Closing the Files—the Bobby Baker Scandals
Even before he returned to Washington, Johnson talked to Abe Fortas about Don Reynolds’s Senate testimony, and as soon as Johnson returned to Washington, he contacted B. Everett Jordan to find out more about what Reynolds had said regarding his testimony incriminating him (LBJ). He found that his worst fears had come true. Reynolds’s testimony, under oath, included his revelation of the $100,000 bribe for fixing the TFX contract, clearly the most worrisome of all the charges for Johnson. The same evening, Johnson also spoke to Abe Fortas about Senator Williams, vowing to punish him with an IRS audit (which he did, to no avail; aside from the inconvenience and time required to answer the questions raised, it was eventually found that the IRS owed him $87).74 Johnson’s own most valued lawyer—the brilliant legal strategist Abe Fortas, who had practically single-handedly manipulated the legal process to enforce Johnson’s stolen 1948 Senate election (see chapter 1)—resigned immediately as Baker’s lawyer to help Johnson in his latest imbroglio, replaced by the renowned Mafia defense attorney, Edward Bennett Williams.75 When Johnson tried to press the Democratic leadership of the Senate to halt the investigations, they tried to get Johnson to pull other strings and use whatever “secrets” he might obtain against the Senate Republican leadership to put a halt to the continuing investigation. Baker was amused to observe that before long, Senator Hugh Scott (R-PA) began to soft-pedal criticism of him, to the point of even starting to praise the new president. “‘I have so much desire not to damage the Republic. I think Lyndon Johnson is a fine, can-do president, a man of action. I believe he is sincerely advancing a program he believes is in the best interest of this country.’ There was good reason for Senator Scott’s conversion, as I learned through the White House grapevine: LBJ had threatened to close down the Philadelphia Navy Yard unless Senator Scott closed his critical mouth.”76
As noted by Peter Dale Scott, “Thanks to what one senator called ‘string-pulling by Johnson and Abe Fortas,’ only a highly bowdlerized version of the Reynolds testimony reached the public and the press, who declined to pursue the matter. One of the strings pulled by Johnson and Hoover was simply having the FBI stop cooperating with the Justice Department: “As soon as Johnson became President, Hoover and the FBI stopped sending the Justice Department reports on the Bobby Baker case.77
Johnson was even more effective in closing down the parallel Senate investigation of the TFX contract, by Robert Kennedy’s former Senate boss Senator McClellan. The McClellan subcommittee had closed its TFX meeting on November 20, 1963, with the chairman’s undertaking ‘to resume hearings next week’; Business Week predicted that Fred Korth would be the next witness. But the hearings promised for ‘next week’ were not resumed until 1969, after Johnson left office; and Korth never had to testify.”78 The nationally syndicated columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, obviously among the most well-connected pundits in Washington, predicted that result within a day of JFK’s assassination:
WASHINGTON—It will be interesting to see whether Sen. John McClellan, D-ARK., really tries to find out how much Bobby Baker knows about the TFX controversy. The stern Senate Investigation chairman has promised to look into published reports that Baker threatened to expose some TFX skulduggery if his own get-rich-quick activities are scrutinized too closely. McClellan’s investigators will have quite a trail to follow. But if they follow it carefully it will take them through the Quorum Club , which Bobby founded, and lead them in the direction of of Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
In the weeks after Kennedy was killed, rumors began to circulate that Johnson had organized the assassination since he had the best motive for wanting Kennedy dead. If he had not been the instigator, the thinking went, it would have been in his best interest to insist on a full and open investigation of the assassination independent of his direction or involvement. This would have been the best way to have cleared his name convincingly then and there, effectively ensuring that it would not haunt the country for decades (centuries, probably) afterward. If he had, in fact, been completely innocent, he should have easily seen that this course was essential. The fact that he forced the close of multiple investigations against himself, that he involved himself with major decisions to limit, destroy, and obfuscate evidence—minutes, days, weeks, and months afterward—clearly ties Johnson to multiple cover-ups of the assassination of JFK.
Senators John Williams and Hugh Scott (both of whom had unblemished public reputations, despite Johnson’s and Hoover’s search for private skeletons in their respective closets) were also pressured to end the Senate inquiry. Other witnesses were allowed to appear before the Senate Rules Committee but most refused to testify. The committee later stated that Don Reynolds was unwilling to continue testifying, which Senator Curtis said was a lie; he had left the country, afraid for his life. By New Year’s Day, 1964, barely six weeks after the assassination, Johnson was still trying to control or stop the Congressional hearings investigating different facets of the still emerging scandal. Starting in January, his anger at Senator Williams grew daily, exponentially, and prompted him to use every tool in his massive toolbox, including news leaks to Drew Pearson, wiretaps, and break-ins by the FBI and IRS tax audits on Williams, threatening to get enough on him “to send the bastard to jail.” The “bastard,” Senator Williams, was a plain and soft-spoken former chicken feed dealer, operating without a staff of investigators, funds, or the power of subpoena, who simply tried to purge Washington of a particularly unsavory clique of political wheelers and dealers.79
Johnson vowed to flood Delaware with enough money to defeat “the son of a bitch” Williams when he came up for reelection the following year (which he tried to do, even making a campaign appearance there for his opponent and pleading with voters saying, “Give me men I can work with!).” For a state having only three electoral votes, a major effort was made to unseat the Republican incumbent, which was to prove, again, unsuccessful, as Williams won reelection by seven thousand votes.80 Victor Lasky was among the few authors who investigated Johnson’s brazenly illegal actions further; most others continued to maintain a “hands-off” approach to the new president either because of fear, or undue deference to the new president during his honeymoon period, or because they were saving their hypocritical venom for his successor after the comparatively lesser episode of presidential illegalities called “Watergate”:81
Even before the story broke into the headlines, Williams knew that his curiosity about the case had triggered someone pretty high up in Washington to “get” him. Strangers posing as Washington investigators were poking around his home town, asking questions about such things as the kind of farm subsidies the senator was collecting. Williams knew immediately that an effort was being made to prove he was benefiting from legislation he helped pass. But Williams remained unafraid and more determined than ever to pursue his inquiries into corruption in high places … Then one night in February 1964 he met with an official in the Johnson administration who had something frightening to say. “I couldn’t risk going to your office,” he told Williams, ‘but I can’t stomach what they’re doing to you. Senator, your mail is being intercepted. Every letter you write to any federal official asking about the Baker case is immediately routed to a special handler. He sends the Senate Rules Committee copies of any information sent to you. Sometimes he even checks with the Committee before deciding whether your inquiry is to be answered at all. You’d better be careful about what you put in writing [emphasis added]… . Also in the works was a campaign of character assassination. Williams was called a “crackpot” by Democratic members of the Rules Committee. Drew Pearson wanted to know why Williams had not been outraged by Eisenhower’s acceptance of expensive gifts … The Washington Post helped the LBJ cause by publishing a false, unchecked story alleging that the senator had been using hidden microphones in his office to record interviews.
Don B. Reynolds continued his testimony before the Rules Committee on January 9, 1964; the
hearings proceeded during the rest of January with Reynolds testifying, under oath, about other shocking stories involving Johnson. “He spoke of the time Baker opened a satchel full of paper money which he said was a $100,000 payoff to Johnson for pushing through a $7 billion TFX plane contract. So much pressure had been exerted to get the contract for Texas based General Dynamics that Republicans called the TFX the ‘LBJ.’ Another Reynolds story described how Johnson, making an official trip to the Far East as Vice President, drew $100,000 in counterpart funds while in Hong Kong. This is money earned by the U.S. government in foreign countries and can only be spent there. According to Reynolds, Johnson had spent all that money ‘in a period of twelve to fourteen hours buying gifts for people who were loaded.’”82
Lyndon Johnson excelled in behind-the-scenes political blackmail and, thanks to his friend J. Edgar Hoover’s extensive files, which yielded dirt on practically everyone in Washington, the compound effect was devastating for anyone who got in his way. Now he launched an all-out attack on Don Reynolds, the “damned fool insurance salesman”; he obtained Reynold’s military file from the Pentagon in a particularly egregious, illegal action, then leaked information to the columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. As orchestrated by Johnson, on February 5, 1964, the Washington Post reported that Reynolds had lied about his academic record at West Point and revealed that he had been a supporter of Joseph McCarthy (as had the Kennedys; McCarthy had even learned his attack methods from Johnson, as noted in chapter 1). The files also claimed that Reynolds had accused business rivals of being secret members of the American Communist Party and had made anti-Semitic remarks while in Berlin in 1953. At the same time as these stories were printed, the Washington Star printed an editorial stating that the administration (i.e., Johnson) had tried to peddle the same derogatory information about Reynolds to them, calling it “a rather clumsy and half-hearted effort to smear Mr. Reynolds and otherwise deflect the impact of his disclosures away from the President.”83
This release of Reynolds’s personal information was not only illegal, but it created a sympathetic backlash in favor of Reynolds. It also provided support to Senators Scott, Williams, Curtis, Karl Mundt, and other Republicans for their arguments to vigorously pursue the Baker case despite the obvious White House meddling.84 A few weeks later, the New York Times also reported that Lyndon Johnson had used information from secret government documents to smear Don B. Reynolds and had been applying pressure on newspaper editors to suppress information regarding Reynolds’s Senate testimony. Senator Williams pointed out that Reynolds had left the air force with an honorable discharge, and he had an “excellent record” in the State Department with “thirteen or fourteen promotions … No one raised the question about discrediting this witness until after he gave some damaging testimony.”85 At a National Press Club luncheon, GOP Chairman William Miller suggested a broad investigation of the considerable advertising revenues the LBJ Company reportedly had received from large defense industries. “‘How many times did North American Aviation advertise over the LBJ station?’ Representative Miller wanted to know.”86 As the hearings wore on, the damaging evidence against Johnson became more muffled and Reynolds became more circumspect due to Johnson’s smear campaign against him. As Reynolds told Senator Williams, “My God! There’s a difference between testifying against a President of the United States and a Vice President. If I had known he was President, I might not have gone through with it.”. 87
In a Senate speech on February 3, Senator Hugh Scott (R-PA) said he had received “veiled threats” for pushing the Bobby Baker probe. The Pennsylvanian declared that he would push for a full investigation and calling of “all witnesses, no matter how many veiled threats may be conveyed to members of the Rules Committee.” He spoke on the Senate floor of the “shocking” leak of confidential information about Reynolds. Since some of the information came from the air force files, he wrote to Secretary McNamara, “I am doubly concerned that leaks of internal memoranda can apparently be used to destroy witnesses whose testimony becomes embarrassing. The situation is particularly serious when it’s realized that this information was denied to proper officials of the United States Senate … In a House speech, Representative Gross charged that the Johnson administration had engaged in an ‘outrageous’ attempt to ‘intimidate’ Reynolds and other witnesses who might give testimony that embarrassed the White House … The Army-Navy-Air Force Journal declared that the leaking of the Reynolds file seriously ‘undermined’ the confidential status of military files … A Washington Evening Star editorial spoke of the ‘smear’ and disclosed that persons connected with the White House had tried to peddle derogatory information and allegations about Reynolds to the Star.”88
In the middle of everything else that Johnson was doing “behind the scenes” to derail the Senate investigations, the wife of the government accountant who had been assigned to investigate Bobby Baker’s finances, mysteriously turned up dead, found by her children in her bathroom. Her autopsy was inconclusive, yet no criminal investigation was conducted.89 Of course, this could have been merely one more coincidence, unrelated to Johnson’s manic actions to put the brakes on the continuing investigation, but the apparent lack of interest in even looking into the matter suggests otherwise. The Democratic members of the Senate Rules Committee, outnumbering the Republicans by a 6–3 majority, were pressured by Lyndon Johnson to end the hearings aimed directly at himself and his connection to Bobby Baker. The three Republicans desperately tried to subpoena Walter Jenkins to testify under oath and be cross-examined regarding the charges made by Don Reynolds about the “gifting” of the stereo. In fact, they had submitted a list of more than fifteen witnesses, including Jenkins; their requests were voted down by the six Democrats, who were trying to kill the investigation completely to avoid further embarrassment to Johnson and their own Congressional leadership. Johnson continued applying pressure on everyone on the Hill he could talk to; one of his recorded telephone calls was to Senator Hubert Humphrey:90
JOHNSON: This is just between me and you and God, now; don’t tell a human.
HUMPHREY: No.
JOHNSON: But Dick Russell just called me and said that the leadership was treating Everett Jordan outrageous, and that he was ready to throw in the towel and that … [Everett] Dirksen ought to be told that if he wants to go into campaign contributions, why, we can look into a lot of campaign contributions. We can authorize the FBI to go into all the Republican ones that have ever been made.
HUMPHREY: Mm-hmm.
JOHNSON: And we’ll do it with the administration if he wants to do that—that we’ve got nothing to hide, that Bobby Baker hasn’t got any campaign contributions. Then he said, “Will you call Mike [Mansfield] and Hubert?” I said, “I can’t tell you who I’ll call, because I don’t want to call anybody that I can’t talk to. But I’ll call somebody. And I don’t want ’em to say the White House is directing this thing.”
HUMPHREY: Mm-hmm.
JOHNSON: He said, “Well, they want to call a bunch of new witnesses, and [Carl] Curtis is going to offer an amendment that any senator could call a witness”—which would be outrageous—instead of a majority, and they want to do that so they can call Walter Jenkins, and call a bunch of other people.
HUMPHREY: Mm-hmm.
JOHNSON: Of course, I wouldn’t let Walter Jenkins go; I’d just defy ’em. But they oughtn’t to be put on that spot, and make that a campaign issue for the rest of the year. It’s deader than hell now; if they’d leave it dead. Every poll they took—they took one, I noticed, in Salem, New Jersey yesterday, and 1 percent have ever heard of it. The rest of ’em don’t pay any attention. (emphasis added).
Johnson was obviously mortified that the committee might try to subpoena his aide Walter Jenkins to get his testimony under oath, under threat of perjury, regarding his role and knowledge about this aspect of the Baker scandal. As seen in the previous chapter, Johnson had a tremendous fear about having to testify under oath about anything
he did, as though that kind of testimony would be turned against him as a way to convict him in the absence of anything else sufficiently incriminating to indict him; clearly, he had the same attitude toward allowing Jenkins to do the same thing, testifying essentially as his surrogate. According to Rick Perlstein,91
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