STONEWALL, Texas—The president is coming our way. That’s him, in the light-colored Stetson, behind the wheel of his white Lincoln Continental convertible. Look closely on the horizon—beyond time, beyond history—and you can still imagine 1964 or 1966 or 1968.

You can see Lyndon Baines Johnson in his long, long Lincoln, trouncing and bouncing along the rocky terrain of the LBJ Ranch in the late afternoon, nowhere near a marked road, kicking up dust, trailed by Secret Service agents in a station wagon.

President Johnson is a man with a lot on his mind: the War on Poverty, war in Vietnam, the health of his cattle, and maybe even that nasty boil on his backside—the one he indiscreetly showed to an aide this afternoon. Yet on his Texas ranch, LBJ is very much in the driver’s seat, sipping ... what? ... Fresca? ... Cutty Sark with soda? ... out of a big plastic cup as he barks out orders to ranch hands and shows off his place to his guests in the convertible.

Who could that be, sitting next to the president in the front seat? Judge A.W. Moursund, his neighbor? Gregory Peck, the actor? The Rev. Billy Graham? The president of Mexico? The prime minister of Israel? They’ve all been for a visit, you know. Mike Howard, the head of LBJ’s Secret Service detail, has taken that ride many times.

“The president thought that getting in that Lincoln Continental and driving harum-scarum all over the place, looking at cows and turkeys and trees, whatever there was to see, was very relaxing,” says Howard, remembering the 36th president. “Every evening we took a trip across the ranch. It was a very personal thing for him. He liked for people to be in that car, and he wanted as many people as he could get in that car.”

Certainly, it is a season of remembrance in LBJ country. This week marks the 100th anniversary of Johnson’s birth, and centennial events and exhibits are planned at the LBJ Ranch, the LBJ Library and Museum in Austin and the LBJ Museum of San Marcos. Yet the president’s spirit seems particularly vivid right now on the ranch, where the National Park Service has restored Johnson’s working office, which will open Wednesday for tours.

A year beyond the death of Lady Bird Johnson, the LBJ Ranch is becoming more and more a public place—an open-house museum of sorts, harkening to its days as the Texas White House from 1963 to 1969. In recognition, the intimates of Lyndon Johnson find themselves in a bit of a sentimental mood in recent days. They see the man very clearly here.

“It was amazing how the place transformed him,” recalls James R. Jones, LBJ’s former chief of staff. “Whenever we took the plane down (from Washington to Texas), the president would change into what he called his chocolate suit—not a suit in a classic sense, but a light brown Western shirt and trousers—and he would start being a different person, right there, right off the bat.”

Lyndon B. Johnson bought his Hill Country ranch house during his first term in the U.S. Senate, in 1951—and as historians remind us, the country surrounding it was loaded with personal significance. This was the land of LBJ’s birth and growth, land connected to Johnson family dreams and Johnson family failure.

He worked hard, even stubbornly, to tame the hard place. He transformed the weather-beaten house into a respectable family home and dammed the Pedernales River running in front of the house. At a time when many of his Senate peers were buying estates, LBJ recognized the political benefits of owning this ranch. It cast rugged, Western light onto his image as a distinctly Southern legislator.

On the ranch, LBJ recovered his strength after his major heart attack of 1955. On the ranch, Vice President Johnson made plans to host President John F. Kennedy and his wife on the night of Nov. 22, 1963—and had even picked out the horse Jacqueline Kennedy would ride. And on this ranch, President Johnson sought personal rejuvenation as his popularity waned and he struggled to negotiate the escalating war in Southeast Asia. “Lyndon Johnson was a gregarious person who did not like to be hemmed in. But during those last two or three years, the White House became like a prison to him,” recalls Jones, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and was ambassador to Mexico after the LBJ presidency. Johnson loved his ranch, needed his ranch. But he knew how to wield it like a tool, too, to utilize it for personal or political advantage. The ranch wasn’t just about refuge; it was a place of hard work and history. He hosted cabinet members and cattlemen there, sometimes on the same day. He dressed as Santa Claus there. He discussed war strategy with generals on the front lawn, beneath the branches of an enormous live oak tree.

At the ranch, LBJ and his aides conceptualized and named the War on Poverty, the product of long brainstorming sessions in the last week of 1963 when there was a sense of urgency to act while post-assassination political good will existed. At the ranch, the president rode out the first Friday night of the Watts riots in silence—not taking phone calls from domestic affairs aide Joseph Califano in Washington for the only time in his presidency—in the summer of 1965. It was a tense time, for the president had just signed the Voting Rights Act and knew that extended racial violence in Los Angeles might undermine his equal-opportunity agenda.

At the ranch, in late 1966, Johnson fought for the soul of the Great Society, assuaging a contingent of Southern Democratic governors who feared that LBJ’s desegregation initiatives were undermining their political futures. At the ranch, on Memorial Day weekend of 1967, he worked in vain to halt the outbreak of the Six Day War in the Middle East. And at the ranch, he talked about foregoing a second term in the company of his wife and his good friend Texas Gov. John Connally. Johnson celebrated his 60th birthday at the ranch as the turbulent 1968 Democratic National Convention was reaching a climax in Chicago, five months after he told the nation he wouldn’t run again. He’d spent the preceding days drafting a speech, just in case he might yet be summoned to appear before his party at a deadlocked convention—or accept ceremonial plaudits there, for his domestic achievements. Even Lady Bird Johnson didn’t know, day to day, whether he would jet to Chicago.

Johnson built his ranch office in 1958. But he did official business everywhere on the ranch. Under the oak tree, on deer hunts, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, at the kitchen table, at elaborate barbecues, at the swimming pool, in the front seat of his beloved Lincoln Continental. He thrived on activity, not solitude.

“Lyndon Johnson was an insightful guy, but he is not what I would call an introspective person,” recalls Larry Temple, special counsel to LBJ. “He wanted a crowd. He wanted people around. ... When he drove around the ranch in his car—it was always with somebody. Never by himself. Never, ever, ever by himself.” The president liked to visit the ranch in July and August. He celebrated every one of his birthdays as president here except in 1964, when he was on the campaign trail. He was at the ranch for every Christmas except one. He liked to be there in November, too—not just for the weather, but because it was the opening of deer season.

“The president carried a chrome-plated 30-30 Winchester rifle in the car, all the time, and he went deer hunting with people, and they hunted from the car,” recalls Howard, disputing the notion that LBJ was sheepish about firing guns on his ranch after the JFK assassination. “He shot hogs; he shot audad sheep. He shot that Winchester a lot. I know, because there were times when we (the Secret Service) ducked under my pickup to keep him from shooting us.”

“If he took people hunting in the convertible, we rode behind in the pickup. (LBJ) would get on the radio and go, ‘You blankety-blank Secret Service, you stay back there. I don’t want you scaring my deer’—even as he’s up in front, going 100 miles an hour. And if that deer starting running past his car and came back toward us, we could hear the bullets whizzing over the top and we’d get under the pickup.”

Johnson liked to tell stories over lunch and dinner, and it was customary for his aides to join the family at the dining table. LBJ was on a diet through most of his presidency, so it was his habit to steal sandwiches or bits of food from those seated beside him. Johnson insisted on sitting between women—usually Lady Bird Johnson and his secretary, Marie Fehmer. He tended to nap after lunch and sometimes watched a movie in the aircraft hangar after dinner.

Johnson left the White House—and came home to his ranch—on Jan. 20, 1969. Mike Howard flew home with him, and stayed on with the Johnson family for the last four years of LBJ’s life. That last year, remembers Howard, “I was with him almost 24 hours a day.”