The Truth about John Connally
Does this man belong on a white horse?
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Bank charters worked the same way. Before Connally, charters were hard to come by—indeed, impossible for anyone without connections to a big bank. That was incompatible with Connally’s vision of a state about to enter upon a period of explosive growth. Texas needed more banks and less conservative lending policies. He persuaded the Legislature to change the makeup of the banking board from three state officials to two officials and a governor’s appointee; then he named none other than the shrewdest political operator in all of Texas, Bob Strauss, to fill the slot. You can rest assured that Connally’s enemies did not open many banks in those years.
Connally used the spoils system to build an organization. There are only two ways to accomplish that—with patronage and with money—and for the sort of people Connally was after, patronage wouldn’t do. Government largesse helped keep people of influence around the state in the Democratic party and loyal to Connally. Such a system strays dangerously close to the line separating smart politics from corruption. The trick is to make sure that the largesse is always legitimate. Don’t hand out contracts for inflated prices or for work that isn’t done; don’t give out bank charters to stockholders who don’t meet the capital requirements. Connally preached playing it straight to every person he appointed to a major state position. He was obsessed by fear of scandal; it was the one administrative thing he cared about. He warned his friends not to support Preston Smith for governor, as some had pledged to do if Connally did not run again; Smith didn’t know how to run the system, he told them; he would be too lax, there would surely be a scandal. And sure enough, there was.
But even Connally could not avoid scandal forever. In the spring of 1971, while Preston Smith was trying futilely to divorce himself from the imbroglio surrounding Frank Sharp, Connally, now Secretary of the Treasury, advised Richard Nixon to raise federal price supports on milk. Eventually it would be alleged that he took a $10,000 bribe from old crony Jake Jacobsen to give that advice, and a jury of his peers, nine of them black, would decide whether John Connally should go to jail. The case turned first on whether Connally would simultaneously be tried for perjury—some embarrassing inconsistencies had crept into his pretrial testimony—but his lawyer was able to prevent it, and then the issue came down to whether John Connally or Jake Jacobsen was telling the truth. Witness after witness spoke up for Connally’s character: Bob McNamara, Dean Rusk, Billy Graham, Barbara Jordan, and Lady Bird Johnson, who said simply, “John is a man of integrity, a man of honor, and so known.” The jury chose Connally, and destiny was allowed to play out its course.
Now Connally is facing a larger jury, but to him the issue is still the same: virtue. Not political virtue, but the kind that is personal and old-fashioned—the kind where he best measures up against Teddy Kennedy, whose peccadillos need no recounting here. His belief in what he sees as the fundamental American values—which even Sunday School teacher Jimmy Carter seems to have abandoned—shows up in every Connally speech: hard work (“We cannot continue to have the lowest productivity in the free world”); thrift (“We cannot go on penalizing Americans for saving”); patriotism (“The greatness of America is not past”). Connally frequently relates how his father drove a bus during the Depression (though he does not say his father owned the bus company); he sees himself as a self-made man matched against Teddy Kennedy, the least self-made public man in America. With perhaps too grandiloquent a sense of his own historical importance, Connally regards the 1980 election as the Great American Watershed that will decide whether the country will abandon for all time these traditional moral values. And, of course, he sees himself at the apex of that watershed. It is campaign rhetoric, but he believes it to his core.
This theme goes back far too long to be considered an expediency of the moment. Before he was wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald, he actually thought about calling a governor’s conference on morals and ethics. This was a man who talked seriously about devising a course to teach first-graders not to lie, cheat, steal, or covet. He does not smoke (he chews unlighted cigars) and his drinking is limited to wine with meals. He uses only mild profanity. He is fond of his wife. “He doesn’t think of the ordinary vices as sins, exactly,” said a former aide. “He thinks they are weaknesses. And he hates weakness.”
His political philosophy is similarly straitlaced. Fundamentally a pragmatist, Connally is not one to dwell on philosophical matters, but he does hold fast to the notion, very much out of fashion these days, that citizenship is not a right but a privilege. He favors a national sales tax because, he says, “Everybody ought to pay some tax.” As governor he proposed and passed the most restrictive voter-registration law in the country, one which required people to sign up every year during a brief period well in advance of elections. It was designed to reward those who viewed voting as a civic duty and to punish those who viewed it as a tool, and Connally said as much. He takes credit now for presiding over repeal of the poll tax, but he contributed little to the effort. He fretted publically about “bloc voting,” but what really irked him was that the blocs would not be voting for him, that they didn’t appreciate what his program of education and jobs meant to them. His almost Hamiltonian fear of the uneducated masses can be traced directly to their failure, in his eyes, to educate themselves about him. All this led Lyndon Johnson to say, a little unfairly, that “John has everything, but he doesn’t love the people.” Trust, not love, would have been more precise, but Lyndon, like most politicians, was caught up in the popular dogma of the day—an ever-expanding list of rights, an ever-shrinking list of responsibilities. Connally’s narrow view of the franchise sees a bit archaic, but who is to say, in this era of a lost national consensus, that his broader view of citizenship is without merit?
Leadership
It’s on his bumper stickers, it’s in every speech, it’s the main theme of his campaign—but what does the record show?
Boca Raton, Florida, 1979. The tiny restaurant, decorated with hanging baskets and ceiling fans, could be anywhere in America. John Connally has come to talk about leadership, but from the beginning the occasion is a fiasco. The introduction, delivered by a strikingly tall woman, has the audience in nervous titters: “In an age of pygmies,” she intones, “his manhood stands out like a beacon in the dark.” Later, as if to mock Connally’s exhortations, the American flag behind the podium topples onto him.
It is a hard thing to get across, this idea of leadership at the heart of the Connally appeal. It is on his bumper stickers; it is in every speech. But what does it mean? Is it enough to say, as nearly everyone has, that Connally looks presidential? There can be no doubt about that. It’s not just the carriage and the height and the silver hair. Connally is always in absolute control of himself. He has an actor’s control over his body, and he is never out of character. His movements are crisp and definite without being affected. Even in an airplane or an automobile he sits so erect that he resembles one of those inflatable dummy passengers used in safety tests.
But there is another side to leadership—getting legislation passed, picking the right people for the right job, and keeping a self-serving bureaucracy in line. If Connally has always had the image, his performance as governor in the more practical areas of leadership is a little different story—different enough to raise some real questions about what would happen if he approached his presidency the same way.
John Connally was a Big Picture governor. He had definite ideas of where Texas was headed and how to get it there. About the future, at least, he turned out to be right, which counts for something. Connally was a decade ahead of his time: he foresaw what we now call the Sunbelt boom, and he knew Texas wasn’t ready to take advantage of it.
During his first campaign, Connally privately told the state’s business establishment, whose primary interest had always been to hold state spending to a minimum, that Texas was “a backward state,” and they were foolish and shortsighted to keep it that way. While Secretary of the Navy, he told them, he had seen hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts awarded to states like California, where sophisticated universities worked as partners with sophisticated industries. “Industry follows brainpower,” Connally said, “the coin of the realm of this new age.” He spoke out for less spending on college construction, where legislative pork-barreling and logrolling were rampant, and for more spending on faculty salaries, which he wanted to double, and on research. “Brains, not bricks” became the Connally slogan.
He also wanted the state to get into the tourist promotion business; the dollars spent would come back a hundredfold. But he knew that the parks board, and consequently the abysmal state park system, suffered from lack of political clout, and so he proposed merging it with the sportsmen-backed game and fish commission. Eventually he would come out for liquor by the drink, pari-mutuel betting, and a world’s fair for San Antonio to bring still more dollars into the state. John Connally was a cash-flow governor.
He was also a big spender—every biennium the Legislature had to raise taxes—and as activist a governor as Texas has ever had. Connally’s liberal enemies might not remember that he was championing some of their favorite issues almost two decades ago. In a move that anticipated by a dozen years the Sunset reforms of the seventies, Connally called for consolidating and eliminating a number of agencies—doubtless not losing sight of the fact that he would be able to fill all the seats on the new boards, not just vacancies. He was the first Texas governor to call for the creation of a public utility commission; he urged constitutional revision six years before the Legislature would assemble itself into a convention for that purpose; and he was so concerned about the condition of the state’s libraries that he called a conference on the subject.
My Library
