Tawl Tawm

They called him "Tawl Tawm." His flamboyant Senate oratory could drown an opponent in sweet molasses or hog-tie him in barbed wire. He smoked ten 15-c- cigars every day and wore his white hair so long that it crested in curls at the nape of his neck. He dressed in modified swallowtail suits--a dignified black from October to May, a delicate grey from May to September. He was Texas' longtime Senator Tom Connally. He died last week in Washington at 86, and, recollecting his career, many a Washingtonian shed a tear for what he thought was a more pungent era.

"It Is Murder." Raised on an east-central Texas cotton farm, Connally went off to college in 1891, heard a speech by the Democratic idol of the day, William Jennings Bryan, and was so smitten that he copied the great man's bow-tie-and-frock-coat dress, his stentorian manner of speech and his shaggy haircut. Connally got his law degree at the University of Texas, practiced in Marlin, Texas, and served two terms in the state legislature. In 1916 he won the congressional seat from Texas' 11th district.

His first vote in Congress was in favor of the U.S. declaration of war against Germany, and even though he was then 41, Connally figured he could not just sit by and send other men to war. He vacated his congressional seat, joined the Army as a captain, sat out the war in the U.S., and went back to the House after the Armistice.

Connally was regularly re-elected to the House until 1928, when he decided to try for the Senate. He mounted a campaign that put him foursquare against the Ku Klux Klan and in favor of Al Smith for President. Neither position was popular in Texas, but he won anyway. In the Senate, Connally backed most of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, but he refused to vote for the National Industrial Recovery Act, battled fiercely against FDR's 1937 effort to pack the Supreme Court. In 1938 Connally led a filibuster to defeat an antilynching bill, claimed it violated states' rights. "I am against the lynching of any man," he said. "It is murder. But I am also against lynching the Constitution of the United States."

Blood on the Wall. Much of Connally's bluster was for show, and rarely was he deeply, genuinely angry. One such occasion was on Pearl Harbor day. Riding home from a White House meeting on the night of Dec. 7, he was in tears of rage as he told a newsman: "That goddamned Frank Knox, that idiot, that fool. He told us only a week ago that the Navy was ready for anything. Now it's lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor." As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as an admirer of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations concept, Connally began working with Michigan's Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg to line up Senate support for the United Nations. He helped draw up the U.N. Charter in San Francisco in 1945, made speech after speech on the Senate floor to assure its ratification.

At one point he arose to speak against Senators who proposed changes in the Charter. Cried he: "They know that the League of Nations was slaughtered in this chamber." Then he turned, pointed his glasses to the rear of the Senate and roared, "Can't you see the blood? There it is on the wall."

But Connally's internationalism had its limits, and his name is most prominently associated with the controversial Connally Amendment, which restricts World Court jurisdiction over cases involving the U.S. to those that the Administration decides are not within domestic jurisdiction.

Through the years, Connally's biting wit was feared by his Senate colleagues. He once snappishly advised New Hampshire Republican Styles Bridges that he should "approach these matters with an open mind instead of an open mouth." He left Ohio Republican Robert Taft speechless with shock by accusing him of "cravenly going around begging for a few dirty, filthy votes." He warned New Hampshire's Bible-quoting Republican Charles Tobey: "Don't you ever shake that lanky Yankee finger at me." He attacked Chiang Kai-shek for "stealing" U.S. aid money, advised that "the trouble with the Generalissimo is that he doesn't do any generalissimoing." And once after a tough session with Soviet delegates at the U.N., he snapped, "They remind me of a difficult fellow I knew in Texas. He once told me, I'm going home and if my wife ain't got supper ready, I'll beat her up. And if she has got supper ready, I ain't gonna eat it.' "

The old man's strength began to falter in the early '50s, and in 1952 he announced he would retire. Rather than leave Washington, Connally joined a law firm, used his office mostly for a spot to jaw with old pals about politics. He visited Capitol Hill regularly for a while. But more and more of his old friends disappeared. Feeble and ailing, he only went to the Capitol to have his hair cut--because the barbers there knew how to cut it just right. A couple of years ago, on one of his last trips to the Hill, he said sadly to an old newsman friend: "Reckon I won't be seeing you any more."

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