The Truth about John Connally
Does this man belong on a white horse?
(Page 6 of 6)
Having the right ideas is part of leadership; selling them is no less important. Connally knew he could not persuade business lobbyists to support his spending ideas, so he beat them by going to their bosses. Connally’s appointments to his 25-member Committee on Education Beyond the High School was a guidebook to power in Texas: H.B. Zachary of San Antonio, George R. Brown of Houston, the chairmen of the boards of Humble Oil, Texas Instruments, General Telephone, and Shamrock Oil and Gas, the president of Ling-Temco-Vought, and on and on. They weren’t enthusiastic at first—but John Connally, in the words of a former top aide, “has a way of making things sound better than they are,” and in the end they embraced his vision. Faced by that kind of lineup, the Legislature, which in 1963 had refused to spend even the piddling $12 million more on higher education Connally had sought, two years later caved in and gave him everything he wanted: money, tenure at teacher colleges, a coordinating board to clamp down on local college empires.
That higher education fight is John Connally at his best: visionary, shrewd, tough (he refused to share his appointments to the study committee with the Speaker and the lieutenant governor, knowing how essential a blue-chip membership was to his strategy). When Connally was passionately interested in an issue, he could hold a clinic on leadership. When he wasn’t, which was all too often, things muddled along about as they did before and after him.
His worst shortcomings do not augur well for a Connally presidency. He did not get along well with the Legislature, just as Jimmy Carter has not gotten along well with Congress (and for many of the same reasons). That didn’t really change until Connally appointed a hostile Speaker to the Railroad Commission, opening the way for his own protégé Ben Barnes. He paid little attention to the administrative side of his job and he didn’t use his appointment power to follow through on his programs. Connally was a fast starter and a very slow finisher. Most of his accomplishments were behind him by the middle of the 1965 legislative session, though he served almost four more years.
Connally took office without quite realizing what the Legislature was like. They had no real interest in his vision of Texas; they were consumed by the things Texas Legislatures always fight over: interest rates, industrial safety, tax breaks—trees rather than forests. His first Legislature made it a crime to display the United Nations flag in Texas. Connally does not suffer fools gladly, and legislatures have a propensity toward foolishness. Perhaps Connally could, as he said, get along with Congress, but he starts with no innate fondness for the legislative process. A U.S. Senate seat could have been his for the asking, but he didn’t want it. Legislatures reward longevity, not productivity.
If Connally didn’t like the Legislature, the feeling was reciprocated. Senators, especially, resented the fact that Connally didn’t invite them to his office or seek their advice; he was too aloof, they said and soon they changed the description to arrogant, a label that has stuck to his day. Whatever the precise term, it was responsible for the turning point in his administration. Connally had appointed St. John Garwood, an eminent Austin lawyer and jurist, to the UT Board of Regents, but the Senate turned him down after Garwood said, “Any errors I make as a regent will be on the side of integration and academic freedom.” The vote that sealed Garwood’s rejection, however, came from a disgruntled liberal who did the deed, he said, “just to let the governor know I exist.” Thereafter, most of the names Connally sent to the Senate were people whose chief credentials were political. There was one notable exception, one time when Connally exhibited what he today defines as an essential element of leadership: the willingness to make the tough choices. Connally appointed a black, the Reverend C.A. Holliday of Fort Worth, to the prison board, and when a delegation of senators called on the governor to say that was unacceptable, he told them that if Holliday was busted, he’d appoint another Negro, and another, and another; they’d have to bust every black man in Texas before he’d quit. Holliday was confirmed, 25-4.
But for the most part, Connally made the easy choice to value loyalty above quality. He even went so far as to name to the Air Control Board the president of a firm that Harris County health officials had cited as polluter of the month. And his regental appointment after Garwood was National Democratic Committeeman Frank Erwin, who, though appointed by a governor committed to “brains, not bricks,” became the most prolific builder in UT history and doubled enrollment—precisely the opposite result from Connally’s own program.
In fact, many a pet Connally program was ultimately done in, or ignored form the start, by the very people Connally named to see it through—not surprisingly, since he seldom discussed policy with them. One appointee who served on two boards under Connally said he never once got any direction from the governor. They talked, yes, but about state convention politics, not about policy. Connally was an unenthusiastic administrator who above all hated detail—a characteristic anyone who has ever worked for him remembers with mock horror. Staffers would sit around and argue over who would have the best chance of getting Connally to look at, say, a grant proposal, and everyone had a nominee other than himself.
He had no luck at all in getting cooperation from the bureaucracy, and at the end of his term he lamented, “Nobody works for the governor. Administrators won’t volunteer anything. I never know anything except by hearsay.” One can almost imagine Jimmy Carter, so maligned by Connally, saying exactly the same thing. But administrators had their complaints too; they grumped to the press that Connally was inaccessible and uncommunicative. Without leadership from the governor, his idea of community-based care was shunted aside for more traditional approaches at the new Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. The merged Parks and Wildlife Department was a shambles from the start, forever consumed by arguments over such matters as which branch should pay for pencils; Connally would later recall it as his biggest failure. Even his beloved Coordinating Board had labor pains and never achieved the stature Connally envisioned. In all, his was a record not unlike Jimmy Carter’s: high goals, mediocre accomplishments, too wide a gap between rhetoric and performance.
Connally’s record as Secretary of the Treasury, at least in terms of his relations with the legislative branch, was much improved over his record as governor. He pushed the Lockheed load through Congress, and he helped make the case for revenue sharing. Connally cites those examples in his campaign speeches as evidence of his ability to get along with Congress. His motto, he says, is that “it’s better to be feared than loved,” and, of course, Jimmy Carter tried the reverse approach and got nowhere. But Connally was more lobbyist than statesman; he could advocate the administration’s programs without taking the heat for Richard Nixon’s personal and political shortcomings—something he could not do as president.
It also remains to be seen whether he can force himself to deal with the drudgery of administration. His distaste for it goes too far back; that is a fundamental part of his personality. It is easy to envision John Connally so preoccupied with Japanese trade negotiations that he’d ignore the kind of petty outrages bureaucrats perpetrate daily when unbridled—to name one example, the way the Interstate Commerce Commission keeps letting railroads raise coal rates to subsidize their losses elsewhere. The government is full of sinecures, and unless the man at the top lets it be known he will have none of such shenanigans and follows up on the commitment, the agencies will erode his strength and support.
But if Connally has not changed, maybe the rest of us have. Connally’s economic theories, which so many saw as elitist a decade ago, are more palatable today, made so by the deepening economic crisis and the futility of the old Keynesian solutions. After Richard Nixon’s gang brought real criminal conduct to the highest levels of government, perhaps we are ready to make the distinction between a Connally-type spoils system and corruption. And surely Jimmy Carter is evidence enough that having a wheeler-dealer in the White House wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.
What are his chances of getting there? Most preference polls have him running fourth among Republicans behind Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Howard Baker. But Ford isn’t running, at least not yet, and Baker’s strength is exposure rather than money or organization. Connally strategists believe that the real race for the nomination is between their man and Reagan, and they claim to be confident that Reagan can’t hang on. They say his age is showing, that in his rare public appearances he seems like a parody of himself (but hasn’t he always?), that his campaign is half a million dollars in debt, that once Reagan starts to slip, the front-runner syndrome that destroyed Muskie in 1972 will ensnare him. If he starts to slip. The New Hampshire primary is on February 26. The Illinois primary comes on March 18. If Reagan isn’t beaten by Illinois, the prevailing wisdom goes, he won’t be beaten at all; if he is beaten even once, he’s finished. So the idea is to stop him somewhere, anywhere, and then start jockeying for position with the other survivors. Connally is years behind Reagan in organization; he has no chance to win in a primary that puts a premium on organization, like New Hampshire’s. His best shot at Reagan is in one of the Southeastern primaries on March 11—Alabama, Georgia, or, most likely, Florida, where he ran virtually even with Reagan in Republican presidential preference caucuses this fall.
Connally believes that the ultimate success of his campaign depends on whether he can convince people to penetrate what he calls the myths that surround him. But the myths are not really myths at all: they are the dark side of John Connally. His real problem is to convince skeptics that there is another side, and that this many internal contradictions will be resolved for the better. Only then can they decide if they want what Connally really is: the precursor of an American meritocracy, a society run by and for winners, where the smart and the sensible and the productive can at last get about the business of running the country.
And so the question of John Connally’s personality goes to the jury one last time. It is a jury composed largely of ordinary people, and perhaps one of them should have the last word. As Connally ended his tour of that Italian neighborhood in Providence, the procession of candidate, staff, and police was making its way back toward the waiting motorcade when a wizened, unshaven man wearing a faded green T-shirt reached out to him. “When you’re president,” the little man implored, “don’t forget about the poor.” But it was too late. Connally had already ducked into his waiting limousine, to pursue his destiny, for good or for evil, and the message of this modern soothsayer went unheard.
My Library
