The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  But Williams was still conducting his own, independent investigation, and so now was a whole pack of reporters, and all through October there was a drumfire of disclosures in the press: that Baker was a partner not only in Reynolds’ insurance business and in the vending machine company that was the talk of its industry, but also in a travel agency and a law firm; that the Carousel wasn’t the only motel in which he had an interest: he was a partner in one in North Carolina as well; that he had, not a month before the investigation opened, moved from a modest home to a $125,000 “mansion” in “swank” Spring Valley—“near the home of Lyndon Johnson”—where, the Chicago Daily News reported, “a Chinese houseboy fends off callers.” And then, as the month was coming to an end, and October, 1963, was drawing close to November, 1963, the stories began growing bigger and bigger, for the Bobby Baker case, it was revealed at the end of October, had every ingredient necessary for it to become a scandal of truly major proportions—not only money, it was turning out, but sex as well.

  During the last week of October, newsmen, searching through District of Columbia real estate transactions, had discovered that Baker was the owner not only of the Spring Valley house but of a Capitol Hill townhouse—one that was occupied by shapely twenty-four-year-old blond Carole Tyler of Tennessee, a former Miss Loudon County, who had been Baker’s administrative assistant before he resigned, and who had continued as his mistress. And they discovered, and began to print, at first in hints and then more openly, that at the townhouse “chain-smoking, martini-drinking, party-loving” Carole and a group of other “attractive young women” were assigned “to dwell and entertain,” in all-night parties at which “Baker’s high-flying circle of acquaintances” entered and left through a back door; headline writers named it the “party house.”

  And a “party house” was, innuendo-wise, thin gruel beside another venue that, over the weekend of October 26 and 27, began to appear in newspaper stories as part of the Bobby Baker case. It was a small hotel, the Carroll Arms, situated not a hundred yards from the Senate Office Building, “just an ice cube’s throw from the Capitol,” as one article put it. On its second floor, the stories said, was an “intimate” club, a “discreet little private club,” “smoky and dimly lit,” a spot where “the ceiling is red and the lights are low”—an “intimate and elegant gathering place” named the “Quorum Club” that Baker had, the stories said, organized for “romantic caucuses” of senators, lobbyists and congressmen. And there were stories also about the caucusees, the young women, the “hostesses,” or “party girls,” the articles called them, in a euphemism for call girls—and in particular about one of the hostesses. For those who didn’t prefer blondes like Carole Tyler, this one was a brunette—and on any scale of scandal material, she was off the charts.

  “Clad,” as one account put it, “in a brief, revealing, skin-tight costume and black net stockings,” sultry, dark-haired, dark-eyed Ellen Rometsch, the spectacularly exotic and sensual-looking wife of an East German army sergeant, had worked at the Quorum Club, and at the Carousel Motel, for more than two years before, in August, 1963, she had been expelled from the United States and hustled back to East Germany because, as Clark Mollenhoff reported that weekend in the Des Moines Register, she had been “associating with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the ‘executive branch’ ”—and because of fears that she was an East German spy.

  As it happened, Lyndon Johnson had no more association with Elly Rometsch than he had with the Quorum Club, which had not even been established until after he left the Senate; he was not even a subject of her boasts. The official with whom she was rumored to have had sex was John F. Kennedy. Apparently she had bragged that she had had sex with the President, and in July, 1963, an informant had reported the boast to the FBI, which was already investigating rumors that she was a spy, the agency’s suspicions “fueled,” as one account puts it, by her “expensive lifestyle,” which, the FBI investigators concluded, “hardly could have been maintained on the pay of a German army enlisted man.”

  The FBI had found no evidence to corroborate either rumor; a summary, written in July, of its preliminary inquiries concluded that “Investigation has not substantiated the security allegations against subject nor does she apparently have the high-level sex contacts she originally boasted of.” Not a week earlier, however, Harold Macmillan had resigned as prime minister of Great Britain, brought down by the “Profumo Affair,” in which the British defense minister, John Profumo, was caught in “impropriety” with a call girl who was also the mistress of a Russian naval attaché—a concatenation of circumstances that raised the spectre of security breaches. The parallels between the Profumo affair and the rumors about Elly Rometsch’s White House connections and about her spying would turn her boasting into a big story if the press got wind of it. Robert Kennedy, who, as Evan Thomas puts it, “From the outset … understood that the merest whiff of a sex-and-spies scandal could be threatening to the president,” had, in August, arranged to have her quietly deported, and the matter had appeared closed.

  If she had no connection to Johnson or Kennedy, however, Ms. Rometsch certainly had one to Bobby Baker’s club, and now, with Baker big news, she was news, too, and she certainly had the figure (35–25–35) and face (an “Elizabeth Taylor look-alike,” one reporter called her) and, apparently, sexual proclivities (“Lesbian prostitute,” was how Mollenhoff described her in his notes; the German Defense Ministry was to mention her “somewhat nymphomaniacal inclinations”; another source said simply, “She would do anything”) to elevate a scandal to new heights. OUST BEAUTY TO HEAD OFF DC SCANDAL was the New York Daily News story that Sunday: “A beautiful German beauty with a lusty yen for men was rushed out of the country in August after bragging about affairs with important Washington figures, informed sources disclosed tonight.” And with reporters tracking down every fact and rumor about her, how long could it be before the identity of the most “important Washington figure” of all was in print? HILL PROBE MAY TAKE PROFUMO-TYPE TWIST was the Washington Post headline over a story that promised “a spicy tale of political intrigue and high-level bedroom antics” when the Senate Rules Committee took up the Baker case that week.

  Robert Kennedy headed off the threat to his brother. On Monday morning, October 28, he asked J. Edgar Hoover to persuade Senate leaders that the Rules Committee investigation should not include sexual matters, and Hoover, meeting with Mansfield and Dirksen, did so, assuring them that none of Rometsch’s—or Bobby Baker’s—activities had anything to do with national security. The attorney general may have had to guarantee the FBI director that his job was secure to persuade him to do it. But nothing could head off the threat to Johnson. Rometsch was undoubtedly linked to Bobby Baker—and Bobby Baker was Lyndon Johnson’s protégé. And the issue of Life magazine that landed on newsstands during the first week of November had Baker on the cover, and inside, illustrating a story headlined THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL, was not only a full-page photograph of Bobby and Lyndon grinning together in their Senate heyday (the caption was “Legman and Leader”) but, on the page facing them, two other photographs, one of Elly Rometsch, one of Carole Tyler—the brunette hugging some sort of fluted upright object, the blonde bounding out of ocean surf in a white bathing suit, every inch the beauty contest winner—that guaranteed the attention of at least the male portion (and, in the case of Ms. Rometsch, perhaps of part of the female portion, too) of Life’s thirty million readers.

  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. Johnson 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 line 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 feelings. 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.

  IN EARLY NOVEMBER, 1963—the exact date is not clear—Senator Williams asked Reynolds to come to his office again, and Reynolds told him about another insurance deal.

  In the spring of 1960, Reynolds said, Baker had invited him to a meeting in the Capitol at which the upcoming bidding for the contract to construct a District of Columbia stadium was discussed. Present were the chairman and the chief clerk of the House District of Columbia Committee, and Matt McCloskey, the contractor and Democratic fundraiser who had been active in the 1960 convention and then had been named Kennedy’s ambassador to Ireland, and who now announced, as the others in the room already seemed to know, that he was going to be one of the bidders. Baker told McCloskey that Reynolds was his business associate and that if McCloskey won the contract, he would like to have McCloskey consider retaining Reynolds as the broker for the performance bond which would be required. McCloskey won—and selected Reynolds as the broker for the bond, on which McCloskey had paid a $73,631 premium, out of which Reynolds had, he said, kept $10,000 as a commission, and paid $4,000 to Baker as what Reynolds was to describe as a “payoff.” And again, Reynolds produced for Williams documents that he said supported his story: an invoice for a $73,631 premium from the insurance firm through which Reynolds had secured the bond, his check to that firm for $63,631 (the amount of the premium minus his $10,000 commission)—and a personal check, signed by “Don B. Reynolds,” for $4,000, made out to, and endorsed for deposit by, “Robert G. Baker.”

  That was all Reynolds told Williams during that interview, but during another session, not long thereafter, he told the senator that there had also been another, more hidden, side to the transaction: that the entire deal had been structured in such a way that it would provide not only the $4,000 payoff to Baker, but a $25,000 contribution to Lyndon Johnson’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

  The amount of the premium had been $73,631, Reynolds said, but that hadn’t been the amount that McCloskey & Company had actually paid. McCloskey had paid $109,205, with the understanding that of the approximately $35,000 overpayment, Reynolds would receive a second $10,000 for being the “bag man” and the remaining $25,000 would be given to what Reynolds described as “Mr. Johnson’s campaign.” Reynolds said he was instructed to deliver the money to Baker in cash—in installments that were never to be more than $5,000 each. He said he made three such deliveries—each of fifty hundred-dollar bills—although, since the performance bond was not written until after the Democratic convention, McCloskey did not pay the $109,000 until October 17, 1960, and the cash was delivered not for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign but for the “Johnson-Kennedy campaign.”2

  If Reynolds’ story was true, the District Stadium deal violated at least three federal laws: one prohibiting political contributions of more than $3,000, one prohibiting corporations from making any political contributions at all, and one prohibiting the charging of a contribution to a government contract. Reynolds told Williams that he didn’t have the check that would document his story—the $109,000 check from McCloskey & Company, to be held up against the $73,000 bill to McCloskey & Company—but Williams would try to find a copy and would eventually succeed, obtaining a photostat of the check from someone, never identified, who wanted to cooperate with his investigation; Reynolds’ story was therefore documented. And Baker would, years later, confirm it. Reynolds, who would later discuss other alleged transactions involving Lyndon Johnson and himself, exaggerated about some of them, Baker was to say, and made up others out of whole cloth (and it appears that Reynolds may indeed have done so), but he was apparently telling the truth about the McCloskey deal: “I was the man who put Reynolds and McCloskey together, so I know what the understandings were,” Baker was to say. Reynolds “told the truth with respect to … the DC Stadium deal.” (McCloskey was later to admit the $35,000 overpayment, but said it had been merely a clerical error that had gone undetected until the Baker investigation started; that someone in his company had assumed the extra $35,000 was the premium on another insurance policy. “Somebody in our organization goofed. We make goofs like that every once in a while.”) And while Senator Williams did not, during that early November interview, learn the whole story of the stadium contract, Bobby Baker knew it—knew it included the cash for the Lyndon Johnson campaign—and Johnson knew that Williams had been talking again to the insurance broker who had been central to it. Suddenly another link between him and Bobby Baker was on the verge of coming to light.

  ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, the President convened the first major strategy session for the 1964 campaign in the Cabinet Room at the White House. It included the men who would be directing the campaign: from the family, the attorney general and Stephen Smith; from the White House staff, O’Donnell, O’Brien and Sorensen; from the Democratic National Committee, Chairman John Bailey and Richard Maguire; from the Census Bureau, Richard Scammon, “an expert,” in O’Donnell’s words, “on population trends with many interesting ideas on where to find the most Democratic votes.” It was a long meeting, lasting from four o’clock until the President broke it up well after seven, saying he had a busy week ahead of him, and then, the next week, his trip to Texas.

  Lyndon Johnson was not at the meeting, and neither was any member of his staff, a fact that might have had no significance (a Vice President is not invariably included in campaign strategy sessions) except for two factors: first, the main topic of the meeting was the South—the difficulty of holding the gains made there in 1960, and the region’s long-term future in the Democratic Party—and in 1960 the South had been his responsibility; second, that there was such intense speculation over whether, in fact, he would be on the ticket.

  In these circumstances, his absence, as Arthur Schlesinger was to put it, “led to a burst of talk”—another burst—“that the Kennedys were planning to dump Johnson.” Such talk, Schlesinger says, was wrong. “The nonexistence of any dump-Johnson plan is fully and emphatically confirmed by Stephen Smith,” he was to write. “Johnson’s place on the ticket was not discussed on November 13 becau
se (barring illness or scandal) it was a given,” is a summary in a book published in 1977 that is in line with that given in virtually all books on Kennedy or Johnson. But of course there had never been any discussion about putting Lyndon Johnson on the ticket in 1960—not even with Bobby—until Jack Kennedy suddenly announced, to the astonishment of everyone, that he was doing so. And, in fact, Evelyn Lincoln says that when, the morning after the strategy session, she was reading material from the meeting and Kennedy came over to her desk, he made a remark that contradicted his other quotes. She was to write that when she told the President that the 1964 convention wouldn’t be as exciting as the 1960 version, “because everyone knows what is coming,” he replied: “Oh, I don’t know, there might be a change in the ticket,” before walking away. And, she wrote, when a week later Kennedy, sitting in a chair in her office, started talking about the reforms he wanted to make in government if he was reelected, he said, “To do this I will need as a running mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.… It is too early to make an announcement about another running mate—that will perhaps wait until the Convention.” When she asked whom the announcement might name, she wrote, Kennedy didn’t hesitate. Looking straight ahead, he said, “At this time I am thinking about” another, more moderate, southerner, the young governor of North Carolina, Terry Sanford. “But it will not be Lyndon,” he said.

  Mrs. Lincoln says that she wrote down the conversation “verbatim in my diary,” but before her book, Kennedy and Johnson, was published in 1968, at a point at which, it should perhaps be mentioned, Robert Kennedy was hoping for Johnson’s support in his campaign for the presidency, Schlesinger saw an advance copy, and, he says, “alerted Robert Kennedy,” who reiterated that there had been no intention of dumping Johnson, and added, “Can you imagine the President ever having a talk with Evelyn about a subject like that?” The reaction of the Kennedy partisans to her book is a case study in reversal. Prior to its publication, references to Mrs. Lincoln in their books and oral history reminiscences had all emphasized the respect Jack Kennedy had for her (“in eleven years he never called her Evelyn,” Sorensen wrote) and her faithfulness to the President; “soft-hearted” is an adjective used about her by Sorensen, who calls her “unruffled and devoted,” and praises her “unfailing devotion and good nature”; Schlesinger talks of her “welcoming patience and warmth” with people insistent on seeing the President. When, decades later, the author asked these same partisans about this woman, whom President Kennedy had regarded highly enough so that he kept her as his private secretary for eleven years, she was described to the author by these same men as a flighty, rather rattlebrained woman. Following the publication of her book, the terms they use to describe the conversation she claims to have had with Kennedy about the 1964 ticket are skeptical; she “claimed to remember” the conversation, Schlesinger said. When the author of this book went to see her himself, she repeated the conversation as she had written it, saying that the President wanted Johnson off the ticket, and “the ammunition to get him off was Bobby Baker.”