The Pulse of Pedernales

THE PRESIDENCY

It was a rainy day in Johnson country, and precisely at 8 a.m. on Election Day the President and Lady Bird arrived at Johnson City's one-story stone Pedernales Electric Cooperative Building to vote. They cast ballots 1 and 2. Then, with the President at the wheel of a white Chrysler station wagon, they led a 20-car caravan of reporters and Secret Service men on a jouncing, 51-mile, four-hour ramble over the Johnson "propity."

At one point, the President, looking tanned and cheerful, decided to go all the way back to the grass roots. Braking the car, he leaped out, plucked handfuls of Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylori) from a field and nuzzled the blades as if they were orchids. "Look at that," the President cried jubilantly to reporters. "Isn't that the thickest grass you've ever seen?" Of course. Lyndon planted it.

Lest newsmen conclude that he had gone too far back to Cynodon roots, Press Secretary Bill Moyers assured an interviewer that even when Johnson is fingering a field of grass he has a hand on the nation's pulse. Averred Moyers: "He has a great natural gift for knowing, feeling and sensing the mood of the American people."

Next day Johnson extended a paw to Poland after swearing in new U.S. Ambassador John Gronouski. The former Postmaster General, the President observed, "will be an ambassador first of peace and good will, whose mission is to build new bridges, not just to Poland but to the people of Eastern Europe." Then everyone hied themselves over to Hye (pop. 134), an unincorporated crossroads five miles from the ranch. There, Larry O'Brien, the aide who did the most to ram the Great Society legislation through the 89th Congress, was sworn in as Gronouski's successor.

The setting was like a primitive painting. The main building in Hye is a combination post office-general store, and sports a false tin front pressed into gingerbread doodads and painted bright red, white and green. It was here in 1912, when he was four, recalled Lyndon, that he mailed his first letter--to his grandmother. "Larry O'Brien told me a few moments ago," he said archly, "that he is going out to find that letter and deliver it." Waxing philosophical, Johnson continued: "This little community represents to me the earliest recollections of the America that I knew when I was a little boy. It was a land of farms and ranches and people who depended on those farms and ranches for a living." Today, he hastened to add, "our task is to make our cities good places to live, expensive and demanding as we realize that task is going to be. But the price of progress must not be two Americas, one rural and one urban, or one Northern and one Southern, or one Protestant and one Catholic, or one white and one colored."

The ceremony over, Johnson and his new Postmaster General repaired inside to munch cheese sliced on an oldfashioned counter top and pose for pictures beside the tiny, 60-box post office.

Last week the President also: > Signed a flurry of bills, including a measure giving the Government permanent possession of all records and evidence connected with the Kennedy assassination, and a four-year omnibus farm bill--barely an hour before the midnight deadline, when the bill would have died for lack of the presidential signature.

> Announced the appointment of a 30-member National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber, to be headed by University of Minnesota Agriculture Dean Sherwood Berg, to make a thorough study of U.S. agricultural problems and recommend solutions.

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