The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Williams seemed not to care where his investigations led. One was into the overseas junkets taken by members of Congress—which didn’t increase his popularity with his colleagues. But while the Senate inner circle and the reporters who crowded close to it and seemed to regard themselves almost as a part of it sneered at Williams, journalists of a more independent bent had made his qualities known to the public. “His performance has not included TV spectaculars,” the New York Times was to observe. “He has no power of subpoena. He has no sleuthing staff, no special counsel serving as prosecutor.” Yet, as the Times wrote, by his investigations “Senator Williams has perhaps brought down more wrongdoers operating in the United States Government, or chiseling from it, than any other man.” “A growing army of men and women … confide in Senator John J. Williams,” Doris Fleeson wrote. Thanks to these journalists, “Whispering Willie” was not John Williams’ only nickname; he had another one: “The conscience of the Senate.” The fiery investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register, who admired him—as much as Mollenhoff could admire anyone—said that despite the softness of Williams’ voice, what he said “usually echoed with a roar throughout the entire federal government.” And, late in September, Williams had begun an investigation into Bobby Baker.

  He did so in his usual low-key manner, inviting Serv-U’s Ralph Hill to his office and asking him for the names of other persons he could speak to if he wanted to learn more about Baker’s business interests, and then he started inviting these people in, and one of them was Don Reynolds.

  The October 6 article contained Reynolds’ name only on a list of persons Williams had interviewed, identifying him as an insurance broker from Silver Spring, Maryland; it gave no hint of what subjects he had discussed with Williams. But Johnson knew what subjects Reynolds might be discussing with Williams—and, it would turn out, was indeed discussing with the senator.

  Reynolds told Williams that in 1957, having been advised that a “political connection” would be helpful in building up his insurance business, he contacted Bobby Baker, a fellow South Carolinian, and they entered into an agreement under which he would make payments to Baker “because,” as Reynolds was to put it, “of his social contacts and his wide knowledge of people [whom he] could present to me.” Baker had shortly thereafter introduced him to Walter Jenkins. Johnson, that same year, had mentioned to Baker that he was having difficulty obtaining life insurance because of his heart attack, and Baker, as he would recall, “told Senator Johnson about my partnership with Don Reynolds, and we agreed to seek the policy through him.” Reynolds secured Johnson $100,000 of insurance (in 1961, the amount would be increased to $200,000), whose premium, he learned, would be paid not by Johnson but by the LBJ Company, with the checks signed by Lady Bird—and when Reynolds obtained the policy, Baker brought him to the lobby outside the Senate Chamber so that he could hand it to Johnson personally.

  Johnson told him jovially that, as Reynolds was to recall, “he was going to rib his bigshot friends from Texas” that with all their insurance company connections, “they were unable to insure him and a country hick came up here from South Carolina and got it for him”; Reynolds, Baker was to say, “was delighted” to be “doing business with the big man.”

  The delight was soon to fade. Reynolds never spoke to Johnson again, but he did speak to Jenkins, because Jenkins called him in to tell him that in return for being allowed to write the policy and obtain the commission, about $2,500 per year, he would be required to purchase advertising time on the television station in Austin, KTBC-TV. When, Reynolds said, he protested that it made no sense for a Maryland insurance broker, unknown in Austin, to advertise on television there, Jenkins said that didn’t matter. Baker, Reynolds said, “prodded” him to buy the time. And after Reynolds made the purchase, buying $1,208 of airtime, another type of purchase was required. The Johnsons wanted a new stereo set, Baker told Reynolds, and Reynolds would have to supply it. Reynolds did, obtaining catalogs from various companies and giving them to Baker to give to the Johnsons; Lady Bird selected a Magnavox S-44 model in a cherrywood cabinet, an expensive set selling for about $900 in stores. Reynolds managed to buy it wholesale through a friend for $542.25; when Lady Bird wanted it delivered quickly for a party she was giving, he had it delivered airfreight, which cost an additional $42.50. Although Jenkins would later deny, again and again, the advertising time and stereo set demands, Baker would confirm them—“He [Johnson] took the stereo, and he required Don Reynolds to buy the … advertising.… It was a kickback pure and simple,” he was to say—as would Reynolds, who called the demands a “shakedown.” And when Williams asked Reynolds if he had proof of what he was saying, Reynolds produced it, and brought it to the senator’s office: the invoice from the Magnavox Company for the stereo, to be shipped to “Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson” and billed to “Mr. Don Reynolds”; the canceled check, signed by Reynolds, with which he had paid Magnavox; the canceled checks—one for $1,000, one for $208—signed by him that he had written to the Johnson television station for “advertising,” on the back of which were stamps showing they had been deposited to the account of “THE LBJ COMPANY.”1

  While these transactions were illegal—insurance laws in both the District of Columbia and Maryland prohibit an insurance salesman from sharing with a policyholder any commission or premium he collects, laws designed to prevent kickbacks or rebates being used by brokers as an inducement to buy insurance”—they were small in amount (although, Baker was to write, that was “precisely my point.… You may be thinking that Senator Johnson spent a great deal of time and effort to clear a very modest profit.” He did, indeed. “He was always on the lookout for the odd nickel or dime”). They nonetheless made clear the crucial connection, documenting the link between Baker and Johnson that Johnson had been trying so desperately to deny. The kickback on the insurance policy that Baker had arranged had been demanded by Baker not for himself but for Lyndon Johnson. Dealing with Little Lyndon had meant, in at least one instance, dealing with Big Lyndon—the invoices and checks proved that. According to Reynolds’ statements to Williams, and according to the written evidence that supported them, the Bobby Baker story was also the Lyndon Johnson story.

  And while a stereo set was a small item in the great scheme of public life, was it any smaller than a freezer, or a vicuña overcoat? Johnson had held a front-row seat at both the Truman “crony” and Sherman Adams scandals—had seen a cold-storage container and an overcoat wreck the reputations of two prominent officials, drive one of them, a man second in power in the executive branch only to the President, out of government. In a way, the fact that freezers and vicuña coats—and top-of-the-line stereo sets—were minor but expensive items, the type of material possessions a newspaper reader could visualize and relate to (and wish he could afford to buy), made them political bombshells that could do as much, or more, damage as revelations of much more significant transgressions. Lyndon Johnson was very well aware of what an expensive gift could do to a political career. The whole Bobby Baker case, in fact, had unfortunate echoes of the Truman scandal, including the fact that each had had a memorable noun for the headlines: “protégé” was a word with an unfortunate ring to it—like “crony.” “He hated that word ‘protégé’—just hated it,” George Reedy said. “Every time he saw it, it just seemed to drive him up the wall.” No one outside Williams’ office was yet aware of what Reynolds had told the senator—even, really, that Reynolds had any significant connection to Johnson at all—but from the moment Johnson saw Don Reynolds’ name, says Horace Busby, he knew the statements the insurance broker might be making, and how damaging they might be to him if they ever became public. “He knew it in a moment,” says Busby, “it was trouble.”

  More important, small an item though the stereo gift might be in itself, its disclosure might open up questions about Lyndon Johnson that were not small at all. The premiums on Johnson’s life insurance had been paid by the LBJ Company. There had been speculat
ion for years about Johnson’s relationship to that company. Lady Bird had purchased one small radio station in 1943 for $17,500. Since then, thanks in part to a twenty-year-long string of strikingly favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission (which, among other aspects, had left Austin as one of the few metropolitan areas with only a single commercial television station), the company had burgeoned into a chain of immensely profitable radio and television stations the length of Texas, and by 1963 it owned as well 11,000 acres of ranchland and major shareholdings in nine Texas banks. Johnson had quieted the speculations by his unequivocal denials that there was any relationship. He had said, over and over, for twenty years, that the LBJ Company was entirely his wife’s business and he had nothing to do with it; that, as he claimed in one of many such statements, “All that is owned by Mrs. Johnson.… I don’t have any interest in government-regulated industries and never have had.” But if Lyndon Johnson had no interest in the LBJ Company, why was it taking out insurance on his life? And, of course, his denials had omitted the salient fact. Texas was a community-property state, and therefore since Lyndon Johnson had an interest—a half-interest—in all the company’s income, he had become rich. If Reynolds’ statements became public, it would cast doubt on Johnson’s claim that there was no connection between LBJ and the LBJ Company—and once that connection was established, the company’s financial dealings would become a subject of journalistic inquiry. Johnson had arrived in Congress poor, and during his career had ostensibly had no source of income other than his government salary. He had been boasting to friends for years that he was a millionaire. By 1963, he, a man who had never held any job but his government positions—whose salary had never been more than $35,000 per year—was not merely a millionaire but a millionaire many times over. That fact had never become known to the press or the public. How would it look if it did?

  Furthermore, once reporters started looking into the LBJ Company, they might look not only into its wealth, but into how that wealth had been accumulated, and one area of that accumulation—the key area—was particularly vulnerable to journalistic inquiry: precisely the area with which Don Reynolds had been involved. The insurance broker had been forced to buy advertising time that he didn’t need on KTBC-TV in return for receiving something from Lyndon Johnson. This had long been Johnson’s practice—and, as readers of the second volume in this series, Means of Ascent, may recall (and if they don’t, they can look on page 101 through page 106), what they were often receiving, often getting in return for their payments, was Lyndon Johnson’s political influence on their behalf; they had been buying, he had been selling, political influence. Sometimes the payments were made not in cash but in kind—in material things that Johnson wanted for his home in Washington or for his ranch, in what KTBC’s general manager, Earl Deathe, called “trading out.” A stereo was only one of many such items “traded out.” Deathe was to recall television sets—large sets, the newest model, enough of them for both the main house and the guest houses Johnson was building on his ranch—as well as tractors and cars. “It was a means of getting material things without paying for them,” he explains.

  And, Deathe says, there was “so much of it.” Johnson, he says, “lived in fear” that such dealings would be exposed; “he just lived in fear of that—and I think rightfully so. He had been involved in so much.” The “Bobby Baker thing” made this fear very real, says Deathe. Johnson had “traded out” with so many people, he says. What if one of them came forward with a statement to the press? And if Reynolds’ statements became public, would others be encouraged to come forward?

  Reynolds was, in his talks with John Williams, opening up other areas as well. He was telling the senator about campaign contributions Baker had made—and, as it happened, on the very day, October 6, on which the first article containing Reynolds’ name appeared, there was another development: one of the senators to whom Baker had offered a contribution that year came forward voluntarily to talk about it, and about what Baker had wanted in return.

  No sooner had he arrived in the Senate in January, 1963, as a newly elected senator from New Hampshire, than Thomas J. McIntyre was approached in the Democratic cloakroom by Baker, who, McIntyre said, told him, “I understand you have some campaign debts. Well, I have a few friends who would be willing to pick up the tab.” McIntyre did have debts, $17,000 worth, but decided to check with an older senator before accepting the offer, and was told, “Don’t touch it or you’ll be in the bag to the oil interests.”

  McIntyre’s statement—he was to issue a formal typed version—was self-serving. “The important point here was that I did not accept the offer because of the possibility that such a sum of money was coming from a single source,” it said, and its timing was interesting; as Newsweek was to comment: “The exchange [between Baker and McIntyre] might have been lost.… But it cropped up because Bobby Baker is in trouble, trouble especially titillating because he is so widely regarded as Lyndon Johnson’s protégé that he is known as ‘Lyndon’s Boy.’ ” To Johnson the disturbing point was that Baker’s role in the dispensing of campaign funds had made an appearance in the public gaze. These funds, startlingly large amounts of money, and much of it in cash, had been raised and dispensed at Johnson’s direction. How long could it be before his role was in the public gaze as well?

  THE SENATE’S REACTION to the Baker revelations had been indignation—at the fact that someone had had the effrontery to make them. Baker had not been asked to resign, Majority Leader Mansfield told reporters on October 4; he had not offered to resign—and there was no reason he should resign. “Bobby’s work in the Senate has been excellent,” he said. “The other matter [Serv-U] affects his activities outside the Senate.” Even in that other matter, he said, Baker might vindicate himself. “We will not attempt to prejudge it.” Some senators tried to duck reporters—Majority Whip Humphrey, cornered by the Associated Press shortly after a visit to Mansfield’s office and asked if they had talked about Bobby Baker, replied, “Not entirely”—and others, even Wayne Morse of Oregon, usually as far outside the Senate establishment as Williams, tried to defend the eager little man who had done them all so many favors. Speaking “for once with the united voice of the Senate,” as Murray Kempton put it, Morse said on the Chamber floor that “Bobby Baker performed many effective services for each and every one of us.… I am not going to walk out merely because a friend may have made mistakes.”

  However, Williams kept bringing Mansfield and Republican Leader Everett Dirksen reports on what his interviews were turning up, and Mansfield asked Baker to meet with him, Dirksen and Williams on Monday, October 7, to give his side of the story, and that morning, Lyndon Johnson didn’t have to leaf through the Washington Post to find the story he was worried about: there it was, big and black in a headline that stretched across the top of the front page: BAKER CALLED IN INFLUENCE PROBE.

  Bobby Baker knew what his side was. Had he talked, he was to write in his memoirs, “many senators would have found themselves in highly embarrassing circumstances, to say the least.” And so would the man he revered. The “wound” Johnson “might have incurred” by his revelations could indeed have been “mortal,” he said. “They could have denied him the presidency, or driven him from office.” Shortly before the meeting was scheduled to begin, he resigned, and the next day, the storm broke on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States, and almost every article, it seemed, not only contained the word that Lyndon Johnson hated, but gave short shrift to his contention that it had not been him who had raised Baker to power. “Baker is a protégé of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson,” the Washington Post explained. “Johnson named Baker to the position of Secretary to the Senate Majority.… At the time, Baker was twenty-six and still at law school.” “Theirs was a close relationship,” Mary McGrory explained to the readers of the scores of newspapers that ran her column; during the 1960 campaign, “it was he [Baker] who put ‘The Yellow Rose’ on the record player. And Mr.
Johnson, to please Bobby, made a long detour to a South Carolina mountain hamlet called Rocky Bottom, where Bobby was greeted triumphantly as a native son who had made good.”

  Baker had hoped, he was to say, that his resignation would make the affair “magically disappear from the front pages and come to a grinding halt,” but nothing could have been further from the truth. Declaring on the Senate floor that “the integrity, not just of Baker, but of the Senate,” is involved, Williams said the case “cannot be closed by resignation,” and introduced a resolution calling for a Senate investigation. The Senate had little choice but to pass it. Although it had been expected that the investigation would be carried out by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee chaired by the hard-bitten Senator McClellan, it was referred instead to the Rules Committee, a decision which, as Newsweek said, “had old Senate hands chuckling.… The Rules Committee has as its most weighty duty, approving Senate press passes.” The committee’s chairman, sixty-seven-year-old B. Everett Jordan, a first-term southern conservative from North Carolina, was slow-talking and slow-thinking—even Baker had to say he was “something of a bumbler”; in contrast to McClellan, one columnist was to say, “He is as hard a negotiator as Neville Chamberlain.” Not only had he been an admiring, indeed subservient, “Johnson Man” during Johnson’s time as Majority Leader, moreover, Jordan had been a “Bobby Baker Man” as well. He was fond of telling how much he had relied on Bobby; asked how he had spent his first day in the Senate, he said, “Oh, I went over to the Senate Chamber, and I stayed there until Bobby Baker told me I could come home.” Although he now hastily removed it, an autographed picture of Bobby had hung in a prominent position on the wall of his office. And he was almost immediately to confirm fears that, as one columnist delicately put it, he “is too soft-hearted to head the investigation,” by postponing indefinitely what the Chicago Daily News called “the logical first step in a hard-hitting investigation—a request to examine Baker’s income tax returns and the sworn statements of his assets that he had given to various federal agencies.”