The Truth about John Connally
Does this man belong on a white horse?
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It is frequently said that Connally’s major problem among Republicans is that he’s viewed as a turncoat. But in reality he has a far greater problem: he hasn’t turned at all. Although he perceives America’s problems like a Republican, he perceives the solutions like a Democrat. He still believes in using the government to solve problems something he has in common with most Democrats and few Republicans. The rationale for his activism is different from most Democrats’: they want a national oil company to break the monopoly of the major energy companies; he wants a national oil company to buy half the assets of Aramco so the Arabs would have to deal with Uncle Sam when they raise prices. But in the end, you wind up with the same thing.
If there is any real difference in the parties these days, it is that Republicans tend to be more ideological, Democrats more pragmatic; surely no one in the country has any doubts about which of those two poles attracts John Connally. As recently as 1976, the very word pragmatist was in disrepute in certain Republican circles. The Reagan faithful disdainfully hung the label on Ford supporters, as though it were synonymous with leper. Connally strategists insist that the GOP right wing now looks to government for help, but whether he can capture its loyalty remains to be seen. He is cool to the idea of a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion—it saps the national vitality for a cause he regards as low priority—and the right so far has been cool to him in return.
For all that Connally has gone around the country saying things like “The Republican party is the only hope for the survival of this country,” attending party fundraisers, and campaigning for innumerable state legislative candidates, he still hasn’t been fully accepted by Republicans. At his trial the only politicians to visit him in the courtroom were Democrats. His speeches don’t seem to enthrall Republicans the way they once captured Democratic audiences. His address at the 1976 Republican convention was a clunker; the delegates talked throughout it, voting with their mouths. It is no coincidence that his best appearances as a campaigner are before politically mixed audiences. His fervent style, where his verbal pace can rival an auctioneer’s, is too often out of place at purely Republican functions. I heard him speak under a twelve-foot chandelier at a Newport, Rhode Island, GOP fundraiser and he went longer without applause than I would have though possible or polite. This was supposedly his kind of audience, too—the very rich—but after fifteen minutes or so I heard a woman wearing a huge diamond-and-sapphire pendant whisper to her companion, “He isn’t pushing the right buttons.” Afterward I asked her what she meant, and she said, “He was using fear motivation. That isn’t the way to talk to these people.” I thought back to Connally’s talk, which had dwelled on national pride and contained phrases like “We’re the most vulnerable nation on earth” and “This country is a hostage.” It sounded a lot like the Jack Kennedy of 1960, who used fear motivation to get elected. As a Democrat.
Before the right audiences, however, Connally can be brilliant. No one can deliver a simple line better. Much has been written about how this style developed from his experience as an actor in the UT Curtain Club, but Connally’s mastery of the language goes far beyond student acting. He knows its strengths and weaknesses like a master linguist. He was at his best at a luncheon in West Palm Beach: witty, intelligent, demagogic on occasion, in charge, yet at one with his listeners. But an hour later, at a Holiday Inn in South Palm Beach, Connally was dismal and flat. The difference? The first audience was the Forum Club, a collection of, in the words of the local mayor’s aide, “everyone who is anyone in Palm Beach County.” At the Holiday Inn the group was exclusively Republican and much older—perhaps not retired, but certainly tired. The Forum Club audience was activist and part Democratic; they were Connally’s kind of folks. He has nothing in common with the people at the Holiday Inn except a party label.
Connally’s natural constituency consists of movers and shakers—that’s why the Republicans he gets along with best are the boardroom types and not the idle rich of Newport—and people who are politically sophisticated. That frequently means Democrats, who are in the majority party and therefore have more experience exercising power. Once at a staff meeting several advisors were trying to get him to soft-pedal his stance on government activism in order to appeal more to the Republican right; Connally would have none of it: “That’s the kind of thinking that’s kept the Republicans a minority party for thirty years.”
The Republicans he cannot reach must seem familiar to Connally. In a different decade, in a different part of the country, in a different political party, they are the same people he could not reach as governor: Texas liberals in another guise, people who would rather control their party than the government, who would rather lose than compromise. It is one of the finer ironies of American politics: John Connally switched parties in 1973 because the Democrats had been taken over by people whose ideology he could not accept, only to find that to gain the Republican nomination in 1980 he must win the support of people whose ideology he cannot accept.
Skill
All politicians want to be known as statesmen. All wheeler-dealers want to be known as negotiators. Can John Connally make the leap?
Austin, 1961. The 35 or so automobile dealers gathered in a meeting room for breakfast at the Driskill Hotel were distinctly unimpressed. They had hoped for a better performance from the tall fellow in the blue seersucker suit and rubber-soled shoes—that was long before Lyndon Johnson would observe that “John isn’t comfortable unless he’s in three-hundred-dollar suits and the company of men wearing them”—for, like the rest of the business lobby, the auto dealers were looking for a candidate to support in the 1962 governor’s race. The incumbent, Price Daniel, Sr., had alienated the lobby in the previous campaign by assailing them as “the Black Knights of Congress [Avenue].” Of all Daniel’s challengers, only Connally had the credentials (Secretary of the Navy) and the conservative pedigree (his long association with Forth Worth oil baron Sid Richardson), but his talk to the auto dealers had been a flop. If he had any knowledge of state government, he kept it to himself. The dealers’ lobbyist, an ex-legislator named Bob Bullock who would go on to a political career of his own, though to himself with dismay, This fella ain’t too bright.
Five weeks later Connally came back to address the auto dealers again, and things took a different turn. Very different. He discussed the issues facing Texas like no one in the room had ever heard them discussed before—not just facts and figures and theories, though he had plenty of each, but where the real power lay and where the bodies were buried. Recalls Bullock, “I never saw anyone who knew Texas politics so well.” And that was the last recorded instance of someone taking John Connally for a lightweight.
Seldom has intelligence been an asset in Texas politics—not too long ago a legislator explained to me why an apparently able colleague had so little influence: “He reads books. Real books”—but Connally’s luck was in. This was 1962, and Jack Kennedy was in the White House, surrounded by Harvard professors and other certified intellectuals who, it was said, brought glamour and respectability to politics. Connally seemed to fit right in, an ambassador from Camelot, though in truth he already loathed the Kennedys for looking down on Lyndon Johnson. He started the governor’s race with a mere 4 per cent in the polls, but on election day he led by more than 100,000 votes. Daniel didn’t make the runoff.
Connally had transformed himself from novice to expert by absorbing what mounted to a month-long cram course on Texas politics, tutored by Frank Miskell, a young lawyer recruited from the legislative research and drafting office. Miskell would become the first, but far from the last, Connally associate to be dazzled by his leader’s osmosis of detail. Connally’s initial gubernatorial staff “just worshipped him,” says a legislative veteran of that era. “It happened within weeks.”
This instant adulation is something of a Connally trademark. It would emerge again at the Treasury Department eight years later, despite the fact that Connally knew little about high-level economics when he took the job. The classic bureaucratic strategy in such a situation is to take along a large and loyal staff to insulate yourself against infighting during your learning period. Connally took one lawyer and one personal secretary. He won over the rest of the agency—including Paul Volcker, now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—with displays like the one he put on for a speechwriter he asked to prepare some remarks about international trade. Connally suggested that the writer look up a speech given six moths earlier by the chairman of Texas Instruments (Connally was a director of the company). As Connally began explaining what the speech had covered, the recollection excited him, and numbers started spilling out of his head: things like GNP, output, work force, percentage changes, there must have been a dozen of them. When the writer found the speech, he checked the actual numbers against his notes of what Connally had said. Connally had missed one by a tenth of a percentage point; on the others, he was on the money.
Acceptance even came quickly for Connally after he joined Houston’s heavyweight Vinson & Elkins law firm following his third term as governor in 1969. This was no mean feat, for Connally’s entry as a senior partner—very unusual for an outsider—touched off resentment inside the firm and speculation among its rivals. It was widely assumed that his association with V-E was calculated mainly to help the firm attract big money clients in search of political influence. The firm soon assigned him to a team of lawyers arguing a banking case before the court of civil appeals, no doubt because he had appointed some of the judges who would be hearing the case. But Connally is not the sort to be content with a token appearance. When the V-E team returned, a colleague’s assessment swept through the firm: “This guy could have made a hell of a living arguing cases in the court of civil appeals all his life.”
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