired from the public arena with heavy hearts and died, if not in disrepute, then in disregard.
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The way we stood in concentric circles about the casket reminded me of the circles of life in a fallen oak, with the dead man our common core. The simile even carried over into how we were arranged about the grave. The first influences on Lyndon Johnson had been those of his hill country boyhood, but as he grew they receded from his center toward the bark of his background, to make room for each succeeding stage of his life. And indeed the "plain people" as John Connally called them, were at our backs, making a great outward circle of several thousand persons. In front of them, in a smaller circumference, were the politicians he had known in his middle stage, and in front of them were those who had served him in the White House. And at the heart of the goodbyes, of course, were the old friends and business associates, and the kin.
A fifth circle was wedged in as close to the family as the stone wall and the secret service would allow: the press, rapacious and rude in its appetite for one final insight and intimacy into the man and what he had meant.
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History redeemed Houston.
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We tended to think of him as a consummate politician, but I wonder. Of course he was with the boys in the backrooms of Congress. He came to rule the Senate as no man in our history. If it hadn't been for Senator Johnson and his majority whip and carrot, Eisenhower would have been left out on the fairway.
But God was he a bore on the podium, speechmaking! Somebody's middleclass Masonic Uncle, beaming a benign conservatism through his bifocals, when you knew damn well he had just broken somebody's back for crossing him. Up close, pressing your flesh and looking you in the eye, or at his leisure with a Pearl beer in one hand (Jesse was right} and a barbecued rib in the other, he was as winning as John Wayne.
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The cinematic Wayne.
Not the new nominating one. He's as dull on the podium as Johnson was.
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As Billy Graham.
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Lady Bird and her girls bore up beautifully, Lynda in her proud, Protestant singing along with Anita Bryant (who was magnificent), Lucy in her Catholic quiet.
But the old aunts, Aunt Jessie Hatcher in particular, you could tell they were chilled to the bone.
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He was a genius in the Senate, gloried in it.
The Presidency was something else. I don't think he ever felt quite at home there, never really hit his stride. Like Andrew Johnson after Lincoln and Chester A. Arthur after James Garfield, he came to it sadly with a nation in tears. Jack Kennedy had been so beautifully young and vibrant.
But after a time, he made it his, came into his own enough to pass the most comprehensive and far reaching civil rights legislation of any President. In this he was a second Lincoln. He put into law what Lincoln had dreamed of and what Kennedy had schemed of. What he did for the minorities was the high mark of his five years in the White House.
But it was not legislation calculated to make him a popular President. In this he led the people and the Congress instead of following. Our inclination as a people was toward racial injustice, and had Lyndon Johnson been a weaker man, it would have been easier to ignore the militants and go along with the country's prevailing opinion. But he saw the light, and the right, though it was against our grain. The irony, and it was a bitter pill to swallow, was that not even the black people loved him for it.
Our mood, as a people, was contentious, as it was in Jackson's time, Lincoln's time, and we barked and bit at him, and at one another, like dogs.
It was not consensus, but contention; and he was miserable and must have commiserated with the ghosts of past Presidents. Now he knew why Washington had left the Presidency sore in heart and mind, eager for the seclusion of Mt. Vernon. Jefferson had called the Presidency the road to splendid misery and Jackson had sworn it more curse than honor.
That was what Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson. More curse than honor was his Waterloo, and it doesn't take history's long view to see how tragically absurd his position was. Here, on the one hand, he was pouring manpower and billions of dollars into the making of our own Great Society, while, on the other, waging one of the longest and costliest wars in our history, not against a major power, but on a tiny country in support of a corrupt regime.
It is true he inherited the commitment from Kennedy; and the policy of containment from Truman, but he let both get away from him. He paid for it, and we are still paying for it.
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The 21-cannon salute fell short by two. A howitzer misfired twice.
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It hurt me to think back over his last lameduck days in the White House. No President since James Polk had worked harder and enjoyed it less. He had wanted to take the country by the tail, but gargantuan that he was, he reached for more than he could handle.
But great men always do. Because, I guess, they are metaphors for the best and worst in all of us.
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Red sold four beers all that morning.
Dugger never did make it to the Capri, and Saul and I talked of Nixon.
Neither did Jody make it out of the hospital. Hazel said he died two weeks later.
So did Aunt Jessie Hatcher, two weeks to the day. She caught a cold and it went into pneumonia. They buried her in the same cemetery.
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