BEFORE HIS INDICTMENT last August for bribery and perjury, John Connally was a man to be envied. A skilled politician and a millionaire ten times over, he started high and rose swiftly, successively serving as Secretary of the Navy, governor of Texas (three times), and Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon Cabinet. He appeared a contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 1976.

But to Richard Nixon's enemies, Connally embodied many of the supposed peculiar vices of the Nixon White House and the Republican Party. Smoothy, shrewd, wealthy, and opportunistic, Connally was a perfect target for liberal acrimony. When he left the Democrats for the GOP in 1973, his old enemy Ralph Yarborough remarked "That's the first time in history a rat has swam toward a sinking ship." The indictment merely confirmed what Connally's enemies had long suspected, and few doubted he would be convicted. Asked why a man of Cornally's wealth would risk his career for a piddling $10,000, one politician replied "John would think of that as a legal fee to which he was entitled. He wouldn't think of it as a bribe." The white knights of the Special Prosecutor's Office had toppled one Nixon crony after another, and Connally looked like merely another transgressor of the public trust, caught red-handed.

By the time the trial began three weeks ago, the government's case was crumbling. Their star witness was Connally's old friend Jake Jacobsen, a former lobbyist for the Associated Milk Producers, who said he gave Connally $10,000 in 1972 in exchange for Connally's support for raising the floor on milk prices. But Jacobsen had only agreed to testify against Connally when prosecutors offered to drop several more serious charges against him in an unrelated bank fraud case. The prosecution had no one to directly corroborate Jacobsen's story--he and Connally were alone when the money changed hands, Jacobsen said.

THE GOVERNMENT PRODUCED evidence to support Jacobsen's version of the time and place of the meetings. Connally admitted both that Jacobsen had offered him the money and that he had persuaded President Nixon to push for a raise in the Price Supports shift. Jacobsen was Connally's lone accuser, and hardly a credible one: when he turned state's evidence, he was deeply in debt and his wife was seriously ill. Connally's lawyer forced Jacobsen to admit that he had received $15,000 from AMPI but couldn't recall giving Connally the last $5,000, and showed that Jacobsen's payments on his debts coincided in time and amount with the alleged payoffs.

The most striking thing about the trial was not Connally's acquittal but that the government had even gone to court with such a flimsy case.

No doubt many Americans will remain convinced of Connally's basic dishonesty, if not of his criminal guilt in this instance. To those who hated Nixon, Connally had not been--could not be--vindicated.

At the same time, a lot of people may be sympathetic to Connally. Many Americans always had a vague suspicion of the righteous zealotry of the Special Prosecutor's team, realizing that issues are seldom so clear-cut as the public was led to believe in the Watergate scandals. Even before his indictment, Connally was a long shot for the Republican presidential nomination, and President Ford would have to withdraw for Connally to have a chance. Connally still lacks a network of supporters in the GOP and an office. Unlike his potential opponents, he has not been out preaching the Gospel to the faithful.

But Connally's unlimited financial resources and shrewd political mind will help to offset those weaknesses. Through all his troubles. Connally stood far above the gray men of Nixon's administration. In a fight between the leaders of the poles of the party. Reagan and Rockefeller, he might be an ideal candidate to step into the vacuum in the middle.

Whatever, the future, Connally looks and acts like a president. From his upset victory in the 1962 race for governor of Texas, through his near-fatal wounding in John Kennedy's limousine in Dallas, through his acquittal last week. Connally's unshakable faith in his destiny has proved well-founded. He summed up his attitude about politics in the advice he gave Nixon: "If you lose, you lose big. But what's the sense of losing small?" John Connally has never lost, small or big, and the events of last week suggest that it still may be unwise to bet against him.