FEES AT PRESIDENTIAL SITES To see the LBJ Ranch adults must pay a fee of $3-$6 for a National Park Service bus tour. How that compares with other presidential sites run by the park service: President Location Fee George Washington Oak Grove, Va. $4 Abraham Lincoln Knob Creek, Ky. Free James Garfield Mentor, Ohio $7-$8 Herbert Hoover West Branch, Iowa $6 Dwight Eisenhower Gettysburg, Pa. $6 John F. Kennedy Brookline, Mass. $3 Source: National Park Service

The dispute comes after the death July 11 of his widow, Lady Bird Johnson. The National Park Service announced plans this week to open LBJ's office in the house to the public daily beginning on the 100th anniversary of his birth Aug. 27. It is a story of shrinking budgets, fading historical memories and the strains on filial obedience brought by changing times.

The tale begins on Labor Day weekend in 1972, a few months before the 36th president died of a heart attack at his "Texas White House" in Stonewall, 65 miles west of Austin. The ailing Johnson summoned National Park Service Director George Hartzog, park service historian Edwin Bearss and others to the ranch. Together, they worked out plans to donate the ranch for a Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park and an adjacent state park that today covers 1,570 acres. Public access began soon after Johnson died in January 1973 but was limited to guided bus tours because the former first lady still lived there. Under the terms of the agreement, when she was gone, the house and grounds would be open to the public.

There were some conditions. Johnson, a Democrat whose Great Society programs waged war on poverty, insisted that no visitor be charged a fee. And the only president elected from Texas wanted the park run as a federal-state partnership.

Johnson mostly got his wish. Visitors arrive at the state park visitor center. They board buses that take them across the Pedernales River for a federal ranger-led tour that includes LBJ's reconstructed birthplace, the family cemetery and an airstrip. The visit was free until 1995, when budget shortfalls brought a fee.

Now, with the former first lady and her Secret Service detail gone, the park service is preparing to expand public access, hoping to increase the number of visitors. After peaking at nearly 200,000 in 1977, the number trekking to the isolated ranch has fallen 72% to 55,000 this year.

Russ Whitlock, superintendent of the national park, blames "a lack of interest in history," but he also faults the limited bus schedule, which he says discourages visitors who arrive at the wrong time. He says Luci Baines Johnson, who lives in Austin and chairs the family's LBJ Holding Co., "wants us to find ways for people to experience the ranch in a different way."

One proposal would admit private cars and tour buses onto the property. That would allow the park service to retire its aging buses, which cost more to operate than the fees cover. Whitlock says visitors could park on the taxiway next to a hangar that is to be converted into a second visitor center.

No decision has been made on admitting vehicles or charging a fee to tour the Texas White House. Whitlock plans public hearings next spring. That gives little comfort to old-timers who, as Hartzog aide Robert Utley puts it, were "present at the creation."

The proposal is "an abomination," says Hartzog, who at 87 is battling throat cancer. "That was not the wish that the president and Mrs. Johnson had."

"That's contrary to my understanding of what they wanted," Bearss says. He and Hartzog are the only participants in the 1972 talks still living. "It's a bad idea."

"Mrs. Johnson was a conservationist," says Leslie Starr Hart, who was park superintendent from 1994 to 2004. She says that during that time, she spoke with her every day until the first of her two strokes. "Why would you bring cars and diesel-belching buses onto the LBJ Ranch, which was a haven, a quiet place?"

Utley says the proposed changes "break a moral commitment that the park service made" to the elder Johnsons and constitute "a betrayal" of their legacy.

Luci Johnson, 60, says it is "most lamentable" that some people are unhappy about the proposals, but, "I do not share their concerns."

Neither does her older sister, Lynda Johnson Robb. "You're always going to have people who feel the best way to preserve things is not to let anybody come," she says.

The sisters see the proposals as part of efforts to boost attendance and financial support for the park. There are also Luci-led bike tours, outdoor movies and, for donors of $1,000 or more, future private house tours. "With the death of my mother and the passage of time, situations have evolved," says Johnson, who says Lady Bird understood dwindling budgets. The National Park Service budget for the ranch and Johnson's boyhood home 14 miles away was $3.5 million this year; the state park budget was $757,000.

"There's an ideal world and then there's the world of what can we do, the real world," Johnson says.

"Daddy didn't foresee the changes," says Robb, 63. "We don't want to limit the number of people who can come because they can't afford to pay the money. But we do want a place that people can come that can function with solvency."

Luci Johnson and her family celebrated Thanksgiving at the ranch house and will spend one more Christmas there before work to open the house to visitors begins. She says her mother might approve of cars if they encouraged more visitors. "During my parents' time, there were droves on the ranch, many people coming and going in automobiles," she says.

But Utley says so many vehicles would threaten the "historical integrity" of the ranch. The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, which has criticized the Bush administration for poor stewardship of federal parklands, agrees. In a letter to the park service, it said the plan would "repudiate the explicit wishes" of the Johnsons.

The daughters urge patience. In separate interviews, each echoed their father's frequent quoting of the Book of Isaiah. "As Daddy would say," Robb noted, "Come now, let us reason together."

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Enlarge File photo by Bill Hudson, AP President Johnson, riding the horse "Lady B," rounds up a Hereford on his Texas ranch in 1964.

		The National Park Service plans to open the office in President Johnson's ranch house, known as the Texas White House, to the public beginning Aug. 27 -- the 100th anniversary of his birth. By Eric Gay, AP