The Canny Conservatism of John Connally

watching him work the crowds, you sometimes wonder if his lizardskin boots are made of chameleon

People who saw him after he had been shot and had come within five minutes of bleeding to death say that John Connally believed even then that the experience proved he was fated. His survival was a message that affected him profoundly. It meant that he was one of the chosen, that he was a man of destiny.

But even the chosen must campaign if they want to be elected. If you want to be President of the United States, you have to work for it. The most craven public-relations man is not required to be as cheerfully hypocritical and effusive as a candidate for President. Certainly, he isn't required to spend time in New Hampshire. But candidates for President are, and when John Connally made his first serious public tour of the state, I went along for the ride, driving across the state line from my home in Vermont. I wanted a look at the man. I also believe in the Fates and a lot of other romantic nonsense that is properly called conservatism. I'd heard that Connally could be a conservative with a chance to win. The country, all the wise men said, was turning right. And Connally might be enough of a candidate and a politician to follow the shifting mood into the White House.

New Hampshire is not Connally's sort of state. He is a Texan--and more. He is from Houston, where everything is scaled up. He is a partner in a Houston law firm that employs 280 attorneys. Houston is the home of two of the world's most celebrated surgeons, Michael De Bakey and Denton Cooley, both just as much prima donnas as healers. When Latin-American tyrants have heart attacks, they fly to Houston for treatment. Houston has the world's most extravagant department store, Neiman-Marcus, where you can buy his and her Learjets. A thoroughly modern city, Houston is the sinister steel flower of technology, blooming on the banks of a putrid barge canal like a fleshy orchid in fetid jungle.

Concord, New Hampshire, is something else. It is probably not big enough to make a modest shopping center in Houston. It is old and shabby and the mills that supported it are closed or closing. Moving South. What money there is in town would be pocket change for Houston. Now, with the energy crisis, things are getting worse. There is no gas or oil in New England. There isn't even enough population density to make pipelines economically feasible. The people who have oil and gas--Arabs and Texans--aren't giving it away. So these are fearful, lean times in New England. In New Hampshire, the two largest industries are tourism and Presidential politics. The state is a ward, surviving on outsiders' wealth.

Connally, a glamorous outsider, was scheduled to appear one day late last September at the cocktail hour, in the back yard of a Concord home. It would be a genteel rally held under an awning stretched over the yard to cover three working bars. For a three-dollar contribution, you could drink whiskey, pick up a campaign button and listen to a speech by the candidate. I arrived early.

From the look of it, the home was probably 100 years old. Not unusual in New England, where people still live in dwellings built before the Revolutionary War. In most New England towns, the church is still the largest and most imposing building. The graveyard is spacious and well tended and the stones go back three centuries. In New England, you are always aware of two things that are obliterated by cities like Houston: the earth and the past.

By 5:30, there were 150 people standing under the awning or around the incongruous swimming pool, waiting for Connally. They were dressed for cocktails, smiling, talking politics and politely passing time. It was a prosperous crowd of civilized and respectable people who could have been waiting for the start of a country-club tea dance.

Connally appeared, on time, trailing a covey of reporters. All the networks had cameras on the lawn and the technicians, good union men, looked like crashers in their Levis, boots and open-necked shirts.

Reporters followed Connally as he moved easily through the crowd, remembering names and shaking hands, for a crisp, professional ten minutes before he reached the podium and waited to be introduced.

There is no getting around it, the man looks good. Robust and fit. He is tall and strong, with a pelt of distinguished silver hair. He looks like what a politician was supposed to look like back in the days when they were sometimes called statesmen. Confidence and authority seem to glow in Connally the way quality glows in the finish of a brandnew Mercedes. He is 6'2" and 62 years old. Men 20 years younger would give a lot to look like him. While this crowd would never lose its composure over a Presidential candidate, or very much else, for that matter, you can feel a tingle under the awning. A flutter of awe and star worship.

He stands by calmly while he is introduced, then takes the podium like the wheel of a car. There is authority and good humor in his voice. Even if you despised him for his politics, you would want him for your lawyer.

He begins by introducing his wife, Nellie. She is a short, blonde, handsome woman who sits smiling at his side, as professional in her role as Connally is in his. They met at the University of Texas, where they both entertained dreams of the theater. John appeared with Eli Wallach in one school production and Nellie went even further, almost winning the part of Melanie in Gone with the Wind. She came in second to Olivia De Havilland.

Connally makes a gracious introduction, even courtly: "So y'all will know that I don't give up easily, let me tell you that it took me five years to win her. I asked her to marry me in 1935 and she didn't agree to it until 1940, five years later.

"But I won her," he goes on in one of those effortless transitions that are part of the stump politician's rhetorical arsenal, "and I intend to win this race, too. I'm 62 years old, so I am not in it for practice." That line is greeted with approving laughs. Connally and his people acknowledge one rival for the Republican nomination: Ronald Reagan. But Reagan has been disappointing Republicans since 1968, when the party took a deep breath and nominated Nixon. By the time Reagan came in, the convention had begun and it was too late. Reagan started late again in 1976, against Ford. Still, he nearly won and there are Republicans all over the country who bitterly believe that if he had not vacillated, he would be President now. They wanted it more than Reagan did, they still feel, and worked harder for it than he did. Which, everybody knows, will damn sure not be the case if Connally is the candidate. He has already announced and at this point has been out working for six months, while Reagan sits on his ranch, writing a newspaper column.

Then there is the age problem. Reagan would be almost 70 at his Inauguration if he were to win, the oldest man ever sworn in for the office. Age is the issue that can hurt him most with Republicans, and he and his staff have let it be known that they think it dirty politics to bring up the subject. Connally is not above it. In 1960, when he was managing Lyndon Johnson's campaign for the Democratic nomination, he helped spread--and may have started--a rumor that John Kennedy suffered so seriously from Addison's disease that he required massive doses of drugs merely to stay alive and functioning. Connally doesn't have to go that far on the issue of Reagan and his age. He brings it up merely standing there and throwing off a seemingly harmless one-liner. "I'm 62 years old, so I am not in it for practice."

Connally begins his speech by saying that he thinks the country is in trouble. It is going to hell in a hand basket, he says, and he is the one man who can do something about it. He says it with humility and wishes it were not so. But he says it again and again.

There is nothing different about Connally's opening remarks--every man running for President says the country is in trouble. Except that this time, the President agrees with him. Last summer, Jimmy Carter went on television and announced that the country was in the grip of a malaise. The crisis, he said in that extraordinary speech, was spiritual, not material.

The speech was a fat pitch for all Carter's rivals. Any candidate running against him can ride that speech right out of the park. Connally, who must be the finest oratorical Republican since Teddy Roosevelt, wastes no time.

"The really sad fact," he says, "is that the country is in trouble when it doesn't have to be. The problems facing this country are not the result of some malaise that grips the people. The failure is not with the people at all. The failure is with the national leadership. And with your help, I intend to change that." He sticks his sculpted jaw out on that note and the cocktail crowd applauds. If Big John wants to lead, then they are ready to follow.

After the applause dies, he goes into the programmatic section of his speech, energetically promising this and that to make the nation healthy again. Most of it is that old-time, free-enterprise (continued on page 232) Connally (continued from page 144) religion. Balance the budget, cut spending, reduce taxes, deregulate, speed up depreciation, balance the trade account, reward work and punish sloth, and so on and so forth. The mind wanders. You can always ignore the detailed campaign promises of a political candidate. Franklin Roosevelt promised to balance the budget and put an end to the extravagances of that notorious profligate Herbert Hoover. And when he ran for governor of Texas, Connally promised, among other things, to cut state spending by ten percent and to pass a law limiting governors to two terms. Spending doubled during Connally's three terms. When an excited aide asked Huey Long how he planned to explain his failure to live up to a campaign promise to some interest group, Long impatiently said, "Fuck 'em. Tell 'em I lied."

So you listen to the music and not the words. Connally plays Adam Smith and Milton Friedman on that old honky-tonk piano and it sounds as good as it did almost 20 years ago, when I listened to Barry Goldwater play the same tunes. There were about 20 of us back then, I remember--of 10,000 or 12,000 students on campus, we were the only ones who openly called ourselves conservatives and wore Goldwater buttons to prove it. We were a couple of dozen kooks reading Hayek and Strauss and fretting over the steadily encroaching tyranny of the state, the masses and the rationalist mode of thinking. Our professors and even our parents didn't want anything to do with us. Those were the days of the Peace Corps, civil rights, the twilight struggle and the Great Society. We could not have been more out of step.

What followed is . . . what followed. The Sixties, which extended into the Seventies. The New Left. Vietnam. All the rest of it, a blitzkrieg of history. Now Barry Goldwater is a respected elder statesman. Free-enterprise tracts like William Simon's A Time for Truth make the best-seller list. Everybody running for office beyond the courthouse level is talking balanced budgets and limited government. Liberal is a dirty word, and liberals everywhere are shedding it as a label. An intellectual movement called neoconservatism made up mostly of former liberals is in full vigor, with several publications and, of all things, a Washington think tank to keep it going. The whole country is turning right, the pundits say. Proposition 13 rolled up a big score. The death penalty is making a comeback. E.R.A. and national health are stalemated. The rising wave is conservative and Connally wants to ride it into the White House. Strange, I think, for the protégé of Lyndon Johnson, our nemesis back in those old days. Connally delivers his belligerent trademark line about getting the Japanese to open their borders to trade or letting them sit on the docks of Yokohama in their Toyotas, watching their Sonys. He sounds like Johnson. Even though most of us weren't even old enough to vote, we would have died before we voted for L.B.J.

I don't know what happened to the others. Some of them are still working the political fields, I imagine. They have probably moved so far right that they are with the libertarians, who believe that we can fix a lot of what is wrong in this country by selling the highways to free enterprise and maintaining the Army and Navy by voluntary contributions.

Since the Goldwater days, I have rambled around the right in an indifferent, journalistic fashion, interviewing Milton Friedman and Irving Kristol, touching base with William Buckley and Henry Mencken's stepchild, Bob Tyrrell. But a lot of the fun has gone out of it for me. It isn't honky-tonk piano anymore, it's Muzak and you hear it everywhere. I am still a conservative, I suppose, but I believe that you could balance the budget, eliminate the minimum wage, cut taxes, end monopolies--create an economy that would dazzle Adam Smith himself. You could do all of that and life in this country would not seem very much better and in many ways would get worse and worse until it would become insupportable and give way to tyranny. Carter was right: The crisis is spiritual.

It is distressing to think that it took a collection of Patrick Caddell polls to convince the President of that. Especially since he is supposed to be a religious man and a reader. José Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and a few dozen others would have been better starting material for him than Caddell. But at least he discovered the right formulation: The crisis is spiritual.

Connally doesn't think anything of the sort. What he wants for the country is more of the same. Forcefully administered, of course.

•

How can you explain John Connally? By all rational, empirical, historical logic, he should be as dead politically as Harold Stassen. He is fortunate merely to be alive and out of jail. He is certainly the only feasible Presidential candidate who has changed parties, been indicted for a felony and nearly died in an ambush that killed a President of the United States. Against that kind of bond with destiny, all the rest of the humdrum explanations for what goes on in our national political life--the powers of the incumbency and the press, the solidity of the South--all of them pale. No political-science course in America can adequately explain Connally. He cannot even explain himself. But it is clear that he believes in destiny, especially his own, and he believes that in 1980, he will run for President against Ted Kennedy, youngest brother of the man whose head was blown off when he rode in the car with Connally back in November of 1963.

Connally has come far. There were no electric lights in his father's house until 1940. Less than 20 years later, Connally was paid $750,000 to handle the estate of Sid Richardson, the famous Texas wildcatter. As a young Texas attorney, making his way to the big money, Connally carried a cigarette lighter even though he didn't smoke; he fired up the lighter whenever he saw a cigarette in the lips of a man big enough to help him on his inevitable way. He rubbed up against the big money, decided he liked the feel of it and has made sure that he is on intimate terms with it ever since. He has plenty now, including a 9000-acre ranch near Floresville, Texas, and the little farm where he grew up. Connally has made it amply by Texas standards, and beyond what most other people can even imagine.

But money was never the whole of Connally's large ambition: necessary but not sufficient. He wanted power and its appointments as well. From the time he ran for president of the University of Texas student body and was one of the first nonfraternity candidates to win, he has kept his eye on high office. His law firm stock-piles two sets of stationery: one with a letterhead that includes Connally's name and one on which it is absent. That stationery is used whenever Connally makes one of his frequent, and brief, trips into Government.

This journey started with Lyndon Johnson before World War Two. Connally managed the young Congressman's office, staying late every night, he remembers, "to type 40 or 50 letters before I went home to bed." He was commissioned in the Navy and served on carriers in the Pacific. (Since Eisenhower, all of our Presidents have been Navy men.) When he came home, Connally and some other veterans bought a radio station with Johnson's help. Connally worked at the station and there are pictures from that time of him doing duty as a disc jockey.

In 1948, he decided to manage Johnson's Senate campaign. But first, Johnson had to be persuaded to run, which was not easy. His feral political instincts and his fear of losing told him that it was not worth the risk. He had a safe seat in the House. If he ran for the Senate and lost, he would be out of politics altogether. For all his Texas swagger, Johnson was that unattractive combination of coward and bully. Connally's poker instincts are far better. Johnson liked pat hands and proved it in 1960, when he managed to run for both the Vice-Presidency and the Senate.

But in 1948, he could not show that kind of gall. He agonized and the people who were urging him to run turned itchy. The campaign was getting closer and they wanted an announced candidate. Well, hell, Connally finally said, maybe he'd run if Lyndon couldn't make up his mind to do it. Johnson announced the next day. On election night, it appeared that he had lost until a late recount turned up another 203 votes and he won by 87 of 1,000,000 cast. It was widely assumed, and still is--though Connally denies it--that the election was stolen and that Connally at least knew what was going on. It was that election that resulted in the nickname Landslide Lyndon, which Johnson so detested.

The entire performance was typical of Connally. He will not be pushed around--which he proved to Nixon's sycophants years later--and he plays to win. The rules and the forms are not important. He remained close to Johnson. It was a stormy, complicated relationship, too easily described as father/son or older and younger brother. They were two proud and ambitious men who relied on each other and who could not afford to be enemies. But each suspected the other of some grave flaw. "The trouble with John," Johnson once said, "is that he's forgotten what it is like to be poor." And during the evil days of Vietnam, Johnson called Connally late one night, near despair and full of whiskey. He was doing his best, he said helplessly, but nobody understood him. Nobody loved him. Connally consoled him and told him that he shouldn't listen to the critics. Later he told friends that he wished Johnson were tougher.

After Johnson went to the Senate, Connally began to chase his material fortunes. He did not want to go back into public life, he said, until he had financial security.

But he surfaced from time to time in Washington, most conspicuously in 1956 during an intense fight to deregulate the price of natural gas. Connally functioned, but never registered, as a lobbyist--claiming he was representing his own interests. In the midst of the debate, an envelope full of cash appeared on the desk of one Senator, who became outraged. Never clearly tied in with the bribery attempt, Connally, nonetheless, left town. The bill was defeated. There was an investigation, carefully managed by Johnson, which produced no results.

Connally next appeared on the national political scene when he managed Johnson's campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1960. At the convention, he spread the rumors about Kennedy's health and dependence on drugs. But those were cheerfully cynical times and Kennedy selected Johnson as his running mate and appointed Connally Secretary of the Navy.

Connally stayed in Washington less than a year, then went back to Texas--against Johnson's advice--to run for governor. He overcame a recognition factor of less than one percent by spending vast sums of campaign money--detractors say that he virtually bought the Mexican vote. He won. He was rated no better than a tossup for re-election when he was gravely wounded in the ambush that killed Kennedy. He gained a kind of political immortality from his brush with death and for almost two years wore a black arm sling, like a crippled gun fighter, until some critics pointed out that it was getting a little frayed at the edges.

Connally was re-elected twice. Nothing spectacular happened in Texas during his administrations--nothing governmental, at least, though economic growth in Texas was fearsome during those years. He was an indifferent supporter of the Great Society. He was once driven by limousine to meet a group of protesters who were marching to the capitol for a confrontation with him--only to tell them when he got there that he would not meet with them. When he first heard that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot, Connally remarked that King had "contributed much to the chaos and the strife and the uncertainty in the country, but he deserved not the fate of assassination."

In 1971, he was invited to Washington by Nixon and became the most conspicuous Treasury Secretary since Andrew Mellon. He administered Nixon's attempt to freeze wages and prices. He lobbied hard and successfully for the loans that saved Lockheed from bankruptcy. He negotiated with--and often bullied--European nations during the devaluation of the dollar. He was, by all accounts, decisive and tough. He told the Nixon place guard--young men accustomed to telling Cabinet officers to "put it in writing"--that he did not deal with them but with the President. Columnist Joseph Kraft called him the most able man in Washington.

Then he quit and went back to Texas. He formed Democrats for Nixon in 1972, when George McGovern was the Democratic candidate. Later, in the middle of Watergate, he signed on, unhappily, as Nixon's unpaid advisor. He told his boss to burn the tapes. He quit again, that time without fanfare, then announced that he was becoming a Republican. One reporter said it was the first known case of a rat swimming to a sinking ship.

In 1974, Connally was indicted for taking two $5000 bribes. The indictments were the work of the Watergate special prosecutor's office, once led by rival Houston lawyer Leon Jaworski. Connally was found not guilty by a Washington, D.C., jury--mostly black--after his lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, brought in a string of character witnesses that included Billy Graham and Barbara Jordan, the black Congress-woman from Texas who had spoken so movingly at the impeachment hearings.

Despite the acquittal, that episode appeared to spell the end, politically, for Connally. For a river-boat gambler, he had done well--made a pile and stayed one step ahead of the posse all the way. He still had a beautiful wife, children, a lot of money and the ability and contacts he needed to make a lot more. It was time to head back to the ranch.

Then the Fates began to do their work once again in Connally's favor. Jimmy Carter slipped badly. It was not so much that he was having trouble; it was the kind of trouble he was having. Carter appeared indecisive and unsure of himself, a weak and ineffectual leader. A strong Democrat with a sure instinct for the jugular, with juices that flow at the scent of combat, would love a fight with Connally. But Carter doesn't have it, or does not appear to have it, or is not perceived as having it--all of which amounts to the same thing. And the man who will most likely be the Democratic candidate, if it is not Carter, is Ted Kennedy. Connally has been ready for that fight for a long time. As a Connally aide said, even before his boss announced his availability, "Nobody drowned in a milk can."

So Connally announced and sounded his theme: leadership. After all the years and all the turns and twists in his fortunes, this would be the year. He was going to go all the way.

•

"You know," he tells this assembled and respectful New Hampshire crowd under the awning, "we sometimes forget how much things have changed in our own lifetimes. We become fearful of change and try to keep things the way they are and the way we think they have always been. We start talking about 'no growth' and an era of limits. But let me tell you something. 'No growth' didn't build this country and 'no growth' isn't going to keep it in the position of leadership in the world. Because the other countries of the world are not going to stop growing. We're going to change the world, my friends, and we're going to change it again and again. I don't fear change; I welcome it."

If a speaker had used those words in front of our little college group--we never really made ourselves into a club or anything formal--he would have been shouted down. Change is inevitable, certainly, but only a fool or a man so bored and restless as to be dangerous would welcome it. Fascination with change usually follows from a lack of root values. Love of change mingled with a rhetorical reverence for older times and better days is, in this century, an invitation to disaster. Because change destroys values unless there is a way to control the change or enforce the values, or both. In the case of Connally, and what I have heard called the "corporate conservatives," there is a contradiction at work: You cannot worship the values of an older, small-town America--even a frontier America--and at the same time give your all to free enterprise as practiced by the corporations. Twentieth Century technology in the hands of the American corporation has reduced to a rubble the values and institutions that conservatives claim to revere.

Conservatism is hard to define--impossible to define with any precision. This is not necessarily a flaw in conservatism, since it is not in thrall to science and precision in the first place. Political science is a liberal term; a conservative would consider it contradictory. But you can get at a definition of conservatism by indirection. An old man in Alabama once told me from his rocking chair on the front porch of a general store that he thought the "goddmaned Gov'm'nt ought to guard the coast, tote the mail and stay the hell out of everything else." That's a conservative sentiment and more in fashion these days than it was 20 years ago, when I first heard the remark.

A conservative does not trust Government and its ability to do what it sets out to do. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, Government is not successful at much besides waging war and inflating the currency. Government attracts people who are comfortable ruling their fellow men--petty bureaucrats who bind you in paper and regulations or genuine tyrants who are willing to slaughter their countrymen in the name of an idea or a program or even the mere security of a regime. Government is an engine of control and Connally would love to be at the throttle. He would be an activist President--what else does he mean by "leadership"?

But a suspicion--and in some cases an outright loathing--of Government is not the complete definition of conservatism. What it rejects is less important than what it embraces. What conservatism embraces is an older, organic system of values that grows out of the way people live in the real world. It is not utopian, not taken with abstractions derived from some idea of the perfect world. In the conservative scheme, fraternity is more important than equality--which is a dream, forever frustrated.

It begins with family and home and tradition. Edward Kennedy is not a conservative. If he were, he would stay home and tend to his damaged family. But liberals believe there are causes worth sacrificing your family for and conservatives believe you should be willing to sacrifice all for your family.

Old loyalties, passed on through generations, kept alive and cherished, a love for things that cannot be quantified or even understood, that is the essence of conservatism. The greatest agent for mindless, destructive change in this country is not the university system (though it is close) or the Government (it has done its share) but the corporations and the unbridled passion for commerce they represent. All over this country, we have bulldozed and paved land that was once loved by people whose descendants live in ugly cities and work in unlovely offices or on monotonous production lines. Families are moved periodically at the pleasure of the corporation and never put down roots. Children grow up with nothing much to cherish and for many suburban men, the office is more of a family than the wife and kids at home. We build things so that they will not last. Permanence is obsolete.

Yet a certain kind of politician who calls himself conservative embraces the corporation and the American from of commerce. He calls it free enterprise.

John Connally makes no secret of his admiration for business. All business, he is at great pains to point out, not just Big Business. But Big Business swallows small business. Ask a small rancher somewhere who is being pressed to sell his few acres to a corporate operation that will turn out beef or crops according to the Harvard Business School method--that is to say, efficiently and with no regard for quality. Corporate farms turn out beef with less flavor than soybeans. But they can sell it cheap and move it quickly. You cannot be for all business, because the giants are never satisfied. The result of free competition is that big beats small every time.

On energy, Connally has spelled it out with admirable clarity. He is for the oil companies and all other producers. But the oil companies have proved again and again that they will do just what oligopolies always tend to do: band together to drive out new competition (solar or anything else, in this case). Connally would have us more dependent on the major oil companies, not less. He would encourage the development of nuclear power, which would make us all more dependent on highly specialized technologies. More dependent, not more self-reliant. Like Nelson Rockefeller, he has a love of the grand, the intricate and the specialized, which is precisely not what conservatism is all about. John Connally sees things large. He is more interested in the building of nuclear plants than in finding ways to restrain ourselves and live with what we have. The proper conservative solution to the energy crisis would be to turn off the lights in Las Vegas.

Economic freedom and prosperity are hard to argue with, but what the wordsmiths at Mobil call "economic freedom" looks like bondage to some of us. Between the health of things we cherish to the root and the health of the corporation, we wouldn't have much trouble choosing. You do not form loving and loyal attachments to corporations, unless you are a wealthy Houston lawyer.

But Connally isn't talking about values. He is talking politics and he winds up his talk on a folksy note. "I'm going to be calling on you, asking for your help. When I was downtown this morning, I bought a pair of high-topped New Hampshire boots. They're warm and they're waterproof. I'm going to be here, wearing those boots, long after the leaves fall and the snow flies."

Laughter and applause. A politician's supporters feel much better about him when he shows them some wit. They want to like the man. Connally's humor is good-natured and masculine. You think of John Wayne in his last half-dozen movies.

He takes questions. He is against the SALT treaty. He wants a defense build-up and he wants the Russians to show some good faith in Cuba and the rest of the world. More applause.

Someone asks about his policy on energy. "What we need to do in this country," he says, "is produce more energy. Conservation is important and we should be looking to conserve energy anywhere we can. But production is the answer. We ought to be exploring all the possibilities--solar, geothermal, every synthetic source. But, like it or not, for the rest of the century, we're going to be dependent on three kinds of energy: hydrocarbons--oil and gas--coal and nuclear. I would deregulate all oil and gas to encourage new exploration and production. This could be done today. With the stroke of a pen. I would encourage easing of some of the environmental standards so we could burn more coal. And I would cut red tape so we could build a nuclear plant and have it on line in six and a half years like the rest of the world, instead of the 13 years it takes us now. I know a lot of you are worried about the dangers of nuclear power. But please quit getting your scientific advice from Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader--listen to Edward Teller."

More applause. That is straight enough talk for a politician. It is a program and it is specific. Connally's energy position could get him elected if the winter of 1979--1980 is bad enough and the Arabs decide to turn the screws a little tighter. A few weeks after he made those remarks. Connally unveiled a controversial position on the Middle East that favored Palestinian rights. It was seen as a slap at Israel, but the most noticeable feature of the plan was that Connally claimed it would win us some friends among the oil-holding Arabs--not surprising from a Texan who has lived with the power of oil all his adult life, a lawyer who once attempted to negotiate with Colonel Qaddafi, perhaps the most fanatical Middle Eastern leader this side of the mad Ayatollah. Connally, who believes you can horse-trade with anyone, was trying to protect the oil rights of Bunker Hunt, son of the late oil billionaire H. L. Hunt.

It is nearly twilight and the cocktail hour is easing into dinnertime. The people under the awning are growing restless and Connally senses it. "One more question," he says.

"Governor," a man respectfully asks, "how do you answer the charge that you are a wheeler-dealer?"

Connally beams. He loves that one.

"Well," he says, "if you mean by wheeler-dealer someone who knows how to talk to Congressmen and businessmen and political leaders all over the world, who knows how to compromise and horse-trade with them to get things done, who isn't afraid to negotiate and hear the other man's side . . . well, then, I guess I am a wheeler-dealer.

"You know, I've been in and out of Washington for 30 years. I've known 'em all. I knew your late Senator Styles Bridges. Knew him well. Worked with him. Met with him many times. I knew 'em all. In the Congress. The Cabinet. Business. I've been on the boards of over 20 major corporations and banks. I remember what a special thrill it was for me when I was named to the board of Greyhound. It was Greyhound that bought my daddy's little bus line from San Antonio to Corpus Christi, and the money from that sale made it possible for us to buy a little farm. So when I was named to the board of Greyhound, I felt like I had arrived. I plowed many a furrow behind a mule or a horse on that little farm we bought with the Greyhound money. And I studied many a night by a kerosene lamp. But that made it possible for me to go to college and to make something of myself. I'm grateful for that chance. I think that kind of opportunity is what made this country grow. With growth there is opportunity and with leadership in Washington, we can keep on growing and keep on providing opportunity for people who want to work and take advantage of the things this country has to offer. I need your help. Thank you very much."

It is good stump oratory. An old theme, of course, but Connally breathes new rhetorical life into it and it is plain that if he gets the nomination, he will be a formidable candidate. I am hastily introduced to the man on his way out. We shake hands firmly. He reminds me of Bear Bryant. Somebody once said about Bryant, "Well, he's got his own way of doing things and I don't agree with everything he does. But if everybody was as good as Bear at what he did, and worked as hard at it, wouldn't it be just a hell of a world?"

•

I ate dinner that night in an old New England lodge with a man who makes his living advising candidates he does not necessarily like or even respect. He is wonderfully informed and almost completely cynical and 30 seconds with him will free you from the grip of the very best political oratory.

"What did you think?" the consultant asked.

"I think he can shake up a crowd," I said. "His kind of crowd, anyway."

"He's a Texas Democrat, remember. Republicans aren't used to that style. But he is a good speaker. He has real problems, though."

"Oh?"

"You ought to see the numbers. It's that indictment. And the whole Texas money image. It's going to be tough for him but not insurmountable. Carter may be the only man alive who could give clean politics a bad name."

"I thought he handled the wheeler-dealer thing pretty well."

"Sure. As long as it is put to him like that. You ask the question that way and he's going to stroke it out every time. Same with the milk deal. He can say he was tried and found not guilty and he's the only candidate who can make that claim. He'll make it sound like a plus. I think he could beat the corrupt-politician, wheeler-dealer rap if nobody comes up with anything new. I hear The Washington Post has a team of people in Texas working on it. Maybe they'll come up with something, but I doubt it. The real land mine for Connally is the Nixon tapes. But if there is something and somebody has heard it, then it will get out. I wouldn't trust a priest to keep a secret in Washington these days."

"OK," I said. "If nothing new comes out from The Washington Post or the tapes, can he do it?"

"You can't count him out. I'll tell you what will make him the next President of the United States."

"Tell me."

"If Ronald Reagan falls down and breaks his hip and Teddy Kennedy gets the Democratic nomination."

"I understand the Reagan part of it."

"The Kennedy part is just as easy. If Teddy gets the nomination, there is going to be a blonde a week at the offices of the National Enquirer telling her story. They'll print it as 'My Fatal Fling with Teddy.' And all the old stuff will come out again. It'll be a dirty campaign and nobody will have a moral advantage. Kennedy will be the liberal in that race and that's not a good thing to be. Necessarily."

The consultant paid, since he likes to run up a big expense account to impress his clients. That night, trying to read myself to sleep in an unfamiliar bed, I thought about the Fates. It isn't something the political wise men think about much and there is no reason they should. They are tacticians and Theodore White is their oracle. But it is hard, if you are a conservative and a romantic, not to believe that our recent political history is being written in the heavens somewhere, that the lines from Prometheus Bound apply:

Prometheus: Craft is far weaker than necessity.

Chorus: Who then is the steersman of necessity?

Prometheus: The triple formed Fates and the remembering Furies.

Chorus: Is Zeus weaker than these?

Prometheus: Yes, for he, too, cannot escape what is fated.

Or, more vulgarly, Emerson:

Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

These quotes and a few others like them are in a journal I keep when I am on the road. I read the quotes and considered what the wise man said and what I had heard that night and what I knew about Connally. It all could be said to go back to November 22, 1963. So much seems to have followed from the murder on that day that you almost have to believe in the Fates and the Furies--or go mad chasing conspiracies or surrender to chaos.

Connally and Kennedy. One of them wounded in the barrage and the other the last surviving brother of the man who was killed. One man gives off a scent of money scandal, the other the odor of sex scandal. Big Texas money, so new it still seems raw, against slightly older money stored in the cold vaults of the East. Sun Belt against the Yankees. The corporations against the unions. Big Business against Big Government. John Wayne against Warren Beatty.

Connally would be the conservative in that race, which is as painful for old conservatives as Ted Kennedy must be for old liberals. They are both modern men and both would probably admit to being pragmatists. But the trouble with pragmatism is that it doesn't work.

I watched John Connally for one more day and heard the same speech, with minor variations, a half-dozen times. I learned nothing much except admiration for the reporters who cover politicians for months and hear the same speech dozens of times. After one last stop in Concord and one last press conference, Connally turned to Nellie and said, "Let's go home, babe." He'd had enough of New Hampshire. He and his wife climbed aboard a fuchsia Learjet and headed for Texas. I climbed into my four-wheel and made for the state line. There were things to do: a church cabinet meeting, a local energy group's fund raiser, wood to cut before the first snows, children and dogs to play with.

It took me two hours to cross the Green Mountains. Connally was up there somewhere, a driven man burning kerosene. It made me feel better to know that he is afraid to fly.

"Connally is fortunate merely to be alive and out of jail. He believes in destiny, especially his own."