by Curt Smith
At Connally’s zenith, it seemed a question only when, not if, he would return Reagan to Hollywood. The Fortune 500 adored him, helping raise a then-record $12 million. His experience—businessman, lawyer, farmer, governor, cabinet official, and global traveler—made him, said CBS Television, “perhaps the most qualified man to be president in this century”—unless that was Bush: businessman, congressman, UN ambassador, RNC chairman, chief liaison officer in China, and CIA director. Poppy was an outlier, slighted by the media, trying to replicate Carter’s 1976 Iowa upset, parlaying delegates one by one.
Connally was above—in truth, bored by—such petty politics. What counted was to rivet an audience, his deep, rich voice addressing issues from nuclear power to international trade. He was more urbane than Huey Long, Theodore Bilbo, and George Wallace but heir to the same southern tradition of stem winding and storytelling. Not reticent—unlike Clement Atlee, of whom Winston Churchill said, “He is a modest man. But then, he has much to be modest about”—nor bland, polls said, like rivals Bush and Howard Baker—nor vapid like, presumably, the Gipper, dispensing simple truths—nor daunted by detail like Carter, missing the forest for the trees—Connally seemed molded for Mount Rushmore. How could he miss?
As it turned out, noted Bushies, in the shorthand of the day, historically.
Across the Potomac River from Washington, Connally headquarters moored the polyglot suburb of Arlington, Virginia. (Reagan inherited the office space next spring when Connally withdrew.) When Democrat JBC became a Republican in May 1973, he profited from Mahe’s GOP Rolodex. He also benefited from a round and jovial press secretary, Jim Brady—to Connally, “The Bear.” On March 31, 1981, Brady, now Reagan’s press secretary, was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on the new president’s life. By then the Connally campaign had long ago gone belly up, costing aides like Brady countless unpaid bills. In 1987, spotting an ex-Connally aide, Brady passed a note: “Would you ask the Silver Thatch [his name for Connally] if my check is in the mail?”
From the start, opinion split on how to conduct the campaign. Mahe wanted to divide time and cash across the country—the “fiftystate strategy”—accenting Connally’s strengths: donors, speaking style, and energy to leapfrog Reagan’s activist network in early primaries. Having helped JBC win three landslides as governor, his old Texas Democrats wanted him to blanket a state, becoming instant front-runner in Iowa and/or New Hampshire. For the moment Connally sided with his campaign manager—mostly, I believe, because he trusted Mahe’s grasp of the GOP.
On July 16, 1979, I left DC for San Antonio. Connally’s boyhood home, Floresville, was thirty miles southeast. Another seven miles brought you to his Xanadu, the Picosa Ranch, in the peanut country of Wilson County, where I met what the New York Times called “the most captivating performer on the American political stage.”
Floresville’s population was circa four thousand. Connally’s father—“a big man,” the son said, “over six-foot-six, about 250 pounds; he never finished the eighth grade”—drove a Greyhound bus from San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley, the rich citrus and vegetable region near the Mexican border. Connally fils ran two blocks from their home to a street where he could wave to John Sr. as the bus left town. At night, like Nixon and Connally’s mentor, Lyndon Johnson, he heard train whistles that spoke of “child’s dreams,” Connally said in a 1973 eulogy to Johnson, “[that] could be as wide as the sky and his future as green as winter oats because this, after all, was America.”
The fourth of seven children helped butcher hogs, make lye soap, render lye, and haul corn into town on a wagon. Connally studied by kerosene light; his mother cooked on a wood stove; their home, on a dirt road, lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. Floresville was unforgiving even for the 1930s. Connally was glad to leave, at sixteen, for the University of Texas. It still intrigues how such poverty—JBC walked barefoot behind a plow—produced his persona as centurion of the rich. “You know the difference between LBJ and Connally?” said ex-Johnson aide Bill Moyers, who hated Connally and was hated in return. “LBJ wants to be the best president in United States history. Connally wants to be lionized in the best country clubs of Houston.” The charge stung—and stuck.
Picosa tied a Lone Star State of Bermuda grass and Santa Gertrudis cattle and streams, falling away in endless sequence, and an airstrip for corporate jets. At the door Connally appeared in jeans and cowboy boots, showing me the home’s two-story beamed den and living room. He vaunted gemstones and antiques, discussed a recent speech, then veered to Western art and back to politics. Next day the ministers would come to call. They did not include Billy Graham, a longtime friend whose crusades Connally had spoken at and who, scarred by Watergate, had vowed to boycott politics. Instead, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones were among those there, most tilting to Reagan. I sent a memorandum: “The GOP’s conservative base must see that only you have the courage to talk about what most Americans think, but no one else has the guts to say.” Connally hoped to convert the choir, and I saw him at his best.
He began as what Time called “an old-fashioned man in many ways.” Unlike Ted Kennedy, about to oppose Carter for the Democrat nomination, Connally understood the clergy. Unlike Carter, he would be the middle class’s spokesman, not pseudo friend. He spoke of his childhood, stern and disciplined, and of a Silent Majority wanting social justice, not social engineering. For two hours Connally seemed the leader those ministers had been praying for—also the mechanic wracked by inflation, textile worker hurt by unfair trade, and mother to whom pop culture seemed a sewer. He closed by vowing to restore “prayer to our schools and order to our streets.”
An hour later, clergy gone, I approached Connally near his backyard pool. “You were terrific,” I told him. “What I especially liked is that you didn’t swear.”
Connally, a gentleman around ladies, relaxed his guard among men. “Yeah,” he fairly whistled, “I was pretty Goddamn good, wasn’t I?”
Straightaway Big Jawn resumed his pursuit of Reagan, not announced but the clear front-runner. In Dallas, before the International Association of Police, Connally opposed a federal suit against alleged Philadelphia police brutality. The suit by “muddled do-gooders” insulted “Philadelphians perfectly able to look after themselves,” he said. “Police departments should be respected, not hostage to ideological inquisitions and political kangaroo courts.” Columnist Pat Buchanan loved it: “Connally’s assault upon the Department of Justice, and the ‘untouchables’ within, signals an intention not to evade the social issues.” Another columnist, Ernest Ferguson, hated how it “showed Connally . . . eager to renew the emotional rhetoric so familiar a decade ago. Few have remarked on its absence . . . but that rhetoric has been heard very little since the departure of the Nixon Administration, of which Connally was a part.” To me, it was as natural as a smile.
In one speech after another, Connally attacked: “If weakness is an art form, Carter is the Rembrandt of our age.” (He didn’t speak, as he told the staff, of his disdain for “everything about that little man in his sweater,” Carter having given a White House TV speech in a cardigan.) In Detroit Big Jawn backed a $50–100 billion tax cut over four years. In San Francisco he hailed “developing the ninety-two nuclear reactors now under construction in one-half the time presently required.” In Pittsburgh Connally’s brief season of triumph led to the City of Hope Medical Center, where he lashed Carter’s caress of reverse discrimination. “We need equal rights for all Americans— not preferential treatment for some.” The innocent were paying “a debt owed by society as a whole.”
At this point, Connally was scoring even with those who detested him. Newsweek hailed his “breakaway positions on the issues”; James Reston termed him “the figure of real Presidential substance, the politician unafraid to take bold and tough positions.” Each ignored how you have to be nominated to get elected.
By fall 1979, under media radar, George Bush was shaking hands, breaking bread at Rotary,
and talking wherever an Iowan paused to listen. “George didn’t just know each county’s area code,” said an aide, “but the GOP leader, the town banker, who got drunk, who went to church.” By contrast, Connally “had grown up with a heroic concept of the Presidency,” said Eddie Mahe. “This fit perfectly with his vision of himself” spurning the intellectual fashion of the time—“a man of ideas, fearless, Churchillian, longing to give his nation resolve.”
On October 11, 1979, Big Jawn brought that longing to the National Press Club in Washington, where he gave a talk drafted by ex–National Security Council (NSC) staffer Sam Hoskinson, former LBJ press secretary George Christian, and himself. The speech addressed diplomacy’s Bermuda Triangle, the Middle East, unveiling a “new approach” that treated Israel as a colleague, not a client. Connally called on it to withdraw from all civilian settlements in territories gained in the 1967 war and argued for some kind of Palestinian state—autonomous or, preferably, a region with self-determination. In return, Arab nations would ensure America’s flow of oil at a relatively stable price.
To guarantee Israel’s security, Connally proposed a new U.S. military presence in the region—an air force base in the Sinai and a “Fifth Fleet” in the Indian Ocean—and the demand that the Arabs endorse UN Resolution 242, recognizing Israel. At the same time, he predated by a decade Bush’s view that “a clear distinction must be drawn by the United States,” Connally said, “between support for Israel’s security, which is a moral imperative, and support for Israel’s broader territorial acquisitions. We must act in America’s interest— not Israel’s or the Arabs’.”
The address was visionary—a blueprint in part for Presidents Bush 41 and Clinton. Yet Connally was not president. October 11 ensured he never would be. His speech enraged the media, the Israeli lobby, and most fatally in the GOP, the evangelical Right that interpreted the Bible literally—Christ would return when Jews ruled the Holy Land. The New Republic braided “his naked trade of Israel’s security for oil.” Wrote the New York Times’s William Safire: “After John Connally’s speech last week, supporters of Israel . . . made a reassessment of Ronald Reagan and decided he looked ten years younger.”
Much later Mahe talked of the Press Club debacle. “It’s just something he felt he had to talk about. Connally said, ‘Goddamn it, I believe it—I’m going to say it.’”
“And you told him not to,” I said.
Mahe smiled sadly. “If anything, I didn’t alert him strongly enough to the political risks, especially among evangelicals. And even if I had, the rest of our problems might have sunk us.”
Those “problems” loomed “like a ball and chain,” said Jim Brady. The heaviest was Connally’s image as a “wheeler-dealer,” consisting, in no special order, of JBC’s 1974 indictment in a milk fund scandal, symbiosis with Nixon and Watergate, and longtime union with LBJ. (Connally’s campaign postmortem was “I reminded everyone of Lyndon.”) He was called a turncoat by Democrats but not accepted by Republicans. The criticism was unfair—Reagan too had been a Democrat—becoming, to quote Shakespeare, whose work Connally playacted in college, the stain that would not out.
A second stain also concerned image. Connally “seemed to be the fulfillment of the mythology of Texas,” ex–LBJ writer Horace Busby said. In 1979, as oil prices and gas lines spiraled, Texas became the incarnation of Big Oil. The public, in turn, blamed domestic oil—not the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) or a presidency adrift—for the crisis. Connally and Bush were experts on energy. Feared more by Democrats, only Connally drowned in the hysteria over energy.
A campaign misjudgment was another stain. “Republicans would never nominate Reagan if Kennedy seemed the nominee,” Mahe was certain. “Given the difference in energy and age, Republicans thought Teddy’d eat the Gipper alive.” Connally yearned to oppose him, despising the Kennedys’ liberalism, their nouveau wealth, and how the media and academe forgave their sins, from college cheating by way of adultery to Kennedy’s letting Mary Jo Kopechne die in a 1969 car incident he caused at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts.
“Teddy Kennedy!” Connally told a reporter. “Now that would be a classic confrontation. There are so many things—personal lives, lifestyles, family, philosophy.”
Big Jawn would become, as his first network TV ad in 1979 said, “the candidate of the Forgotten American,” which is the America that I knew. Only, paraphrasing the musical Oklahoma’s “Poor Jud Is Dead,” it didn’t turn out that way, “so nobody ever knowed it.”
That November 4 Kennedy appeared on CBS Reports and, like Connally a month earlier, committed political suicide. Roger Mudd asked the simple question of why Kennedy wanted to be president. His response was almost incoherent; millions of TV sets turned off. In spring 1940 the Nazi rape of Western Europe made foreign policy dominant, harming then–GOP favorite Tom Dewey, only thirty-nine, dubbed “the first American victim” of Hitler’s aggression. After Mudd, Kennedy’s erosion of support inverted the Democratic field— Connally its first victim. Republicans would not need him now to prevent Camelot II.
Finally, Connally suffered from Iran’s November 1979 seizing of fifty-two Americans. “What a case of Murphy’s Law,” said Mahe a decade later. “We were trying to redress October 11’s damage and the way to do it was in foreign policy—Connally’s forte. Now [Ayatollah] Khomeini takes the hostages. Suddenly, that dominates foreign policy, and we can’t even discuss it.” Big Jawn had declared a posthostage-taking moratorium of Carter’s foreign policy.
Longtime Connally aide George Christian grew easy at the memory. “That was Connally at his purest,” he said. “I was worried he’d incinerate Carter—way too partisan. Instead, he told me, ‘The poor bastard’s doing the best he can.’”
“What explains it?” I said.
“Connally had no respect for Carter—but total respect for the Presidency,” Christian said. “It’s just too bad the crisis came when it did.”
Comparing generals, Napoleon once said, “Ability is fine, but give me commanders who have luck.” Luck was the avenging angel of Connally’s 1980 campaign.
In October I flew to San Clemente to spend three days at Ray Price’s condominium. Like Nixon, about to move back east, Price wrote speech drafts, suggested policy themes, and helped edit his stillboss’s books. The final day Ray took me to the villa and nearby stucco building once called the “western White House,” to meet with the man the Washington Post had recently called “the one true superstar of the 1970s.” Entering, we passed the Situation Room, where Nixon, Kissinger, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff once plotted war and peace. Nixon’s office was adjacent. The former president was alone, removed from the pinnacle, standing, slightly hunched, in a dark blue suit, beside an illuminated globe.
“How’s Ray been treating you?” he asked, tanned, sixty-six, and younger than I expected, settling in his chair.
“Fine, Mr. President—he’s showing me California,” I said.
“Let’s talk some politics,” he replied. For two hours Nixon etched Carter, whom he pitied (“too small for the world’s biggest office”); Kennedy, whose candidacy he said would fail (“Democratic bosses don’t want a divided party”); and Republican candidates whom he knew and found wanting.
“Howard Baker,” I said.
He stiffened, leaning forward in his chair. “Nice smile, not enough steel.”
“George Bush.”
“Good background, fine mind, especially on foreign policy. The questions are his strength and if he can connect.” Behind him, through the window, the lawn of La Casa Pacifica—“the Peaceful House”— sloped sharply to the sea. A railroad track split its grounds. Surfers littered the beach where once Nixon walked in wing tips.
Next came the Gipper, a hybrid of Dixon and Eureka College and WHO Radio Des Moines. “A good man, a loyalist, man of principle. But can you imagine him going up against Brezhnev?” he asked. “That’s quite a stretch.” Pause. “But who knows? He’s been underestimate
d before.”
That left Connally. Nixon was worried about his friend. In 1971 the treasury secretary had scolded White House staffers. “If you gave the average person the choice,” he asked, “what do you think they would like to hear—about revenue sharing, taxation, government reorganization, or what Tricia’s boyfriend is like?” Correctly, JBC chose the latter. Yet what he urged as Nixon’s counselor, he ignored as Nixon’s candidate.
A job of mine was to monitor Reagan’s 1979 speeches—opposition research. Listening, I found them more anecdotal than factual. By contrast, even ad-lib Connally remarks were structured; he was a lawyer making a case to the jury—the electorate. Yet “politics,” Price once wrote Nixon, “is only minimally a rational science, and no matter how persuasive our convictions, they will be effective only if we can first get people to make the emotional leap.”
Many had or would with Reagan—despite or because of what Norman Mailer called his “tripped on my shoelaces, aw-shucks variety of confusion.” In Tennessee, Idaho, or rural Ohio, his vision was their vision—as actor David Ogden Stiers later narrated in the PBS documentary Reagan, “inheriting the values of the American heartland—a clear sense of right and wrong, and self-reliance.”
Nixon agreed: “The American voter doesn’t vote as an adult—on fact. He votes on images and impressions and how they relate to him,” he said.
“But the public’s instincts can be right,” I said, “especially if it knows what’s at stake.”
“Sure,” he replied, “and that’s what you appeal to. But the average guy with a beer watching TV doesn’t spend his time reading The Nation or National Review or what have you. It’s values, not detail, to which a voter responds.”