Nation: Meanwhile, Back at the LBJ. Ranch…

It was more than seven months ago that Lyndon Baines Johnson, the most boisterous, bumptious occupant of the White House in two decades, shuffled off to Texas like an injured bear to lick the wounds of office and hibernate for a while out of the public view. TIME Correspondent Don Neff has been following Johnson’s elusive spoor, and last week he filed this report:

AT first, the word among L.BJ.’s knowing neighbors was: look out. Old Lyndon’s reappearance was greeted by a mixture of nervous smiles and wonderment by his weathered-faced cattleman neighbors in the hill country and by the soft-handed politicians and businessmen in Austin, 60 miles away. Johnson, everyone said, would be a whirlwind. With his gargantuan energy and an ego to match, he would be into everything—buying up banks and newspapers, pulling the strings of Texas politics, holding rambling press conferences on everything from cattle prices to Republican snafus.

But the Lyndon Johnson who was frenetically visible in Washington has all but disappeared among the squat oak trees in the empty vastness of Pedernales country. He is only a fleeting presence, a blurred picture, a voiceless phantom. He has granted only one interview, a session with CBS’ Walter Cronkite before the Apollo II launch, reportedly for a five-figure fee. He is seen only in telephoto glimpses: walking practically unnoticed on the University of Texas campus, going into the Johnson City Bank for a chat with A. W. Moursund, his old friend and business partner. He turns up horseback riding on the ranch, inspecting his herd of Herefords, watching a cattle sale at the Round Mountain auction ring. In short, he has cut himself off from all appearances where he would be the center of attention. ∙

To hear his friends tell it, Lyndon Johnson has turned into just another hill-country rancher. He helps lay irrigation pipe, frets about his cattle and the weather, works on his memoirs and papers, entertains a few close friends, watches an occasional movie in a converted hangar at the ranch (he invariably falls asleep). Sundays, he usually goes to one of the churches around Johnson City—Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran, it hardly seems to matter, as though he were facing God as an equal and the intermediaries were supernumerary. He is fit and tanned, relaxed and happy.

Johnson has clearly put out the word that he is now very much a private citizen. Those few friends who will talk about what he is up todo so with the hasty over-the-shoulder air of a heister peddling a hot watch in front of a police station. Among his friends, says one intimate, Johnson cannot help noting that the stock market has gone to hell, inflation is rampant and Nixon has had more men in Viet Nam than L.B.J. ever did. But to talk to outsiders about L.B.J. and his works is to court disaster. After a news commentator at Johnson’s KTBC-TV in Austin talked to a reporter about goings-on inside the station, a terse memo came from L.B.J.: “I want his ass fired.” It was.

Johnson might not be able to resist the temptation to play kingmaker in next year’s Senate race. Democrat Ralph Yarborough, an old L.B.J. foe, is up for reelection, and two possible opponents, Republican Representative George Bush and Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, have both been out to the ranch. So have two old cronies, Federal Judge Homer Thornberry, whom Johnson unsuccessfully nominated for the Supreme Court last year, and Frank Erwin, a longtime intriguer in Texas Democratic politics.

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Though Lyndon Baines Johnson himself may be furtive as a desert fox, his works are everywhere in booming Austin. During Johnson’s vice-presidency and presidency, the city became a key federal administrative center, adding at least 5,000 jobs to the local payroll. On the University of Texas campus, a $12 million public-affairs school and library is going up, which will house L.BJ.’s 8,000 filing-cabinet drawers of papers.

In downtown Austin, the ninth floor of a new federal office-building complex is listed only as “Secret Service,” but in fact it includes a luxurious suite of offices for L.B.J., a staff and about a dozen Secret Service agents still assigned to the ex-President. One uniformed agent sits in the lobby with an eleven-button telephone; no one gets past him without an appointment. Johnson either flies into Austin by Air Force helicopter, landing on the roof, or drives in his Lincoln Continental. Federal employees are finding parking spots in the basement garage increasingly hard to come by. The whole front row has been commandeered by L.B.J. and the Secret Service, and about half the remaining spaces disappeared in a trice to make room for a large Sheetrock storehouse—presumably for some of those voluminous collections of presidential papers.

While Johnson is obviously enjoying the perquisites of a White House pensioner, the deeper question of what is really on his mind must go unanswered. The feeling is that he is wrestling with his soul, trying to figure out just how things went sour in his five-year presidency. Where did he lose touch? What went wrong in Viet Nam? Ronnie Dugger, owner of the liberal Texas Observer and an expert Lyndonologist, speculates: “He has given up on current opinion and retreated into history. With his memoirs, he is going to try to make as strong a case as possible for his decisions, particularly about the war. He is plunged into self-justification.”

That may or may not be so. Whatever he is up to, it is uncharacteristically solitary for a man to whom all the world was, quite literally, his stage. It is difficult to believe that there will not be some sort of second act.