Man Of The Year: Lyndon B. Johnson, The Prudent Progressive

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nuclear force for NATO long after it had become obvious that the West Germans were the only ones interested. Johnson, like his predecessor, remains convinced that nobody has come up with a better way to halt nuclear proliferation. But at year's end, he advised U.S. diplomats to quit twisting the allies' arms to make them accept MLF, pledged that no program would be adopted until it was first aired with London, Paris and Bonn.

At the Heart. Through the year, whether he was hoisting his beagles by the ears, bellowing through a bullhorn to invite campaign crowds to "a speakin','' or roaring along a Texas road holding his five-gallon hat over the speedometer, Johnson made colorful copy and was copiously covered. Even when fear of getting too much news exposure induced him to try to get away from it all-as when he took a powerboat trip on Granite Shoals Lake last July-newsmen pursued him on foot, by boat and by plane, and photographers zeroed in from afar with telescopic lenses.

Yet, for all the verbiage, he remained hard to classify. He hates labels, and none will stick on him for long before he rids himself of it. "At the very heart of my own beliefs," he once wrote, "is a rebellion against this very process of classifying, labeling and filing Americans under headings: regional, economic, occupational, religious, racial, or otherwise." Back in 1958, he defined himself as "a free man, an American, a United States Senator and a Democrat, in that order," and added, "and there, for me, the classifying stops."

For a partial understanding of Johnson, one has to go back to the harsh hill country of west-central Texas where he was born in 1908. Historian Walter Prescott Webb describes it as a land of "nauseating loneliness," whose inhabitants were "far from markets, burned by drought, beaten by hail, withered by hot winds, frozen by blizzards, eaten out by grasshoppers, exploited by capitalists and cozened by politicians."

For all that, Lyndon speaks almost lyrically of the land. "It's dry country," he says, "but it seems there is always a breeze blowing. And there is always sun here. We don't have dreariness. We don't have those dull grey skies when you look up. Here you have birds singing, flowers growing, girls smiling."

Rattle, Rattle. To Lyndon, who left the land to seek his fortune elsewhere and came back in style, the hill country now means mostly the 400-acre LBJ Ranch on the banks of the Pedernales.

It is an oasis of expensive Stetson hats and tailored twill trousers, herds of sleek Herefords, Angora goats and blooded horses, a fleet of Lincolns and a landing strip with a gleaming private plane, meals of venison steak, homemade bread and pecan pies, a heated pool and Muzak piping in The Yellow

Rose of Texas. And it is a galaxy removed from the granite and limestone land that Webb wrote about.

Just two miles up the road from the LBJ spread, though, is Emil Klein's 167-acre ranch. There, a battered pickup truck sits in the driveway, wash hangs on the line, and an income of a few thousand a year is all that one can expect. In the grim days of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, the face of Texas that Lyndon knew best bore a close resemblance to Emil Klein's pinched place, and so he cleared out.

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