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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Nellie amped up the scene. She flitted and fluttered through the crowd, hugging, kissing, and squeezing almost everyone on the lawn. She craned her neck as she threw her arms around Barnes, nodded sympathetically as she listened to Luci and Lynda, bent over Lady Bird to kiss her hello. Little exclamations of joy and surprise followed her wherever she went. At the graveside, she sat among the widows, but while they were silent and stoic, she snuggled next to the former first lady while she listened, beaming, to a soloist who delivered an a cappella rendition of "America the Beautiful." When he finished, Nellie shook her fists in victory. She was back in her old role, pulling the group together and giving it life, as had been her job from her earliest days with the Johnson crowd.
Nellie and John were married in 1940. By then her husband had already caught Congressman Lyndon Johnson's eye, and the protégé was working late into the night in Washington, D.C., answering constituent mail and plotting political strategy. (Johnson was supposed to be the best man at the couple's wedding but never made it to the ceremony.)
Nellie didn't quite know what to make of Johnson at first. "I was not really political," she explained. "I just knew that this was a powerful man and he was going to be somebody." She did notice that he couldn't relax and that he was extremely coarse; he ate off her plate after finishing what was on his. She took it upon herself to lighten his dark moods with little ditties and tried to be his receptionist, briefly, but left sometime after he threw a book at her when she accidentally cut off a big donor. "It took me a while to love Lyndon Johnson," she admitted.
While Connally worked for Johnson, Nellie cooked dinner, kept house, and tried to create a life for herself. At one point, she considered joining a theater group in Falls Church, Virginia, but her young husband wouldn't hear of it. "Let me ask you something," Nellie told me, quoting John. "What if there's a special dinner and you were in rehearsal?" When she said she'd go to the rehearsal, Connally shook his head. "I don't think you'd better hook up with them," he told her, and she didn't. "Little did I know he would put me on a stage much bigger than Falls Church," she said. "I had to act, and I had to be real good."
When the war started and both husbands joined the military, Nellie shared an apartment with Lady Bird, who ran Johnson's congressional office in his absence. Again, Nellie took on the role of cheerleader, filming skits in which she cast Lady Bird as a femme fatale and sending Lyndon cheery notes. "I really threw one last PM," she wrote him. "I had six girlies out for a good drink, dinner, and a wild poker game. After drinks, I quit worrying about how my dinner would taste, because I could have fed them steamed grass and mud pies for all they cared."
When the war ended, John and Nellie moved to Fort Worth; John traveled frequently to Austin and Washington as a lobbyist for Sid Richardson, the legendary Texas oilman and uncle of the Bass brothers. Nellie was, by then, the mother of four children, an enthusiastic if at times eccentric parent. On trips, she dried diapers by rolling them up in the car window and letting them flutter in the breeze; at home she allowed the children to have a dog even though she was deathly afraid of all animals, large and small. By then the family was living on a grander scale, taking their cues from Fort Worth's old wealth, the Carters, Moncriefs, and Fortsons. "They just had so much that we didn't have," she told me. "I learned from watching them."
Their lives seemed nearly flawless until March 1957, when the Connallys' eldest daughter, who was sixteen, started dating eighteen-year-old Bobby Hale, the son of a former Texas Christian University football star. As John Connally recounted in his autobiography, Kathleen, or KK, was a bright, headstrong girl who had suddenly grown rebellious. "Nellie and I were both perplexed and agitated," Connally wrote. "We could hardly talk about anything else. We knew her behavior was irrational." John and Nellie came to suspect that Kathleen was pregnant; as Kathleen continued to deny that fact, the Connallys' home became a battleground. Finally, in frustration, John Connally slapped his daughter, an act he would regret for the rest of his life. The next morning, he left for another business trip to Washington, and that night Kathleen loaded her clothes into the family station wagon while Nellie, he wrote, "pleaded and cajoled and raged. She drove off with her mother begging her to stay."
After several agonizing days of silence, the Connallys got a letter explaining that the couple had eloped; Kathleen was living in a squalid boardinghouse in Tallahassee with her new husband. It was March 1958. John made one dispiriting visit to Florida; within a few weeks, he got the call in which he learned that Kathleen had committed suicide.
Lyndon and Lady Bird came to the funeral. It was, Lady Bird later wrote, "As painful a time as I can ever remember. John was just like a granite cliff, and Nellie was her sweet, warm, loving self. There was a whole lot of us out at their house. Love brought us all. We yearned to make it less painful, and there was no way to do it."
John Connally made public mention of Kathleen's death only once in his life, in his book. He wrote the chapter swiftly, late at night, and punctuated the recounting of his daughter's death with a promise: "This is the first time I have ever discussed it in any detail, and it will also be the last."
Nellie does not speak of Kathleen either, nor did she choose to write about her death in her book. "We lost her and I never got over it and I never will. There's hardly a day that goes by that I don't think of Kathleen," she told me. "I will never get over thinking there is something I could have done to help her." But at the time, she had three more children to raise. "I did the best with what I had and moved on," Nellie said on the drive back to Houston. Then, for just an instant, she allowed herself to look extraordinarily tired.
FOR SIX YEARS SPANNING MY CHILDHOOD and early adolescence, John Connally was my governor. I was nine when the Kennedys and the Connallys drove by my elementary school in San Antonio, just a day before the assassination, and he was a Zelig-like figure in most of the American history I witnessed as a young adult. These facts may explain why I was taken aback by my first visit to Nellie's condominium. It is almost impossible to think of a home in the Four Leaf Towers as reflective of diminished circumstances, but if you grew up, as I did, on John Connally stories, you probably would have thought that too.
The place is pretty and well appointed but a little overcrowded with Connally memorabilia. The reason for this is not that Nellie has intentionally built a shrine to her husband but that, because of the bankruptcy, this is all she has left. They'd planned to retire to their Picosa ranch, she told me. He would commute (with his own plane and pilot) from South Texas to Houston, where he would run the new Sam Houston pari-mutuel horse-racing track while Nellie waited back at the ranch. Maybe that's why Nellie's condo had seemed so small: because the Connallys had lived so large.
The time between the assassination and John Connally's bankruptcy spans almost 25 years, during which he managed to pack in several careers—corporate lawyer and rainmaker, Secretary of the Treasury, presidential candidate, real estate developer, and racetrack promoter—and never seemed to falter, at least from his perspective. "Connally wasn't given to great periods of introspection as to whether he was a great fellow," noted Houston's former mayor Bob Lanier, who was not only a political associate of Connally's but also a River Oaks neighbor. "Johnson had great self-doubt; Connally was very self-assured."
He moved easily from one world to another, from business to politics and from Democrat to Republican—perhaps too easily. When he resigned as Richard Nixon's Treasury Secretary, in 1972, to head a group called Democrats for Nixon, Johnson supposedly said, "I should have spent more time with that boy. His problem is that he likes those oak-paneled rooms too much." Three months after LBJ's death, in January 1973, Connally switched to the Republican party. Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird's press secretary, weighed in with "It's a good thing John Connally wasn't at the Alamo. He'd be organizing Texans for Santa Anna now."
Even so, to Connally it seemed like the right thing to do: The Democratic party, he said, had been captured by Northern liberals. When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned under a cloud of bribery accusations, Nixon, dazzled by Connally, wanted to appoint him to fill the vacancy. ("They didn't have many friends," Nellie told me. "So we tried to be their friends.") But powerful senators in both parties blocked the appointment, and soon Connally was facing his own bribery accusations over a contribution he had received from milk producers while he was Treasury Secretary. He was acquitted but fatally wounded politically; when he ran for the Republican nomination in 1980, he spent $12 million and won exactly one delegate. "I reminded everybody of Lyndon," he told a reporter glumly.
He tried real estate, partnered with his old protégé, Ben Barnes, but when oil and real estate prices crashed in the mid-eighties, so did they. Then there was Connally's daring rescue, with his close friend oilman Oscar Wyatt, of several American hostages held by Saddam Hussein in 1990. These were the kind of events Nellie Connally was referring to when she told me, "We had our ups and downs."
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