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it."

The war over, Connally renewed his association with Johnson, who helped him with ten other men back from the war buy an Austin radio station, named KVET for the veterans who ran it. In 1948 Connally returned the favor by managing the Senate race that earned Johnson the ironic sobriquet "Landslide Lyndon." After the preliminary count showed Johnson trailing, a "corrected vote" was reported in south Texas. The results gave 202 additional votes for Johnson and one more vote for his opponent, enabling Johnson to win by a "landslide" of 87 votes. Once again Connally followed his patron to Washington. Johnson called him "my boy John," but he was also adopted by his mentor's own mentor, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, the master of backstage maneuvering.

Connally, not a man for the shadows, soon hankered after a political career of his own. "But Nellie and I decided," he recalls, "that I shouldn't run for anything until we had financial independence." For what he calls his "moneymaking years," Connally found another successful man to hitch onto, Oil Baron Sid W. Richardson, whose fortune in the '40s was estimated at more than $150 million. In return for acting as his troubleshooter, Connally got help from Richardson to put together some lucrative deals of his own, and Connally took to the business the way a Texas steer takes to Bermuda grass. When Richardson died in 1959, Connally was named a co-executor of the estate. His fee: $750,000. For tax purposes, Connally received the amount spread over a decade, which led to charges that he was secretly accepting $75,000 a year during 1963-69, when he was Texas Governor. Responds Connally: "It was not a secret. The whole thing was brought up at my [Secretary of] Navy confirmation hearings in 1961." The transcript shows that he did indeed inform the committee that fees were still owed to him, but he says that he was not required to tell about the deferred payment plan. There was nothing illegal about this arrangement.

In 1960, while managing Johnson's unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Connally contended that John Kennedy was suffering from Addison's disease, a charge that Kennedy Aide Pierre Salinger described as "far beyond the latitude of fair play, even in the rough-and-tumble of convention politics." Nevertheless, at the urging of Rayburn and Johnson, Connally was made Secretary of the Navy in the new Kennedy Administration. He threw himself into the job, but he soon showed signs of restlessness with day-to-day administration. He quit in 1961 to go back to Texas and run for Governor.

His six years in Austin showed that he was no political clone of Lyndon Johnson. Both fiscally and socially, he was more conservative. Says Hank Brown, who then headed the state AFL-CIO: "I've seen him stand and talk about industrial safety, then nothing happened. He fought the minimum wage, he lowered taxes on banks, he lowered taxes on business, and he raised the sales tax." He both doubled state spending and raised the budget surplus—and he built a political machine that lasted a decade. His administration was untainted by scandal. And though many of his views displeased minority leaders, Congressman Gonzalez notes: "I was never able to get any other Governor to