The Truth about John Connally
Does this man belong on a white horse?
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That’s the way everyone played the game when Connally was learning the rules. He is the product of an era when Texas politics was a give-no-quarter struggle among states’ rights conservatives, Johnson New Deal moderates, and earnest liberals, and woe to the losers. If the host delegation at a state convention ended up on the losing side, they would retaliate by removing the rented furniture and leaving the winners chairless for the duration. Compromise was unthinkable; this was war.
At a different time, with a different personality, Connally as governor might have been able to unite the state Democratic party. He always ran well among ethnic minorities, and he was the first Texas governor to appoint a significant number of blacks and Mexican Americans to state boards. His program should have appealed more to liberals than the combined recommendations of his three predecessors—or his three successors, for that matter. But the old enmities ran too deep. The liberals didn’t trust him from the start; he was part of the Johnson crowd that had wrested—stolen, they said—control of the 1956 state convention. The split showed up early: Connally abandoned the sections of his program that the liberals were most interested in—industrial safety and loan shark reform—knowing that they could not pass the Legislature; the liberals, meanwhile, viewed Connally’s cherished higher education proposals with skepticism because they were aimed at attracting industry, not scholars.
Gradually the liberals came to see a sinister motive behind every Connally proposal. When the new Parks and Wildlife Department allowed shell dredgers to operate dangerously close to live oyster reefs, his critics not only blamed Connally but even suggested it was the entire purpose behind the creation of the new department. When Connally asked a railroad commissioner who had been tainted by scandal to resign, the liberals said that he was playing along with the major oil companies, because the commissioner favored independents. When he recommended more emphasis on community mental health care, which is both cheaper and more effective than institutional care, the liberals assailed him for trying to chop the mental health budget. Even Connally’s blueprint for higher education was assigned a malignant purpose: to give a state coordinating board the power to cancel courses in politically sensitive areas like Keynesian economics. Every Connally proposal—even those liberals had been advocating for years, like four-year terms for governors—got a similar reception. Eventually Connally ran out of patience. “Your friends are all crazy,” he told Charlie Wilson, then regarded as somewhat left of center.
The moment the breach became unbridgeable can be identified with certainty: it happened when Houston liberal Don Yarborough filed against Connally in the 1964 primary and called him “the worst governor Texas has ever had.” Connally was still weak from his assassination ordeal two and a half months earlier. He didn’t want to campaign and didn’t feel he should have to—in particular, he felt he’d given liberals no reason to oppose him and told them so. You can just imagine the thought going through Connally’s mind: By God, I won’t make that mistake again—next time they’ll have a reason. As it became clearer that Don Yarborough would indeed make the race, Connally stepped up his efforts to find an opponent for U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough (no relation to Don), the liberals’ bellwether. But Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection too, and he couldn’t afford to have his Texas base endangered by political fratricide. He put out the word: Yarborough was untouchable. Connally had to pull back his claws, and his displeasure at being denied the kill bordered on despair. He told a Capitol reporter he’d never seek office again. “This business gets old,” Connally complained. “It’s not your enemies who hurt you the most. Sometimes it’s your friends.”
Connally’s attitudes were hardening; he was the old Johnson hatchet man again, though acting now in his own behalf. He told the liberals that Don Yarborough’s entry had ended any chance of party harmony and set out to fulfill his own prophecy. He won the primary by almost three to one and sailed into the June state convention determined to teach the liberals a lesson. The vehicle turned out to be conservative challenges to liberal delegations from San Antonio and Dallas. The anti-Connally folks appeared to have the much better legal claim (something that counts about as much at state conventions as Boy Scout merit badges); nevertheless, they offered to split Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio with the Connally forces. They transmitted their compromise to Connally through a respected intermediary with ties to both sides. The emissary pleaded with Connally to make some conciliatory gesture—after all, he pointed out, this was a presidential year, LBJ was running, Texas was a critical state, and party unity was essential. Would Connally want the defeat of his mentor on his conscience? “To hell with ‘em,” Connally snapped. “I’ve got the votes.” After the convention he characteristically rubbed the liberals’ nose in the dirt, by appointing Marvin Watson head of the Texas Democratic party; Watson was the longtime corporate assistant to the man who was chairman of Democrats for George Bush—Ralph Yarborough’s Republican opponent.
The spring of 1964 proved to be a pivotal time for John Connally. Thereafter his personal toughness and his political toughness too often were inseparable. He hounded those he deemed to be his enemies with unrelenting vigor. He called reporters into his office for off-the-record revelations about a labor leader’s sexual adventures. As a defender of Johnson’s Viet Nam policies he lit into Senate critics with a force that would later be typical of Spiro Agnew, using words like appeasement and surrender that respectable politicians shunned. He even pursued Martin Luther King beyond the grave with the uncharitable statement, on learning of King’s murder, that he “contributed much to the chaos, and the strife, and the confusion, and the uncertainty in this country, but he deserved not the fate of assassination.” Connally’s toughness dulled his historical judgment (and his political judgment); by acknowledging that King was, nonetheless, a great man, Connally could have said all the negatives and had gotten away with it. But that isn’t John Connally’s style.
His close friends say that Connally’s experience in the Milk Fund case has tempered his lust for combat. He has learned what it is, they say, to fight against the limitless resources of the government; it teaches you humility and compassion and a sense of what it’s like to be oppressed. If he needed further instruction in compassion, he could turn to an uplifting letter he received during his ordeal from his old nemesis Ed Clark, the one-time kingpin of the Austin lobby, whose gesture transcended the fact that Connally, as governor, broke Clark’s grip on the Legislature.
Perhaps Connally is different. But he doesn’t sound much different when he ridicules opponents of nuclear power by saying he takes his scientific advice from Dr. Edward Teller, not Jane Fonda. Teller, known as the father of the H-bomb, is just as uncritically pro-nuke as Fonda is unreasonably anti. The Connally of that statement is familiar: it is the Connally of 1968, lashing out at Martin Luther King, unable to see any redeeming qualities in those he opposes.
Style
An unlikely obstacle stands in John Connally’s way to the Republican nomination. He is a Democrat.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1979. John Connally is in the dark. Literally. The 75 or so guests invited to the home of a former Fort Worth oilman have tarried too long around the swimming pool and the bar and the plates of tenderloin of beef, and by the time they make their way to the chairs on the front lawn, the sun has gone down. The lighting illuminates the house, not the speaker, silhouetting Connally against the white brick. This accidental staging is strangely effective at that, as it converts Connally into an orchestra conductor, so that when he comes to the subject of Russian troops in Cuba and points to the south, he seems to be cuing the trumpets to their entrance.
But Connally only knows he’s in the dark, and he isn’t pleased. He cuts his remarks short and calls for questions from the audience. The first one comes from a porcine man with a glass in his hand, a double for Ned Beatty in Deliverance. “John,” he begins (he has never met Connally before in his life), “there are a hundred and eighty million white people in this country. When are you going to make the nigras stop stepping on us?” Everyone has heard the question only too well, but Connally repeats it, giving himself time to formulate his answer. It is perfect—“Yes, I believe in equal right for everyone in this country”—and it says two things about Connally’s political style. One, he thinks very well on his feet. Two, he has a knack for telling people things they don’t want to hear and making them like it. In fact, his chances of winning the Republican nomination may depend on just how good this knack is.
Earlier that day he had been confronted with a less dramatic, though equally emotional, question about giving welfare to people with Cadillacs and foreign aid to countries that stab us in the back. Connally began by saying that we need to help people. He did not pause for a breath before adding that we’ve got to improve the delivery system: “We can’t go on handing out money to welfare cheaters and people who don’t want to work, and we shouldn’t give foreign aid to our enemies. You can’t buy friends.” Connally has such an instinct for emphasis and theatrics that by the time he’d pounded the podium into submission on welfare cheaters, his audience had entirely missed the point: he is for welfare. Once he was asked about national health insurance; his response was to attack the Carter and Kennedy proposals and add, as if an afterthought, “Of course, we do need to take care of the twelve per cent of the people who don’t have serious medical illness coverage.” In other words, he’s for a form of national health insurance too.
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