The Witness
Of the four people who rode in the presidential limousine on November 22, 1963, only Nellie Connally is still alive—alone with her memories of the day that defined the rest of her life.
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The driver pulled the Lincoln from the motorcade and raced to the hospital. "We were floating in yellow and red roses and blood," Nellie told me. "It was a sea of horror." While a team of doctors worked on the president, Nellie Connally wondered what to do. Who was treating John?
She became increasingly more frantic as everyone concentrated on Kennedy. The question racing through her mind was this: "How long do I have to sit here in deference to my president, who is dead? All this time I was trying to be so nice when that was the last thing I ever wanted to be. I was as alone as I'd ever been in my life," she wrote. The only consolation was that her husband continued to moan in pain. "That was the best thing I heard, because I knew he was still alive," she continued.
The doctors finally cut John's clothes from his body and began to repair the damage. Nellie sat numbly by while the death of the president was announced, barely able to speak with her three children by phone, unsure what to tell them except that their father was still in the operating room. She broke down only once, when Lady Bird Johnson, a friend of more than twenty years who would soon become first lady, burst through the swinging doors of the emergency room. "She opened her arms wide and I flew into them," Nellie wrote. "And I cried and cried for the first time."
It was many agonizing hours later that Nellie got the news that her husband would live. A doctor told her that by pulling John over and covering him, she had inadvertently closed his baseball-size wound and, most likely, saved his life. Seeing her husband for the first time, pale but alive, Nellie leaned over the hospital bed and kissed him. "We had been through so much and had been spared," she wrote. "We still had each other and could go on and fulfill whatever mission fate had in store for us."
The Nellie who appeared on television in those horrible hours did not look like a woman in control of her destiny, nor did she look like the confident woman people know today. She was a very young-looking 44, drawn and almost unbearably fragile. She stood anxiously by her husband's bedside when he was well enough to talk to reporters, not meeting the camera's eye, steadying herself with the bed rail one minute, fidgeting the next, her bottom lip quivering, her chin tucked. She had still not recovered from Kathleen's death; now she had nearly lost her husband in a terrible crime, and the signs of shock were unmistakable. Even so, she understood on some level that she had become a part of history. Two days after bringing her husband home from the hospital, Nellie went to a quiet corner of the Governor's Mansion, picked up a legal pad, and recorded her account of the events, thinking that maybe her grandchildren and their children might want to know what had happened on that day. "I left Austin at noon on Thursday, November 21, 1963," she began, with the harrowing account to follow.
Then she put her memories in a drawer and began to fashion the kind of story a woman of her time and place could make sense of. As she wrote in her book, she went to the beauty salon:
In those days, that's what ladies did when they felt worn down and worn out: They got their hair done.
My hair dresser in Austin put me in the chair, looked me over like a Parkland surgeon, then gave a low whistle.
"Mrs. Connally," he said. "Did you know there is a streak of white hair, two inches wide, down the back of your head?"
I sat bolt upright and reached for the mirror. "No, I didn't! It wasn't there three weeks ago!"
Shortly thereafter I made an appointment with our family doctor. During the routine physical, I asked him what might have caused the white streak.
"Shock," he said matter-of-factly. "From what you say, you never screamed or even cried until after the event. You kept everything inside. That's what happens to good little soldiers."
That description is still the best characterization of Nellie Connally. She's stalwart and dutiful and displays a well-developed sense of the absurd only when she's sure the coast is clear. Her friends talk about her affectionately but with the care and concern of diamond cutters; maybe they see her as the perpetual political wife (never say anything that could hurt the campaign, which is ongoing), or maybe they simply do not wish to inflict, even by accident, one more scintilla of pain. Nellie becomes, in their accounts, a virtuous and devoted martyr, albeit one with a madcap sense of humor. Only occasionally will anyone admit that there's been an enormous price to pay for her life, that just as there were enormous rewards for being married to the most classic of Texans, there were also enormous sacrifices. They leave that part of the story to her, and she recounts it with the facts but not the details. "A political wife has a hard go," she told me, as she has told other reporters and friends in the past. "When people ask me who I admire, I say the political wife who has managed to get through her husband's term without becoming a drunk, having affairs, or getting a divorce."
Nellie managed. No one close to the couple has ever doubted that John Connally loved his wife—former lieutenant governor Ben Barnes was sometimes embarrassed when they'd smooch like teenagers in the back of a car he was driving—but Connally was a narcissist, and there were always other women around, the bored wives of very rich husbands, the political groupies. "Nellie was realistic about the kind of husband she had," Mickey Herskowitz told me. "She knew early in her marriage she had to have a philosophy about it." She has repeated that philosophy in countless interviews and repeated it to me, as a shield against further inquiries: "As long as he came home to me at night, I didn't ask any questions," she said. "And he did." She was, after all, his wife, the mother of his children, the one with whom he took long drives in the Hill Country and the one with whom he attended social events all over the world. Nellie's quality time came after the parties were over, when the couple would stroll alone together through the empty streets of some of the world's greatest cities. To this day, there are many places Nellie Connally has seen only in the dark.
Her memory of their first meeting seems right out of a Texas romance novel. In 1937 Idanell Brill was a star on the University of Texas campus, with more than her share of suitors. She wasn't beautiful in the conventional sense, but she was petite and lively and unafraid—sexy, in other words. "I was walking to the student union building, and this young man was coming my way," she told me, her voice softening at the memory. "God, I never saw anything as good lookin' as that in my life. Tall, slim, black hair. We were separated by about twenty-five feet. When we got opposite each other, we just looked at each other and that was it. Poor guy, he didn't know his bachelor days were over." Soon enough, however, the terms of their relationship were established. "All I know is, I was the star, but the roles very quickly became reversed," she told a reporter several years ago.
The Sweetheart of the University had fallen in love with the ambitious president of the student body, a young man raised in poverty in South Texas who wanted to make damn sure he never had to return to it. (Connally's father, a heavy drinker, had scraped out a living as a farmer, a bus driver, a butcher, and a barber in an attempt to support seven children.) Nellie came from a family that was better off but not wealthy. Her father, a hunter and fisherman, worked alongside his father at the family leather shop, one famous for making holsters for the Texas Rangers. While John Connally's childhood was deprived—his happiest Christmas was the year he and his four brothers received one football as their only gift—Nellie's was rich, in spirit at least. Her mother in particular was a lively, strong-willed woman who never let disappointment slow her down and imparted that lesson to her children. When Nellie says, "I only look forward, never back," it is her mother talking, but the truth is that in her own life, she has had to do both.
Like so many relationships of that time, Nellie and John Connally each found in the other what he or she lacked—or could not express. He had the drive; she had the stability. He was formal and occasionally severe; she was unpretentious and irreverent, her compassion making up for his arrogance but without illusions. Several years before John Connally's death, Herskowitz was at the family ranch when an old college classmate teased Connally about the wide swath he had cut as a student.
"That was a whole different John Connally," the governor insisted.
"Oh, no, it isn't," Nellie argued, grinning. "He's just the same. Vain, arrogant, and pompous—the three things every woman wants in a man."
IN LATE AUGUST, NELLIE AND I drove to the LBJ ranch for an annual event, the laying of a wreath on LBJ's grave on his birthday. The ranch was a four-hour drive across Central Texas from Houston, and to make it on time, we had to leave at around five in the morning. Nellie came downstairs briskly, dressed sharply in a pin-striped, waist-cinching Armani suit and, planting herself in the back seat, groused good-humoredly about the tight seat belt and the design of the car's headrest, which blocked her view of the road. She reminisced steadily as we headed west, while the sun came up and mist lifted off the hills beyond Columbus. No one would have known that she was ambivalent about making the trip, torn between reading the final galleys of her book and her loyalty to the crowd that was her life for so many years.
As we approached the sprawling, oak-shaded ranch house, Nellie grew more animated. She hadn't been there in years, and every landmark—LBJ's birthplace, the cemetery, the road (now closed) that used to bring visitors across the Pedernales—seemed to remove a year or two until, by the time she leaped from the car, she was as giddy as a teenage girl.
It was an unseasonably cool morning, and until Nellie made her entrance, everyone had been milling about respectfully, sipping coffee from speckled tin ranch cups. LBJ's daughters, Luci and Lynda Bird, were there with their children, along with some old LBJ hands—Larry Temple, Julian Read, Ben Barnes—and the widows of others—George Christian's wife, Jo Anne, Walt Rostow's wife, Elspeth, and finally, Lady Bird herself, now ninety, who, due to a debilitating stroke, was rolled out in a wheelchair.
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