LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  Johnson knew what the Kennedys were up to, and he tried to get them to back off by having Hoover confront them about JFK’s involvement with Ellen Rometsch. Rometsch was one of the party girls who had frolicked with him at the nude pool parties in the White House. Since she had been furnished to Kennedy in the first place by Bobby Baker, from the Quorum Club, both Baker and Johnson (ergo, Hoover as well) had enough information about her background to enable any of them to threaten both John and Robert Kennedy with blackmail. Although Johnson tried to distance himself from Baker, even to the extent of denying that they had ever had close business dealings, it was widely known that Baker was Johnson’s protégé and would inevitably be linked to Lyndon (by then, it was already being reported that the Bakers had even named their one-year-old son Lyndon, obviously in tribute to the man who once said of Baker, “If I had a son, this would be him”; Cliff Carter had probably felt a bit jealous of this attention since he had also named a son after Lyndon).

  When the Baker scandal broke, Fortas was immediately appointed as his counsel, and having spoken with Fortas only four times in the previous six months, Johnson and Fortas talked by telephone almost daily during October, from a few minutes to an hour and, when he returned to Washington, had Fortas visit him twice, on October 14 and 21. Johnson also visited Fortas in his home for two hours, driven there by Mrs. Johnson in a borrowed car.196 After October 29, Johnson returned to his ranch to begin the detailed planning for the Dallas segment of Kennedy’s trip to Texas. Back in Washington, with Johnson out of town, JFK began planning his political strategies for the 1964 campaign with his top political advisers: his brother Bobby, John Bailey, Ted Sorenson, Steve Smith, Larry O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell, and others, none of whom were amenable to Lyndon Johnson’s continued presence around the White House.197 Something apparently happened at that point to allay Johnson’s worries about the Baker scandal and the continuing Senate investigations about it, because the number of calls between himself and Fortas declined;198 after the assassination, Fortas was replaced as counsel to Baker by another of Johnson’s lawyers, and Fortas was then put back to work directly under Johnson, working full-time on shutting down both congressional investigations.

  The news of the emerging scandals began showing up more regularly in The New York Times during September 1963 and continued throughout October, including linkages of Baker to Johnson, Davidson, and Murchison and stories about another associate, Ed Levinson, and his Las Vegas skimming operation.199 The Long Island tabloid Newsday printed an article on October 29, 1963, titled “Baker Scandal Quiz Opens Today,” beginning with these words: “Already liberally spiced with sex, scandal, and intrigue, the tantalizing case of Robert G. (Bobby) Baker comes under official scrutiny today. And what everyone wants to know is: Who is going to get caught?” The article included the following: “A report, from those who claim ‘inside information,’ is that the Justice Department started an investigation of Baker as a means of embarrassing Johnson and eliminating him from the Democratic ticket next year …” (emphasis added). The November 8 issue of Life magazine featured a cover page with a picture of Bobby Baker at a masquerade party with a bold headline: “CAPITAL BUZZES OVER STORIES OF MISCONDUCT IN HIGH PLACES: THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL.” The article (p. 36) asked the rhetorical question, “How had a simple, hardworking majority secretary, earning $19,612 a year, struck it so rich in so short a time?”

  Johnson and Hoover knew they had to tread carefully around the breaking news stories and rumors that were quickly spreading about Capitol Hill’s sex scandal because it was so closely related to the concurrent Bobby Baker financial scandals, which included Johnson’s procurement and acceptance of a $100,000 payoff for the TFX contract and numerous other related financial payoff schemes developed over many years.200 Bobby Kennedy, meanwhile, had to turn to Hoover—in desperation—for his help in quashing the Rometsch story, to avoid it bringing down the entire administration. Hoover’s intense hatred of both Kennedy brothers put him into a quandary over how far he could go to help them, but he thought he could use their anxiety as his “ace in the hole” to obtain another waiver from the mandatory retirement rule. As Burton Hersh noted,

  According to Justice Department insiders … Hoover had been tapping his attorney general’s line, and he had heard Bobby laughingly assure his friends that, as big a pain in the ass as the Director had become, it really would not matter for a whole lot longer because he was on his way out. At worst, he would be seventy in 1965 and Jack would dump him then.… Hoover—to whom his position and his existence were interchangeable—panicked. The stage was set for that very grim executive-mansion lunch. Watching both autocrats, Courtney Evans could imagine a head-on collision that would obliterate them both. “I figured I had one mission,” Evans maintains with all the conviction his ninety years can muster. Just keep the Kennedys from firing J. Edgar Hoover. I thought that was a blow they’d never recover from politically. Hoover had such connections on the Hill, such a reputation for having all the gossip in Washington stored away….

  Both Kennedy brothers had to consider the successive updates the Director kept sending over to Bobby relating to Judith Campbell (Exner) and Sam Giancana. Along with the fact that, on Robert Kennedy’s orders, the late Marilyn Monroe’s telephone records had been confiscated by the FBI … Hoover’s grip on the brothers was getting tighter every day.201

  Bobby Kennedy decided to stop any investigation into the Rometsch affair by having her deported and then tried to stop the Senate from investigating the “sex angle” of the multifaceted Bobby Baker scandals any further. His actions immediately hit the newspapers (e.g., the headline on October 28, 1963, of the Des Moines Register was “U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials—Is Sent to Germany after FBI Probe”), and this article was subsequently read into the Congressional Record. Although RFK thereafter tried to steer the investigation away from the “sex angle,” he continued for a time to feed Senator Williams information on the financial frauds being committed and was conducting his own investigation on Baker for tax evasion.202 He couldn’t go to Johnson for help, so he went to J. Edgar Hoover, hat in hand. This put the director in the position of added leverage with Bobby, to be used as an IOU and as a guarantee of his extended tenure. Hoover reluctantly agreed to Bobby’s request of him to meet with Senators Mansfield and Dirksen to ask them to limit the Senate’s investigation; doing so for Bobby wasn’t appealing to him, but Hoover decided that he would go along with it since it would also benefit his friend Lyndon B. Johnson.

  Bobby had “put together the information regarding all the girls and the members of Congress and the Senate who had been associated with the girls—and it got to be large numbers in both ways,” he told Anthony Lewis. Hoover used this information in a secret meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Dirksen on October 28, 1963, at Mansfield’s apartment.203 Bobby’s plan worked very well, because by that afternoon, the Senate’s plans to discuss Rometsch had been canceled. As noted by Richard Mahoney, “There was no more private discussion, much less public debate, of the Rometsch affair by the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body.’ But Hoover had a high price for his service: assurance from both the attorney general and the president (with whom he lunched on October 31) that he would be confirmed in his position as director. Further, he exacted from Bobby approval for four new wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr., a man both Kennedys, but particularly Bobby, had come to admire and respect.”204 Being so compromised, RFK would also have to discontinue feeding Senator Williams information on the financial side of Baker’s activities, information that he had planted in order to force Johnson off the ticket in 1964.

  Although Hoover agreed to get the discussion of the Rometsch scandal stopped on Capitol Hill, he decided to have the dirty laundry put into the journalistic record; he leaked pieces of the more embarrassing lascivious details to Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register about a Washington party girl cavorting with “members of the Senate” and h
igh executive branch officials.205 Life magazine, in a story written days before the assassination, published an article in its November 22, 1963, edition about Bobby Baker’s Quorum Club and its reputation as a rendezvous hot spot among Washington’s elite, some of their clerical help, and additional support from the city’s most elite call girls. The secrets of both Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy had begun to unravel during October and November 1963 and spilled over on the very day of JFK’s assassination. Bobby Baker’s troubles were far from over, but Lyndon Johnson’s predicament of being intertwined with Baker was growing inexorably into as complex and unsettled a mess as he had ever been in, which is saying a lot. Unless his long-planned executive action—the assassination of John F. Kennedy—was performed soon, a potentially destructive, ongoing controversy ultimately culminating in possible prison terms for both of them was now almost inevitable. The man Johnson had proudly taught, his surrogate son to whom he had become a mentor, would become, by the end of 1963, “just an employee around here.”206

  Baker Scandal Status Quo: November 21–22, 1963

  By the autumn of 1963, the rumors of Lyndon Johnson’s many entanglements with the Billie Sol Estes case and the TFX payoff were still percolating. The latest scandal was referred to generally under the name of its chief architect, Bobby Baker, and must have been seen by Johnson as the biggest threat of them all, especially since Baker was no longer communicating with Johnson—or vice versa. JFK’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, said that Bobby Kennedy was also investigating Bobby Baker for tax evasion and fraud. This is where the matter was on November 19, 1963: The president had discussed the Baker investigation with his secretary and told her that his running mate in 1964 would not be Lyndon Johnson, two days before the president left for Texas. Jack Kennedy knew that if he kept Johnson on the ticket, he would be like a time bomb that could go off at any time. Doing so could lead to certain defeat in 1964. He and his brother Bobby decided to agree to Hoover’s terms to try to stop the Bobby Baker investigation and help cover it up. Unfortunately for them, it was too late; the unraveling had already gone too far.

  Insurance salesman Don Reynolds had come forward with information that Lyndon Johnson had been involved in receiving kickbacks from a life insurance contract that Reynolds had sold him through their mutual friend Bobby Baker. He also had intimate knowledge of other financial bribery and extortion involving Baker, including Baker’s skimming “commissions” from other transactions such as those involving Ralph Hill of Capitol Vending and Matthew McCloskey, a major construction contractor who benefited from the largesse of Baker’s ties to many government officials on the take. McCloskey had been the contractor who built, among other things, the Rayburn House Office Building and was then building the new stadium in DC which would later be renamed RFK Stadium. Among other charges, Reynolds would testify that McCloskey had bribed Baker to get the stadium contract and then managed to increase the cost of it from $6 million to $20 million in his statement to the investigating subcommittee of the Senate Rules Committee on November 22, 1963.207 The question about how much of the “cost overruns” would be kicked back to Baker and Lyndon Johnson was never established before Johnson’s efforts to close down this investigation were complete. Reynolds had initially been a reluctant witness, and he was under pressure to either “forget” the answers or take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to talk. He was warned that he was tampering with the reputations of “big men” and that it could only cause him trouble if he talked.208 Despite this pressure, Reynolds was determined to cooperate; some of his determination was supplied by his wife, who was tired of life in the “fast lane,” the weekend parties in New York and Miami, and the “fast buck” attitude in the crowd her husband was now involved with—Bobby Baker, Fred Black Jr., and Tommy Webb in particular.209

  Although it was to be a closed session, Johnson knew that Williams would leak the committee’s findings to the press, which he undoubtedly saw as a Hobson’s choice for himself: He had to proceed as planned and Kennedy had to die on November 22. After that, it would be too late to contain the problem presented by the new witness, Mr. Reynolds. He knew by this time that he could cover up this story only after becoming the president of the United States, his lifetime goal that was now within his grasp. While Johnson knew that he would be taking a big risk with the assassination, and then trying to deftly cover it up, it would be much more manageable when he was president, since he would then have complete power to control the vast resources of the federal government and comparable power over even local governments, especially in Texas.

  Reynolds told Chairman B. Everett Jordan and his committee on November 22, 1963, that Johnson had demanded kickbacks in the commissions Reynolds was to receive for the two $100,000 life insurance policies he sold to Johnson in 1957 and 1961. This included a $585 Magnavox stereo. Reynolds also had to pay for $1,200 worth of advertising on KTBC, Johnson’s television station in Austin. Reynolds had paperwork for this transaction, including a delivery receipt that indicated the stereo had been sent to the home of Johnson. Reynolds also told the Senate Rules Committee of seeing a suitcase full of money that Bobby Baker had described as a “$100,000 payoff to Johnson for his role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract.”210 About 1:30 p.m. in Washington—as JFK was being shot to death in Dallas—he was still testifying and producing records to substantiate his story. He said that he purchased the stereo at wholesale, through a friend, but its normal retail price was $900. It was a set that Mrs. Johnson selected from a catalogue that Reynolds said was sent to her by Bobby Baker. Lady Bird wanted the stereo for a musical, so he had to send it by airfreight to Baltimore Friendship Airport, where it was picked up by a Senate delivery truck, which brought it directly to Johnson’s home.211 He also said that he tried to resist the kickback, which he felt was illegal, but both Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins called him and told him to pay it. To the committee, Reynolds denied that it was a “kickback” (which would have been illegal and might have subjected him to prosecution); instead, he said it was a “shakedown,” an “after the fact” demand put to him as a veiled threat. He asked Jenkins if he would allow him (Reynolds) to resell the advertising time on KTBC, since he really had no use for it since his marketing area was one thousand five hundred miles away from Austin, Texas. He said Jenkins consented to his request.212

  As his testimony came to an end at about 2:30 p.m. Washington time (1:30 p.m. Dallas), a secretary burst into the room, sobbing hysterically that “President Kennedy has been killed!” … “Reynolds was stunned. If President Kennedy was dead, then Lyndon Johnson, the man about whom he had been talking, was President of the United States … Reynolds reached for the documents on the committee table which confirmed his story of the gift stereo set and the television advertising contract. He quietly pulled the documents toward him. ‘I guess you won’t need these,’ Reynolds said soberly. ‘Giving testimony involving the Vice President is one thing, but when it involves the President himself, that is something else. You can just forget that I ever said anything if you want to.’ Counsel Van Kirk replied that Reynolds should not concern himself with the problem of what should be done with the evidence. ‘The documents on this matter are now the records of the Rules Committee,’ Van Kirk said. ‘The decision on whether we will use them is a matter that the Committee will have to decide. None of us can do anything about it.”213 Johnson’s continuing efforts to stop the Senate investigations are described in chapter 9, “The Aftermath.”

  This is where the unfolding scandals of Bobby Baker rested, along with all of the many direct connections from them back to Lyndon B. Johnson, when the thirty-fifth president of the United States was shot down in the streets of Dallas, Texas, by assassins acting—albeit well removed, through many layers of plausible deniability—under the authority of his successor, the thirty-sixth president. They were guaranteed protection against prosecution, and by all accounts, that promise was fulfilled.