The Senate & the Peace

(See Cover)

Shortly after 11 o'clock one morning last fortnight, a little group of men burst out of the Democratic conference room in the Senate Office Building. They were led by an extraordinary figure. Tall, pink and portly, with a mane of grey-white hair curling over his collar, he was dressed in a long-coated black suit, a boiled white shirt fastened with gold studs, a black bow tie, and mirror-shiny black boots. As he pushed his way through a swarm of newshawks and photographers Tom Connally of Texas, whose appearance reminds some of an oldtime Shakespearean actor, cried out sonorously: "Make way for liberty!"

Everybody knew what "liberty" he meant. Senator Connally and colleagues were on their way to tell rebellious Alben Barkley that he was no longer beholden to President Roosevelt for his Senate leadership; that now he was free to be his own and the Senate's man.

But the Connally battle-cry had a meaning which transcended the individual fortunes of Alben Barkley. It was also a declaration of the U.S. Senate's independence from Executive domination. The Barkley revolt had completed a process begun in 1937, by which control of the Senate has passed from convinced or captive New Dealers to a working coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. For the New Deal is a real minority now: of the last 13 who voted to uphold the President's veto, at least three are secretly against a Fourth Term for their Boss.

The Democratic leaders of the Senate now are the veterans who have risen by seniority to chairmanships or high rank on the eleven important committees. Connecticut's Francis Maloney and Missouri's Harry Truman are independent voters and thinkers; neither has much influence on the floor. Montana's Burt Wheeler, diehard Roosevelt hater, is a formidable individual fighter. But the real leaders are Kentucky's Barkley, Georgia's Walter F. George, Virginia's Harry Byrd, North Carolina's Josiah Bailey, Alabama's John Bankhead, Tennessee's Kenneth McKellar and Texas' Tom Connally. These are all veterans who feel that the deference due their long Party service has been withheld by Franklin Roosevelt and his brain-trusters. All are men of the Old South, which has been shaken to its foundation by Franklin Roosevelt's economic experiments and his "coddling" of Labor and the Negro.

These rebel barons of the Democratic Party will nevertheless rally around the Term IV campaign. But this does not remove the possibility of a disastrous feud between President and Senate, either before or after Nov. 7. In no field could such a feud be more disastrous than on the traditional battleground of Presidents and Senates: the conduct of foreign relations and the making of peace.

Therefore, as the Senate retains its Constitutional power to veto a treaty by the vote of one-third plus one of the Senators present, the life, personality and opinions of Thomas Terry Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have become of portentous significance to the U.S. and to the world.

Texas Talker. Tom Connally's mother (he dropped the Thomas Terry long ago) was a Georgia girl who moved to Texas with her young husband, lost him in the first year of the Civil War, and returned to Georgia, where she married his brother and repeated the trip to Texas. Jones Connally, husband No. 2, became the father of Tom, of six daughters and another boy who died in infancy. After fighting through the Civil War, Father Connally settled down to raising cotton on the good black dirt of the Brazos valley near Waco. He prospered. But Tom, born in 1877, had to do his share of barnyard chores and pulling Johnson grass. He grew up hearing his father say over & over: "Tawm, I never had a chance for much education. If I'd had your chance, I'da gone to Congress."

From a "little ole red schoolhouse" through Baylor University at Waco to the University of Texas for a law course, Tom did well at his books. Otherwise he failed to distinguish himself much. He acquired a couple of nicknames: "Double-Barrel Shotgun" Connally, a tribute to his skinniness, and "Talking Tom," a tribute to his wagging tongue. His college days were briefly interrupted when he volunteered for the Spanish-American War; but his regiment saw no action. Settling down to law practice in Marlin (pop. then: 3,092) after the war, he found business none too brisk. Soon he ran for the legislature. After two terms he went back to the law again for twelve years, with a four-year stretch as prosecuting attorney of Falls County sandwiched in. Texas had frequent killings in those days and Tom Connally, increasingly adept in courtroom debate and cross examination, was soon making a good living. But politics was in his blood.

Tom Connally fitted easily into the groove of Texas politics, where a good show is worth more than a bundle of issues. As a youth he began patterning his clothes and hairdo after William Jennings Bryan's. He sharpened his naturally agile tongue on the works of Texas' once-famed skeptic, Brann the Iconoclast. He became an enthusiastic lodge-joiner and speaker at fraternal gatherings far & wide. By the time he was ready to run for Congress in 1916 he knew all the tricks.

His closest political friends and advisers forget what issues, if any, Tom talked about. But they remember well the time an opponent momentarily dismayed him by purchasing and proceeding to campaign in an eye-catching, vote-catching jalopy. After hunting in vain for an even more dilapidated vehicle. Tom bought a shiny red-wheeled limousine and stumped the district crying: "If my opponent hasn't been successful enough to buy himself a respectable automobile, he ain't good enough to represent you in Congress." Tom won hands down.

Connally's first act as Congressman was to vote (after prayer) for war with Germany. His next was to join the Army, as a captain. This time the Armistice thwarted his ambition to fight. He was re-elected regularly to the House until 1928, when he campaigned courageously against the Ku Klux Klan and for Al Smith, and went to the Senate. He became Foreign Relations chairman in 1941.

The Connolly System. At 66 Tom Connally is a happy man. He owns a home in Marlin and a "couple little ole farms" (some 900 acres) near by, but he is not rich. Better at making money than keeping it, he lost heavily in the collapse of the Florida land boom and the 1929 stockmarket. He signed over his late first wife's entire fortune to their lawyer son Ben, now an Army Air Forces major stationed near San Antonio. (Said he: "She loved me but she idolized Ben.") Nonetheless he lives comfortably and well, enjoying plenty of good food and as many as ten three-for-50-c- cigars a day. For years, from longtime conviction and in deference to the law and the opinions of his colleague, Texas' late Senator Morris Sheppard, original proposer of prohibition, he both voted and drank dry. Now he enjoys an occasional drink, especially a glass of sherry before dinner. A willing dancer and accomplished raconteur specializing in Negro dialect stories, he loves Washington's glittering parties, has long been a regular at Evalyn Walsh McLean's shindigs.

After his first wife's death in 1935, Tom Connally remained a bachelor for seven years. In 1942 he married the comely, youthful-looking widow of his friend Morris Sheppard. The Connallys now live in a comfortable, handsome white colonial house on Woodland Drive in the residential section behind the Shoreham Hotel. In the cozy, book-lined den the Senator listens regularly to Lum & Abner on the radio and enjoys his favorite pastime of bridge, a game which he plays by a "Connally system'' which still baffles his new wife. It seems to involve bidding every hand in no trump, often with a bid of six right at the start. When there is no bridge, the Connallys frequently go out.

Tom Connally is proud of his Foreign Relations chairmanship, proud of the attention which his distinctive appearance attracts, proud of his reputation as the Senate's ablest rough & tumble debater and gallery-pleasing showman. Most of the flavor of his barbed and occasionally brutal wit is lost in print. It requires the addition of his personality, his masterly timing in repartee, his mimicry and acting --mincing and squeaking when he calls somebody an "old woman," swelling and shrinking as he describes things large or small. Connally carefully chose his seat in the second row rear of the Senate chamber in order to be comfortably visible to the maximum number of galleryites.

Connally's seat in the Senate is seemingly secure. Though he has gone along with President Roosevelt on most issues, and though Texas is increasingly anti-New Deal. Connally has stood out against the President often enough to convince Texans that he is no abject coattail-rider. He voted against NRA; he risked his political career to fight the President's Supreme Court plan when most of Texas was for it; he co-sponsored the Smith-Connally antistrike bill which passed last summer over the President's veto.

And many a Texan who neither knows nor cares that Connally is chairman of Foreign Relations is sure that Old Tawm will always put on a good show, will always look after the interests of Texas oil and cotton, will always fight to keep labor in line and the "nigra" in his place. He is what Texans call "a good, steady man to have in the Senate."

The South Looks Outward. Before abandoning himself to despair about the chances of a great & good peace surviving Tom Connally's Senate, the patriot should recall one fact about the present Senate leadership. However backward-looking the South may be in other matters, it has depended for prosperity since colonial days on the sale of its cotton and tobacco in world markets and is traditionally outward-looking in the field of U.S. foreign relations.

Tom Connally was an early devotee of Virginia's Woodrow Wilson. He was for the League of Nations and World Court from the start. He was a Big Navy man throughout the '30s. Though he hoped the U.S. could keep out when War II began, he caught on quicker than most, was in the forefront, of the fight for Neutrality Act repeal, Lend-Lease, Selective Service, et al.

Now he accepts as simple, unshakable fact the platitudinous postulate that "there has to be some kind of world organization to keep the peace, and we have to be in it."

But, though he sees clearly enough on such big points, Chairman Connally is hampered by a vast lack of erudition. He has no real foreign policy himself; he has not attempted to think his way through the problem of the Polish frontiers; the problem of Finland, of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; he has no profound ideas about the Balkans or Eastern Europe or the Near East or China. In general he seems content to take whatever proposals the White House and the State Department send down, amend them to suit the Senate's temper that week, and pass them on.

In his 26 years on the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, Tom Connally has inevitably picked up a good deal of information. He has visited Europe several times. But he has no clain to expertness in the endless subtleties and complexities of foreign relations. He shows none of the scholarly inclinations in the field of international affairs which have distinguished his great predecessors in the Foreign Relations chairmanship. In knowledge and experience he ranks far closer to William J. ("Gumshoe Bill") Stone, the Missouri lawyer-politician who stubbornly opposed Wilson's war policies as chairman in 1914-18, than to the real statesmen who have held his job. Henry Clay (1834-36) had already served a term as Secretary of State before coming to the chairmanship. Charles Sumner (1861-71) was a diligent firsthand student of European peoples and governments, and an intimate of many foreign statesmen. The elder Henry Cabot Lodge (1919-24), whose judgment was warped by his consuming personal hatred of Woodrow Wilson, nonetheless rightfully held his title of "the scholar in politics." William E. Borah (1924-33), though provincial to the last, was widely informed and superbly articulate in his chosen specialty.

In the last couple of years he has begun reading himself to sleep for a half hour or so each night, but his reading is confined almost exclusively to the U.S. Civil War. "I think he knows every battle of the Civil War and everyone who fell in every battle," says Mrs. Connally.

If Connally is undereducated, he is also overcautious. On occasion he has stepped out ahead of the State Department, once with his famed blurt during the delicate negotiations at the Pan-American conference of 1942 that "we trust . . . President Castillo will change his mind or the Argentine people will change Presidents." A lot of people now think that the State Department might wisely have begun to get tough with Argentina far sooner than it did. But at the time Tom Connally was furiously criticized as a tactless blunderer. He has been supercareful since, which may or may not be a defect.

Certainly Torn Connally does follow the cautious State Department lead closely. He accepts uncritically the U.S. practice of expediency; the series of deals with Darlan, Franco, Badoglio and the Little King have not ruffled him; he went undisturbed through the storm over the U.S. treatment of De Gaulle. Clearly Tom Connally, speaking either for himself or the Senate, has not asserted any perceptible moral leadership, or acted to lay the foundation of a firm and trustworthy foreign policy.

Tom Connally remembers only too well how the Senate, masterfully maneuvered by Foreign Relations Chairman Henry Cabot Lodge, wrecked the peace of 1919 --which was in poor shape anyway by the time Wilson got back from Paris. A savage fighter in debate, Tom Connally envisions himself whipping back a pack of Roosevelt-hating Senators as they attempt to wreck the next peace. But Chairman Connally, like many another man of international good will, may be laboring under a profound misapprehension. There is no present reason to believe that the pattern of 1918-20 will repeat itself, that the Allies will again win a total victory and that the U.S. Senate will again be offered a total peace to accept, amend or reject.

Many an expert now believes it far more likely that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin will continue to make the peace as they have begun: piecemeal, by private conferences and agreements. The President has indicated that there will be no immediate Peace Conference this time; and some observers, mindful of the Long-Armistice proposal of Sumner Welles, believe there will be no Peace Conference at all. Tom Connally, to be sure, swears that the Senate shall not be thus bypassed. He insisted successfully that he and some of his committeemen have a share in the planning of UNRRA, which was an executive agreement on a tentative first step into the postwar. But in a disordered world of partial, piecemeal victory, Tom Connally and his fellows may be presented with other executive agreements in the form of faits accomplis which they will have no choice but to accept.

Even more against Tom Connally's chances of participating in peacemaking is the fact that he views the Senate's role in literal terms of "advice & consent," not of leadership. His imagination has not caught the vision of the way that great Senate debate might inform and inspire a nation which seems resolved to participate responsibly in world affairs, but is deeply confused about ways & means. His attitude, like that of other high officials, is the comfortable one of not trying to rock the boat. He is little moved by the argument that if there is to be a people's and not a rulers' peace, the debate cannot begin a day too soon.

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