the last book I ever read (The Passage of Power, excerpt eight)

from Robert A. Caro's The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson:

On October 30, Lyndon Johnson had attended Tom Connally's funeral in Marlin, Texas, flying to Waco, the nearest city with a sizable airport, and then continuing on by a small plane to the little town.

All during Johnson's years as a congressman's secretary and a congressman--and into his first term as senator, until Connally retired in 1953, at the age of seventy-six, at the end of his fourth term in the Senate--Connally had been a great power in Washington, chairman for almost a decade of the Foreign Relations Committee, as well as an icon in Texas, his frock coat, string tie, black hat and great mane of silver-gray hair familiar in every corner of the state: a man to be courted and feared. As a newly elected senator in 1948, Johnson had made a pilgrimage to Marlin to solicit Connally's help with committee assignments, and had been careful not to take offense when Connally patronizingly refused it. John had told his staff never, under any circumstances, to antagonize him. But in 1963, Connally had been retired for ten years, and the turnout of officials at his funeral was slim. Although Presidents Kennedy and Truman had sent elaborate floral arrangements, the Presidents weren't there themselves, and neither were any senators or congressmen, not even the representative from the local district.

After the funeral ceremony in Marlin's First Methodist Church, mourners filed past the open coffin, and when it was Johnson's turn, the lined stopped as he stood looking down at Connally's face. He put on his glasses, and continued looking, for a long moment, and then walked out of the church, and the harsh Texas sun spotlit his face, on which was written a depression so deep that Posh Oltorf, who had known Johnson for many years, was shocked.

After following the coffin to the cemetery and watching it being lowered into the ground, Johnson came to Oltorf's house. "I think it's a disgrace that there was no delegation there from Congress," he said, as Oltorf recalls it. "As powerful as he was, and with all he had done, if he had died when he was in office, you wouldn't have been able to get into Waco for all the airplanes."

"I had seen him low before," Oltorf was to say, "but I had never seen him that low." And having heard Johnson tell him more than once how meaningless a job the vice presidency was--how only the presidency meant anything--Oltorf felt he understood Johnson's feeling. Tom Connally had been a powerful senator, but no one remembered him. Lyndon Johnson had been a powerful senator. He was thinking he would never be President--and no one would remember him, either.