LBJ's Texas White House "Our Heart's Home"

CHAPTER 10 "Eight Hundred Yards up the Road":
The Ranch and Retirement, 1969-73

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Lyndon B. Johnson's retirement remains the source of many of the stereotypes about the man and his ranch. After returning to the Texas Hill Country in the aftermath of Richard M. Nixon's electoral victory over Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election, Johnson found himself described as "a worn old man at sixty, consumed by the bitter, often violent five years" in the White House, a man who had been "swept down a hole of obscurity" into retirement. His "removal into irrelevancy" followed his departure from the White House, one reporter cruelly wrote.¹ This portrait—of a man exhausted by the Oval Office who resented his treatment by the press—contributed greatly to the popular view of Johnson as a man defeated by the presidency, someone who only surfaced occasionally and reluctantly during his retirement.

For the press, this characterization of Johnson served as retribution against the man whom they never understood but who many in the media felt betrayed them and the country in the quagmire of Vietnam. Always difficult to label, Johnson, in his decision to remain apart from public life after leaving the White House, allowed the press to fix upon him a stereotype of failure—in their terms, not in his. The man who had manipulated journalists throughout his career did not publicly respond to them now, for once deciding not to attempt to fashion a counterimage to negate the one put forward by his detractors. The result has been a popularly held and widely reinforced mischaracterization of Johnson's retirement as an admission of defeat on a personal as well as a political level.

With Lyndon Johnson, however, no transformation of this magnitude could be so simple. His return by choice to the ranch embodied much more than the public perception of a worn and tired old man. In his retirement, Johnson melded the various functions of the ranch in his life and career: the symbol, the haven, and the place he could control. Rather than flamboyantly display his retirement and beg for the attention of the world, as have many ex-presidents since, Johnson chose to live, for the first time in his adult life, on personal rather than public terms. He left the public scene, leaving a void behind him, and his attitude reflected his sense that he was, at last, home. "He was still a politician," long-time aide Yolanda Boozer remembered, "but he reverted more to a rancher-businessman type of person, more a father." His attention now focused on different issues than it had during his political career. Even in private, he rarely discussed matters of state or criticized the actions of his successor, except in the case of offering strategic advice to 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, Senator George McGovern. Johnson promised Lady Bird, he told one reporter, to "cultivate more small pleasures" in retirement, and he genuinely tried to do so.² With both Lynda and Luci and their children at the ranch or in Austin, Johnson had ample opportunity to exercise long-denied paternal instincts, to enjoy a life without the constant stress and maneuvering of politics.

To journalists and individuals still embroiled in the public world of Washington, D.C., his decision to give up the power and primacy of presidential status was incomprehensible; it reinforced their feeling of having never understood the man and, in some ways, accentuated their desire to mark him as defeated. Even Doris Kearns, who became a close confidante of the president during the preparation of his memoirs, tacitly accepted this perspective when she wrote that "after thirty-two years of public service, with the end of his presidential responsibility, a terrible, perhaps impossible transition to the hill country awaited him. . . . Whatever vestiges of power went with the retiring president . . . the real power was gone." Johnson had assumed a value system that the public world of journalism and politics could not fathom. Only writers such as Flora Schreiber of Modern Maturity, who represented a constituency of older Americans accustomed to such difficult transitions, appeared sympathetic to the president's desire to leave the public world; the mainstream political press regarded his desire to retire in a far more negative manner.³ The resulting characterizations denigrated Johnson for being what he had become: a man of the country who had succeeded in the world of national politics but who turned his back on it after achieving the position, if not always the goals, he set for himself.

The lack of public appearances and media attention belied the typically more complicated nature of life at the ranch during Johnson's retirement. Always a hands-on administrator, Johnson still had many projects to occupy his time. He supervised the details of the construction of the LBJ Library on the University of Texas campus; dictated the sessions that became his book, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969; and managed his various properties in Texas and Mexico from the ranch on the Pedernales River. Johnson reveled in life at the ranch, escorting guests, checking his herd, and not "keeping to anyone's schedule but his own." He let his hair grow almost to shoulder-length, a visage that elicited comment when George McGovern visited the ranch during the 1972 presidential campaign. He traveled by Air Force helicopter and a personal turboprop airplane, using the military aircraft to check on progress on the library and the private airplane for longer trips. Each year on December 21, the Johnsons hosted a rollicking party at the Argyle Club in San Antonio, Texas, to celebrate their wedding anniversary.⁴

One of his biographers, Paul Conkin, detects an important change in Johnson during retirement. "For the first time since childhood," he notes, Johnson "was not tugged and pulled by ambition, not challenged by some new task." This "subdued, passive" former president had changed his scope and understanding of the world, and not withstanding his morbid sense of an early death, which was confirmed by an actuarial study he commissioned, he sought a different and more peaceful existence after leaving the presidency. According to Conkin, the public Johnson, the combative veteran of political wars, ceased to exist in 1968, and a new incarnation of the man, one focused on private rather than public affairs, lived on. This change was most apparent in his lack of public comment on political matters. According to Tom and Betty Weinheimer, Hill Country neighbors and friends, the only public comment on the Vietnam War Johnson offered from retirement was that he was "glad that it's someone else's problem." This attitude reflected his changed feelings about public life.⁵

The ranch was as central to this new private Johnson as it had been to the presidential Johnson. He had become, in the words of one urban, Ivy League-educated aide who typically could not understand the distinctions of rural life, "a goddamn farmer," albeit one who received foreign policy briefings from the staff of Nixon administration Secretary of State Henry Kissinger every Friday.⁶ This conflicting picture, of a man at peace with self and place who could not resist keeping a hand in national affairs, defined the post-presidential years for Johnson. His ranch gave him the ability to do both, to be both. From it, he could—with only minor exceptions, such as the interviews by Walter Cronkite he allowed during retirement—
control not only his world but also the outside world's knowledge of him and, through this, the way in which he was perceived. Johnson understood this, but again, as had been the case throughout his career, his desire to manage an image for the world conflicted with his essential character, formed and affirmed by the Hill Country. In retirement, as in the presidency, Lyndon Johnson remained paradoxically both a man of the world and a man of the Hill Country. In this sense he had traveled a great deal farther than the "eight hundred yards up the road"—a phrase some caustic locals used to describe Johnson's accomplishments—from his birthplace to the ranch.

Although Lyndon Johnson had left the presidency of his own volition, the approaching inauguration of Richard M. Nixon offered a permanent closure to his years in the White House. The final days in Washington, D.C., became a whirl of farewells and parties, while much official business remained unfinished. A farewell dinner for the cabinet on January 10 reflected the closeness of his staff, working together through difficult times. Although from anyone else such sentiments would seem hackneyed, Lady Bird Johnson best expressed the feelings in the room by quoting Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," she began. "It's a rare unequaled feeling, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and we are fortunate to have known it, to have shared it with you, and we are grateful," she told the people who comprised the cabinet.⁷ The Vietnam War and domestic unrest had taken an enormous toll on the cabinet over the years, and the people in that room, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Dean Rusk, had shared difficult and trying times and made hard decisions together. Brought close by the trials of the Johnson presidency, they felt a kind of bond that stemmed from their experiences. Exchanges of gratitude and closeness marked the last weeks before the inauguration of Richard Nixon.

More public events and characterizations also reflected on the accomplishments of Johnson's years in the White House. For Lyndon Johnson, this was harder; it required coming to grips with a legacy of which he was not entirely proud. According to Conkin, Johnson's presidency "ran aground on Vietnam. On this, as on no other issue in his life, he failed. He knew it. He suffered intensely." This knowledge meant that there was a tone of apology in Johnson's final speeches, as well as a hint of defensiveness. During his final news conference at the National Press Club, Johnson echoed Winston Churchill when he told the assembled press corps that he did not think that his administration "had done enough in hardly any field." In telling a story long attributed to Churchill, Johnson quoted: "so little I have done, so much I have yet to do."⁸

Johnson's final State of the Union address, scheduled for January 14, 1969, took on significant personal meaning for the departing president. Johnson "invited" his grandson, eighteen-month-old Patrick Lyndon Nugent, to the speech, telling Lady Bird that she and their daughters could attend but that "it's my State of the Union speech and it's my last one and the only person I'm inviting is Patrick Lyndon." Seated in the gallery with his mother, the toddler behaved impeccably throughout the speech. At its conclusion, Democrats and Republicans cheered, and misty-eyed congressional leaders reflected on the Johnson presidency. The press reported that Lady Bird Johnson cried. She denied it, saying she was laughing at her grandson, the youngest listener ever to survive a State of the Union address. The baby "might not remember it," Lyndon Johnson said, "but I would."⁹

On their last night in Washington, D.C., the Johnsons threw a party for the White House staff and their families. As had much of the rest of the week, the evening offered memories and reminiscences, hopes for the future, and sadness at the parting of ways. It was a happy affair; the only sad moment came when a five-piece Marine band played "Hello, Dolly," with Johnson's staff changing the words to "Hello, Lyndon."¹⁰ All the joy of the experience of working in the White House, all the tension and fear, were embodied in this welcoming song, set against imminent departure.¹¹

The morning of the inauguration, January 20, dawned as a typical Washington, D.C., winter day: dreary, cold, and gray. The Johnsons planned to leave for Texas shortly after the inauguration. As they had throughout the presidency, military valets awakened Lyndon Johnson at 7:00 a.m. on the last morning of his term. Shortly after 10:00 a.m., Richard Nixon arrived at the White House, and by a little after noon, the United States had a new president. A lunch at the Clark Cliffords' followed; from there, the entire Johnson clan, including the two grandchildren, Patrick Lyndon Nugent and Lucinda Desha Robb, left for the airport. A huge crowd of well-wishers awaited, among them Congressmen George H. W. Bush, there, as he said, to "pay his respects" to "his president."¹²

At Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, five thousand people and a huge sign that read "Welcome Home Mr. President and Family" greeted the Johnson entourage. Resplendent in its trademark orange, the University of Texas Longhorn band struck up "The Eyes of Texas" and "Ruffles and Flourishes." Dignitaries and friends dotted the crowd, and the mayor of Austin presented Lady Bird Johnson with a bouquet of early spring flowers. The ex-president gave a short speech, and the Johnsons boarded a Jetstar for the ranch.¹³

The ranch came in sight as darkness fell, and the Johnsons could see that a crowd had gathered to welcome them home. More than five hundred local people waited at the hangar, some of whom had known Lyndon Johnson his entire life. The former president greeted his friends and neighbors with a talk that emphasized how glad he was to be home. Leaving the hangar and walking into the warm, mild weather, the Johnsons went into their house. A "giant mound" of luggage awaited them in the kitchen. "For the first time in five years," Johnson remembered, "there were no aides to carry the bags inside to the rooms." Lady Bird began to laugh: "the coach has turned back into a pumpkin and the mice have all run away."¹⁴ At last, the Johnsons were home.

The pile of luggage was a fitting beginning for their readjustment to private life. Although in the view of some the ranch had never been home to the Johnsons, in the minds of the former first family they were returning to their life, their place, and their people. The circumstances were different; at every level of public life, the Johnsons had experienced the intersection of their daily existence with senatorial, vice presidential, and presidential obligations. The transformation of the ranch into a remote White House during the presidency was an especially poignant example of this complex condition. But after January 20, 1969, the Johnsons were on their own on a ranch that they thought of as home but that they often had shared with federal officials charged with ensuring their welfare. finding their baggage dumped in the middle of the kitchen floor was a reminder that after the presidency, life would be very different.

The most salient feature of the Johnsons' return to the ranch was a newfound privacy. Without the eternal glare of the press and with the absence of a vast staff, the Johnsons could regain some of the small pleasures of life. There were now solitude and darkness, things that the network of Secret Service searchlights shining away from the house to hamper anyone trying to see in had entirely obliterated. "Some nights, you couldn't even see the house for all the lights," bus driver M. W. Ivy said. Johnson had a number of habits typical of rural people in which he could not engage during the presidency. In particular, he liked to end his evening by urinating off the porch at the ranch, a habit he acquired from his father. Johnson enjoyed this practice but found that becoming president had limited his freedom. On the first night he was home after assuming the presidency, he had tried to sneak away from the Secret Service agents to engage in this nightly ritual. Johnson "eased out on the front porch, and . . . started," he recalled, "and right in the middle, this big floodlight hit me." Although Johnson remonstrated with the Secret Service agents, they insisted that his security was paramount. When he tried the next night, again Secret Service floodlights came on. After that, "I just decided to give it up," Johnson told William W. Heath, an Austin attorney whom Johnson appointed ambassador to Sweden in 1967. "The small pleasures in life you have to give up."¹⁵ After Nixon's inauguration, he could again do as he pleased, a prospect that well suited the former president.

Nor were there pressing demands on the former first family. "We were living on our own time," Lady Bird Johnson recalled, thinking of the thirty-five years Johnson spent in a hurry during his political career. The pace of life slowed greatly, something the former president appreciated. For the first time in their married life, the Johnsons picked their social engagements based on their choice of friends rather than on political needs or requirements. "The people who the president saw during his retirement years were people he wanted to see," Jewell Malechek remembered, "not people he had to see." Everyone who came by the ranch was invited for lunch or dinner, for Johnson did not like to be alone. He kept a telephone by the table to call people: relatives of guests or perhaps old friends who were being discussed during the meal. Typically, lunch was followed by a nap, a luxury the presidency had not allowed. Johnson resumed his activities about 5:00 p.m., when dinner guests would arrive for a cocktail, a drive around the ranch, and the spectacular sunset. Even his sleep was better. "One of the things I enjoyed most was being able to go to bed after the ten o'clock news at night and sleep until daylight the next morning," Johnson recalled of the early days of his retirement. "I don't remember ever having an experience like that in the five years I was in the White House."¹⁶

Despite the pleasure that Johnson experienced when he returned to the Hill Country free of the burdens of public service, the beginning of his retirement did not go well. "The man didn't know how to enjoy retirement," George Reedy asserted, and the first months of 1969 amply demonstrated that observation. Johnson became depressed—ceasing the characteristic activities of a politician, such as attending funerals; failing to respond to the phone messages of former associates; and becoming something of a mystery. "He has remained invisible, a kind of non-presence," Marshall Frady, a southerner who oddly tried to recast Johnson's retirement in the terms of the South, wrote in Harper's. Lady Bird tried to find people to visit who could bring him out of this depression, but the transition was slow. According to Conkin, this attitude stemmed from Johnson's dissatisfaction with the activities he had set out for himself. Johnson "came home to be a real rancher," this biographer states, "a formerly idealized profession that in no way matched his talents or inclinations." Johnson was a politician, a people person, not the taciturn kind of person who typified the ranching profession. Johnson's expertise was with people, not animals. The president had also been worn down by the demands of the presidency, a situation that dampened the spirits of this typically energetic man. "It took him nearly a full year to shed the fatigue from his bones," former White House staffer Leo Janis recounted.¹⁷

The transition from the position of leader of the free world to that of gentleman rancher remained difficult, but after the feelings of gloom lifted, the former president found his ranch, as he had often said, a good place to walk. After his depression lifted and he began to adjust, Johnson enjoyed a period of good health and good spirits, and his primary interest remained the ranch. His land in the Hill Country had captured his heart long before retirement, and as he became accustomed to life in the Hill Country, the ranch became the center of his existence in a way it never before had been. At last, the ranch became a place to live, not merely one to visit.

In retirement, Johnson did exactly what was expected of a man of his energy and temperament. "What he did was go to work," reported
W. Thomas Johnson, deputy press secretary and special assistant to the president, who moved to the executive staff of the Texas Broadcasting Corporation when Johnson retired. "He became one of us," ranch foreman Dale Malechek remembered. Johnson "just wanted to ranch" in retirement, Russell Thomas, a veterinarian who specialized in large and exotic animals and who consulted at the ranch, recalled. Despite his protests to the contrary, Johnson ran both the ranch and the Texas Broadcasting Company. Malechek reported to him daily, as did Jesse Kellam of his communications company. "I've got to go out and see about my [water] pipe. It's not working right," was a frequent Johnson refrain in retirement. Malechek remembered milking cows at 6:00 a.m. and finding Johnson standing behind him in pajamas and house shoes asking questions. Johnson "didn't know everything" about ranching, Father Wunibald Schneider remembered, but he paid close attention to its details. Whenever, as president, he returned from a trip, the first question he asked was, "What did I miss?"¹⁸ The operation of the ranch, one of Johnson's primary interests during the presidency, occupied an even more central place in his life in retirement.

In particular, Johnson participated in the irrigation operation during his first year of retirement. He "hauled pipe," Malechek recalled, because "he wanted to get some exercise, and come spring, he got in and started helping us move pipe. . . . We let him have the light end . . . and he would carry that and do the site lining to line us up." In typical fashion, Malechek recalled, Johnson was "very cranky in wanting [the pipe] as straight as it could be . . . since he was hellbent on getting them as straight as can be, we gave him that chore" of siting. He engaged in laying pipe throughout the spring and summer of 1969, but ongoing heart trouble forced him to quit in 1970. In the summers, when the "cattle work" lasted until as late as 10:00 p.m., Johnson frequently watched and sometimes participated.¹⁹

As soon as he got into the rhythm of retirement, Johnson returned to the daily habits that had typified his public life. He remained a driven man and retained some of the great energy that had been characteristic of his political life. Johnson rose early and tended to ranch matters, and at about 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. he returned to his bed to read the newspapers and answer correspondence. He "never let a letter sit on his desk," Jewell Malechek recounted, answering them all the day they arrived.²⁰ This pattern allowed Johnson the sense of being involved so crucial to his well-being, the illusion of leisure that spending time in bed at 9:00 a.m. meant to a man such as Johnson, and the feeling of control that dictating correspondence from his pillows gave him. In this respect, retirement allowed Lyndon Johnson to be exactly who he wanted to be, albeit on a smaller scale. He had traded the limelight and power of national politics for the control of even the minuscule details of the ranch operation.

Johnson remained a social being, "the kind of person who liked people," in the words of the long-time editor of The Blanco News, J. N. "Jimmy" Houck. The Johnsons maintained a busy social life, particularly with people from the Hill Country. There was an ongoing stream of dinner and afternoon visitors from among their neighbors and friends, for the president craved the company of his Hill Country neighbors. As he had during the presidency, Johnson visited the Blanco Mill and the Blanco Nursing Home on a regular basis. He had "a way about him" that made him visit people, Houck recalled, and his neighbors reciprocated in the age-old manner of rural people.²¹

The Johnsons were much more selective about travel outside of the Hill Country during retirement. For every fifty invitations he received, Johnson told his staff, he accepted one. Still, these added up. By 1971, he had attended a parade of functions and hosted a number of others. Old colleagues and friends, such as Walter Heller and Henry Fowler, were hard to turn down; the president felt a responsibility to them. He attended a dinner for his old political colleague Representative Henry B. Gonzalez one Saturday early in the fall of 1971, followed shortly after by a dinner given by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Marcus in Dallas.²² Such occasions fulfilled social needs as well as the ex-president's desire to feel wanted.

Although his political activities were distinctly curtailed, Johnson did meet with a number of political candidates in his retirement. He tried "as hard as one man can to ignore politics," reporter Nicholas Chriss wrote in The New York Times of Johnson's retirement, but entirely disengaging was impossible for Johnson. By 1971, visitors to the ranch had included former vice president Hubert Humphrey, Senator Henry Jackson, and others. Members of Nixon's cabinet, including Henry Kissinger and Secretary of the Interior Rogers C. B. Morton, also came to the ranch. Many of these were courtesy calls, but some still sought the political advice of the sage former president.²³

Retirement also accentuated characteristics of Johnson's personality that the stress and strain of five years in the White House had diminished. "He discovered play," his daughter Luci recalled, and his sense of humor returned with a vengeance. Johnson had many of the characteristics of a prankster during his public life, and retirement revived these traits. He always had a prank or a joke on hand in any social setting, and as was characteristic of him, some of them were biting. Johnson also developed his touch for ironic humor, which had been muted during his presidency. One day, Johnson and Doris Kearns were out in a boat on Lake LBJ. "It was a magic afternoon—the sky was blue, the water was blue, and the boat was magnificent," Kearns remembered. In this tranquil setting, Johnson turned to her and said: "Boy, I sure do miss the Middle East!"²⁴ This typical display of humor masked one aspect of his true feelings: his desire to remain part of the world of politics, even in a tangential way. It also reflected his joy at being back in his Hill Country.

Johnson clearly enjoyed his new status as a grandparent during retirement and took pleasure in his relationship with his grandchildren. He "loved his grandchildren," Father Wunibald Schneider recounted; "he would kneel down on the floor and play with them." As the first-born grandchild, Patrick Lyndon "Lyn" Nugent became the favorite, bouncing on his grandfather's knee. This allowed Johnson to experience some of the joy of parenting that he had missed with his own children as a result of his busy travel schedule and frequent absences from home. Although neither of the Johnson daughters ever expressed resentment about their father's absences, others have suggested that Johnson recognized that he missed out on important experiences and sought to make up for them with his grandchildren.²⁵

Johnson was different in retirement, relaxed and relieved but engaged in defending his actions in the Oval Office. The large-scale entertaining ceased after he left the White House, but when small affairs were held, Johnson felt obligated to explain his presidential policies. On one such occasion, shortly after Johnson's retirement, Lady Bird Johnson invited people in the Stonewall area who had helped at various presidential functions to a small thank-you party. When Johnson addressed the group, his comments turned to Vietnam. "The pain of that memory was evident," Cactus Pryor, who attended the event, said. Johnson "was explaining to these farm people the political frustration of that episode and it hit me, the ghost was still there, the nightmare still existed. Here he was home with his neighbors, but the specter of that disaster was still plaguing him."²⁶ Yet this was a personal kind of justification and even perhaps absolution, different from the stoic refusal to comment on politics that he regularly offered the press.

Another manifestation of the changes in Johnson was a willingness to delegate responsibility for things close to him. Secret Service Special Agent Michael Howard, who had served the Johnson family since the vice presidential years, was stationed at the ranch during the former president's retirement. A Texan, Howard had developed a good relationship with Johnson that began when the agent served as his driver in Texas during the vice presidency. In 1970, Howard noticed that Johnson's horses were not being properly attended to on the ranch. Johnson was known, even feared, for requiring his staff in both Washington, D.C., and at the ranch to be on top of every detail all the time. When something as personally meaningful as his horses was not well cared for, it suggested that the president might be slipping. Howard asked about the horses, and Johnson placed them in the agent's care. "That's when I first started taking care of them," Howard said. "Any time he'd have guests come in after that, he'd call, and I'd saddle them and he'd come down and ride a little bit." By 1970, Johnson was debilitated by heart problems, and he did not ride for a very long time, "but he'd get up on there," Howard recounted, "and trot around a little bit." From the perspective of Father Wunibald Schneider, riding around the ranch renewed the former president. "He loved to see the cattle and the deer" from horseback.²⁷ Johnson had begun to step back from the obligations of public life and let others do some of the work while he enjoyed the benefits.

In retirement, the Johnsons traveled frequently. They visited Acapulco every February, staying in a villa owned by former Mexican president Miguel Alemán, one of Johnson's partners in the ranching business. As had been the norm when he was president, the trips were nearly spontaneous. Typically, Johnson invited people on one day's notice, and his flights to Mexico disgorged people, food, liquor, and bottled water. A cook accompanied the entourage, and Arthur Krim, Johnson's old friend, made sure that first-run movies were available for screening in the evenings.²⁸

Life on these trips was vintage Johnson. Despite an array of important personages who came and went, the entire vacation party would follow Johnson's whims. He determined what would happen; if he wanted to go to the beach, everyone went to the beach. Golf was another common activity, with the president leading his entourage across the links. Some days, he sat down to breakfast, and he and the entire party conversed until lunch. Johnson especially enjoyed jaunts to Alemán's ranch, called Las Pampas, in the interior of Mexico. The stark beauty and isolation of the location touched Johnson, and he and his entourage could bask in the solitude of that magnificent setting.²⁹

Excluding these trips to Mexico, travel outside of Texas was more infrequent after retirement. The president rarely went north at all, favoring the warmer climate of the South. Johnson appears to have made only three trips to Washington, D.C., each time to events hosted by President Nixon. Once he regained his emotional equilibrium, he resumed his time-honored practice of traveling to funerals of friends and colleagues. This symbolized his connection to politics, to the ways and activities of a politician. Johnson attended a Democratic Party dinner in Chicago, a park dedication in California with Lady Bird Johnson, and an Apollo moon launch in Florida. Besides these trips, he spent his time in Texas, occasionally leaving on private excursions to visit personal friends.³⁰

Johnson became a devoted football fan and used his retirement to indulge this newfound passion. "Football became almost his life" in retirement, Cactus Pryor believed, and although on some occasions Johnson denied this, he became the leading fan of the University of Texas football team. He "really buried himself in the Texas football program," Pryor recounted, befriending players such as star halfback Jim Bertelsen. The president took his "football group," which included Lady Bird; Carroll Staley; Frederick Spurga, the vice president of the Securities State Bank in the Hill Country; Harold Woods, the LBJ State Park manager; Jesse Kellam; and the Malecheks as its nucleus, to all the Texas games, home and away. In 1969 and 1970, Coach Darrell Royal's Longhorns were the best team in the land, winning the mythical national collegiate championship both years with the last segregated teams at the university. Despite Johnson's commitment to civil rights, he and the racially intransigent Royal developed a friendship. Royal was a frequent guest at the ranch, and he was the kind of hard-boiled, successful man with whom Johnson had much in common. "Johnson related to Darrell [Royal] in a very personal way," Pryor said; he sought his company so often that the coach was sometimes forced to neglect other responsibilities. Johnson assisted Royal by inviting Texas football recruits to the ranch, where Johnson would deliver a pep talk. At home games, the president and his entourage were very visible in their fifty-yard-line seats, but "nobody sat with him in the stadium," Pryor quipped in his characteristic manner, "because he was mostly on his feet, shaking hands, playing the politician." Students at the campus, at least those involved in official organizations, loved him, making him an honorary member of the Silver Spurs, a prestigious student service organization. He reciprocated their affection and was quite comfortable in the fall in the excitement of Southwestern Conference football stadiums.³¹ Again, pleasure and status were melded in retirement.

Johnson also engaged in other activities, when football was not in season. Golf became a passion for him in the spring and fall. "Sometimes he'd spend the whole morning playing golf," Jewell Malechek remembered. He typically played at either Fredericksburg or Kingsland, both relatively close to the ranch. The Johnsons often spent part of August at the Haywood Ranch, near the Kingsland golf course, and the Malecheks would join them in the evenings. Dale Malechek would drive back to the main ranch in the morning with the Malechek children, while Jewell Malechek remained with the president as he played golf. During one round, Johnson was observed tossing a ball he hit into the rough out onto the fairway; one Secret Service agent quipped that these were "LBJ rules." After rounds at Kingsland, the group would ride back to the LBJ Ranch in a helicopter, sometimes handling the president's correspondence on the way.³² But as much as he enjoyed the game, golf was never the obsession that football became. Johnson never added a few holes or a putting green at the ranch, preferring the sport as a way to get off the property and out into the world. At the ranch, he preferred other activities.

From the ranch, Johnson engaged in a number of projects that he hoped would serve to highlight his legacy. Although Doris Kearns, who played an important role in constructing The Vantage Point, believed that "none of these projects really engaged Johnson," the president spent an enormous amount of time assuring that every detail Wt his conception of each project. These were his statements for posterity in an actual and symbolic sense, and they allowed him to play the role that best defined him, that of the hands-on chief executive who attended to every detail. The evolution of this legacy consumed much of his energy during retirement.³³

The first piece of the Johnson legacy was the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historic Site, authorized on December 2, 1969. Consisting of Johnson's original boyhood home in Johnson City and the reconstructed birthplace cottage near the ranch, the new historic site was the beginning of the legacy that the former president himself fashioned. The boyhood home in Johnson City was the subject of comprehensive renovation. At the former president's request, J. Roy White handled the project. Johnson "saw the house as something related to his youth, his times in the past in the area, and the home it always was," White remembered. "He felt he wanted to recreate it." Johnson's birthplace, near the ranch, was transferred to the National Park Service during the summer of 1970, and the president could not resist the chance to offer personal tours of the property. "He wanted people to see and enjoy the things that gladdened his heart," newsman and long-time aide Charles Boatner said. "He wanted to gladden their hearts.³⁴

Johnson regarded the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs on the University of Texas at Austin campus as central to his legacy—important emblems of his impact on American society. During his presidency, Johnson had begun to plan the shape of his legacy. In 1965, he agreed to donate his papers and other historical materials to the University of Texas at Austin, and the plans for the library began. In December, 1966, the design for the eight-story structure was unveiled. Windowless, the nearly eleven million dollar project was referred to by some as "austere," by others as "architecturally forbidding," but Johnson believed it a fitting testimony to his accomplishments. At the dedication of the library in May, 1971, he expressed his views. "It's all here," he said from the podium, "the story of our time—with the bark off. There is no record of a mistake, nothing critical, ugly or unpleasant that is not included in the files here. We have papers from my . . . years of public service in one place for friend and foe to judge, to approve or disapprove." An enormous crowd of dignitaries, including President Nixon, Senator Barry Goldwater, former vice president Humphrey, Senator Edmund Muskie, and countless others, attended the ceremonies. Senator Philip Hart of Michigan best summed it up when he quipped, "I never thought I'd come to Austin, Texas, and know half the people I saw."³⁵

Both the national historic site and the library attracted many visitors, in no small part because of Johnson's persistent promotional efforts. He demanded daily visitor traffic reports from both locations as religiously as he had insisted upon Hill Country weather reports in the White House. Johnson could often be found at the Johnson City house and at the birthplace, giving guided tours of the home, inviting passersby in to see what he claimed was the crib in which he rested as a baby, and selling The Vantage Point and other books. Yolanda Boozer recalled that when she needed the president and could not find him, a phone call to the boyhood home or the birthplace usually established his location. Johnson often helicoptered in to the library, both during construction and after its completion, and did everything he could to increase the number of tourists who came to see it. He signed books, encouraged visitation, and in one episode remarkable for its sheer audacity sought to persuade the announcer at nearby Memorial Stadium, where the Longhorns were in the middle of a football game, to invite the crowd of more than fifty thousand to the library to use the facilities and have a drink of water after the game. Fortunately, the announcer demurred. At the time, the library had one public drinking fountain and one set of public restrooms.³⁶

At the ranch, Johnson also began to fashion his memoirs, a project of such enormity that it would have daunted even someone with the suitable temperament and skills. All accounts agree that Johnson was a poor candidate to accomplish such a task. Recognizing this, he assembled a team to assist him that included MIT professor and Kennedy and Johnson White House stalwart Walt W. Rostow, staff assistant Harry Middleton, speech writer Robert Hardesty, and a young Harvard University doctoral candidate in government named Doris Kearns. Johnson believed that his memoirs were his "last chance with the history books," Kearns reported Johnson telling her, and the project had to be done properly.³⁷

The Vantage Point, as Johnson's memoir was titled, became a compendium of the efforts of his staff augmented by the staccato explosions of the former president. The project began slowly. "It soon became clear," Kearns recalled, "that [Johnson] would rather be doing anything else than working on his memoirs." In formal interviews for the book, Johnson remained his public self: stiff and even pedantic. As soon as the formal portion of each interview ended, he relaxed, and a colorful Lyndon Johnson, the powerful stump speaker and brilliant persuasive political leader, emerged. But Johnson regarded the memoir as a representation of the man he thought he should be, a "calm, almost cold man, sober fellow, with pinched energy; humble, earnest, and crashingly dull," as Kearns later wrote. He resisted the efforts of his writers to use material from the relaxed portions of the interviews. "What do you think this is," he shouted at Kearns one day, "the tale of an uneducated cowboy? It's a presidential memoir, damn it, and I've got to come off looking like a statesman, not some backwoods politician."³⁸

Although in her account of this process Kearns borders on the melodramatic, the tension she portrays reflects the most difficult side of retirement for the still-energetic Johnson. A master at controlling everything around him, Johnson became frustrated by the self-imposed limits of retirement. Reflective by nature but fiercely impatient, the former president felt hamstrung by the prospect of time on his hands. In the haste of the presidency, Johnson could trust his finely honed instincts. The opportunity to reflect in retirement, which would have been good for most people, propelled him to question himself in unhealthy ways. It accentuated his doubts about himself and his position, about the choices he had made and the ways he could represent them to the world. The press, which he had long perceived in an adversarial fashion and sincerely believed denigrated and mocked him in retirement, became the focus of his attention.

Even in the peace and quiet of his ranch, Johnson retained bitterness about his treatment by the press. He displayed antagonism about the way in which he was quoted by reporters and about books that purported to show the decision-making process in the White House. A new book or article would engender a press release denouncing the work as filled with major inaccuracies. Johnson even attacked the demography of the journalism profession, claiming that he and other rural presidents, such as Herbert Hoover and Andrew Johnson, could not get fair treatment from the East Coast press.³⁹

Much of Johnson's animosity towards the press predated his retirement, but a solid measure of his feelings emanated from press treatment of his retirement and from the series of interviews he did with CBS's Walter Cronkite, the beloved face of television news, after he returned to Texas. Johnson was upset by the editing of the early tapes, but he continued the interviews. Most of the taping was done in the Cedar Guesthouse, for the amount of lighting and camera equipment made it impossible to use the main house; one interview was done at the LBJ Library, and others occurred at various locations. Johnson liked and respected Cronkite, but the president was not always happy with the results of the broadcasts. He believed that his remarks were taken out of context.⁴⁰ Cronkite was a symbol of the American people, and in the president's view the newsman's fond ambivalence about the president reflected the nation's views. Johnson's tension with the media never subsided.

Johnson's physical condition soon became a major problem, for in his retirement, as in earlier periods of limited involvement in public affairs, his vaunted control disappeared and he became undisciplined. He stopped following his diet, gained weight, and in 1971 resumed smoking "like a fiend," as Abraham Feinberg, chairman of the executive committee of the American Trust Company, noted. One biographer, noting Johnson's history of heart trouble and the pattern of early death for males in his family, describes this as "insanity." He also experienced periods of intermittent depression. Biographer Paul Conkin states that despite the stress associated with the presidency, Johnson would have lived longer had he served a second full term.⁴¹ Inactivity proved more dangerous to him than the intensity of public life.

Johnson's medical needs were a constant issue during most of his retirement, and they compelled a daily routine that provided supervision for the former president. Navy medical corpsman Thomas Mills, who after Johnson's retirement became the lone medical professional at the ranch, checked on Johnson first thing every morning. If the president seemed ill, Mills stayed close at hand. If not, he attended to other duties. Daily exercise for the former president was strongly encouraged; Johnson liked to swim when the weather was nice, and he usually went to the pool after he had returned to bed, watched the news, and read the newspapers. A plastic canopy over the pool allowed him to swim even in cold weather. This worked well "if you could get him to do it," Mills recalled. Mills began to eat lunch with Johnson during retirement and usually departed afterwards, returning to give Johnson an evening massage. Unlike during the White House years, when he accomplished his daily reading as the kinks were worked out of him, in retirement Johnson often fell asleep during the massages. Especially during the summer, when he kept a later schedule and ate his evening meal, called "supper" in rural Texas, quite late, Johnson's massages often began after 10:00 p.m.⁴²

Johnson pushed himself even in retirement. "He was out there as long as anybody else," Mills recalled, a sentiment that Malechek echoed with evident consternation in his voice as he recalled enduring the president's constant involvement.⁴³ At his age and with his health problems, Johnson's insistence on carrying irrigation pipes and opening gates for cattle was a double-edged sword. It helped him feel vital, in control, and a part of the operation, but it taxed his weakened body.

Despite his chronic problems, Johnson "kept plugging ahead." Mills tried to get him to take a daily walk, "up and down the runway, anywhere, to get him more exercise than he did," Mills remembered. The Johnsons often walked together after their evening meal. Strictures on his diet increased in a largely unsuccessful effort to reduce his weight. "It seemed he was always on a diet," Jewell Malechek remembered, and his weight fluctuated dangerously. His salt intake was restricted, something Johnson abhorred. Johnson liked salt, pepper, spices, and sweets, and "he didn't want to give up any of them," according to Mills. Fried foods, especially catfish, were favorites, and Johnson liked to eat. When Lady Bird Johnson was away, he always took an extra helping of dessert. Even when she was present, he was known for sneaking a spoonful of dessert from someone else's plate.⁴⁴

Although he knew well the dangers of overeating for a man with his health problems, Johnson could not resist the opportunity to tweak authority even when rules were enacted in his own best interest. Nash Castro, a National Park Service official who became a frequent guest at the ranch and whom Lady Bird Johnson regarded as both an indispensable supporter of her beautification efforts and a close friend, recognized this trait. On one occasion, Johnson received a batch of homemade pecan cookies from a neighbor as a group departed on one of his motorized safaris. After passing the cookies around, Johnson set them on the dashboard in front of him, and "as we drove along," Castro recounted, "LBJ kept snitching cookies—quietly and unobtrusively." Lady Bird noticed this and said, "Lyndon, if you eat another cookie, you will spoil your dinner." Lyndon Johnson replied, "I've only had one, Lady Bird. Isn't that right, Nash?" As Johnson turned toward Castro, he muttered "plus" under his breath.⁴⁵ He indulged a passion while defying orders given to him.

This pattern led directly to new and greater health problems. A little more than a year into his retirement, Johnson began to exhibit symptoms of his most serious long-term malady, heart trouble. Since his first major heart attack, in 1955, the specter of a reoccurrence had haunted Johnson. Severe chest pains in March, 1970, sent him to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and angina pains were ever after a constant companion. In the middle of 1971, he was again hospitalized in San Antonio, this time with viral pneumonia.⁴⁶ Illness, added to his smoking and his refusal to carefully monitor his diet, increased the risk of a serious coronary.

In the spring of 1972, Johnson experienced a major heart attack at Lynda and Chuck Robb's house in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rushed to a hospital, he was in intensive care for three days. Certain he was going to die, Johnson browbeat Lady Bird and his physicians until they grudgingly allowed him to fly home in a few days. The hospital director opposed the idea. Johnson insisted that when he departed life he do so from his beloved Texas and defied the leaders of the institution. Some accounts offer the mythic scenario of the director of the Charlottesville Hospital rushing to prevent Johnson's departure only to find an abandoned wheelchair in the hospital parking lot. Although Johnson survived this episode, the remainder of his life was a pain-racked ordeal. Nitroglycerin tablets and an oxygen tank were necessities, and almost every afternoon Johnson had to stop his activities and lie down and gulp oxygen as sharp, racking chest pains hit him. After returning to Texas, Johnson again became ill and was flown by helicopter to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Mills accompanied him and stayed in the hospital room, while an array of medical personnel attended to the president's needs. Lady Bird Johnson and a secretary also accompanied the president. "I'm hurting real bad," he confided to friends, and the pain remained throughout the rest of his life.⁴⁷

This second major heart attack squarely focused Johnson's attention on his legacy. The national historic park was a "backwater park which LBJ did not take great interest in," as Edwin C. Bearss, long-time chief historian of the National Park Service, recalled, "until he has the [1972] heart attack. Then it goes on a fast track. The heart attack is in April; the superintendent's out of there in July," after disagreeing with Johnson's plans. The superintendent was "out of there" after he curtly refused a Johnson request to change the information in a leaflet. Shortly afterward, as Johnson became deeply interested in his park, the former president approached the National Park Service Director, George B. Hartzog, Jr., with a proposal to donate the entire Johnson ranch to the American people—to, in the words of Bearss, "make a real park. . . . Where they could tell the president's story from cradle to grave." Johnson had been rebuffed in a prior effort to acquire his grandfather's nearby ranch, then owned by a neighbor who resented him, but with the help of the National Park Service, the National Park Foundation, Bearss, and Richard Stanton, the chief land acquisition negotiator for the agency, the deal was secured. Shortly after, Bearss and Stanton arranged for the purchase of the Junction School and found themselves, as Bearss phrased it, "in high cotton with the president." With the two properties secured, only the ranch remained to complete a park of the stature that Johnson envisioned.⁴⁸

On Labor Day weekend of 1972, as the Park Service prepared to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Yellowstone National Park, a group of Park Service officials and planners descended upon the Johnson ranch. George Hartzog and his wife, Helen; their son, George; Bernard Meyer, the Department of the Interior solicitor assigned to National Park Service issues; Jay Bright, a planner from the Western Service Center in Denver; and Bearss all flew to the ranch. Johnson met them with the Lincoln Continentals for a tour of the ranch. Bearss found it "a little strange" when Hartzog ordered him into the lead car with Johnson, inverting the hierarchy within the agency; other Park Service officials present ranked more highly than he. The group drove around the ranch while the president indicated what he wanted to donate and on what terms. Johnson and Hartzog "[thought] big," Bearss remembered, "much bigger than the ranch," envisioning a larger park that included much adjoining land. The following day, they examined the Johnson ranch payroll and began to decide who would become a federal employee and who would stay with the Texas Broadcasting Company, Johnson pushing for the well-paying GS-12 for Dale Malechek, whose qualifications might not have been adequate in other circumstances. Everyone left the ranch but George Hartzog, Bright, and Bearss, the historian whom Hartzog had selected for this task as a result of his nearly total recall. After two days of wrangling, a plan was finalized. The Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park had become more than a dream. Congress would authorize it in 1980.⁴⁹

Besides accelerating his interest in his legacy, chronic illness made Johnson grow more introspective. By the fall of 1972, his physicians had ordered him to give no more speeches, but he could not resist accepting some invitations, especially when old friends asked. He used the chance to speak to people in a way that some later remembered as preparing for his departure from life. His love of the Hill Country came through even more clearly as he thought his end neared. He referred to "the pleasure he got from riding around the property and seeing the sunset. . . . He was trying to get the most out of the land," Mills recalled.⁵⁰ It remained in him and became even more important as he grew older and more frail.

Even the debilitating effects of long-term illness did not deter Johnson from pursuing the causes closest to his heart. The last public affair Johnson hosted was a civil rights symposium on December 11 and 12, 1972, at the LBJ Library. It was the second in a series of symposia on public issues; the first, in January of 1972, had featured discussions about education policy issues. The civil rights symposium was supposed to begin with a reception at the ranch on the evening of December 10, but bad weather delayed visitors, including former Chief Justice Earl Warren and Hubert and Muriel Humphrey. It was one of the coldest and iciest spells in the history of Central Texas. The ranch was iced in, and for a while it appeared that Johnson would not be able to attend the conference. His physician advised him not to make the trip, and Lady Bird Johnson begged him to stay home. "I was just heartsick at that," Harry Middleton, then director of the LBJ Library, recalled. "But then we got word that he was coming anyway, that he was at the wheel himself, that he got impatient with whoever was driving this snowmobile, and he took over and drove it." Resplendent in cowboy boots, Johnson was pleased to find that he had successfully negotiated seventy miles to reach the conference, while Elspeth Rostow, who lived four miles away from the library, had not yet arrived. Warren, Humphrey, and other guests were bused in from San Antonio. Warren quipped that he had expected to come to discuss civil rights but not actually to be bused in order to do it. With Johnson's surprise presence, the conference flourished.⁵¹

The strain of attending the conference was enormous, as Johnson's physicians had anticipated, but despite feeling poorly, the former president decided to give his scheduled keynote address. All the remaining major figures of twenty years of the Civil Rights Movement had assembled for the symposium, but in the aftermath of the 1968 assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and with a Republican executive branch, there was no clear national leader for the cause of civil rights. On the last day of the conference, Johnson insisted that a group of demonstrators be given special podium time to offer their point of view over the objections of Tom Johnson, Harry Middleton, and event chairperson, Burke Marshall. The event coordinators felt that an addition to the program was unwarranted, but Johnson overruled them. He wanted everyone to have their say. The former president came quietly into the auditorium to hear the words of the demonstrators. Later he rose from his first-row seat to give his planned keynote speech. "I don't suppose anyone who saw him come up will ever forget it," Harry Middleton said. "He was very slow on those steps."⁵²

The speech he made was one of his boldest and most poignant. As in his famous "nigra, nigra, nigra" speech in Baton Rouge in 1964, in which Johnson told Southerners that succumbing to race baiters at election time prevented them from receiving the quality of political leadership they deserved, Johnson now pushed far beyond his prior publicly stated positions on civil rights. Despite feeling so ill that he needed a nitroglycerin pill during his talk, Johnson articulated both the successes and the problems of American society regarding civil rights. He raised the issue of the level playing field, discussed with candor the problems of being black in a white society, and insisted that no one could delude themselves, despite the progress of the previous two decades, that real civil rights had been attained. "The progress has been much too small; we haven't done nearly enough," Johnson insisted. "I'm kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn't do more. . . . We know there's injustice. We know there's intolerance. We know there's discrimination and hate and suspicion. . . . But there is a larger truth. We have proved that great progress is possible. We know how much still remains to be done. And if our efforts continue, if our will is strong and our hearts are right . . . I am confident we shall overcome."⁵³

The speech ended in applause, but some factions in the audience wanted to use the end of symposium to denounce the racial policies of the Nixon White House. Reverend Kendall Smith of the National Council of Churches and Roy Innes of the Congress of Racial Equality composed a statement that Reverend Smith delivered. It was highly critical of the Nixon administration, asserting that Republican policies had increased racism and insisting that the symposium had to devise a strategy that would combat the attack on the successes of the 1960s. "We demand an extension of today's agenda," Smith concluded.⁵⁴

For a few brief moments, the old Lyndon Johnson returned. The fatigue, the weariness, the health problems all fell away, and an invigorated Johnson bounded back up the steps and delivered an impromptu speech that revealed once again his incredible persuasiveness. "The formal talk had ended," Middleton said; "now it was just Lyndon Johnson from the courthouse square." It was classic Johnson, full of emphasis on reason and communication, brimming with ideas about how to approach Nixon, how to sway him, and how to get both sides to work together. "Until every boy and girl born into this land, whatever state, whatever color, can stand on the same level ground," he closed, "our job will not be done!" The audience thundered its applause and crowded around, seeing the old Johnson magic again and feeling the energy and commitment of this veteran of national political and moral wars.

It was a fitting finale for the public career of the man from Texas, who had challenged local sentiments in his construction of national leadership and who had forced a reckoning between the South and the rest of the nation that has resounded through national politics since. Both in his formal speech and in his impromptu remarks that day, he showed the most important of his qualities: leadership, resolve, and vision. Only a man of Lyndon Johnson's stature and experience could have delivered the remarks he did that day; only a man at peace with himself and his role in the world, convinced of his own mortality, would have tried. Only someone with vision and hope would have attempted the brave reconciliation he offered in his last public words. The civil rights symposium showed Johnson at his best, at his most persuasive and charismatic, his most compassionate and skillful. For one brief instant, he was again the leader he had been in the Senate and in the first years of his presidency, the leader who could see the solution to any problem facing the nation. The day signaled an appropriate closure to Johnson's public career.

A little more than one month later, on January 22, 1973, Lyndon B. Johnson died. Stricken by a massive heart attack at 3:50 p.m., he called the ranch switchboard and asked for Secret Service agent Mike Howard. Howard was unavailable, and two other agents, Ed Newland and Harry Harris, rushed to the bedroom with a portable oxygen unit. Johnson was lying on the floor, unconscious and ashen faced. The agents tried to revive him, Newland giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Howard arrived a few minutes later and tried external heart massage; he too failed.⁵⁵ Lyndon B. Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was dead.

After a state funeral, he was buried in the family cemetery by the Pedernales River, where he had always expected to be laid to rest. It was the place he had chosen, where he could join his ancestors and feel ever after the warm Pedernales River sun on the ground. The irrigated grass in the cemetery area is always green, rare in the Hill Country but vivid testimony to the fundamental optimism of the man laid there among his family.

At the burial, Johnson played one last trick on everyone. He had given specific instructions that he was to be buried between his mother's grave and his wife's future grave site, but according to custom his wife was to one day be buried to his right, the reverse of what Johnson had planned. Charles Boatner stopped the military grave diggers, persuading them to follow the president's wishes. About five feet down, the machine's digging bucket hit metal. It was a large irrigation pipe, running lengthwise down the center of Lyndon Johnson's grave. Boatner called Lawrence Klein, who came and cut the pipe and removed it. Boatner asked if Johnson was aware the pipe was there, and Klein replied that Johnson had located the line in the first place. "It's my firm belief," Boatner attested, "that one of the last little jokes that the president thought that he'd play on his staff was locating that line lengthwise to that grave and wondering how we would handle the digging of the grave when we hit that pipe."⁵⁶

During his retirement, Johnson had finally been able to be his personal self, to do as he pleased outside of the public eye. He had chosen a public life, and he had lived most of his life on those terms, but retirement to the ranch allowed him a freedom from scrutiny that he had not previously experienced. Despite the claims of the press that Johnson was depressed or otherwise unhappy, Johnson appears to have been engaged by the activities of his retirement. He missed the limelight but enjoyed his newfound ability to choose—who to see, what to do—that had never been available to him as a public servant. Retaining the knowledge that Vietnam had turned into a debacle that destroyed his presidency and negatively affected his legacy but celebrating the accomplishments of his domestic programs, Johnson still believed in the moral righteousness of his cause, the Great Society. His retirement did not diminish him; Lyndon Baines Johnson was fortunate to spend the last years of his life doing what he most wanted to do: breathing the air of his beloved Hill Country how and when he chose.