{LBJ's} 'Texas White House' will be turned over to public (AP/CNN)

[eppur_se_muova]

STONEWALL, Texas (AP) -- Shaded by a massive 400-year-old oak tree and perched above the rippling waters of the Pedernales River, it was known as the "Texas White House."

President Lyndon Johnson served barbecue to world dignitaries at the ranch in the rolling hill country 70 miles west of Austin, and first lady Lady Bird Johnson lived there for three decades after her husband died.

With her death Wednesday at the age of 94, the National Park Service will soon take over the 4,000 square-foot stone and wood home on the historic LBJ Ranch, near the town of Stonewall.

Lady Bird Johnson is scheduled to be buried next to her husband Sunday in the family's private cemetery less than a mile away from the ranch house. Video Watch how Johnson tried to make U.S. beautiful »

While much of the ranch is already open to the public -- with tours that drive buses through the property and allow visitors to walk up to the cemetery -- the main home was off-limits during Lady Bird Johnson's life.


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more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/07/13/johnson.ranch.ap/index.html

I toured the ranch a couple of times, and the first time Lady Bird was sitting out on the porch, a little to the left of the center of the picture. She didn't get up, but her daughter Lucy came out to the bus (leaving a nurse/caretaker behind) and shook hands, answered questions, and posed for photos. Of course, I didn't have a camera.

Consider the inevitable comparison: Someday, Laura, having finished her journey to senility, will be sitting out on the porch with Jenna and not-Jenna, tour busses will pull up outside the proscribed four-mile limit, and the occasional heckler will get through with a bullhorn shouting "George Bush was a MASS MURDERER!!" Of course, anyone with an artificial limb will be considered suspect and not allowed on the bus. Ah, what a pleasant little national monument that will make.

[Sapere aude]

1. I will never see the Bush family dump some day. I live within 1/2 days drive of Nixon and saint

Ronnie's hollowed grounds but I would never go to either of them. I drive by Reagan's ranch occasionally and would not go there either. It is now a training ground for future neocons.

[SoCalDem]

2. I don't think so.. The Bush Pigfarm is a prop.. They'll sell it

They only bought it to reinforce the myth that he's a "plain man"..a "rancher".. He did not want anyone realize that he's a YANKEE..and a phony Texan at best...

[Hidden Stillness]

3. They Believed the Ranch Belonged to the Public

Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson actually gave the ranch and hundreds of acres attached to it to the American public December of 1972, to be owned and run by the National Park Service as a National Historic Site, after going to Jefferson's estate at Monticello, and realizing then that the "Texas White House" was also a treasure of our Nation's, and belonged rightfully to all the American people, where they could go and visit it for free, at any time. This was all part of Lady Bird's general attitude that her life, and the life of any public servant, belonged to the American people, and that the common public places of the country, such as highways, belonged to society as a whole, to be enjoyed and cared for, and not to commercial interests to exploit, and thus her famous billboard bans along Interstate highways, and flower-plantings there instead. PBS "News Hour" had a nice tribute to her on Friday evening, with clips of her greeting visitors at the ranch several years ago. Although she also lived in another house for the last many years of her life, I think in Austin, she often still stayed at the ranch.

Lady Bird's hero was Eleanor Roosevelt, which explains a lot, and she had the same all-encompassing love for American history and the public's unfettered right to it, that Jackie Kennedy also had. Much has been made since her death, of her influence as the creator, just about, of the modern environmental movement, but it should not be forgotten that she believed, as all New Dealers did, that the people own the treasures of our country and should have free access to them; they are not the "property" of corporations or individual rich people. How different they both were, Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson, and how seldom they got any credit for the greatness they both were.