The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  WHAT JOHNSON WAS DOING behind the closed door of his suite in Copenhagen was telephoning—and panicking. “He panicked on Bobby,” George Reedy was to say. He “absolutely panicked.” He was scared—“timorous,” in Reedy’s word. “The way that man could panic. And when he panicked, he had this animal instinct: cover up.” With reporters badgering him for an explanation for the Vice President’s daylong seclusion in his suite, Reedy tried to tell Johnson he had to give them some explanation, but the response was a shout: “Don’t say a thing!” When Reedy, as always, tried to reason with him, Johnson said, “Don’t tell them a thing!” and went into his bedroom, slamming the door in Reedy’s face.

  Johnson telephoned Abe Fortas, who had gotten him out of some of the tightest spots in his career—the federal judge’s decision to hold hearings on the vote-counting in the 1948 election, for example. But those had been legal difficulties. Fortas was indeed what Johnson considered him, one of the sharpest of lawyers, but this new problem was at the moment a public relations problem, and public relations was not the area of Fortas’ expertise. When, however, he gave Johnson advice that fit in with the “cover-up” instinct, Johnson followed it. Fortas suggested that reporters should be told that he, Johnson, really wasn’t all that close to Bobby Baker, and never had been—that Baker had been selected as Senate secretary not by Johnson but by vote of all the Democratic senators; that, in fact, he had hardly seen Baker since he had left the Senate.

  “Oh my God, that was incredible,” Reedy was to say. “That was just stupid. Abe was the one who came up with this.… ‘All the Senate Democrats elected Bobby secretary of the majority.’ Well, for the love of God, they all elected him because LBJ told them to”—and, of course, everyone knew that. While Reedy didn’t have to deliver that line himself, at least not for a while—the reporters who were accompanying Johnson in Denmark knew nothing about the matter—Johnson telephoned Jenkins and told him to take that line with the reporters asking him questions in Washington; meanwhile, he told Jenkins, he was rushing home.

  JENKINS HAD RECEIVED one call that was particularly disturbing. Harry Provence, editor of the Waco News-Tribune and an editor who had been working closely, and subserviently, with Johnson for years, had telephoned from Texas to say that one of the reporters who was looking into the lawsuit had already written a draft of a story about it, and had sent it to him.

  The reporter, fifty-three-year-old Sarah McClendon, wrote a column that ran weekly in the News-Tribune and six other Texas newspapers and was also a one-woman news bureau who submitted articles to newspapers around the country and to a small New York–based wire service, the North American Newspaper Alliance, in hopes that they would publish them. She was regarded by the rest of the Washington press corps, in the words of one article, with “a mixture of derision and respect,” the former for her practice of shouting down other reporters at presidential news conferences—in a loud, shrill, gravelly Texas voice—and asking accusatory questions that were all too often based on conspiracy theories, the latter for the courage she displayed in her struggles to make a career (and support her daughter; her husband had abandoned her when he learned she was pregnant) as a woman journalist in Washington at a time when the National Press Club didn’t even admit women. “She didn’t know how to be discreet,” her colleague Andrea Mitchell was to say. “She was as aggressive as hell. Objectivity was not her concern. That was bred from years of having to be outrageous to be heard.” And while her stories were sometimes filled with overstatements and unsupported generalizations, this time her story was understated—and filled with facts.

  McClendon’s article did not merely give the details of the lawsuit against Serv-U, it identified one of Baker’s co-defendants, Fred Black, as a lobbyist employed by North American Aviation “for the purpose of securing contracts from the United States government,” and said Black had worked with Baker to do that. And her article was not limited to the suit, or to Serv-U. It reported that the Senate employee was operating other businesses as well—“businesses of a varied nature in Washington and South Carolina.” It reported that he had built and operated the Carousel, a motel in Ocean City, Maryland, that was a “recreation spot for … top officials of government.” Nor was it limited to Baker’s private business interests. He was, the article said, “one of the chief dispensers of lush Democratic campaign funds.” And, it said, Baker was Johnson’s “protégé and close personal friend.”

  Provence read McClendon’s article to Jenkins over the telephone, and then Jenkins had the editor dictate it to a secretary, and then Jenkins either read it to, or discussed it with, Johnson in Copenhagen. And at about 5:30 on Monday, about the time that Johnson was boarding his plane in Iceland for the flight back to Washington, Jenkins telephoned Ms. McClendon and asked her to come to his office in the Senate Office Building, and, she says, when she arrived, took the line that Abe Fortas had laid out. “We have your story,” he told her. “We know that you’ve been trying to peddle it all over the country for days.” The story was “just not true,” he said. “Baker is no protégé of Mr. Johnson. Baker was here before Mr. Johnson ever arrived in the Senate. Mr. Johnson hasn’t seen him in ages. Mr. Johnson has barely seen him since he became Vice President. He never sees him, on social occasions or otherwise.” Ms. McClendon says that Jenkins ordered her to stop trying to “peddle” the story. “We know you’re trying to get it out. We want you to stop it. You are not to print this story.” It was no use trying to get it out, he said. Telephone calls had been made. “The impression” he “passed on to me [was] that no one would print the story, that all lines of getting the story out … had been closed off.” She had better stop trying to get it out, he said. “I was given the impression that if I persisted my bosses in Texas were ready to act.”

  Jenkins’ statement that Ms. McClendon had been trying to sell her story was correct; she had sent it to all her other Texas newspapers. His statement that no one would print it was correct—as far as Texas was concerned. Every one of her Texas clients had rejected it.

  But, she says, while “Walter knew what papers I worked for, he didn’t know about” (or had forgotten about) the North American Newspaper Alliance—“the little wire service in New York.” Feeling that “in justice” she owed it to the wire service to tell it that there might be consequences if it sent the story out to its subscribers, she went straight from Jenkins’ office to her telephone in the Senate Press Gallery, glanced around to make sure that no one could overhear her, and called the service’s editor, warning him that “He’ll [Johnson] make trouble. He’s going to make an awful lot of trouble.”

  The editor said it was too late to stop the story from going out. “It’s already on the wire.” Only one newspaper, the Des Moines Register, printed it, but on Wednesday, September 18, there it was, on the Register’s front page, and the next day the Charleston (South Carolina) Courier picked it up, and the Chicago Tribune assigned its top Washington correspondent, Willard Edwards, to it, and on the 23rd, his article ran; not only did it contain the story of Baker’s ties to Serv-U, whose rapid growth made it “the talk of its industry,” it also contained the same phrase McClendon had used: “Lyndon’s protégé.” And that same day, Vend was published; “it was,” as one account put it, “one of those rare instances when a highly specialized trade journal became a newsstand sellout in Washington”—and suddenly not a few but a pack of reporters were investigating the case of Bobby Baker, and the next Monday he was in a national magazine, Newsweek, its headline calling him “THE SERV-U MAN.” The text had an amplified identification: Bobby Baker, it said, was “so much the protégé of Lyndon Johnson … that he is known as ‘Lyndon’s Boy.’ ”

  THE CASE THAT HAD BROUGHT Baker to national attention had no direct connection with Lyndon Johnson, and possible connections would never be definitively explored; the only senator who would ever be directly linked with Serv-U was Robert Kerr, one of whose banks had, before his death, made a major loan to the company. The on
ly journalistic references to a possible connection would be hints—all of Serv-U’s contracts were “with plants in the aerospace industries,” and “among several hats worn by the Vice President is that of chairman of the Space Council”—or gentle sarcasm (“It is, of course, only accident that Lyndon Johnson is chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council and that Bobby Baker is his protégé,” Murray Kempton wrote in The New Republic). And it was also, of course, possible that Baker had been invoking Johnson’s name without his consent or knowledge. Johnson did his best to keep such hints to a minimum by, on the record, silence (“Don’t tell ’em a thing,” he kept saying to Reedy; the single sentence Reedy was authorized to give to reporters was “No comment on a matter pending before court”) and, off the record, denials (“Just trying to sell that line that ‘he hardly knew Bobby Baker,’ ” in Reedy’s words. “You just couldn’t sell that ridiculous story,” Reedy says. Johnson kept trying to sell it, however; Reedy was to recall one “horrible” session at which he had to watch as Johnson denied to reporters a relationship which they, often in company with Reedy, had witnessed, year after year, with their own eyes). The Vice President also stopped communicating with Baker, never speaking to him during this period and ordering his aides not to speak to him. The single telephone call from The Elms that Baker received, late one evening, wasn’t from the man with whom he had, for years, right up to the time Johnson left on the Scandinavian trip, spoken almost daily.

  “Bobby,” Lady Bird Johnson said, as Baker recalls the conversation. “Lyndon and I just want you to know we love you. You are like a member of the family and we are so grateful for all you’ve done for us. Our prayers are with you.” Then she changed the subject.

  No sound came over the telephone line to indicate that anyone was in the room with Lady Bird, but Baker was sure someone was. “I knew while she was talking on the phone, he was lying right beside her listening,” he was to say. He understood the reason for the call, he was to say. It was to keep him friendly. “He probably was … concerned that I might become miffed at his inattention and say something harmful to the detriment of his career.… He’s using Lady Bird to soft-soap me.” And, he was to say, he knew the reason for the silence. “I was thinking: LBJ’s right there by her side, but he won’t talk to me because he wants to be able to say that he hasn’t.” It was very important to Johnson that he be able to say that, Baker says. “I knew Johnson was petrified that he’d be dragged down” by being connected with him. And, Baker says, there was valid reason for Johnson’s concern. If he had revealed their many connections, Bobby Baker would say, “Lyndon B. Johnson might have incurred a mortal wound by these revelations.… They could have … driven him from office.” “He lied. He knew exactly what I was doing.”

  Johnson would be able to go on saying that for quite a long time. From the moment in Copenhagen that he learned of the lawsuit until—almost exactly nine years later—Baker visited him for a day at his ranch in October, 1972, “We spoke not a word and communicated only through intermediaries” (and, even through intermediaries, very rarely). Lyndon Johnson didn’t speak to Bobby Baker during the years before 1967, when Baker was convicted of larceny, fraud and tax evasion in an unrelated campaign funds case, and sentenced to three years in prison, or during the years in which Baker was appealing the conviction, or when Baker finally went to jail. And even on that ranch visit, there were moments hurtful to someone who had so worshiped the man he called simply “Leader.” When, in 1973, Walter Jenkins telephoned to invite him and his wife, Dorothy, to the ranch, he included the caveat that “This is to be very private. No publicity before, during or after.” Meeting the Bakers at the Austin airport, Jenkins “quickly ushered us into his car as if eager to hide us.” At the ranch, Johnson tried to create an atmosphere of old times, but Baker noted that Johnson wanted to know about the memoir he had contracted to write. “Is it going to be one of those kiss-and-tell books?” And when Baker asked him to “put in a kind word for me” with the Justice Department, which was investigating him again (“I don’t want to go back to jail”), he turned cold. As the Bakers were leaving, Bobby noticed the ranch guest book on a table by the front door. He knew how insistent Johnson was that every visitor sign the book. He stood there until “it became too obvious that my old leader” wasn’t going to ask him to sign.

  No matter how completely Johnson cut himself off from Baker, however, he couldn’t do so in the press. Baker was, of course, his protégé—“Lyndon’s Boy,” “Little Lyndon.” Any new revelations about Baker (and the new revelations would come fast upon each other’s heels, including the fact that according to a financial statement he filed in 1954—the last financial statement he filed before Johnson had him elected majority secretary—his net worth was $11,025, and in 1963, according to another financial statement he filed, it was $1,791,186) would reflect upon Johnson himself. “The man most harmed by Baker’s fall from grace is his longtime sponsor, Vice President Johnson,” Doris Fleeson wrote. And while no direct connection may have existed between Johnson and Baker’s activities with Serv-U, there were connections between him and Baker in other areas, and when Johnson was leafing through the Washington Post on the morning of October 6, and reached page B-6—ever since the first story by Jack Landau had appeared in the city section, he had taken to looking through that section as well as the national section every morning—he realized that at least one of those connections was about to come to light, for the article contained the name of Don B. Reynolds.

  REYNOLDS’ NAME WAS there because a senator had begun looking into Baker’s business dealings—from Johnson’s point of view, the worst possible senator.

  Although John J. Williams, a Republican from Delaware, was not a junior senator—in 1963, he was a year away from completing his third term and was the ranking Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee—no senator could have been more isolated from the Senate’s ruling inner circle, because he wanted it that way.

  Williams hadn’t been a politician but the owner of a livestock and poultry feed company when, in 1946, at the age of forty-two, he decided to run for the Senate. Arriving in Washington, he shunned the social circuit that politicians frequent; reinforcing his appearance of shyness was his demeanor on the Senate floor, where his voice was so soft that it was often inaudible to reporters in the Press Gallery, who gave him the nickname of “Whispering Willie.” A tall, spare man with, as one journalist put it, “friendly lines grooved at the corners of his mouth,” he soon had a reputation for fierce independence. Although, as one account was to say, “Washington folklore holds that any Delaware politician jumps when DuPont snaps its fingers in Wilmington,” he opposed, and defeated, a proposal that would largely have freed DuPont stockholders from taxes on a particularly profitable company transaction, and, although a rigid conservative about social mores, he voted to censure Joe McCarthy because he disapproved of his methods. The niche he carved out for himself in Washington was an unusual, perhaps unique one. Becoming curious about complaints that “something was wrong” in the Wilmington office of the Internal Revenue Service, in 1949 he launched an investigation, not through a Senate committee with its attendant glare of publicity but largely on his own, that went on for three years and by 1952 had resulted in no fewer than 125 convictions for bribery, extortion and falsification of records. During the years since then, he had conducted more investigations, again not through Senate committees but on his own, relying on information supplied by the Government Accounting Office and on tips from men and women in the government. Of all the scandals involving Harry Truman’s “cronies” that had marred his presidency, none resonated more with the public than the one involving Truman’s old friend and military aide General Harry Vaughan, described by the press as perhaps the ultimate White House “crony,” who helped obtain government contracts and favored treatments for businessmen, and accepted from one of them—and arranged for another to be given to First Lady Bess Truman—an expensive food storage “deep
freeze.” Although Vaughan said the freezers were merely “an expression of friendship,” and although there was nothing illegal in what he had done, the “deep freeze” had, in headlines and cartoons, come to symbolize “the mess in Washington.” Williams, who spent three years looking into the Vaughan situation, was to add a dimension to the story: it wasn’t only businessmen who had benefited from Vaughan’s influence, he revealed, but businessmen associated with the underworld. During the Korean War, one of them had been given a government post “solely upon” Vaughan’s recommendation. And during the Eisenhower Administration, Williams, although he was a Republican, had been one of the first senators to demand the investigation of, and then the dismissal of, Eisenhower’s “assistant president,” White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams, who had intervened with federal agencies on behalf of Boston textile magnate Bernard Goldfine, and who, the investigation revealed, had accepted expensive gifts from Goldfine, including an Oriental rug and a vicuña overcoat.