Scars

Pale and still easily exhausted, Democratic Governor John Connally last week tried to tend to the business of Texas from a hospital bed in Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital. His recovery from the bullet that ripped through his chest, wrist and thigh has been rapid. His punctured lung has re-inflated and is healing beyond all original expectations. Each day he is up and about for a bit longer. Half of the stainless steel wires used to stitch together his torn thigh have been removed. Doctors predicted that the Governor would leave the hospital in a week or so, should recover with little more to show than a collection of scars, possibly a stiff wrist--and a horrifying memory.

In a brief interview with a lone reporter, Governor Connally talked mostly of the moments when bullets flew, but he also had some rambling remarks about one of his closest friends--the new President.

Lyndon Johnson, he said, "is a person who will be viewed by some as being perhaps unlettered and in some ways he is unlettered . . . not the most well-read, but he has the greatest human understanding that you will ever encounter ... He is a person of great charm and great poise. At times he can be almost brusque and rude, [but he is] always determined, always firm ... an indomitable worker, working always for perfection."

As a longtime Johnson political manager, Connally plotted strategy for L.B.J. campaigns from 1937 right down through the 1960 national Democratic convention. Lyndon helped bring Connally to Washington as Kennedy's first Navy Secretary. But Connally disliked that life and resigned the post, whereupon Vice President Johnson put his own political prestige on the line in his home state to help Connally get elected Governor. Connally presumably would protest against returning to Washington, but after he recovers from his wounds he almost certainly could be persuaded to go if Lyndon really put the pressure on.

Connally's accomplishments as Governor of Texas have been quite modest --some new industry attracted to the state, a tourist development agency set up, a commission appointed to study higher education problems. Texas minority groups have deplored his stand against the public-accommodations section of the Administration's civil rights bill. Political trouble looms in his own party, where fighting-mad liberal Democrats cry that Connally, with Johnson's blessing, has frequently snubbed them.

If a call to Government service in Washington does not come from Old Friend Lyndon Johnson, Connally will leave Parkland Hospital to return to the 108-year-old becolumned Governor's mansion in Austin--and to the family life he loves with his attractive wife Nellie, a onetime University of Texas Sweetheart, their two sons and a daughter.

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