LEADERS: Lyndon Johnson: 1908-1973

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After his return to the Pedernales four years ago, Johnson supervised the building of the massive L.B.J. Library, wrote a volume of memoirs, and is said to have doubled the size of his personal fortune (usually estimated at more than $20 million, including land, cattle, airplanes, banks and radio stations). But mostly he devoted himself to his 330-acre ranch, occasionally helping to lay pipe in the middle of the shallow Pedernales and gradually building up his cattle herds through shrewd trading at local livestock auctions. He would come home at ten in the evening, tired and dung-booted, to tell his guests about the price of beef and about egg production problems. "He's become a goddam farmer," an old friend complained. "I want to talk Democratic politics. He talks only hog prices."

Friends were disturbed a year ago when Johnson began smoking for the first time in 16 years, and started to put on weight as well (see MEDICINE). "He would wait until Lady Bird was deep in conversation at the other end of the table," a family friend recalls, "then reach for two or three extra cookies." Even his serious heart attack last April failed to change his habits. "I'm an old man," he once explained, "so what's the difference? My body is just aging in its own way."

A cold rain had just stopped falling as they buried Lyndon Johnson under the giant live oak trees in the family cemetery near the Pedernales. "Along this stream and under these trees he loved, he will now rest," said ex-Governor John Connally. "He first saw light here. He last felt life here. May he now find peace here." Beyond a nearby stone wall, the howitzers of the Texas National Guard fired a 21-gun salute in a cow pasture.