In late January [of 1964] when Republicans tried to get Walter Jenkins, Johnson’s most intimate aide, to testify before a Senate subcommittee investigation, Johnson put in the fix. Two psychiatrists appeared to testify that an appearance would—literally—kill him. [Republican] Carl Curtis moved to call Jenkins to the stand anyway. He lost 6 to 3 in a party-line vote. That was a good thing for Johnson: ‘I’ve got considerably more detail on Reynold’s love life,’ Jenkins told the President about the man who linked him to Bobby Baker. ‘Well, get it all typed up for me,’ Johnson replied—not the kind of shady behavior Jenkins wanted to be asked about under oath. Curtis lost again when he moved to make the record of the session public. The investigation closed without a single Administration witness being called.
Johnson Throws a Congressional Hissy Fit
By February, Johnson was getting more and more nervous about the course of the congressional investigations. Naturally, in most cases, the conversations regarding the bribery, blackmail, political influence peddling, and other illegal activities that transpired on Capitol Hill were closely guarded secrets only known to those complicit in the activities (except those recorded by Hoover’s men of course). Unfortunately for Lyndon Johnson, as a result of his inability to be discreet when under pressure, there was one major exception in his case, which was told by a firsthand witness to it, Robert N. Winter-Berger, in his book The Washington Pay-off. This impromptu conversation—a result of Baker’s insistence on the additional payment of $5,600 by Ralph Hill for the rights to the renewal of his contract noted above—occurred on February 4, 1964, in a surprise appearance by the new president Lyndon Johnson in Speaker of the House John McCormack’s office in the Capitol. Speaker McCormack, for the record, was a longtime friend and collaborator with both Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, and an enemy of John F. Kennedy, who “view[ed] each other with personal disdain.”92 Mr. Winter-Berger had an appointment with Speaker McCormack at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, February 4, to discuss his public relations concerns regarding his effort to win the nomination for the vice presidency in the coming elections.93
Ordinarily, Winter-Berger attended meetings with Speaker of the House John McCormack only in the company of Nathan Voloshen, a friend and business associate-lobbyist who later pled guilty to influence peddling and conspiracy. He had been a longtime associate of John McCormack, who, when he was Speaker of the House, rented a portion of his offices to Voloshen for $2,500 per month and allowed him unlimited use of those facilities and his staff in exchange for this and other favors, including a weekly supply of Havana cigars and creams and lotions from Saks Fifth Avenue for his wife which the secretaries called “Voloshen’s Lotions.” On that day, however, Voloshen had a conflicting appointment which required him to be in New York, but he urged Winter-Berger to go ahead with the meeting with McCormack without him.
The meeting began on schedule, in McCormack’s massive office across the corridor from the House chamber. After only five minutes, the private door to the inner office opened and Lyndon B. Johnson strode in, with a look of “such anguish” as he had never seen before. Winter-Berger sat stunned by what was happening before his eyes, not knowing whether to stay seated or excuse himself and exit quickly; neither gave him any hint about that choice, so he stayed seated:
Johnson disregarded me, but I can never forget the sight of him, crossing the room in great strides. In a loud, hysterical voice he said: “John, that son of a bitch is going to ruin me. If that cocksucker talks, I’m gonna land in jail.”… Things couldn’t be worse, and you know it. We’ve talked about this shit often enough. Why wasn’t it killed, John?” When Johnson looked up at McCormack, I could see he was crying. He buried his face again… “I practically raised that motherfucker, and now he’s gonna make me the first President of the United States to spend the last days of his life behind bars.” He was hysterical… . “How much money does the greedy bastard have to make?” Johnson said. “For a lousy five thousand bucks, he ruins his life, he ruins my life, and Christ knows who else’s. Five thousand bucks, and the son of a bitch has millions.”… “He should have given him the goddamn machines,” Johnson said. “He should have known better. Now we’re all up shit creek. We’re all gonna rot in jail.” “We’ll think of something,” McCormack said. He rubbed Johnson’s shoulder. “Please. Calm down. Control yourself.”
In a burst, Johnson said: “It’s me they’re after. It’s me they want. Who the fuck is that shit heel? But they’ll get him up there in front of an open committee and all the crap will come pouring out and it’ll be my neck. Jesus Christ, John, my life is at stake!… . He’s got to take this rap himself. He’s the one that made the goddamn stupid mistake. Get to him. Find out how much more he wants, for crissake. I’ve got to be kept out of this… Oh, I tell you, John, it takes just one prick to ruin a man in this town. Just one person has to rock the boat and a man’s life goes down the drain. And I’m getting fucked by two bastards—Bobby and that Williams son of a bitch. And all he wants is headlines.” “It’ll pass, Lyndon,” McCormack said. “This will pass.”
Johnson got angry. “Not if we just sit around on our asses and think we can watch it pass. You’ve got to get to Bobby, John. Tell him I expect him to take the rap for this on his own. Tell him I’ll make it worth his while. Remind him that I always have.” “All right, Lyndon.”
All during this session, McCormack tried to position himself to block the view between Johnson and Winter-Berger, who had continued to be tempted to make his escape, and there were several occasions when he probably could have done it discreetly. Johnson broke down, crying hysterically, a few times, making so much noise himself that he would not have noticed it if Winter-Berger left; but he sat transfixed, unable to move. He sat in amazement of the scene that was unfolding before him. After one of Johnson’s tantrums, he suddenly became quieter and, apparently for the first time, he became aware of Winter-Berger’s existence, asking McCormack softly,
“Is he all right?” McCormack said. “Yes. He’s a close friend of Nat’s.” Johnson looked up at McCormack, his expression changing to a look of discovery. “Nat can do this,” he said. “Nat can get to Bobby. They’re friends. Have Nat get to Bobby.” McCormack seemed relieved. “Yes, Lyndon. I’d prefer that. I don’t think this is a good time for me to get in touch with Bobby.” “Yes,” said Johnson. “Get Nat. Let’s talk to him. Is he around?”
McCormack told Johnson that Nat was in New York, but agreed to get him to be an intermediary to work with Bobby Baker. Winter-Berger agreed to meet with Nat the next morning; Johnson asked him to take him a message,
Johnson said, “Tell Nat that I want him to get in touch with Bobby Baker as soon as possible—tomorrow, if he can. Tell Nat to tell Bobby that I will give him a million dollars if he takes this rap. Bobby must not talk. I’ll see to it that he gets a million-dollar settlement. Then have Nat get back to John here, or to Eddie Adams later tomorrow, so I can know what Bobby says.”
Winter-Berger continued writing all of this out, saying repeatedly, “Yes, sir.”
Then McCormack said, “Tell Nat to tell Bobby Baker not to try to get in touch with me, I don’t want to have any meeting with Baker.” Johnson said: “Tell Nat this is urgent, and I want him to get on it right away.”
With this, Johnson was now relieved enough to calm down. He and McCormack then left for the White House in McCormack’s chauffer-driven car; Winter-Bergen left as well, on his way to New York to carry the bribery offer from the president of the United States—albeit with two intermediaries between him and the recipient—to his old friend and associate, Bobby Baker. Lyndon Johnson, in another instance of hysteria prompted by his realization that he was in danger of being indicted along with Baker, admitted his long-term criminal involvement. It is yet another “dot” on the matrix that can be connected to the hundreds of others which point to him as a criminal mastermind. In this case, the price of his own protection which he offered to pay was a nice round number: one million
U.S. dollars.
It is not difficult to imagine Johnson having similar tirades at other equally distressing times when he felt himself in legal jeopardy. From the time that the Bobby Baker affair first began appearing in the news four months prior to this conversation, there were no doubt many similar occurrences of the same reaction; Johnson even admitted as much when he shouted, “We’ve talked about this shit often enough. Why wasn’t it killed, John?”
On another front about this time, Johnson arranged for Secretary of State Dean Rusk to write to a judge who was adjudicating a trial involving Baker’s—and his partners’—involvement with a Dominican Republic scam, to request that the judge suppress audio taped evidence implicating Baker in the interest of national security.94 Several months before this, before the assassination, Johnson and Baker had made a trip to the Dominican Republic, which was related to a business deal involving Johnson’s leverage within the Department of Agriculture and gaining approval for a slaughterhouse owned by Clint Murchison (which had a history of failed inspections due to unsanitary conditions) to sell its product on the Haitian market; getting the USDA’s inspection approved was part of the deal that netted Baker a “finder’s fee” of a half cent per pound of beef sold.95
One week after Johnson’s meltdown in Speaker McCormack’s office, an internal FBI memorandum written to FBI Assistant Director Alan Belmont on February 13, 1964 partially explains how Lyndon Johnson was finally able to shut down the Justice Department’s investigation into Bobby Baker and, with it, the Senate investigations as well. The memo was captioned “ROBERT G. BAKER / CONFLICT OF INTEREST / FRAUD AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT” and stated, “There is attached hereto information received from the Washington Field Office which indicates that (redacted) advised the Washington Field Office that President Lyndon B. Johnson had confiscated the Robert G. Baker file from the U.S. Department of Justice while Attorney General Robert Kennedy was on his recent peace mission trip. (Redacted) stated this information came to him from Senator John Williams of Delaware. (Redacted) stated as a result of this action, the Senate Rules Committee investigating the Baker matter was at a complete standstill because it was not receiving any further information from the Justice Department.”
On March 16, Senator Hugh Scott made a speech on the Senate floor charging that the six Democrats on the Rules Committee were lining up for a political vote to kill the investigations. “It is not an investigative decision. It is a political decision. This investigation is embarrassing to members of the Democratic Party. The majority members of the Rules Committee are not watching facts; they are watching the calendar. The November elections are approaching, and they are determined to put this skeleton back into the closet.” He accused his Democratic colleagues of having “attached to themselves blinders for their eyes, plugs for their ears, and handcuffs for their wrists. So equipped, they have stumbled into, through and around one of the most sordid scandals in Washington … The investigators have been directed to skip evidence on party girls; they have been directed to skip evidence on political contributions; they have been directed to skip evidence on abortions* … The request to call Mr. Reynolds [in an open hearing] was refused, and the request to call an important witness, the head of a telephone answering service who would establish that Mr. Jenkins had made certain calls to Mr. Reynolds, was refused.”96
Shutting Down the Senate Investigations
As the (by now, crippled) Senate investigations wore on through the remainder of 1964, the Republicans managed to keep the scandals alive while the Democrats continued to portray Bobby Baker as an embarrassing loose cannon, amazingly disconnected from anyone else in the party, including the president. As both sides geared up for the 1964 election, the news of the scandal almost dried up entirely, though the GOP tried to move it back to the front pages through vague charges that “something is wrong” with respect to the state of Washington morality. On September 11, Time reported, in an article titled “Investigations: That Lingering Aroma” that the issue had not quite gone away:97
With a sort of ‘heh-heh-now-let’s-see-what-you-Republicans-can-do-about-it’ air, the Democratic majority on the Senate Rules Committee last May declared its investigation into the shenanigans of former Senate Democratic Secretary Bobby Baker at an end. The majority report found no real wrong doing on the part of Baker or, perish the thought, his longtime sponsor, Lyndon Johnson.
But the aroma from the Baker case has refused to fade away, mostly because of the efforts of Delaware’s G.O.P. Senator John J. Williams, who has fashioned a highly successful Senate career from his lone-wolf investigative abilities. Among Williams’ gum shoe disclosures … [was] all sorts of chicanery in the farm soil-bank program, which was altered after Williams’ disclosures.
Time’s September report detailed how a $35,000 payoff made by contractor Matt McCloskey to Bobby Baker was set up to allow him to claim it as a business expense, deductible from the profit he banked from the construction of the D.C. Stadium. On December 11, 1964, Time updated the affair in an article titled “Investigations: Parties & Payments”:98
Anyone who has followed the Bobby Baker case even vaguely knows of charges of a political payoff to help finance the 1960 presidential campaign and of reports that Baker used shapely party girls to help smooth the way for his shady deals. Last week, the fact that there was indeed a lot of loose change floating around—$35,000, to be exact—was confirmed beyond a doubt, to whatever purpose it may have been used. And the Senate Rules Committee, reopening its hearings into the Baker affair, also began pinning down some of that party-girl talk… . Star witness was Insurance Man Don Reynolds, 48, an old business buddy of Baker’s…“I,” said Reynolds, “was the bagman in this thing from beginning to end. The bagman is the man pushed around for having been the medium … I was low man on the totem pole.” Of the $35,000, Reynolds said, he kept $10,000 for himself, and “Bobby told me that $15,000 was to go for the presidential campaign and the other $10,000 was to go for political purposes as he and Mr. McCloskey saw fit—mostly Bobby.” Reynolds said that Baker further told him to “stick the money in a bank you don’t ordinarily use, so those people snooping around will have a hell of a time locating it.” [Reynolds] produced some impressive documents to support his story: 1) an invoice in the amount of $109,000 sent to McCloskey by Reynolds, 2) a check for $109,000 sent to Reynolds by the McCloskey company, and 3) a bill for only $64,000, the performance-bond premium minus Reynolds’ regular $10,000 commission, sent to Reynolds by the insurance company for which he was agent.
That left it all pretty much a case of Reynolds’ word against McCloskey’s. And as far as Bobby Baker was concerned, that was how it would stay. Appearing under subpoena before the committee last week, Baker invoked not only the Fifth Amendment, but the First, Fourth, and Sixth refusing to answer more than 40 Rules Committee questions.
The following March, Time reported on how the Senate closed down the hearings of the Rules Committee under the pretext of an “FBI Report” that was a thinly disguised whitewash, which seemed to be written by someone in the White House:99
In fact, the report was not written by the FBI at all, but rather by a team of Justice Department functionaries who boiled down hundreds of pages of raw FBI interviews. Unlike Reynolds, none of the persons interviewed by the FBI were under oath. The only part of Reynolds’s testimony that has at any time been tested by a sworn statement from an adversary witness turned out to be true: that was Reynolds’ claim that he had purchased advertising time on a Johnson-owned Austin TV station in return for selling insurance on Johnson’s life. The claim was recently corroborated in substance by former White House Aide Walter Jenkins.
Through the skillful parsing of words, this report—falsely labeled an FBI report—seemingly vindicated the real culprits, Baker and Jenkins, while portraying Don Reynolds as a liar, even though he had receipts and documents backing up every one of his charges. According to a follow-up article in Time four months later, the Senate finally yielded to Jo
hnson’s pressure, which was probably applied in much the same way as he used in his tirade with Speaker McCormack in February.100
The “Watchdog” Loses His Fangs
Senator Williams appeared on the television program, Face the Nation, stating he regretted that the Rules Committee had ended the hearings “without pursuing some of the many leads … left dangling.” He called Reynolds “an excellent witness,” and lamented that “there was … what appeared to be a determined effort to discredit him … based on some leads from high sources …” Moreover, he suspected that “it may be an effort to intimidate any future witness that may want to testify before the Committee.”101 He defended Reynolds from the Johnson “leaks” of the FBI’s findings of dirty laundry in his closet (noted above) and pointed out that he had “an excellent record” in the State Department “with 13 or 14 promotions” and had served commendably in the air force, leaving as a Major and an honorable discharge.102 Senator Williams, a simple man from the rural part of south Delaware, who went to Washington with a commitment to fight political corruption, passed his information to the three Republicans on the ten-member Rules Committee. Being outnumbered, though, their push for a full investigation into Johnson and Baker was stopped by the Democrat majority.103
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