"Powerful self-control is the distinctive mark of John B. Connally," says TIME Washington Bureau Chief Robert Ajemian. "He's in control on the podium, where he ranks with Ted Kennedy as one of the two best stump speakers in America. He's in control of his emotions, and he never appears off-balance." A former assistant managing editor of LIFE, Ajemian has been covering presidential candidates since 1956, and reported extensively on the Texan for TIME three years ago. For this week's cover story, Ajemian shadowed three Connallys nonstop for a week: he rode with the leather-lunged campaigner on a four-states-in-four-days fund-raising sweep; he weekended with the ten-gallon-hatted, boots-and-khaki cattle rancher at his Floresville, Texas, spread; and he interviewed the smooth-talking, pinstriped attorney in his expensively furnished Houston law office. It was only in this third and most worldly incarnation that Ajemian saw Big John ease up on his relentless self-control and look touchingly human. "I had asked him about country-and-western music, and he started talking about the ballads of his youth," Ajemian recalls. "Then,all of a sudden, he began to sing -- his voice strong, a little creaky , perhaps and certainly less splendid than his oratory, but the words never faltered and he was into this song about The East Bound Train." ("My father is in prison/He's lost his sight, they say/ I'm going to seek his pardon/ This cold December day.") Ajemian's reporting was woven into a cover story by Staff Writer Walter Isaacson, who got out from behind his desk in Manhattan to catch Connally in action at some Northeastern whistlestops. As a native son of Louisiana and former city hall reporter for the New Orleans States-Item, Isaacson is familiar with the eccentricities of Southern politicians. "Their style," he says, "is a stimulating mix of the byzantine and the evangelical." This week, after a year and a half as a Nation writer in New York, Isaacson begins a new assignment as a congressional correspondent in Washington, D.C., thus moving even closer to the heart of Dixie -- not to mention the byzantine and the evangelical.

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