The Last Empire
A rootless steamboat captain carved the King Ranch out of the frontier more than a century ago. Today Captain King’s descendants, rooted in the land he conquered, struggle to hold his legacy together.
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“Most ranch kids of our generation lived in town,” Helenita recalls. “We three grew up on the ranch. We spent our youth playing with Kineños. This was all pre-oil. The porch was screened then — there wasn’t any air conditioning. We didn’t have a pool, and I can remember my father’s spraying us with the hose in the summers while we jumped up and down and squealed. We didn’t have cars or radios or television the way kids do today. We had to entertain ourselves. The ranch was our playground. The old Kineños always had time to talk, and they would show us things. We’d walk down a path and they’d know a use for every bush — this one would heal a wound, that one cure a toothache, this one over here would make tea, another one would make soap. My father was always telling us to become close observers, to notice details and to draw conclusions from what we saw.”
B and Bobby grew up to be opposites, both in appearance and in personality. Bobby is short and scrappy, an endearing good old boy. After dabbling in college at A&M and UT, he went to work at the ranch in 1958. He helped with the breeding programs in South America, ran the Laureles Division, then became executive vice president of the ranch after Bob’s death and oversaw all of the domestic ranching operations. He is brash, opinionated, loyal, uncomplicated. “I love the ranch,” he said back in 1969. “I like to play cowboy and I don’t mind working.” A man of tremendous energies and a natural salesman, he would boast that he “could sell anybody anything.” He owned a Buick dealership in Kingsville, and when things got slow on the ranch he would go down and sell a few cars, just to keep in shape.
B is tall and graceful, with the rosy complexion of an English beefeater. He was a young man of inner strength and drive, serious about his ambitions, willing to challenge his uncle on his own ground. After prep school he studied agricultural economics at Cornell. He entered the army at the end of the Korean War, then returned to attend the Stanford business school.
Bob Kleberg wanted nothing so much as for B to come back to the ranch and work with him. He took B along, for example, on his initial trip to Australia. When the ranch’s first board of directors was formed in 1954, B, at 25, was by far the youngest member, just as Bob had been the youngest trustee following Mrs. King’s death thirty years before. Bob put B in charge of the Santa Gertrudis Division, the showplace of the ranch. But to B, being in charge meant being in charge. When Bob and Dick traveled around the Santa Gertrudis and gave orders to the foremen and the Kineños as was their custom, B considered they had broken the chain of command. He had learned from the Army how a successful organization worked, and he never forgot his military lessons. If you gave a man responsibility, you had to give him authority. How could he run the ranch unless Bob or Dick went through him?
But Bob Kleberg was not about to give up the absolute power he had always wielded. So in 1956, convinced that he could not continue to work in his uncle’s shadow, B Johnson, then 27, took his financial statement to the bank and borrowed enough money to buy the 70,000-acre Chaparrosa Ranch southwest of Uvalde. No one since Captain King had ever done such a thing on his own. Bob saw this independence two ways: first, as a commendable sign of strength, confidence, and character, and second, as a direct challenge to his authority as head of the ranch and surrogate father. B remained an active member of the ranch’s board, but he devoted the lion’s share of his time to his own affairs.
More than any other member of the family, B was the logical person to take over Bob’s role after Dick became ill. He was the oldest male in the bloodline; he had studied at his uncle’s knee and knew everything about ranching and the ranch; he was educated, diplomatic, polished. He even inherited the old man’s boots, which he wears just as Bob did, with the trouser legs of the ubiquitous King Ranch tan twills tucked inside. Yet when it came time to pick a successor to Bob Kleberg, the family did not call on B Johnson to fill his boots. Nor did they call on Bobby Shelton. Instead, they turned, as Captain King had almost a hundred years before, to an outsider.
The Outsider
In 1943, during the dark days of World War II, a tall and elegant young Army captain from Pennsylvania named James Clement married Ida Larkin, the daughter of Bob Kleberg’s sister Henrietta. The young man, a Princeton graduate, was from a prominent Eastern family; his father was the chairman of the Pennsyivania Railroad. Not long after the marriage James Clement went back to war and was badly wounded in Normandy. After the war the couple settled in New York. Clement’s wounds were complicated by diabetes, and his physical weakness made him less than enthusiastic about the bitter labor battles that plagued the coal and railroad industries in the late forties. With Bob’s encouragement, he and Ida (who is known as Illa) moved to Kingsville in 1947.
Jim Clement of Princeton and Philadelphia’s Main Line went to work in the King Ranch office as the assistant office manager. His main duty was managing the inventories at the ranch’s dry goods store and lumberyard. He was happy as could be, although Illa missed New York. They moved into the Big House and became occupied with the world of Kingsville and the ranch.
Clement did not immediately make the transition to the relaxed style of the South Texas ranching aristocracy. One family member recalls that his somewhat stiff urbanity, so appropriate for New York City clubs and boardrooms, seemed “a little out of place in the mesquite brush.” The young Clement started out to bring a bit of Eastern professionalism to the frontier informality of the ranch’s operations. “You couldn’t see anybody without an appointment for the first few days,” remembers a former ranch employee, “but that didn’t last long.” Soon Jim Clement was having coffee every morning at Harrell’s drugstore with the locals, soaking up gossip, being a part of things.
But though he adapted to the rough, masculine casualness of the ranch, Jim Clement has never pretended to be what he is not. He is not at home in the saddle, and he can’t look at a bull calf and pick out its breed type or use cowman’s jargon to describe its beef conformation. He is more likely to wear topsiders and a porkpie hat than boots and a cowboy hat.
He is a businessman rather than a Rancher. And by being so different, he carved out a place for himself at the ranch that no one else in the family wanted. “We can leave that up to Jim,” they said as they saddled up to go out and work cattle. “Jim understands all that,” they said as they loaded up to go hunting. “Ask Jim about the figures,” they said as they went off to pick out breeding calves. In other words, Jim Clement became indispensable.
Bob Kleberg had kept the ranch running as a ranch. By sheer force of personality he had given the impression that it could be run from the saddle, that running it was an art, an insight, a way of life. But during Bob’s lifetime the ranch became an increasingly complex business stretching all over the world. When Bob Kleberg would not return the lawyers’ and accountants’ phone calls, they talked to Jim Clement. And so did the family members who had moved away and had questions or needed help. Unlike his more robust relatives, to whom the indoors was almost a prison, Jim Clement was always in the office. It was not calculated. It was just that business was what Jim Clement did best.
Who Runs the Ranch?
The beginning of the ranch’s recent history dates from the board meeting in 1974 to pick Bob Kleberg’s successor. Dick Kleberg should have taken over, but even then his failing health would not let him. The board of directors was composed of two members from each branch of the family — the descendants of Bob and Richard Kleberg and their sisters Henrietta and Sarah. They were Bob’s daughter, Helenita, and her daughter Helencita; Richard’s son Dick and Dick’s son Tio; Henrietta’s sons-in-law, Jim Clement and John Armstrong; and Sarah’s sons, B Johnson and Bobby Shelton.
On the day of the board meeting in 1974 Bobby and B each made a strong case that he should be named to head the ranch. Bobby based his claim on his determination to seek out better marketing approaches for the Santa Gertrudis breed, his plans for expanded oil and gas exploration, and his ability to come up with a reorganization of the ranch that would help the family’s estate planning. B based his case upon his proven record and his commitment to maintaining the ranch’s traditions. He was, he said, experienced and qualified — the logical choice.
The magnitude of the decision was not lost on the board members. Not one of them had been alive the last time the family had picked a man to head the ranch, and now they would be deciding its future. The initial choice was basically either B or not B. Some of the directors resented the time and energy B had devoted to his own projects and the distance he had kept between himself and the ranch for the past few years. But the crucial factor was that he was a chip off the old block. If they picked B, they would be continuing the ranch as it was. They would be turning it over to a vigorous, confident man in the prime of his life, a man who was certain to give them, in his own words, “exactly what they had with Uncle Bob, and more of it.” The directors weren’t at all sure that was what they wanted. As great a man as Bob Kleberg was, the longevity of his rule had stunted the growth of many members of the family. Perhaps, they thought, it would be better to have someone more like Dick, someone self-effacing and not so dominating.
After a night of painful soul-searching, the question became if not B, then who? Bobby had some support, but there was one man whom everybody trusted, a man who had not sought the leadership of the ranch and did not expect to get it. His integrity was unquestioned, and as everyone knew, he did not have any personal ambition. He was a man who could be counted on to serve the ranch selflessly for as long as necessary and then to step aside, a man who, although he was not of the family, exemplified the seriousness and sobriety of Henrietta King and Robert Kleberg, Sr., without the flamboyance or charisma of Richard King or Bob Kleberg.
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