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John Connally
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John Bowden Connally, Jr. (February 27, 1917 June 15, 1993) was an influential American politician, serving as Governor of Texas, and Secretary of the Navy and Treasury under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, respectively. While he was Governor in 1963, Connally was a passenger in the car in which President Kennedy was assassinated, and he was seriously wounded in the shooting.
ally was born into a large family in Floresville, the seat of Wilson County located southeast of San Antonio.
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John Bowden Connally, Jr. (February 27, 1917 June 15, 1993) was an influential American politician, serving as Governor of Texas, and Secretary of the Navy and Treasury under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, respectively. While he was Governor in 1963, Connally was a passenger in the car in which President Kennedy was assassinated, and he was seriously wounded in the shooting.
Early years, education, military
Connally was born into a large family in Floresville, the seat of Wilson County located southeast of San Antonio. He was among the few Floresville High School graduates who attended college. He graduated from The University of Texas School of Law where he was student body president. He was admitted to the bar by examination before he graduated from law school.
Connally served in the United States Navy during World War II, first as an aide to James V. Forrestal, then as part of the planning staff for the invasion of Africa by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He transferred to the South Pacific Theater, where he served with distinction. He was a fighter-plane director aboard the aircraft carrier USS Essex and won a Bronze Star for bravery. He was shifted to another carrier, the USS Bennington and won a Legion of Merit. He was also involved in the campaigns in the Gilbert, Marshall, Ryukyu, and Philippine islands. He was discharged in 1946 at the rank of lieutenant commander.
On his release from the Navy, Connally practiced law but soon returned to Washington, D.C. to serve as a key aide to Lyndon Baines Johnson, when LBJ was a Congressman. He maintained close ties with Johnson until the former president's death in 1973. Shortly after that, Connally switched to the Republican Party.
Two of Connally's principal legal clients were the Texas oil tycoon Sid W. Richardson and his nephew partner Perry Bass, both of Fort Worth. At his death in 1959, Richardson made Connally co-executor of his estate. The designation provided Connally with steady income for years afterwards. In the 1950s, Richardson was believed to have been worth from $200 million to $1 billion.
Marriage and family
On December 21, 1940, Connally married the former Idanell Brill nicknamed "Nellie" (1919-2006), whom he met while both were attending the University of Texas at Austin. The couple had four children, Kathleen (1942-1958), John B. Connally, III (born June 7, 1946), Sharon Connally Ammann (born November 17, 1949), and Mark M. Connally (born July 21, 1952). Kathleen died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound shortly after her elopement at the age of sixteen.
Two Connally brothers were also involved in politics. Wayne Connally (1923-2000) was a conservative member of the Texas House of Representatives (1965-1967) and the Texas State Senate (1967-1973). Merrill Connally (1921-2001), a Wilson County administrative judge and a film actor, managed the unsuccessful 1968 gubernatorial campaign for Eugene Locke, the former deputy ambassador to the former South Vietnam though John Connally himself was neutral in the primary campaign to choose his successor as governor. Wayne Connally left the Senate to run for lieutenant governor in 1972, but the Democratic nomination and the general election went instead to William P. "Bill" Hobby, Jr., of Houston, the son of a former governor William P. Hobby.
The Senate primary of 1948
In the 1948 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the retiring W. Lee O'Daniel, Connally was campaign manager for LBJ, as the congressman opposed former Governor Coke R. Stevenson of Junction, the seat of Kimble County near the geographic center of Texas. Johnson at first expressed reluctance to relinquish his House seat for an uncertain Senate campaign. Connally therefore told Johnson that he, at the minimum age of thirty, would seek the seat. Johnson, eight years Connally's senior, then changed his mind and agreed to run.. For years, Connally said that his own Senate "candidacy" in 1948 was merely a ruse to get Johnson into the race.
During the tabulation period for the Democratic runoff election, Connally journeyed to Alice, the seat of Jim Wells County in south Texas. Through then entrenched "political boss" George Parr, he gained a revision of the totals from Precinct 13. Some 203 names were added to the LBJ tabulation, all signed in blue ink and in the same handwriting. Some of the names were of deceased persons. The list was thereafter burned in a fire. This change in tabulation plunged Johnson into an 87-vote primary runoff majority.
Connally then persuaded the Temple publisher Frank W. Mayborn to return to Texas from a business trip in Nashville, Tennessee, to cast the decisive vote in the 29-28 decision by the Democratic State Central Committee to certify Johnson as the party nominee by the disputed eighty-seven votes. United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had deemed that the decision in the Johnson-Stevenson race rested squarely with the central committee.
From Navy Secretary to Governor
At the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Connally led supporters of Senator Lyndon Johnson. He claimed that John F. Kennedy, if nominated and elected, would be unable to serve as president for a full term because of Addison's disease and dependence on cortisone. Kennedy, however, had wrapped up the needed delegates for nomination before the convention even opened. Kennedy realized that he could not be elected without support of traditional Southern Democratic votes, many of whom had backed Johnson. Therefore, Johnson was offered the vice-presidential nomination.
JFK assassination
The assassination, in which Connally was almost killed, took place on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time (18:30 UTC) in Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was fatally wounded by gunshots while riding with his wife Jacqueline in a Presidential motorcade. The ten-month investigation of the Warren Commission of 1963–1964, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) of 1977–1978, and other government investigations concluded that the President was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Secretary of the Navy
At Johnson's request, in 1961 President Kennedy named Connally Secretary of the Navy. Connally resigned eleven months later to run for the Texas governorship. He had managed one of the largest employers in the world, as the Navy had more than 600,000 in uniform and 650,000 civilian workers, stationed at 222 bases in the United States and 53 abroad. It had a budget of $14 billion.
Connally directed the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea on a new kind of "gunboat diplomacy". The USS Forrestal landed in Naples, Italy, and brought gifts to children in an orphanage. Connally ordered gifts also to a hospital in Cannes, France, which treated children with bone diseases; to poor Greek children on the island of Rhodes; and for spastic children in Palermo, Italy. Presents were also sent to Turkish children in Cyprus and to a camp in Beirut for homeless Palestinian refugees.
Connally fought hard to protect the Navy's role in the national space program, having vigorously opposed assigning most space research to the United States Air Force. Time magazine termed Connally's year as Navy secretary "a first-rate appointment". Critics noted, however, that the brevity of Connally's tenure precluded any sustained or comprehensive achievements.
Running for governor
Connally announced two weeks before Christmas of 1961 that he was leaving his position to return to Texas to seek the 1962 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He would have to compete against the incumbent Marion Price Daniel, Sr., who was running for a fourth consecutive two-year term. Daniel was in political trouble following the enactment of a two-cent state sales tax in 1961, which had soured many voters on his administration. Former state Attorney General Will Wilson, who had run for the U.S. Senate vacated by Lyndon Johnson in 1961, also entered the gubernatorial campaign and was particularly critical of Johnson, whom he claimed engineered Connally's candidacy.
Connally ran as a conservative Democrat. He was placed in a primary runoff election against the liberal candidate, Don Yarborough of Houston, no relation to Connally nemesis U.S. Senator Ralph W. Yarborough. In November, he turned back a determined bid by the conservative Republican Jack Cox, also of Houston. Cox had run two years earlier in the Democratic primary against Daniel. Connally received 847,036 ballots (54 percent) to Cox's 715,025 (45.6 percent). In the campaign, Connally made an issue of Cox's switching to the Republican Party (GOP) the previous year. Eleven years later, Connally made the same switch. Cox, as it turned out, was the strongest Republican gubernatorial candidate in Texas since 1924. Not until 1972, when Henry Grover carried the GOP banner, did the Republicans make a better showing for governor.
Connally was a master campaign professional. He believed in the entourage and advance men, the practice of having staff aides check out events in advance, and having press interviews on the run to demonstrate his heavy schedule of commitments. Biographer Charles Ashman claims that Connally would have aides telephone airports which he would shortly visit and ask to page him for an urgent message. Such manipulation, he believed, impressed airport patrons, many of whom would also be Texas voters.
Governor of Texas
Connally served as governor from 1963-1969. In November 1963, Connally was seriously wounded while riding in President Kennedy's car in Dallas when the president was assassinated. He recovered from wounds in his chest, wrist and thigh.
In the campaigns of 1964 and 1966, Connally defeated weak Republican challenges offered by Jack Crichton and T.E. Kennerly. He prevailed with margins of 73.8 percent and 72.8 percent, respectively, giving him greater influence with the nearly all-Democratic legislature.
In 1965, Connally appointed House Speaker Byron M. Tunnell to the Texas Railroad Commission, on the retirement of 32-year veteran Ernest O. Thompson, a former mayor of Amarillo. This appointment enabled Ben Barnes to succeed Tunnell and become the youngest Speaker in Texas history.
After Charles Joseph Whitman, on August 1, 1966, went onto the University of Texas Tower in Austin and commanded the grounds for over an hour and a half. Connally put together a Commission of experts who determined that Whitman had been suffering from a glioblastoma brain tumor, amphetamine abuse and had family troubles. All of the preceeding issues contributed to the killing of sixteen on the campus and the wounding of many others, as well as the killing of his Whitman's wife and mother in the early morning hours of August 1. Whitman himself was killed by ex-APD Officer Houston McCoy.
As governor, Connally promoted HemisFair '68, the world's fair held in San Antonio, he believed would net the state an additional $12 million in direct taxes. A permanent Institute of Texan Cultures museum was an outgrowth of the fair. It was designed to be "a dramatic showcase, not only to Texans, but to all the world, of the host of diverse peoples from many lands whose blood and dreams built our state."
During the Vietnam War, Connally hawkishly urged Johnson to "finish" the engagement by any military means necessary. Johnson, however, was more moderate in his conduct of the war than Connally advised him.
There was some talk of Connally being picked as Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968, but the liberal Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine was chosen instead. Connally endorsed Humphrey and greeted the nominee at the Fort Worth airport and even reconciled for a month with intraparty rival Ralph Yarborough. Ashman claims that Connally was also "privately helping Nixon, recruiting a number of influential Texans, members of both parties, to work for the Republican candidate."
Secretary of the Treasury
In 1971, Republican President Nixon appointed the then Democrat Connally as Treasury Secretary. Connally that year famously told a delegation of Europeans worried about exchange rate fluctuations that the dollar is "our currency, but your problem."
Secretary Connally defended a $50 billon increase in the debt ceiling and a $35 to $40 billion budget deficit as an essential "fiscal stimulus" at a time when five million Americans were unemployed. He unveiled Nixon's program of raising the price of gold and formally devaluing the dollar—-finally leaving the old gold standard entirely, a process begun in 1934 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prices continued to increase during 1971, and Nixon allowed wage and price guidelines, which Congress had authorized on a stand-by basis, to be implemented. Connally later shied away from his role in recommending the failed wage and price controls. Connally announced guaranteed loans for the ailing Lockheed aircraft company. He fought a lonely battle too against growing balance-of-payment problems with the nation's trading partners. He also undertook important foreign diplomatic trips for Nixon through his role as Treasury Secretary.
Democrats for Nixon
Connally stepped down as treasury secretary in 1972 to head "Democrats for Nixon", a group funded by Republicans. Connally's old mentor, Lyndon Johnson, stood behind Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern of South Dakota, although McGovern had long opposed Johnson's foreign and defense policies. It was the first time that Connally and Johnson were on opposite sides of a general election campaign. Some evidence suggests that Connally was "privately" for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, instead of the Democrat candidate Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, for whom Johnson campaigned with considerable loyalty.
In the 1972 U.S. Senate election in Texas, Connally endorsed the Democrat Harold Barefoot Sanders, later a federal judge from Dallas, rather than the Republican incumbent John G. Tower, also of Dallas. Connally had considered running against Tower in 1966, but chose to run for a third term as governor. Tower then defeated a Connally ally, state Attorney General Waggoner Carr of Lubbock.
Tower, Nixon's choice in the Senate race, won handily over Sanders, but the Republican candidate for governor, Henry Grover of Houston, a victim of intraparty maneuvering, fell short and lost to Democrat Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde, a city in the Texas Hill Country.
In January 1973, Lyndon Johnson died of heart disease. He and Connally had been friends since 1938. Connally took part in eulogizing Johnson during interment services at the LBJ Ranch in Gillespie County, along with Billy Graham, who officiated at the service.
Switching parties
In May 1973, Connally joined the Republican Party. When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned five months later because of scandal, Connally was one of Nixon's potential choices to fill the vacancy. Nixon tapped Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., the House Minority Leader from Grand Rapids, Michigan, because he believed that the moderate Ford could be easily confirmed by both houses of Congress, as required by the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. A Connally nomination presumably could have been blocked by liberal Democratic opposition. The weakened Nixon did not want a fight for the vice-presidential selection.
Connally's party bolt left a sour taste in the mouth of at least one prominent Texas Democrat who stood with George McGovern in 1972: Bob Bullock, the Hillsboro native who served as Texas secretary of state, comptroller and lieutenant governor: ". . . I got some ideas on Mr. Connally. He ain't never done nothin' but get shot in Dallas. He got the silver bullet. He needs to come back here and get hisself [sic] shot once every six months. I attack Connally on his vanity. He's terribly bad [sic] vain, y'know. . . . "
In 1975, Connally was accused of pocketing $10,000 for influencing a milk price decision by Texas lawyer Jake Jacobsen. At his trial, he called as character witnesses Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Billy Graham. Connally was acquitted.
Running for President
Connally announced in January 1979 that he would seek the Republican nomination for President in 1980. He was considered a great orator and strong leader and was featured on the cover of Time with the heading "Hot on the Trail". His wheeler-dealer image remained a liability. He raised more money than any other candidate, but he was never able to overtake the popular conservative front runner Ronald W. Reagan of California. Connally spent his money nationally, while George H. W. Bush targeted his time and money in early states and won the Iowa caucus. Bush thus became the principal alternative to Reagan.
Connally focused on South Carolina, an early primary state where he had the support of popular U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, but he lost there to Reagan 55 to 30 percent. He withdrew from the primary race. After spending $11 million during the campaign, Connally secured the support of only a single delegate, the late Mrs. Ada Mills of Arkansas, who became known as the "$11 million delegate". Connally quickly endorsed Reagan and helped him win a narrow primary victory over Bush in the latter's adopted home state of Texas.
Connally said that he and Bush despised each other.
The later years
In 1986, Connally filed for bankruptcy as a result of a string of business losses in Houston.
In December 1990, Connally and Oscar Wyatt, chairman of the Coastal Oil Corporation, met with President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Hussein had been holding foreigners as hostages (or "guests" as Hussein called them) at strategic military sites in Iraq. After the meeting Hussein agreed to release the hostages.
Connally was known as an immaculate dresser who wore expensive and stylish suits wherever he went. Biographer Charles Ashman related a story about Connally's carrying a cigarette lighter in his pocket and lighting cigarettes as a courtesy only for very wealthy men who might be inclined to contribute to his political causes or retain him as a consultant on lucrative business arrangements.
In one of his last political acts, Connally endorsed then Republican U.S. Representative Jack Fields of Houston in the special election called in May 1993 to fill the vacancy left by U.S. Senator Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Bentsen was appointed Treasury Secretary in the new administration of Bill Clinton. Fields finished fourth in the special election and left Congress thereafter. Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, for whom Connally's daughter had been employed in the state treasurer's office, won the seat by a wide margin in the special election runoff against the appointed Democratic Senator Robert Krueger.
Death
Connally died of pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive scarring of the lungs. John and Nellie Connally were interred at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. The Connally Loop in San Antonio is named in his honor. The Connally Memorial Medical Center in Floresville is named for John, Wayne, and Merrill Connally.
See also
- List of U.S. political appointments that crossed party lines
External links
- Exclusive television coverage most from the KRLD -TV/KDFW Collection at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
- (TV Interview with Nellie Connally)
- Retrieved on 2008-02-07
- , hosted by the
- Kelley Shannon, Associated Press, "Connally Dies at 87," September 3, 2006.
- Charles Ashman, Connally: The Adventures of Big Bad John, New York: William Morrow Company, 1974.
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