# John Connally: The Politics of Kicking Ass **URL:** **By** Thomas Hazlett **Published:** January 1, 1980 --- “President Connally of U.S.A., Inc.” Jimmy Carter may not have done much for America, but he _has_ performed a gargantuan favor for one John Connally: President Jimmy has made the electorate lust for a good ol’ sonofabitch in the White House. While Jimmy emerged from the obscurity of Plains, Georgia, wearing nothing but a smile and a halo, John Connally is now surging forth on the devil’s mandate. And Big John is countin’ on Americans who want to trade brother Jimmy’s Gospel of Love for Governor Connally’s politics of power. As one out-of-work Republican intellectual endorsed the Texan recently, “Connally knows how to kick-ass just like they did in the Navy. He knows how to reward his friends and pay back his enemies.” If Carter truly believes that “the meek shall inherit the earth,” Connally knows that they will only if the big shots get drunk and hand it over to them—and Connally sees it as his mission to make sure the big shots stay sober. Connally’s cynical smirk could only have a political chance in a year when it would play against Carter’s goofy grin. Just as Nixon made a market for silly shibboleths and meaningless moralizing, Carter has made the political world safe for “kicking ass” and Mr. Connally (to say nothing of a jubilant Mr. Kennedy) should be forever grateful. Dealing with the “philosophy” of Mr. Connally is like considering the “charisma” of Howard Cosell. As one writer puts it, “Connally has no beliefs, only interests.” The man’s nose simply points in the direction of power. He can sniff it out at enormous distances, from the pungent oil fields of Texas to the odoriferous Oval office. He possesses the metaphysics of a Doberman versed in Macchiavelli. Yet if one were to confront the man with just this charge, his most likely response would be, “thank you.” Here is a man who boasts of what most people are embarrassed by. And this is what makes him such a fitting antidote to Carter: The President boasts of the most obvious and tired public virtues and the crowd chokes on his goody two-shoes sweetness. Big John pleases those subjects who are ready to trade the Sunday School Teacher for the town bully. And this, to be honest, is a helluva constituency. Millions of Americans have, after all, been in the Navy, or a college fraternity, or the local police force, or have ridden in a motorcycle gang. It may seem odd, then, that Big John’s most boisterous backers are to be found in more refined quarters: in America’s corporate board rooms. The key is to see that for them, for the Big Business crowd, John Connally is macho in pinstripes, their Hell’s Angel in a three piece suit. How they love to see Gov. Connally varoom through Washington, scaring the Hell out of each and every special interest group competing with the assigned lobbyists of Business. As President Nixon confided to Arthur Burns, “only three men in America understand the use of power. I do. John Connally does. And I guess Nelson \[Rockefeller\] does.” If businessmen don’t have much use for philosophical ideals, they have many a use for pull. They see John Connally as the Arnold Schwarzenegger of American politics; and when Big John flexes, corporate checking accounts ripple. Though only fourth-place joggers in the Republican race, the Connally boys have already out-cadged Reagan, Kennedy, Baker and the sitting (lame) duck in D.C. As the chief of a prosperous Southern banking concern relates, “one guy is rallying all the support in the business community, and he is that tall, wavy-haired fellow from Texas.” And Lewis Foy, head honcho at Bethlehem Steel, passes on the tale that at a recent New York City dinner party for 26 of the most important business executives in the nation, a secret, just-for-the-hell-of-it poll revealed the wavy-haired fellow scored a clean sweep. Occidental Petroleum Chairman Joseph Baud sums it up: “Connally understands business.” That is true—but sad. For when John Connally boasts of the virtues of free enterprise, he actually means an economy free of enterprise, a market dominated not by entrepreneurship but by political influence. How a former Treasury Secretary with his unsavory record on the question of economic freedom could be taken with a straight face on this score is a clue to the desperation and ethical nonchalance of the business community itself. Connally originally went to Washington because he had a job to do—a job on the American economy. Coming to power in December 1970, he quickly maneuvered Richard Nixon toward the largest budget deficits in peacetime history, into shutting the gold window in a repudiation of foreign debts (thereby slicing away the last milligram of monetary restraint and enabling the incumbent to trade an election year “boom” for a record-setting post-election bout of galloping inflation), and most heinously, to economy-wide wage and price controls. Connally was, characteristically, a leader in the controls game and became their chief advocate in White House councils. As the _Wall Street Journal_ notes, “while Mr. Connally dismisses his 1971 price controls program as something the country ‘had to go through,’ in 1971 he saw it as a model for the future. Although the program was mercifully cut short in 1974—with inflation accelerating at three times its pre-controls pace—Mr. Connally had seen the program as lasting at least 5 years and suggested it should never be entirely abandoned.” Never mind that a couple of Princeton econometricians have recently found that those controls actually _raised_ the cost-of-living, when all relevant costs (including the costs of shortages—like waiting in line and the price of substitutes) are properly included. The sensational point is that Connally today has the gall to pass himself off as a champion of the private sector. As we shall see presently, the sector Connally represents is very private (and very exclusive) indeed. But it has not one whit to do with the concept of a competitive market economy, as anyone who saw Big John urge President Nixon to make the act of competitive bidding an illegal endeavor should be able to figure out for himself. The remarkable political legacy of this historical boner is that Connally’s army now justifies his price controls error (“they were a mistake,” he concedes), on the grounds that (according to _Time_) “businessmen wanted them at the time.” Free enterprise be damned; what’s good for the Dow Jones Index is good for America!! (The DJI jumped 33 points on August 16, 1971.) Not only does Big John shelve his “free enterprise” mumbo jumbo the instant the big corporations seek protection from union wage demands, but he rushes out with oodles of taxpayers’ tribute to subsidize any business enterprise thought to be failing in the market and big enough to suit John Connally. During the Nixon years, the Treasury Chief was right there to nurse the helpless Lockheed conglomerate with $250-million in taxpayer guarantees, and Penn Central with another $200-million (Penn Central went broke even with this largesse). But Big John had even bigger plans: his proposal (adopted by an eager Administration) was to undertake 3-4 billion dollars annually in subsidies for high technology research (apparently “free enterprise” is inoperative in the realm of R\&D). He also lobbied for millions for an SST program which the British and French have just abandoned after several billions in losses, and he enthusiastically urged a revival of Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation to sprinkle the New York Stock Exchange with “seed money.” Why redistributing monies from workers and taxpayers to the stockholders of major corporations is called for is a deep mystery that this proponent of “free enterprise” fails to discuss in his Chamber of Commerce orations; a failure on the part of Big John’s corporate friends to attract enough money on their own could presumably _not_ be the problem. ## President Connally of U.S.A., Inc. Perhaps it is simply that Mr. Connally is Texas personified and believes that absolutely nothing is bad, so long as it’s B-I-G. Even socialism gains a sacred respectability when it is applied at the Corporate level. As the _New Republic’s_ Stephen Chapman aptly notes, “Connally stands for free enterprise for the poor, welfare for the rich.... If ever a politician has earned the right to be called a tool of corporate America, it is John Connally. And if the G.O.P. nominates this grotesque caricature of a Republican for president, it will have forfeited any right to claim that it is anything but the political arm of America’s Country Clubs.” What a nation of boobs we have become to see this mountebank taken seriously. As the mother of price controls, for example, John Conrnally looms as the guiltiest of all the Potomac gang in culpability for the present energy shortage. As UCLA economist Clay Laforce has recently commented, “it is no accident that an OPEC cartel conspired to restrict output and raise prices only after the U.S. petroleum industry was in the harness of wage and price controls.” When the central role of the Connally-Nixon price controls is examined in the context of the oil shortage, it becomes plain that the Connally crusade is much less concerned with the health of capitalism than it is with the wealth of selected capitalists. Connally’s metaphysic amounts to socialism in theory, capital gains in practice. All of this is sour medicine to anyone with less than a million invested in the market, and prompts us to sneer at the 80 percent of American business that is lining up behind the scoundrel. Steady your ticker-tape for this mighty list of mighty backers: the Chief Executives of General Foods (James Ferguson), Southern Pacific (Benjamin Biaggini), H\&R Block (Henry Block), Union Oil (Fred Hartley), Citicorp (Walter Wriston), and Textron (Joseph Collinson); the Presidents of Boeing (E. H. Boullioun) and Occidental (Joseph Baird); and former Chief Executive Officers of A.T.\&T. (John DeButts), Marriott (J. Willard Marriott), Texas Instruments (J. Erik Jonsson), General Foods (C. W. Cook), and American Airlines (C. R. Smith). And why not? To these movers and shakers, Big John is the “heads we win, tails you lose” candidate. Perfectly fitted to his role as Connally’s Campaign Chairman, Winton (“Red”) Blount is a time-tested practitioner of the art of profit at the public trough. Best known for his fine civic service as President Nixon’s Postmaster General (and mastermind of today’s reformed, “private enterprise” postal service—wasn’t that a marvelous innovation?) “Red” Blount is less well known for his financial acumen. But those close to the magnificent Blount estate in Montgomery, Alabama, are filled with tales of his expertise in utilizing a finely crafted combination of government World War II surplus machinery, government contacts, and government contracts to weave a web of fortune estimated at $35-million in 1972. President Mobutu and the Shah are thought to have raided their governments for slightly more than this sum and are denounced accordingly, yet Winton thrives nonetheless. He was last in the news for losing to John Sparkman for a U.S. Senate seat and, oh yes, that matter of a lucrative postal delivery contract in a rural San Diego county precinct which landed in the lap of one of Mr. Blount’s immediate family at a time when “Red” himself was at the helm. It is significant, but not surprising, that such a track record is looked on in Connally circles as qualification not for being excluded from the campaign team, but for running it. But back to the candidate himself. What are we to expect if Connally should hustle his way into the top spot? Any prediction on this question should certainly be accompanied by an oil tanker of caveats: Connally does _not_ make the claim “I’ll never lie to you.” He would rather boast something on the order of, “I’ll never lie unless I have to get a tough job done––but by God I’ll get the damn thing done!” (Patriots and virgin Republicans dying to be overcome rise and cheer with a deafening tumult at this point.) And no one will ever claim that LBJ’s protege has not mastered the science of politalk. In a virtuoso performance for _Politics Today_, Connally responded to a question on the Bakke decision thusly: “I think I agree with the Bakke decision, although I think that some of the criticism on both sides is probably justified... which tells me that the Bakke decision was probably a wise one.” This Texas toughie has thus managed to stake a firm stance, a) in agreement with the decision, b) in agreement with the criticism on one side of the decision, and c) in agreement with criticism on the other side of the decision. Big Bad John does indeed keep his options open! In foreign affairs Connally has lately resorted to an amalgam of publicity stunts, mostly on Mideast issues, but there is no clue that President Connally would do anything more than contract out to Henry Kissinger to take care of everything international just as his two GOP cohorts Nixon and Ford did. Henry the K is just the kind of operator Connally respects: bright, bold and possessing not a trace of principle. On domestic matters Connally is partial to the grand visions of the nearly-impeached Imperial, although he is by no means hostile to the other giants who have ballooned federal powers in the past. He is known as a political clone of the late great Lyndon Johnson, and even LBJ’s second most tragic war, the War on Poverty, fails to frighten Big John. He also agrees with President Carter’s confident assertion of four years ago that the “solution” to our problems is making government more “efficient.” Presumably the efficiency under Connally would be applied not with the carrot but with the stick. Efficient doesn’t necessarily mean inexpensive, however. For all his schemes to dole out tax funds to enterprises which haven’t managed a profit in the competitive marketplace, Connally sounds amazingly convinced of the virtue of taxing away the profits of those which have. While political necessity (i.e., Ronald Reagan) may force Connally to budge, the Texan began his campaign criticizing the Republican Party for advocating a 30 per cent tax cut in the ’78 elections. As the _New York Times’_ Adam Clymer writes, “for all his conservative image, the Texan does not spend much time arguing for whittling the Federal government down to size... he has a vision of government solving problems.” This, at any rate, is a novel idea. Government has certainly invested more time to date in learning how to create them. But Connally’s dynamic personality will turn this all around. The way he sees it, our dilemma (inflation, energy shortage, taxes, poverty—you know the prognosis) stems not from any mistake in government policy or misconception as to the role of private activity and bureaucratic authority, but rather is simply a result of an inexplicable attitude-adjustment problem. The road to recovery is a nationwide pep rally—to get us out of a “state of indecision, guilty of vacillation, guilty of looking inward and engaging in self-flagellation, concerning itself with all the weaknesses, the frailties, all the shortcomings of a great society.” Political economy hasn’t been like this since high school. Consider Governor Connally’s peculiar approach to the balance of payments problem. Any junior college graduate can see that our trade deficit is a lot bigger problem for our foreign creditors than it is for us in that it means that we are ending up with a lot of their goods and services while they are ending up with lots of IOUs. But to Connally there is something anti-American about this subsidy to America. He juts out his chest and lets loose with his most famous announcement: “If you don’t take our citrus, if you don’t take our beef, if you don’t take some of our other commodities, we’d be delighted to see you sitting on the docks of Yokohama in your Toyotas, in your Datsuns, eating your oranges, watching your own television sets.” Go John! Tell ’em to keep those Toyotas—we don’t want ’em! We’d rather have those federal reserve notes to drive us around town! Rah! Rah! America! Now we’re talking John Connally’s language. This is a guy who really doesn’t have a clue as to what is going on in the real world, but wants to get right in there and lead it. It could easily be said that John Connally is the thinking man’s F.D.R. (pardon the contradiction in terms). In point of fact, Connally expresses great affection for the fabled New Dealer. And as Joseph Fay, president of Houston Natural Gas Company, offers in what is presumed to be endorsement, “if John gets to the White House, it won’t be eight peaceful years like Eisenhower. John is very forceful and active. This is the kind of man who produces programs.” ## Connally’s New Deal Connally’s New Deal would presumably offer such welcome innovations as those provided by the, at last count, nine constitutional amendments he has proposed, covering everything you ever wanted to amend but were afraid to contemplate. Examples: a single, six year term for president, 2 six year terms for senators, 3 four year terms for congressional servants, a stop busing measure, approval of federal judges by a Senate vote every decade, and a marvelous Jimmy Carter-like gimmick forcing congresspersons to spend at least three months of each year making deals in their home districts. But whatever his zeal for further constitutional amendments, Connally appears to have little regard for many of our past ones. Take the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, one that you might have imagined to be free from doubt. Connally has boldly proposed compulsory national service for 18-year-olds in order, he says, “to provide discipline for young people.” The government sentence is all the more comical in light of Connally’s self-description: “On many of the so-called libertarian civil rights issues, I think I’m a liberal in the Jeffersonian sense.” Libertarians for slavery, unite! In point of fact, the Connally campaign—led by a candidate who is in love with the grand and dramatic as much as President Richard M. Nixon was—is a veritable volcano spewing forth oddball programs and policies. He charges that human rights complaints against such allies as South Korea and the Phillipines encourage “communist expansionism.” His cure for the educational mess is not to cut Federal involvement but to enlarge its “vocational training programs” (chalk another one up for Wall Street). And while shunning Senator Kennedy’s socialized medical plan he offers an expanded Federal role in “preventive health care.” Yet the top choice for the Connallyism-of-the-year award has to be, in conservative columnist John Lofton’s words, “a Rube Goldberg-type National Dividend Plan which would dole out, tax-free, billions of dollars in federal corporate taxes to those individuals voting in previous national elections.” How many generations of politicians have racked their brains to come up with a scheme to make sure their constituency stays bought? Well Big John has got it! He’s got a program which requires him to pay off only upon delivery of the damn office! It takes a man with a strong amoral fibre to toss such suggestions into the presidential pot, but then John Connally has had many moons to cultivate what may be politely termed _political ethics_. What better training for _political ethics_ than in Connally’s home state and under the very wing of Lyndon Baines Johnson? Johnson was very, very, very, fond of the young Connally. After he helped LBJ in his first congressional victory, the upstart was in turn “helped” to get into the radio business: Lyndon dealt him an FCC license for KVET in Austin. It being Connally’s move, his next favor was to manage Johnson’s first Senatorial crusade in 1948. Here, Connally really earned his stripes. For when the tally came showing that Johnson has lost his bid by 114 votes, a “corrected vote” was brought in (or bought in) from South Texas. And lo and behold, the new shipment counted a Johnson mandate of—no chuckling please—202-1. The horseplay earned Johnson the appellation “landslide Lyndon,” but may have also brought the office of President to both scoundrels. Such a record of service brought Connally high prestige and influence in the ranks of the Democratic Party. After taking a decade out of politics to make himself a millionaire, Big John went to Washington as President Kennedy’s Navy Secretary, but quit after a few months to run for Governor of Texas. His three terms (six years) in Austin left a mixed record of achievement on fiscal issues, but the current salesman of strong leadership might be chagrined at _Time_ magazine’s assessment: “even his friends admit that he was often an indifferent administrator, bored by the daily routine of office.” Well, the Republicans put the zip back into Connally’s lifestyle, for he found the rigors of price control enforcement and the thrill of handing out hundred-million-dollar subsidies to be even more fun than an amended vote count. It was assuredly a most fascinated man who sank his teeth into the labors of a reelection campaign in the historic year of 1972. As the man Richard Nixon was grooming as his heir, he had access to the innermost councils and carte blanche when he operated out of town. Of course, such a long leash allowed Big John to sniff out some great deals, including the one that led to the infamous milk scandal. As Richard Nixon’s tapes unerringly reported, “The private sector Connally represents is very private (and very exclusive) indeed.” Connally was in the Oval Office in 1971 leading the Chief by the paw toward doling out millions more in tax subsidies to bid up the price of what milk producers sell: “They \[milk producers\] are going to make their associations and alliances this year and they’re going to spend a lot of money.” Connally’s counsel carried some weight, and history proved his theory: when Nixon bought the package and upped price supports 27¢ per hundredweight, CREEP swallowed up $2-million in dairy industry pledges. Perhaps this illustrates the “new alliance” of industry and the state which Connally heralds? What fascinates both the media and Connally about this episode is that the Treasury Secretary ended up on trial for accepting a $10,000 cash stipend for making the aforementioned argument to the President. When he was acquitted of accepting the bribe (a long-time Connally associate was, curiously, convicted of successfully offering it) by a predominantly black Washington, D.C., jury, it gave him the opportunity to bellow: “I’m the only certified not-guilty candidate running in either party.” (One wishes a jury had been convened to hear the evidence on the 1948 vote “count” in South Texas.) Even operating under the leaky assumption that Secretary Connally enjoyed no personal windfall on this milk money transaction, we are then left with a chump who views political extortion as something more than a means by which to raise a few bucks to put his kids through college, who sees it as a positive contribution to society! As one Texas Connally-watcher says, “The real danger in the milk fund case is in the manipulation of Government policies to fit business interests, encouraging Nixon to raise milk price supports to extract political money.” The implication, in the eyes of former _Texas Observer_ publisher Ronnie Dugger, is clear: “Corporate interests and Government interests? They’re all the same to him.” Yet, the Nixon White House proved to be a great frustration for this connoisseur of the free lunch. Not because Nixon ignored his many hints at how to buy off whole industries or destroy entire marketplaces—the President went down the line on such matters. The frustration came in regard to the “final solution” that only John Connally could suggest to surmount the highest of Nixon’s mountains: the Watergate tapes. Surging forth with Texas confidence, the Treasury Secretary belted out his version of the public’s “right to know”: “call in a group of witnesses, make sure it’s in the open, but burn them.” Not even Richard Nixon could walk that last mile with Big Bad John. Nonetheless, Connally was enraptured with the GOP in 1973. So much, in fact, that he decided in that year to make the Big Switch—“when the party was down,” he notes, “so that I can’t be accused of opportunism.” No doubt his timing was a key, for as late as 1970 he had been stoutly counseling fellow conservatives in the Texas Democratic Party to keep a safe distance from George Bush’s Republican campaign for U.S. Senate. “Some of you are inclined to feel at home in the Republican Party,” he had observed. “But the trouble is you won’t give you a key to the house. If you think you can move in and have any influence with the Republicans, you’re making a bad mistake.” It surely must have taken big changes to make this political animal step to a different drummer in less than three quarters of a presidential term, and, indeed, two major blasts did hit John Connally’s life. First, Lyndon Johnson passed away, thereby releasing his protege from any loyalties—or any skeletons—the old pol might bring to bear. And second, the GOP plummeted into Watergate. Now, while this shameful archipelago of public shenanigans sent the mass of Americans into outrage, it had quite the opposite effect on Brother John—he gained a new respect for the Grand Old Party. Whatever detriment Watergate may have provoked amongst the others, it only convinced John Connally that these were his kind of folks. At last, Connally found the GOP a viable political apparatus from which to fly his flag. Soon a vulnerable electorate will peer up from Monday Night Football just long enough to see this impressive figure of a man make impassioned pleas on a variety of topics. It will be a measure of America’s desperation to count his converts: it will tell us the number of adults judged to be in workable running order who feel the moment has come to throw out honest debate in favor of a godfather who offers to treat his own family of voters very gently. Whatever the crazy outcome of 1980, the record will read that there was no shortage of warnings on the consequences of a President Connally. Arthur Burns states that John Connally is a “dangerous man.” Mo Udall shivers: “John Connally scares me more than any other politician. He likes power and knows how to use it, but he doesn’t have any real beliefs.” Th ex-Press Secretary to Lady Bird Johnson, Liz Carpenter, characterizes him as “a political transvestite who at the battle of the Alamo would’ve organized Texans for Santa Ana.” And when President Connally lays his finger on the button, try to forget the assessment of his biographers Jack Keever and Ann Fears Crawford: “What worries many is his mind appears to have no fail-safe device. Once committed, even mistakenly, there is no turning back.” Still no one is a better critic of the Connally psyche than… John Connally. As he steadies his aim on an opponent he would love to be Teddy Kennedy (manslaughter takes a bribery acquittal in the poker game of politics) he bravely chirps that “issues are not going to be that important.” What rates with Big John is style. “When I think of presidential leadership,” he dreams, “I think… of Franklin Roosevelt. Whether you agreed with him or not he gave clear direction and was able to persuasively appeal to people.” But much to John Connally’s disappointment, issues may well play a role in the events of 1980. And he has reason to fear that possibility. Particularly if the issue of John Connally comes up. As Douglas Hallett wrote for the _Wall Street Journal_: > Mr. Connally’s biggest flaw is that he is not what he says he is: He is not a ‘can-do’ public man. The best of his public record is a testament to the limitations of what government should try to accomplish. And the worst demonstrates that, however enchanting its proponent, the kind of government-business “partnership” which devastated the Republican Party 50 years ago is even less viable today. It was John Bowden Connally, Jr., whom President Nixon singled out to boil down his options on milk price supports—a decision which would affect millions of taxpayers and consumers in 1971. “You’re in this thing for everything you can get out of it,” Connally instantly summarized. Today, out of power, he strokes the American voter with powerful posturing and stirring phrases in quest of the power which that voter may bestow upon him. And Big John hopes like hell that the voters, unlike his former boss, are in this thing for something significantly less than everything they can get out of it. Π Tom Hazlett, staffer at the International Institute for Economic Research, broadcast journalist, and Ph.D. candidate in economics at UCLA, has written for _Inquiry_, _Reason_ and _National Review_, as well as for _LR_.