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

By Hal K. Rothman. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. Pp. [xii], 300. $24.95, ISBN 1-58544-141-4.)

Hal K. Rothman has written an interesting study of Lyndon B. Johnson's ranch in the Texas Hill Country that explores the personal, political, and cultural uses that the president made of his property near Stonewall before and during his term of office. Relying on the voluminous records in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Rothman follows the evolution of the LBJ Ranch from the early history of the Johnson family through the president's death in January 1973. For the presidential years, Rothman's narrative is strong and well informed, and he provides useful insights into an important aspect of recent presidents--their retreats. Indeed, Johnson's symbolic use of the ranch is now being replicated by George W. Bush in his "Western White House" near Crawford, Texas.

There are, however, problems with the book that arise from Rothman's failure to do research in the legal records of the counties in which Johnson and his family lived. This difficulty is not Rothman's alone. The major Johnson biographers have not gone personally to the county courthouses in Gillespie, Blanco, Hays, and Travis Counties in search of documents that illuminate the business and political careers of both Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., Lyndon's father, and Lyndon Johnson himself. Had they done so, they would have found abundant evidence that Johnson's depiction of his father's economic status as an impoverished failure in the 1920s and 1930s leaves a good deal to be desired. While he suffered setbacks in the agricultural depression of the early 1920s, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. bought and sold property in the Hill Country during the rest of the decade and was far from destitute. Johnson very much exaggerated his father's plight to heighten the impression of his own rise from poor circumstances. By accepting these stories at face value from the existing stock of Johnson biographies, Rothman falls into the same difficulty that their authors encounter in understanding their subject.

Historians are properly skeptical about Lyndon Johnson's veracity on public policy and diplomatic problems, and his problems with the truth as president have been often chronicled. Yet many scholars adopt as gospel Johnson's assertions about his background with a stunning credulity. Even though the myth that Johnson's political career began with an unexpected and unplanned speech at a 1930 rally for Pat Neff in Henly was exploded two decades ago, it shows up once again in Rothman's narrative. The next step in studies of Johnson, whether it be of his ranch or his early life, is to cast a cold eye on the stories he told about his upbringing and match them up with the full documentary record. One important figure in Johnson's life in the Hill Country was his business partner, A. W. Moursund, with whom Johnson had a falling-out after leaving the White House. That gentleman becomes A. W. "Moursand" throughout Rothman's narrative, a recurrent slip that does not build confidence in the author's mastery of the Hill Country and its people. Had Rothman not accepted the historiography on Johnson with so much trust, and had he brought the same research thoroughness to the Hill Country that he brought to the Johnson Library, his good book would have been the definitive treatment of its important topic.

GOULD, LEWIS L.
Austin, Texas