The Lonely Star Candidate
Reed, John Shelton
The Lonely Star Candidate In John Connally's interesting, score-settling autobiography, the former governor says he didn't yearn for more power. But there's thwarted ambition on every page BY...
...Or consider the 1955 bill to end natural gas price controls that was derailed when Senator Case of South Dakota rose to report on the Senate floor that he had been given an envelope full of hundred dollar bills by a lobbyist...
...But they were not bought and they were not stolen...
...Reagan's election left him free to pursue a short, disastrous career in Texas real estate development, and his ensuing bankruptcy showed him at his best...
...The tendency to straighten one's tie and pose for posterity seems to be irresistible...
...When Johnson became president, he often sought Connally's advice—according to Connal-ly—but he didn't always take it...
...Start with the 1948 Senate election that gave LBJ the nickname (which he hated) "Landslide Lyndon...
...Connally shared Bill Moyers' admiration for LBJ's "moral imagination" and he seems to have been genuinely fond of the man, but he had few illusions about Johnson's devious intelligence and bulldozer tactics...
...And it wasn't just the Eastern Establishment that didn't cotton to the Connally style...
...His account of the assassination makes you want to refurbish the old joke to make the punchline read: "Who's the man with Governor Connally...
...to which Rep...
...samples, complimentary, and other free copies: (1,383) 1,557...
...One concerns Lyndon Johnson's first meeting with Franklin Roosevelt...
...4. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...Estate of Philip M. Stern, Washington, DC...
...John Rothchild, Miami, FL...
...and asking, "What are you doing...
...Owners of 1 percent or more of shares of The Washington Monthly Limited Partnership: Preston Brown, Washington, DC...
...I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete...
...Howard W. Young, Washington, DC...
...He and his wife could have sold their belongings privately, to a dealer, but they decided that a public auction, however painful, would bring a higher price and let him do better by his creditors...
...NW, Washington, DC 20009...
...Like Wyatt, Connally opposed the war, partly because he saw it as a gimmick to restore Bush's popularity, partly because (as Wyatt put it), "In 19 years of trading with the Arabs, the one and only thing I've learned is to stay out of their chickenshit conflicts...
...In Austin he was elected president of the student assembly and made friends that lasted him for life: future businessmen, politicians, and political lawyers, among them Robert Strauss and Congressman Jake Pickle...
...Later he did not talk much about these inelegant origins—not that he was ashamed of them, he says...
...The young congressman went to the White House to seek a favor for his district...
...Forty years later, Richard Nixon told Connally about the parade of Aeroflot stewardesses to the bedroom of the visiting Leonid Brezhnev...
...6. Names and complete addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher, Mary Beiro, 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...After that the story is all anticlimax: a trial and acquittal on bribery charges...
...Roger S. Kuhn, Bethesda, MD...
...2. Mail subscription: (19,855) 23,891...
...Matthew Nemerson, New Haven, CT...
...Fred Stanback Jr., Salisbury, NC...
...Like most Southerners of his generation, Connally was not born to prosperity...
...Morton Mandel, Cleveland, OH...
...His latest book is Surveying the South: Studies in Regional Sociology (University of Missouri Press...
...The young Connally wore kneepads cut from old tires to pick cotton...
...Warren Buffett, Omaha, NE...
...William Schulz, Phoenix, AZ...
...He says he was always "a conservative who believed in an active government," and he certainly backed a good many statist measures as secretary of the Treasury, notably a 10 percent import "surcharge" to "correct unfair trade balances," the Lockheed loan guarantee, and Nixon's wage and price controls...
...His father was successively a tenant farmer, a bricklayer, a barber, a butcher, and finally a bus owner/driver and local politician...
...After 1968, the McGover-nite handwriting was on the wall for conservative Democrats, and Connally, like many other Southerners, changed first his vote and then his party...
...So Johnson's workers were told to report low vote totals initially so the other side would underestimate how many votes they had to steal to win...
...2. Date of filing: October 1, 1993...
...C. Total paid and/or requested circulation: (23,644) 31,065...
...Although he claims that "the failure of the loan was not the result of mismanagement but of circumstances in the general economy" and argues that the government should have intervened to tide embarrassed real estate investors over (it did it for Lockheed, after all), when his fortunes finally collapsed he took it like a man...
...The longest explanation—it gets a full chapter—has to do with Connally's indictment and trial in the 1974 Milk Fund scandal...
...You can't say now that Dallas doesn't love you, Mr...
...Joseph Cole, Lyndhurst, OH...
...They're the ones who released the route to the press, too...
...According to the president, those Russian women were quite fetching...
...Some of the best are about his big-oil friends...
...Editor, Charles Peters, 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...Owners of 1 percent or more of stock in The Washington Monthly Publishing Corporation: Joseph D. Crowley, New Haven, CT...
...Connally says that he was determined to avoid a repeat of 1941, when Johnson had a Senate seat stolen from him by a group of operators that included Coke Stevenson, his 1948 opponent...
...After listening patiently for a few minutes, Roosevelt asked him, out of the blue, "Did you ever see a Russian woman naked...
...Ewing of "Dallas," a Huey Long in tailored suits, a suaver version of Lyndon Johnson...
...Picture John Connally, not as a bitter has-been offering advice no one wants, but in his prime, in 1972, a 53-year-old mover and shaker bringing President Nixon to his ranch to eat barbecue and corn on the cob with other movers and shakers of Texas...
...Sound familiar...
...Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation (Required by 39 U.S...
...According to Connally, who was Johnson's campaign manager, "There has been so much pure drivel written about the Senate election of '48 that it has driven out the impure drivel...
...Approached by Billy Graham (of all peo-p 1 e ) about Gergeniz-ing the Nixon cabinet as secretary of Defense or of the Treasury, Connally took Treasury...
...Carole Lee Smith, Salem, OR...
...John Spencer, Middlebury, VT...
...But the style that served him so well in Texas was like a rare wine that doesn't travel well...
...State has the glamour, Defense has the toys, but Treasury is and always has been the most powerful job in the cabinet," he observes...
...7. Owner: The Washington Monthly Co., an unincorporated joint venture between The Washington Monthly Corporation and The Washington Monthly Limited Partnership, of which The Washington Monthly Publishing Corporation is sole general partner...
...Of course, Alexander Hamilton's career topped out at secretary of the Treasury, too, but Connally was no Alexander Hamilton nor, apparently, did he ever aspire to be...
...Fiona Beck, Washington, DC...
...The political skills he picked up from mentors like Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson served him well in the intrigues of state government, and they made him an effective power broker, advisor, and confidant to presidents...
...2. Return from news agents: (3,215) 0. G. Total: (31,100) 35,000...
...Suzannah Lessard, New York, NY...
...C. 3685) 1. A. Title of publication: The Washington Monthly...
...As he moved back and forth between Washington and Texas, from government to business and back again, his talents and connections made John Shelton Reed is Kenan Professor of Sociology and acting director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill...
...Fatefully, he came to the notice of an ambitious young New Dealer named Lyndon Johnson, whom he served as factotum and advisor off and on for the next 30 years...
...Connally's book concludes with a hodgepodge of policy recommendations—national service, a value added tax, term limits, a $10-a-bar-rel tax on imported oil, federal standards for public school curricula, and (this one piquant, given the source) the restriction or elimination of plea-bargaining—that, if nothing else, suggest why neither major party was ever really comfortable with this it's-broke-let's-fix-it Texan...
...B. Paid circulation: 1. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, and counter sales: (3,789) 7,174...
...Another oil man, Oscar Wyatt, went with Connally on a mission to Baghdad just before the Gulf War—unapproved and in fact discouraged by the Bush administration—to meet with Saddam Hussein and bring out some of the American hostages...
...Charles Peters, Washington, DC...
...His 76 years in many ways recapitulated the history of the South in this century: from humble agrarian origins, early New Deal loyalties and military valor, to political and economic success (with an occasional whiff of corruption), finally switching political allegiance to an ambivalent Republican party, but always with the nagging sense that he never got his just deserts from the Eastern Establishment...
...F. Copies not distributed: 1. Office use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: (2,858) 2,378...
...But there's thwarted ambition on every page BY JOHN SHELTON REED In History's Shadow: An American Odssey John Connally with Mickey Herskowitz Hyperion, $24.95 John Connally died last June 15 from pneumonia, complicated by a lung condition believed to be related to the wound he received from Lee Harvey Oswald...
...Alexander Ewing, Millbrook, NY...
...NW, Washington, DC 20009...
...NW, Washington, DC 20009...
...A contribution that would have been given routinely was handled clumsily, with atrocious timing...
...And then there was his actual, if short-lived, presidential campaign in 1980...
...He says things like, "I never planned or sought, or wanted a long career in politics," or "I never felt afflicted with Potomac fever," or "I could have spent my whole life happily as a pretty fair cattleman, or even as a corporate lawyer...
...5. Complete mailing address of the headquarters of general business offices of the publisher: same...
...Here's Alan Shivers, a former governor, and Miss Ima Hogg, daughter of another...
...he is convinced, he says, that at the very least Oswald wanted to kill them both...
...His only question was, "What was the name of that railroad again...
...Elsewhere, this can-do wheeler-dealer came across as something like J.R...
...and an interesting young newcomer named H. Ross Perot...
...And the Connallys were there, at the sale, to explain to buyers the history and provenance of their art and other effects...
...Managing Editor, vacant...
...a Republican White House that seemed happy to leave him practicing law in Texas...
...But he was obviously consumed by what-ifs...
...Russell Baker, Leesburg, VA...
...Mary Beiro...
...Inc., New York, NY...
...Nixon would have delivered him the Republican nomination in 1976, if it hadn't been for Watergate...
...Connally claims his prosecution was politically inspired, and among the conspirators he names Jim Wright and Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski (who worked for a rival Houston law firm), as well as Dick Cheney and most of Gerald Ford's cabinet, who wanted to keep him off the 1976 Republican ticket...
...Tom Peters, Palo Alto, CA...
...And of course there's the Kennedy assassination...
...Phil Keisling, Portland...
...It seems that Harry Hopkins had visited the USSR and brought back the intelligence that heavy labor had made the New Soviet Woman differently constructed from the American model, information FDR apparently found intriguing...
...In the end, he was acquitted, but the episode haunted his political career thereafter...
...Ticket sales for the fundraisers were weak, Connally says, until he worked the phones for two nights and personally sold $50,000 worth (a lot of money in those days...
...Other than believing that a separate bullet was intended for him, however, Connally accepted the Warren Commission report...
...President...
...My personal conviction," says Connally, "was that no attempt had been made to bribe anyone...
...Kanawha Banking and Trust, Trustee of John D. Rockefeller IV, Charleston, WV...
...He applauds the few—among them, Sheldon Cohen of the Internal Revenue Service and Joe Barr, undersecretary of the Treasury—who stood up to Johnson successfully...
...Not surprisingly, many of Connally's best stories are about Lyndon Johnson...
...Connally even repeats Marina Oswald's speculation that Oswald was actually gunning for him, not the president...
...Clearly this was a man who very much wanted the brass ring of American politics, and it plainly grieved him that bad luck and other people's blunders and malice kept him from getting it...
...There may have been invalid votes that were cast for Lyndon Johnson," Connally allows...
...His book is full of innuendo, hints of plots, and implied skullduggery on the part of everyone from the young man who eloped with his daughter (who subsequently killed herself) to every politician who ever crossed him, of whom there were many...
...9. Not applicable...
...Richard L. Ot-tinger, Washington, DC...
...Walter Cronkite was on the publicity committee...
...But Connally had the virtues as well as the defects of his type...
...Jake Jacobsen, an Austin lawyer and lobbyist for the milk producers, a man with "the personality of an eel, but a friendly eel," plea-bargained his way out of a prison term by agreeing to testify that he had delivered $10,000 to Connally in 1971 for advising President Nixon to raise milk price supports...
...Extent and nature of circulation: (average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months) actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date...
...NW, Washington, DC 20009...
...him a wealthy man by non-Texas standards, a prominent figure in the conservative wing of the Texas Democratic party, and eventually a popular and successful three-term governor, elected to his last term with 72 percent of the vote...
...This book's last chapters are largely about those blunders and that malice...
...Murray Kempton, New York, NY...
...a humiliating, unsuccessful run for president...
...But there was more to Connally's stalled career than the incompetence and conniving of others...
...PKL Co...
...3. Frequency of issue: monthly except combined January/February and July/August...
...For example, Johnson was given to calling people at 5:30 a.m...
...Edgar Kaiser Jr., Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada...
...Connally was a good hater, and he is charmingly forthright in his self-service...
...He quotes Earl Warren: "What possible set of circumstances could get me and Dick Russell to conspire on anything...
...President, I've been lying here hoping you would call...
...As for giving the author's side of things—well, Connally does have a lot of explaining to do...
...Gene Gordon, Bethesda, MD...
...A first person account like this is probably not the best way to get the flavor of the politics Connally practiced...
...At the trial, Connally's character witnesses included Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Barbara Jordan, Lady Bird Johnson, and the ubiquitous Billy Graham...
...Ann Peretz, Cambridge, MA...
...3. A. Number of issues published annually: 10...
...Connally reports that the Kennedy visit was forced on him by the president, who wanted to meet and mend fences with big-money Tex-ans...
...B. Publication number: 704640...
...8. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: Marline Resources Company, 645 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10022...
...Owners of 1 percent or more of stock of The Washington Monthly Corporation: Estate of Timothy J. Adams, Washington, DC...
...Wayne Hays once replied, "Well, Mr...
...Joseph Freitas Jr., San Francisco, CA...
...This last is one of the two things in his career Connally regards as mistakes, the other being the real estate investments that bankrupted him in 1987...
...Joseph Rosenfield, Des Moines, IA...
...There's Anne Armstrong, over yonder Bunker Hunt, Perry Bass, the Murchison brothers...
...Estate of Stuart W. Thayer, New York, NY...
...At 16, he went off to the state university, where he was active in a drama club that during the 1930s produced Eli Wallach, Zachary Scott, Allen Ludden, and the television actress Betty White...
...New Haven Terminal, New Haven, CT...
...Estate of Peter Lisagor, Arlington, VA...
...While he denies that he could be bought, he also adduces what could be called the Rostenkowski defense: It's ridiculous to think that he could be bought for a lousy ten grand...
...James Fallows, Washington, DC...
...Connally says that he disagreed with his mentor about three things: He wanted to threaten Hanoi with nuclear attack, he disapproved of the volume and speed (but not the aims) of Johnson's social legislation, and he thought Johnson suffered a "failure of nerve" in not replacing John Kennedy's cabinet—including Robert Kennedy—with his own men...
...Robert Hellawell, Demarest, NJ...
...Estate of Sidney B. Sachs, Washington, DC...
...The scene is actually moving, lessened only slightly by the fact that Connally knew that it was...
...and personal bankruptcy...
...After Navy service in World War II—which gave him a Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and a taste for the recordings of Enrico Caruso—his fortunes rose with those of his patron and his state...
...It's possible that Hopkins didn't meet a representative sample...
...Estate of Carol Trueblood, Washington, DC...
...It was really just that the actual totals were being reported for the first time...
...D. Free distribution by mail, carrier or other means...
...B. Annual subscription price: $38.00...
...Nancy M. Folger, Washington, DC...
...James C. Thomson Jr., Cambridge, MA...
...Hugh Sidey, Potomac, MD...
...Then, when Johnson's totals mysteriously increased, see, it just looked as if new votes were being generated...
...He left Treasury, just in time to avoid Watergate, over a dispute about his prerogatives as secretary (an undersecretary was reporting directly to the White House staff...
...A. Whitney Ellsworth, New York, NY...
...E. Total distribution: (25,027) 32,622...
...All entities at 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...Here he is, tall and handsome, laughing and shaking hands, the gracious host...
...Two of the stories in this book are about the unlikely subject of Russian women...
...Eleanor Rovere, Tarrytown, NY...
...Julien Phillips, San Mateo, CA...
...Let me refresh your memory...
...In the 1980 South Carolina Republican primary, Ronald Reagan cleaned his clock: A $12 million campaign netted Connally exactly one delegate to the Republican National Convention...
...When oil millionaire Sid Richardson (Connally's sometime employer) bought the New York Central railroad, for instance, he discovered that his part of the price was $5 million more than he had thought...
...Still, Connally tells some nice stories...
...A. Total number of copies printed: (31,100) 35,000...
...He tried to talk the president out of having a motorcade, but the president's advance men insisted on it...
...Estate of Carol Trueblood, Washington, DC...
...He acquired a law degree and got his first taste of statewide politics working for a business-backed gubernatorial candidate who lost to the inimitable W. Lee ("Pass the biscuits, Pappy") O'Daniel of the musical Light Crust Doughboys...
...The Elizabeth E. Chilton Marital Trust, Charleston, WV...
...Then and later, Connally denied the charge indignantly: "I would not have condoned for one minute anything of questionable character, much less anything illegal...
...Taylor Branch, Baltimore, MD...
...He believed he could have had the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, if Kennedy hadn't been shot...
...But what's an autobiography for if not to settle old scores and give your side of ancient disputes...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 11
