The Truth about John Connally
Does this man belong on a white horse?
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And yet . . .and yet. With John Connally there is always a qualifier, always a negative to cancel any positive. Even his mind works against him. It needs constant nourishment; he is quick to be bored and slow to conceal it. His governorship was only weeks old before word began to circulate that he found much of the job boring. He was frustrated by the constitutional weakness of the office. He didn’t want to run for a third term in 1966, but Lyndon and others begged him to; he delayed his decision so long that Attorney General Waggoner Carr went to the State Democratic Executive Committee meeting with two press releases, one for governor, one for U.S. senator, depending on what Connally would say.
He always hated the ceremonial aspects of the job, for they offered no challenge. Once a group of Tigua Indians from El Paso came to make a presentation; they streaked his face with war paint and Connally made no effort to hide his disgust. He began rubbing the paint off before the ceremony was over. Such incidents often seemed to cross the line from boredom to arrogance and gave substance to the notion that Connally only cares about the rich. That is not quite accurate. A state senator who was close to Connally as governor says, “He doesn’t care much for the common man, but what people don’t understand is that he doesn’t care much for most big shots either. Everybody’s got to prove himself.” Connally admits that he likes to be around bright and successful people “because I learn a lot,” as he told a Florida luncheon. But that night he went to a fundraiser attended mostly by the playboy rich, and he was bored: the veins on his neck were standing out—the barometer of Connally’s impatience.
Even Connally’s greatest talent is a political liability. He is best at negotiating—a skill synonymous these days with wheeling and dealing. Poor Connally: his natural talent, a skill he is justifiably proud of, is in political disfavor.
And he is good at it. When he was Secretary of the Treasury, most European finance ministers were furious with Connally—a sure sign he was a tough bargainer. When the U.S. imposed a surcharge on imports, the Europeans wanted it held to 5 per cent. Connally made it 10. He scoffed at State Department pleas to go easy on our friends; his job, he said, was to protect the interests of the United States.
His law practice in recent years has concentrated on his negotiating skill. His clients include independent oilmen and many of the Arabs who have made Vinson & Elkins their legal headquarters, and he works mostly on deals, operating at the highest business and financial levels. “If you’re after something like mineral rights in the Virgin Islands, you go to John,” says a law partner.
Connally regards negotiating the way some men view hunting or tennis: he does it for sport. So avid is his passion for personal negotiation that it led him into one of his most serious political miscalculations of the sixties. He simply did not understand demonstrators; he could not accept them and abhors them still. To him they didn’t play fair: their tactics were aimed against him, but they wouldn’t confront him directly. He went on television as governor to oppose the 1964 public accommodations law, a position history will not look kindly on, and he would not even receive striking Valley farm workers marching to Austin in 1966 to dramatize their plea for a state minimum wage. Instead Connally jumped in the big governor’s limousine and met the marchers in New Braunfels in what would become a famous confrontation. Connally told a priest leading the marchers that his door was open to the leaders of any group, but “I do not feel that as governor of this state I should lend the dignity of an office to dramatize any particular march.” Connally actually thought he’d pulled off a great coup by going to face the marchers—but again, that’s not how history has recorded the visit from the man in the limousine giving a lecture on dignity to the poor.
Connally tries very hard to turn his wheeler-dealer image into a strength, or at least neutralize its negative side, and on the campaign trail he seems to be doing pretty well at it. “They say ol’ John’s a wheeler-dealer,” he told one audience, “and they’re right, you bet I am. I know those wheeler-dealers in the Congress and I know how to deal with them.” On another occasion he said, “They say I’m tough, crude, a wheeler-dealer, that I’ll lose friends for this country, but I say if you’re going to run a twenty-eight-and-a-half-billion-dollar trade deficit, what’s the use of having friends? I don’t care if they like me. I’m running for president of the United States, not president of the world.” Then he delivered the line that invariably gets him the biggest applause, wherever he goes: “I say we should tell the Japanese that if they aren’t willing to accept Iowa beef and Florida citrus and Rhode Island manufactured goods, they had better be prepared to sit on the docks of Yokohama in their Toyotas, watching their own Sonys.”
That is vintage Connally, but how persuasive will it be in the long run? The problem with the wheeler-dealer image is not something that can readily be overcome: it is that negotiators do not ride easily on white horses; theirs is not a talent that inspires. Connally the wheeler-dealer cancels the strength of Connally the leader. Lyndon Johnson understood this; that’s why he soft-pedaled his own wheeler-dealer side as soon as he became president. Negotiators are hired guns, not leaders—good people to have on your side, but people to be respected and not loved.
Values
One thing has always been consistent about John Connally: his belief in old-fashioned virtues. Then what was he doing in court?
Providence, Rhode Island, 1979. It is the beginning of a long day of campaigning. Today John Connally will give six speeches, shake three thousand hands, tour three ethnic neighborhoods, attend two coffees, a cocktail party, and a dinner party, and hold two press conferences. The first of these is a private breakfast session in his hotel suite with two writers from the local paper. The discussion follows the ordinary course until it turns to who the Democratic nominee will be.
“Teddy Kennedy,” says Connally. The unexpected candor so takes the reporters by surprise that it is Connally who breaks the silence: “Now, there would be a classic confrontation. There are so many things—personal lives, lifestyles, family, philosophy . . .” It is as whimsical a tone as you’re ever likely to hear from John Connally. The reporters come alive—“Tell me more,” one pleads as Connally’s voice trails off—but the moment is past. “I’ve said all I want to say,” Connally says. “For now.”
John Connally versus Teddy Kennedy. The dream race. Strength against strength. Connally has been promoting Teddy as the probable Democratic nominee for months now, no doubt because he thinks the Kennedy specter is advantageous to his own candidacy, but that is only part of it. John Connally longs to run against Teddy Kennedy, aches to run against him, and political differences are the least of the reasons. What really matters is virtue.
Virtue? The word does not associate easily with a man who less than five years ago was instructed to rise and face the jury, and in fact, John Connally’s political virtue has always been a little suspect. He worked for Lyndon Johnson at a time when Lyndon’s most trusted aides occasionally functioned as bagmen (“It would be illegal now,” says one old Johnson hand, “it wasn’t then”) and the taint of Box 13 and the 1948 senatorial election was still fresh. Nationally, his reputation has been slightly odoriferous ever since 1956, when President Eisenhower vetoed the Natural Gas Act because of what he called “arrogant lobbying,” including a bribe to a senator. Connally was never tied to the bribe itself, nor was he registered as a lobbyist, but as Sid Richardson’s lawyer he orchestrated the campaign to pass the bill.
The Connally administration in Austin was without scandal, but it was not without accusation. Connally was attacked for accepting at least $225,000 in deferred executor’s fees from the Richardson estate, a small matter made larger by a state constitutional prohibition against governors receiving fees for professional services. A 1966 opponent insisted that Connally had added 30,000 acres to his landholdings while governor. Actually it was more like 16,000, most of it the Tortuga Ranch in South Texas, plus 1000 acres added to his Floresville spread—a lot of land, to be sure, but not the sort of get-rich-quick deals characteristic of influence peddling. The bottom line is that Connally was not a rich man when he left the governor’s office. Neither was he worried about where his next meal was coming from. His net worth doubled while he was in office, from around half a million dollars to a million, but most of that was represented by ranchland. In fact, one reason he wanted out of politics was so he could accumulate real wealth—the same path followed by Lloyd Bentsen and Dolph Briscoe when they interrupted their political careers to get rich.
Much of the Capitol gossip about Connally and money seems to have stemmed, in retrospect, from Connally’s avid embracing of the spoils system. A great admirer of its inventor, Andrew Jackson—when he lived in Forth Worth in the fifties, one wall of his den was covered with Jackson-era cartoons and political memorabilia—Connally was a skilled practitioner of the help-your-friends, gut-your-enemies style of politics. Connally-era appropriations bills contained riders giving the governor veto power over state architectural and construction contracts, and he did not hesitate to use it. In 1964 a UT regent resigned in protest after a $90,000 contract was jerked from an El Paso architect who happened to be an active Republican; Connally’s close friend Frank Erwin, then both a regent and national Democratic committeeman, said bluntly that the governor regarded architectural contracts as “valuable gifts” to be bestowed only on friends.
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