In History's Shadow: An American Odyssey.

• Author: Reed, John Shelton

In John Connally's interesting, score-settling autobiograpby, the former governor says be didn't yearn for more power. But there's thwarted ambition on every page

John Connally died last June 15 from pneumonia, complicated by a lung condition believed to be related to the wound he received from Lee Harvey Oswald. His 76 years in many ways recapitulated the history of the South in this century: from humble agrarian origins, early New Deal loyalties and military valor, to political and economic success (with an occasional whiff of corruption), finally switching political allegiance to an ambivalent Republican party, but always with the nagging sense that he never got his just deserts from the Eastern Establishment.

Like most Southerners of his generation, Connally was not born to prosperity. His father was successively a tenant farmer, a bricklayer, a barber, a butcher, and finally a bus owner/driver and local politician. The young Connally wore kneepads cut from old tires to pick cotton. (Later he did not talk much about these inelegant origins - not that he was ashamed of them, he says.) At 16, he went off to the state university, where he was active in a drama club that during the 1930s produced Eli Wallach, Zachary Scott, Allen Ludden, and the television actress Betty White. (Walter Cronkite was on the publicity committee.) In Austin he was elected president of the student assembly and made friends that lasted him for life: future businessmen, politicians, and political lawyers, among them Robert Strauss and Congressman Jake Pickle. He acquired a law degree and got his first taste of statewide politics working for a business-backed gubernatorial candidate who lost to the inimitable W. Lee ("Pass the biscuits, Pappy") O'Daniel of the musical Light Crust Doughboys. Fatefully, he came to the notice of an ambitious young New Dealer named Lyndon Johnson, whom he served as factotum and advisor off and on for the next 30 years.

After Navy service in World War II - which gave him a Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and a taste for the recordings of Enrico Caruso - his fortunes rose with those of his patron and his state. As he moved back and forth between Washington and Texas, from government to business and back again, his talents and connections made him a wealthy man by non-Texas standards, a prominent figure in the conservative wing of the Texas Democratic party, and eventually a popular and successful three-term governor, elected to his last term with 72 percent of the vote.

When Johnson became president, he often sought Connally's advice - according to Connally - but he didn't always take it. Connally says that he disagreed with his mentor about three things: He wanted to threaten Hanoi with nuclear attack, he disapproved of the volume and speed (but not the aims) of Johnson's social legislation, and he thought Johnson suffered a "failure of nerve" in not replacing John Kennedy's cabinet - including Robert Kennedy - with his own men.

After 1968, the McGovernite handwriting was on the wall for conservative Democrats, and Connally, like many other Southerners, changed first his vote and his party. Approached by Billy Graham (of all people about Gergenizing the Nixon cabinet as secretary of Defense or of the Treasury, Connally took Treasury. "State has the glamour, Defense has the toys, but Treasury is and always has been the most powerful job in the cabinet," he observes. He says he was always "a conservative who believed in an active government," and he certainly backed a good many statist measures as secretary of the Treasury, notably a 10 percent import "surcharge" to "correct unfair trade balances," the Lockheed loan guarantee, and Nixon's wage and price controls. (This last is one of the two things in his career Connally regards as mistakes, the other being the real estate investments that bankrupted him in 1987.) He left Treasury, just in time to avoid Watergate, over a dispute about his prerogatives as secretary (an undersecretary was reporting...