Privateline.com's Telephone History

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The LBJ Ranch, the Independent's View

From The Heritage of Time: The People and Times of GTE Southwest 1876 - 1988, by Larry Johnson. (1990) GTE Southwest Incorporated, San Angelo, Texas

It was November 1963. President John F. Kennedy was soon to embark on the political odyssey that would take him to Texas and the fateful encounter with an assassin's bullets.

In preparation for the visit, Southwestern Bell had been requested to install a two-position switchboard in the Commodore Perry Hotel in Austin, where the President was to come after his stop in Dallas. The board was to be equipped to handle fourteen trunks and more than a hundred stations. [individual telephones, ed.] Southwestern Bell was also to install a two-position switchboard at the LBJ ranch, just outside of Stonewall near Austin, equipped with through-and terminating tie limits to the Commodore Perry Hotel switchboard for direct connection to the White House in Washington, D.C. Sadly enough, the tragic events of November the 22nd unfolded and the facilities were never used.

Yet the background of telephone service of a special kind in the hill country of central Texas provides an interesting story in itself. It's a story that involves Southwestern States Telephone Company, that notable politician named Lyndon Johnson, and Southwestern Bell Telephone Company.

It began in 1960, when Lyndon Johnson was elected as Vice-President. I. W. "Stormy" Davis and Henry Mudd, of Southwestern Bell, went to the Brownwood general office of Southwestern States Telephone to meet with D. T. Strickland. The purpose was to discuss the provision of service for Vice-President Johnson when he was at home in the ranch country near Austin, which was Southwestern States territory. Strickland said that his company had neither the manpower nor the finances to install and maintain the equipment and facilities needed to meet the communications requirements for a VicePresident. It was agreed, therefore, that Southwestern States would continue to provide local service out of Stonewall to the Johnson ranch, while Bell would provide long distance service from the Bell exchange in Austin.

Johnson was told of the proposal and he agreed. The installation included twelve six-button key telephone sets in the main residence, two in the pilots' quarters, and two in the servants' quarters. To these were connected three circuits from the inter-toll network, one Stonewall line, and a dial intercom line between the sixteen stations. The additional twelve toll terminals provided by Bell were placed through an existing carrier system previously used to provide for news service people and visiting dignitaries during Johnson's days as a U.S. Senator.

And that was how the situation was handled for more than three years, until that dark day in November. When Johnson assumed the presidency after the assassination of President Kennedy, the quantity and quality of communications needs again multiplied. With little time to even mourn the death of Kennedy, Southwestern States Telephone had to face up to the fact it did not have the resources to adequately serve the needs of the new president. Pressed by the demands of the White House Communications Office, Bell and Southwestern States reached an agreement to let Bell take over complete responsibility for providing communications at the LBJ ranch.

LBJ Ranch in spring, Photograph © Bill Ballenberg

Even Southwestern Bell was not big enough to handle this new order of things as quickly as required. AT&T came into the picture, securing cable from wherever quantities of it could be found, diverting some from as far away as Alaska. Eighty-six miles of aerial cable were required to connect the ranch switchboard to a special operator in Austin. About eighteen hundred people were brought in to work on the project, plus crews from Western Electric and Southwestern States. This enormous composite crew completed in about two months what would normally have taken two years.

President Johnson believed in using the telephone, and his staff saw to it that he was never more than two minutes from one no matter where he was. That edict included his sprawling ranch, where he had telephones in the deer blinds and a radio telephone in his car. His love for the telephone was matched by his affinity for impromptu press conferences. Telephone people geared up at Stonewall, Fredericksburg, and Johnson City because at any of those places he might say, "Let's gather all you reporters around here and let's talk."

Click here to enlarge

Southwestern States was always very much involved, as it served the little town of Stonewall adjacent to the ranch and the town of Fredericksburg. The motel switchboards were connected to the White House phones, and almost every street corner had its own phone, in order to accommodate Secret Service people who showed up in one place or the other.

Southwestern States had twenty-four-hour coverage throughout the five years of Johnson's tenure as President. The men rotated on shifts of eight hours on and eight hours off. Dayton Ransleben, out of Fredericksburg, was one of the men pulling these demanding shifts. During those five years, he had no vacations or holidays. Because of men like Ransleben, Southwestern States experienced no cases of trouble on the special lines during the entire period. Ransleben himself would retire in August 1989 with thirty-seven years of telephone experience.

In 1964, "Stormy" Davis was summoned to President Johnson's office at the ranch, where he was told to see what he could do to bring about the purchase by Southwestern Bell of the Johnson City and Stonewall exchanges owned by Southwestern States Telephone. Johnson indicated that he thought Bell could do a better job, that States was too small to be effective. Chester Loveland, president of Western Utilities Corporation, the parent company of Southwestern States, personally came to Texas to inform Bell that he would not sell the two exchanges. Ninety days later, he announced that GTE and his company had arranged a six hundred million dollar merger, to be effective on June 30, 1964. The actual physical merger of the two companies would not be totally completed until January 1968.

In the 1970s, General Telephone of the Southwest paid about ten cents on the dollar for the Bell equipment, including the cable between Johnson City and Fredericksburg, and once more resumed all service to the LBJ ranch.

The LBJ Ranch, Southwestern Bell's View

From Good Connections: A Century of Service by the Me and Women of Southwestern Bell by David Park Jr. (1984) St. Louis

Another situation [Harold] Miller recalls vividly was the communications emergency that burst upon them after President Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became president. Suddenly the Little White House was not at Hyannisport, Mass., but in the hill country west of Austin, which was in the Houston service area at the time.

"The LBJ Ranch was not in our territory; it was handled by the Southwestern States Telephone Company," Miller points out. "They agreed to let us come in and put in the long distance service. Southwestern States still took care of the local service.

"The ranch was about 65 miles west of Austin, out in the boondocks. Johnson had some service out there as vice president, but nothing like what he needed when he became president."

How does one decide what communications facilities a president needs? The solution was a rough-and-ready one, but it worked. The company looked at what had been installed at Hyannisport for John Kennedy and doubled it.

"We were playing it safe," Miller says. "We wanted to be sure that if another tragedy occurred, no one could blame it on lack of communication.

"For a lot of the stuff, like all the mobile radio equipment, we just furnished the circuits; the equipment belonged to the government. Johnson had to have a telephone at his fingertips all the time. When we knew that he was going to come out there for his Christmas holidays, the service had to be there. And the supply of equipment kept growing and growing as he stayed there.

"It was touch and go, too, every time LBJ flew into Texas. We might know he was coming, but we were never told where the plane was going to land. So we had to be prepared with communications facilities at all possible landing sites."

"Another part of the problem was providing circuits for all the media people who were scattered all over. A lot of motels were built near the ranch, but some of the news people stayed at other places, like Fredericksburg and Austin. They wanted to have circuits going all the way in to the ranch."

"And throughout, we were constantly trying to meet deadline -- self-imposed deadlines. This all started the day Kennedy was killed. We had to move fast, without any service orders. The White House people came down a few days later and told us what they wanted; but it was just guesswork on our part as to what we put in there before we even heard from them. That was a hectic month of finding locations, putting up buildings, installing and testing equipment and doing whatever needed to be done."

Miller stresses that the LBJ and NASA situations weren't just Southwestern Bell projects. AT&T Long Lines and Western Electric were deeply involved, too. And of course, engineering couldn't have handled all these projects on its own. In every case he cites, the Southwestern Bell Plant Department handled most of the physical effort, and engineering's role was largely one of coordination. This always has been the relationship between the two departments.

Don Kimberlin Recalls (internal link)

For my part, a lot of the above rings true to my time in AT&T. The opening bit described was the typical traveling US presidential setup of the 1950s-60s, often simply code-named "POTUS" for "President of the United States." During my AT&T tenure in Miami, we'd have a POTUS setup whenever Richard Nixon came to town, to stay at his Key Biscayne residence.

More for show than for necessity, AT&T had an arrangement where, on orders, we could flip a switch on the Private Line Testboard that would switch the channels of two Miami-Washington dial trunks from the 4A switching machine to jacks on a manual operator switchboard. Two gray business-suited White House Communications Agency male telephone operators would arrive to sit down at that switchboard in the Southern Bell building, where dedicated phone lines to Nixon's various places in the Miami area radiated out, and
play Telephone Operator For The President. There wasn't anything in it that we could not have done with patch cords in an instant, nor anything that Telco operators could not have done but Washington wanted it done their way, and being the political animal that Telco has always been, it was done the Washington Way.

As to LBJ, his telephone mania even reached me personally in a remote corner of the AT&T network at Lake City, Florida on a night shift. Lake City, Florida sits at the junction of I-75 going north/south and I-10 going east/west (formerly US 441 and US 90). There, two major AT&T microwave routes crossed. The tower and office were located on the third floor of the Southern Bell building in downtown Lake city. At night the only people in the building were a couple of telephone operators on the second floor and one of our AT&T crew on the third floor. We never even really saw each other.

Up in the AT&T premises were the microwave bays of two full cross-country TD-2 (4 gHz) microwave routes of 10 working and two spare 600 channel or one TV basebands in each of four directions. On some (like the video), the entire baseband went through or turned a corner (for example, NASA had a couple of video channels that ran north from Orlando to Lake city, then changed to the westerly route along the Gulf toward Houston). On most, however, we had LMX600 SSB carrier terminal bays that broke down to 60 channel supergoups or 12 channel groups of voicegrade channels, which could
be dial trunks between cities, dedicated analog computer circuits for modems, or a variety of dedicated channel voice lines.

One of those apparently was or were dedicated voice channels for LBJ from Washington. The phone rang late one night, and it was an excited sounding Army officer who had apparently attended enough of a lecture about how the phone network operated to make him dangerous. I had heard one or two similar calls at other spots in my time in Florida, but this was the first one I took.

I, Plain Civilian, got that call in the wee hours. The shavetail officer on the other end had learned enough to find out that some circuit to LBJ's ranch was inaudible to the President, and he'd learned enough to read some circuit layout cards and gotten his hands on an AT&T internal phone book.

He wanted me to "turn up the volume" so LBJ could hear down in Texas. I was simply unable to get him to understand that LBJ's circuit was but one of 60 in a supergroup that was coming to me from Atlanta, then turning west toward Houston, and the one bit of "volume control" I had on a supergroup connector would, if it accomplished anything, destroy the level settings on 59 other circuits in that supergroup.

All I could get was, "Isn't POTUS worth that?" I had to get arrogant and ask him if it was a nuclear disaster event or not. He finally blustered
and blew up enough that he slammed the phone down and hung up, probably to go off and complain about the uncooperative Telco. At any rate, I never heard about it again, even though I suspected there would be some nasty repercussion through the AT&T ranks about my poor customer service handling. I imagine LBJ's phone got fixed shortly thereafter, by someone who could smooth the officer's feathers.

You can't win 'em all.... Don Kimberlin (internal link)

Links

Lyndon B. Johnson State Park and Historic Site (external link)

Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park (external link)

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