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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AT THE HEIGHT OF THE BARNES-Connally partnership, Nellie and John had amassed enough money to compete with the flashiest eighties moguls, including their friend Donald Trump. The Connallys had homes in Houston and Santa Fe, as well as a 3,900-square-foot penthouse in a condo on South Padre Island. (At some point, they sold their house in Jamaica, the one they'd purchased in the seventies as a possible Caribbean White House.) But their most important acquisition was the Picosa. Connally bought the spread near Floresville while he was governor, and as his fortunes improved, so did the Picosa's. It was their showplace: He turned the land a rich, loamy green by importing coastal Bermuda grass. He and Nellie covered the walls with the finest Western art and imported stair railings from an old London embassy. They built an extra floor to accommodate an antique banister. They furnished the dining room with a massive table and carved, high-backed Spanish chairs, two cushions of which Nellie needlepointed with their initials. The bricks in the fireplace came from the old Texas Capitol building; a floor of swirling black and white marble came from an old English mansion. ("When we went shopping, he was as bad as any woman," Nellie confessed.) Eventually, the ranch would include a main house, a guesthouse, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a skeet-shooting range, a landing strip, and an enormous rose garden behind the house. But by 1987, John Connally had debts of $93.3 million and assets of only $13 million. He had had such confidence in his business acumen that he had personally guaranteed his investors' money, and now he had to pay it back. Nellie does not count the bankruptcy as one of the "three bad days" she told me she'd had in her life—those being Kathleen's death, the assassination, and John's death—but it was, nevertheless, "a sad time." Reporters could not help but frame the four-day auction of the Connallys' possessions as a referendum on the Texas myth. Publicly, the couple promised to make a comeback, but privately, they were devastated. "We would lie in bed at night, wide awake, not talking to each other, our minds racing about what was happening to us," Nellie told me. "We knew we couldn't start over again in our seventies."
They presided over the liquidation, Nellie said, "even though it was like cutting off our arms and legs." But the dignity and humor with which they conducted themselves during the proceedings helped to resurrect Connally's reputation and to cement Nellie's. He would take the mike from the auctioneer and regale the audience with the history of an item; she would fluff the pillows on sofas on their way to the auction block. Their closest friends and biggest fans bought the few items they treasured most—Nellie's wedding silver, for instance—and, after a decent interval, returned them to the couple. But everything else was gone.
To get through it, she relied on friends and the unexpected kindness of strangers. One woman offered to send $50 to pay any of the Connallys' smaller bills. Another woman called for advice. She was living in a small town where she felt shunned because she wasn't making any money. What should she do, she asked Nellie.
"How old are you?" Nellie asked her.
The woman said she was 30.
"Oh," said Nellie, who was then 69, "if I could just be thirty again. What's the matter with you? Get yourself to a new town, get yourself a job, and start living."
UNFORTUNATELY, CIRCUMSTANCES PRECLUDED NELLIE FROM following her own advice. She was lying in bed one night in 1988, almost asleep, with her hands on her chest. "My little finger felt something," she told me. "I sat straight up in bed. I knew exactly what it was." For several weeks, she told no one—she was on the committee for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Texas Capitol and didn't want to put a damper on the party. "I couldn't bear to tell all those people, and I didn't want 'em all saying, 'Poor Nellie, poor Nellie,'" she told me. She went to the party, suffered an anxious weekend afterward—"Saturday I thought about a lot of things and Sunday I went to the hospital"—and had a mastectomy after doctors found she had breast cancer. Her husband was sitting across the room, dejected, when she came out of the anesthetic. "Nellie," he asked, "Do you think the stress of our bankruptcy caused your cancer?"
She was groggy from the drugs but still knew an opportunity when she heard one. "John," she said, "if stress causes cancer, I should have had this fifty years ago, because I have been under stress since I met you."
After her recovery, John worked their way back to financial comfort. He had retired from Vinson and Elkins (where he had also worked as a name partner upon retiring as governor) in 1985. His old friends Oscar Wyatt and Charles Hurwitz put him on the board of their respective companies, Coastal and Maxxam. (He also modeled for Hathaway shirts, wearing an eye patch, an inside joke evoking the company's earlier ads that featured a similarly dressed pitchman.) Connally threw himself into the creation of the new racetrack, which was backed by Hurwitz, and in his off-hours planned a fundraiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, with Nellie as the honoree. Barbara Walters and Donald and Ivana Trump showed up to honor her, and Richard Nixon played "Happy Birthday" on the piano. It may have been the first time in their lives that Nellie was the star of the evening instead of her husband; to the Connallys' friends, the night seemed to signal a new start for both of them.
But then, in May 1992, John began having trouble breathing. He got so sick that Nellie had to call 911. "Well, Nellie," he told her, "you saved my life once more." No one was particularly worried at first, because no one could believe that anything as minor as a lung infection could slow John Connally down. He may have felt differently. "If anything happens to me, sell the Picosa," he told Nellie. "It's free and clear."
When he did not respond to treatment, Nellie asked her friends to pray and even brought Billy Graham to see him in the hospital. A few days later, she called the evangelist to deliver the sermon at the state funeral, in Austin. No one there, least of all Nellie Connally, quite knew how she was going to survive without her husband.
John Connally, who had lived like a billionaire, left an estate reported to be worth only $500,000. Within two years, Nellie was calling her children down to the ranch. "Take what you want," she told them. "This is your heritage." The children flipped coins over the belongings; the ranch went to some wealthy caterers from San Antonio. Nellie returned only once. "It's not mine anymore," she told me. "It's beautiful, but I have no desire to go back."
WHEN JOHN CONNALLY BEGAN WORKING on his autobiography in the early nineties, some thought was given to the idea that Nellie might do the same. An agent shopped a proposal around New York publishing houses, but no one, it seemed, was interested in the recollections of the wife of a former Texas governor, even if she'd been married to John Connally and even if she'd witnessed the assassination. Nellie's notes, pushed to the back of a file drawer in 1963, remained just where she had left them.
Then, one day in 1996, she was searching through some files when she came across some papers torn from a legal pad. "What in the world is this stuff?" Nellie asked herself. She pulled the pages from the file folder and looked closer: It was the notes she had written after the assassination. "This is good," she told herself as she reread them. "I did this and this is good." Her husband never saw those notes—she hadn't thought they were important enough to read to him. And, as she told me, "We would have fought over every paragraph."
But now Nellie felt differently. "I just thought somebody ought to hear them," she explained. And so she began reading them to small groups; initially she read without stopping or ever looking up from the page. She first read the notes to the Official Ladies Club, a group of political wives, in Austin. Then she gave another reading in Dallas. The response convinced her that, as a shy, 44-year-old political wife, she had created something of lasting value. ("Forget the magic bullet, the grassy knoll, triangulation, the Cubans, the mob, the CIA, the Warren Commission, and Oliver Stone," Alan Peppard wrote in the Morning News in 1997. "No amount of analysis of the JFK assassination can prepare you for the emotional sledgehammer that comes from hearing the former first lady, Nellie Connally, quietly read her personal notes describing the scene in the back of the limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963.")
Then, a year ago, Larry King asked Nellie to come on his talk show to recall that day in November 1963. She was nervous, but, as usual, the story came alive with her telling. An agent named Bill Adler happened to be watching—he had represented both John Connally and Herskowitz for Connally's autobiography—and it struck him that the time was now right for Nellie's story. There were many people who had been born after the assassination, and her version of events would seem fresh. "It was like doing a book with Lincoln's wife, who was with him when he was shot," he told me enthusiastically. "No other assassination books coming out this fall will have a firsthand account." Even if Nellie wasn't the wife of the president at the time, Adler was right about the renewed enthusiasm for the assassination: He sold the book to a new publishing house, Rugged Land, on the basis of an outline.
It took Nellie and Herskowitz only a few months to write the book, but doing so resurrected old hurts. The awkwardness that always existed between Jackie Kennedy and Nellie had soured before the former's death. In William Manchester's Death of a President, Jackie had insisted that Nellie and John were screaming in the car, something Nellie always denied. Nellie had asserted in her speeches that Jackie could have been trying to get out of the car when she crawled across the trunk that day—"The car at that time was not a good place to be," Nellie told me—while Jackie claimed she had been trying to retrieve her husband's brain. These actions may explain why the executors of Jackie's estate refused Nellie's request to use in the book a note Jackie had sent her after JFK's death and Connally's recovery. Likewise, Nellie sent Caroline Schlossberg a note; she wanted to meet with JFK's daughter before she died. She longed to tell Caroline about her father, how happy he had been in Dallas that day, how promising the world had looked then. She never got a response.
Nellie's young publishers, in contrast, could be a little too enthusiastic about sharing her memories. She had to nix a Texas book tour, for instance, that followed the same itinerary as the one in 1963. Nellie also refused to let them describe her in the book as "tony."
ON MY LAST VISIT TO SEE her, Nellie wanted me to meet her children. Dutifully, they all collected in her apartment one day in early September, cheerful adults in their fifties who wore the features of both parents equally. On that day, Nellie was happier than I'd ever seen her. She fussed over her kids, bantered with them, fed them cheese dip mixed with chili. When the joking died down, they praised her strength to me, but she demurred. "I am strong because of your father," she insisted. Her kids, products of another generation, argued the point. "You're not who you are because of him," her eldest son, John Connally III, countered. "You're who you are because of you." Nellie listened closely, her eyes darting quizzically from one child to the next, but she seemed unconvinced.
Then, once again, the talk turned to the assassination, and once again, the family of John Connally tried to make sense of the events of that November day. They argued over what happened when, over who did what. When had Nellie told them the president was dead? When had the children learned their father was all right? Why had the eldest child, John, been able to go to Dallas when the younger ones had been left at home? (The answer: because he hadn't asked permission; he'd just gone.) Everyone had a slightly different version of events, and finally, Nellie had had enough. She shook her head and hugged herself, as if warding off a chill. Then she allowed herself one moment of wishful thinking. "Well," she said, "I'm glad that deal is over."
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