Television: Fine Hours

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Johnson is never very far from his past; his recollections of his grandparents' pioneer trials are obviously as close to him as the everyday burdens of the presidency, and he can retell them with spirit: "The Indians came in and stole the horses and ransacked the place . . . and left late that day, almost dark. My grandfather came in looking for his wife and his baby. He couldn't find them . . . and he started calling my grandmother. After she was sure it was her husband's voice, she opened the trapdoor and came out of the basement, safe and sound, but with the diaper still in the baby's mouth [to keep it from crying aloud]."

His memories of the Twenties, when he worked on road gangs and taught Mexican children, and his courtship of an anonymous "very pretty girl" were no less vivid: "I got a job for $125 a month . . . and she got a job that paid her $150. That counted much to my humiliation that a girl could make more money than I could . . . She tried to tell me how to say buenas tardes or amigos or something, and I would try to tell her the difference between the Governor and the President. And then we would transact a little business in between." Johnson stood out in sharpest relief twice—once during a schoolroom soliloquy by one of his old pupils, who affectionately imitated the young schoolteacher's loose gait and swinging arms, and again when the camera moved slowly around the little town of Johnson City (pop. 611) to show the leathery, drawling townspeople—a group of Texas Gothic faces who, after all, are the people from whom Lyndon Johnson came and to whom he returns whenever he can: "You would be surprised how they can clear up a lot of things that seem pretty foggy to you when you get here."