John Bowden Connally Jr. (February 27, 1917 - June 15, 1993) was an American politician. He served as the 39th Governor of Texas and as the 61st United States Secretary of the Treasury. He began his career as a Democrat but switched to the Republican Party in 1973. Born in Floresville, Texas, Connally pursued a legal career after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin.

Connally announced two weeks before Christmas of 1961 that he was leaving the position of Navy secretary to return to Texas to seek the 1962 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He would have to compete against the incumbent Marion Price Daniel, Sr., who was running for a fourth consecutive two-year term. Daniel was in political trouble following the enactment of a two-cent state sales tax in 1961, which had soured many voters on his administration. Daniel had let the tax become law without his signature but could have vetoed the measure. Former state Attorney General Will Wilson, who had run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1961, also entered the gubernatorial campaign and was particularly critical of Johnson, who he claimed engineered Connally's candidacy. Other primary candidates were highway commissioner Marshall Formby of Plainview, another party conservative, and General Edwin A. Walker, who made anti-communism the centerpiece of his campaign. Connally waged the most active campaign of any of the Democrats, traveling more than 22,000 miles across the state. He made forty-three major speeches and appeared on multiple statewide and local telecasts. Connally ran as a conservative Democrat. He was placed in a primary runoff election against a liberal attorney from Houston favored by organized labor, Don Yarborough, no relation to Connally's long-term party nemesis U.S. Senator Ralph W. Yarborough. After winning the runoff against Yarborough by a close vote, Connally faced a determined bid by the conservative Republican and oilfield equipment executive Jack Cox, also of Houston. Cox, a former state representative from his native Stephens County, had run unsuccessfully two years earlier in the Democratic primary against Daniel. Connally received 847,036 ballots (54 percent) to Cox's 715,025 (45.6 percent). In the campaign, Connally made an issue of Cox's switching to the Republican Party (GOP) the previous year. Eleven years later, Connally made the same switch. Cox, as it turned out, was the strongest Republican gubernatorial candidate in Texas since 1924. Not until 1972, when Henry Grover carried the GOP banner, did the Republicans make a better showing for governor. Connally was a master campaign professional, having worked on several of Lyndon Johnson's campaigns. He believed in the entourage and advance men, the practice of having staff aides checking out events and having press interviews on the run to demonstrate Connally's heavy schedule of commitments. Biographer Charles Ashman claims that Connally would have aides telephone airports which he would shortly visit and ask to page him for an urgent message. Such manipulation, he believed, impressed airport patrons, many of whom would also be Texas voters. In 1971, Republican President Nixon appointed the then Democrat Connally as Treasury Secretary. Before agreeing to take the appointment, however, Connally told Nixon that the president must find a position in the administration for George H. W. Bush, the Republican who had been defeated in November 1970 in a hard-fought U.S. Senate race against Democrat Lloyd M. Bentsen. Connally told Nixon that his taking the Treasury post would embarrass Bush, who had "labored in the vineyards" for Nixon's election as president, while Connally had supported Humphrey. Ben Barnes, then the lieutenant governor and originally a Connally ally, claims in his autobiography that Connally's insistence saved Bush's political career because the then former U.S. representative and twice-defeated Senate candidate relied on appointed offices to build a resume by which to seek the presidency in 1980 and again in 1988. Nixon hence named Bush as ambassador to the United Nations in order to secure Connally's services at Treasury. Barnes also said that he doubted George W. Bush could have become president in 2001 had Bush's father not first been given the string of federal appointments during the 1970s to strengthen the family's political viability. Shortly after taking the Treasury post, Connally famously told a group of European finance ministers worried about the export of American inflation that the dollar "is our currency, but your problem." Secretary Connally defended a $50 billion increase in the debt ceiling and a $35 to $40 billion budget deficit as an essential "fiscal stimulus" at a time when five million Americans were unemployed. He unveiled Nixon's program of raising the price of gold and formally devaluing the dollar--finally leaving the old gold standard entirely, a process begun in 1934 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prices continued to increase during 1971, and Nixon allowed wage and price guidelines, which Congress had authorized on a stand-by basis, to be implemented. Connally later shied away from his role in recommending the failed wage and price controls, and announced guaranteed loans for the ailing Lockheed aircraft company. He also fought a lonely battle against growing balance-of-payment problems with the nation's trading partners, and undertook important foreign diplomatic trips for Nixon through his role as Treasury Secretary. Historian Bruce Schulman wrote that Nixon was "awed" by the handsome, urbane Texan who was also a tough political fighter. Schulman added that Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, noted that Connally was the only cabinet member that Nixon did not disparage behind his back, and that this was high praise indeed. Connally stepped down as treasury secretary in 1972 to head "Democrats for Nixon", a group funded by Republicans. Connally's old mentor, Lyndon B. Johnson, stood behind Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern of South Dakota, although McGovern had long opposed Johnson's foreign and defense policies. It was the first time that Connally and Johnson were on opposite sides of a general election campaign. Connally's brother, Golfrey Connally, an economics professor at a junior college in San Antonio, also endorsed McGovern. Some evidence even suggests that Connally was "privately" for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, not the Democratic candidate Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, for whom Johnson campaigned with considerable loyalty. During the war, Connally had served on Eisenhower's planning staff for the invasion of North Africa. In the 1972 U.S. Senate election in Texas, Connally endorsed the Democratic Harold Barefoot Sanders, later a federal judge from Dallas, rather than the Republican incumbent John G. Tower, also of Dallas. Connally had considered running against Tower in 1966, but chose to run for a third term as governor. Tower then defeated a Connally ally, state Attorney General Waggoner Carr of Lubbock. Tower, Nixon's choice in the Senate race, won handily over Sanders, but the Republican candidate for governor, Henry Grover of Houston, a victim of intraparty maneuvering, fell short and lost to Democrat Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde, a city in South Texas. In January 1973, Johnson died of heart disease. He and Connally had been friends since 1938. Connally took part in eulogizing Johnson during interment services at the LBJ Ranch in Gillespie County, along with the Rev. Billy Graham, who officiated at the service. Millions around the world viewed Connally's eulogy as the most famous moment of the LBJ funeral, as it was a reminder that Connally was wounded in the assassination that made his mentor and fellow Texan president.

When did he leave office?
In 1971, Republican President Nixon appointed the then Democrat Connally as Treasury Secretary.