Old Tom Connally’s toes were bruised and tender. Back home in Texas, where he is running a hard campaign for reelection, some of the folks had been stepping on him for paying too little attention to Texas and too much attention to Dean Acheson and those other dudes he runs into as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
One day last week he and Acheson walked out from a closed Foreign Relations Committee meeting about the governmental crisis in France. Inside, Acheson had just assured everybody that France would take care of her problems and do her part. Reporters asked Connally for a statement and his toes twinged. “France,” he snapped, “must be told that she cannot rely upon the U.S. to defend her and to hand out large sums of money to aid her from an economic standpoint. France must do her duty. That’s all.”
Next day, while the French press was fuming and aggrieved French Ambassador Henri Bonnet was rushing to the State Department, Old Tom’s toes twinged again. This time Tom wanted the Senate to get going on a vote on the tidelands oil bill, which means a lot to Texas. The vote was being held up by a discussion of Hawaii’s plea for statehood. Hawaii, snorted Minor Statesman Connally from the Senate floor, is just “a province out in the Pacific Ocean … I think I am a better American than a great many people who live in Hawaii. I’ve been to Hawaii. The majority of the people there are not of American ancestry or descent.”
Within 24 hours, an emergency committee in Honolulu raised $5,000 to send six Hawaiians (a Gold Star mother and five veterans) off to Washington to make Connally eat his words. En route, the Hawaiians stopped off at Austin, Texas, and got a rousing reception from old friends in Texas’ 36th Division. The reason: a “lost battalion” of the Texas 36th, when encircled by the enemy in France in 1944, was rescued by the U.S. 442nd regimental combat team, which was made up mostly of Hawaiian-born Japanese-Americans. At the time, none of the Texans made inquiries about the Hawaiians’ ancestry.
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