The Lone Star

...He lacked fire-in-the-belly...

...There are still those in Texas, it's said, who take him at his word...

...And why shouldn't they...

...A s secretary of the Navy and governor of Texas, Connally held his own, though with little, impact on the national scene (Reston's mind-rupturing theory that Oswald was trying to kill Connally...

...in which year, if my understanding of Reston's biography is clear, Jimmy Carter would have been elected by roughly the same margin that he defeated Gerald Ford in the actual event...

...Big Tex could always talk a good game...

...But as biographer James Reston, Jr...

...Connally wantTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 41 ed a piece of it...

...the coiffed silver mane...

...Oh boy, he'd lovingly caress it.' " Portrait of the future President manqué as a young narcissist...

...The bigger they are, the bigger you will be...

...the elegant tailoring...

...John Connally, after all, cuts a very impressive figure...

...He was particularly fascinated by his own hair, and he would, by Luther Jones's account, stand for hours before a mirror brushing it...

...And had there been no Watergate, Nixon would undoubtedly have made Connally his choice for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976...

...But Big Tex, by God, was a born leader who looked like a President and talked like a President...

...but in the end, no matter how long or hard he brushed, the biggest thing John Connally destroyed was himself...

...Don't ask what was going through Connally's mind as he watched his prized possessions sold off...

...After the humiliation of his $11 million delegate, his political career was over, and he turned his back on it with a vengeance, doing nothing to retire the debt his campaign had accumulated and leaving bitterness behind with such aides as Jim Brady and David Parker, who had put tens of thousands of their modest personal savings behind the Connally campaign, only to find that, after defeat, Connally felt no obligation to them whatever . . ." Lyndon's son, the businessman...

...Not many, but some...

...When he went bust not long after, Big Tex blamed it all on the collapse of the oil market...

...From that alone it is easy to see why Connally and Lyndon Johnson, twoegos in search of an incarnation, were a perfectly matched political couple...

...That was Connally in the role of the macho poi, no doubt impressing Kissinger with his instinct for Realpolitik...

...Wage-and-price controls, that was the ticket...

...But then, of course, Nixon was said to have been awed not only by Connally's political savvy but his business acumen as well...

...Indeed...

...But for all the snickers it drew from Connally's friends at the Dodge, the preening paid off...

...Business wanted a sure winner, and who could doubt, watching Connally strut across the political landscape during the 1960s and '70s, that he was destined to succeed Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office...

...There is a case to be made that political failure makes a better story than political success anyway—Richard III beats Henry Vas drama on any given evening—and Reston has done a marvelous job telling the Connally story, from his early years of promise to his dismal decline into political and financial ruin...

...A shrewd political move, all right...

...There was the jutting jaw...

...R eston's book on Connally comes out at a time when Robert Caro's second volume on LBJ is being serialized and two new biographies of Richard Nixon—one by Stephen Ambrose, the other by Robert Morris—are also reaching book stores...

...Senate by a razor-thin margin in 1948...

...George Bush...

...And with the 1972 election coming up, what better reason was there to trust the judgment of Lyndon Johnson's protégé when, as secretary of the Treasury, John Connally proposed the pluperfect Democratic answer to cooling an economy overheated from LBJ's guns-and-butter policy of the 1960s...

...It was obvious, as Reston makes clear, that Big Tex was not a public figure given to reflection or remorse...

...Connally worked on it, day and night, a sagebrush Jay Gatsby creating a public persona to move him along in his chosen profession...

...and the attention-getting way he pounded fist-against-lectern when he warned the Japanese that, if elected, he'd see to it that Toyotas would gather rust on the docks at Yokohama...

...Not only did Nixon fall over himself to bring Connally into his fold, but he elevated his Democratic convert to the highest level...

...Connally was considered, in Kissinger's words, the administration's "best political brain...

...All very impressive...

...seated in the second row at his own bankruptcy auction with "an enormous unlit Macanudo panatella in his mouth...

...18.95 Victor Gold Nothing reflects the political acumen of the American corporate board room better than its overwhelming support of John Connally for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination...

...When he spoke of Texas," says Reston, "it was as if he were speaking about himself...

...That it did nothing to help the administration with business, labor, or the voting public, and also proved to be an economic disaster, did nothing to dampen Nixon's faith in John Connally's judgment...

...No doubt about it, John Connally, beyond the preening, had a fair share of serviceable political skills...

...Reston's well-detailed story of the way in which the Nixon White House wooed Connally—with Big Tex allowing that the only cabinet posts he might consider were State or Treasury—tells us as much about Nixon's overrated political perspicacity as it does about Connally's chutzpah...

...In time he became Lyndon Johnson's second self when a stand-in was needed to stroke a fat-cat contributor, screw a political enemy, or put the final touches on the Duval County vote steal Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...

...that sent "Landslide Lyndon" to the U.S...

...not Kennedy, in Dallas notwithstanding...

...Once beyond the corporate board room, he proved to be one of the worst candidates in modern history, a laughing-stock best remembered as thejaw-jutter who paid $11 million to pick up one delegate...

...He was the victim, argued Connally, of economic conditions beyond his control...

...He'd look at his hair, and he'd brush it, and he'd brush it...

...Connally's biography can stand on its own, despite the man's failure to reach the top rung...

...From the very beginning, back in 1938, he understood the importance of superficial assets in a superficial town...

...Thus we pick up the story of Big Tex, as told by James Reston, Jr., after his political fall: In the expectation of oil selling at more than $35 a barrel, fortunes were a declension of good, better, and best...

...but never as many as he believed or led others to believe...

...The jutting jaw, the pampered hair, were all part of the act...

...For beyond first impressions, John Connally's career as a national politician (as distinguished from the bullshit Texas variety) was characterized, in the downhome phrase he frequently used to describe others, as all hat and no cattle...

...tells it, impressing folks was what John Connally did best, from the moment he arrived in Washington as Congressman Lyndon Johnson's aide and took up residence at the venerable Dodge House on Capitol Hill...

...As a presidential contender in his own right, however, Big Tex learned that hairstyling and swagger can take a political hustler only so far...

...The temptation is to recommend The Lone Star for reading as a supplement to those presidential biographies, but that would do Reston, not to mention his subject, an injustice...

...He saw himself, writes Reston, as the personification of his native state, "the incarnation" of its financial collapse during the 1980s...

...Around the Dodge, Connally became somewhat notorious for his narcissism," writes Reston...

...Ronald Reagan was too old...

...You will be measured in this town," he once told Henry Kissinger, "by the enemies you destroy...

...What is more difficult to understand is.how Lyndon's protégé--1`the incarnation" of every federal excess that Republicans railed against during the Kennedy-Johnson years—went on to become the man Richard Nixon considered best qualified to succeed him as President...