AND FOR LYNDON JOHNSON, the stories were beginning to come closer and closer. Hitherto, during the two months in which the scandal had been unfolding, it had, despite the frequent mentions of Johnson’s name, been primarily a scandal about Bobby Baker, but that was about to change.
On November 15, two liberal Democratic senators, Stephen M. Young of Ohio and Quentin N. Burdick of North Dakota, called in reporters and told them that, in early January, 1961, while Johnson was still contemplating keeping control of the Senate, Baker had kept them from seats on the Judiciary Committee by telling the Democratic Steering Committee, falsely, that neither had any interest in serving on the committee; two Johnson allies, his junior senator from Texas, William A. Blakley, and Edward V. Long of Missouri, were named instead. And on November 18, a New York Daily News columnist drew the lesson that the two senators’ disclosures were not about Baker’s personal financial maneuvers but about his impact on the governmental process, that he had been an “instrument” of the Senate’s inner circle, and, specifically, of Lyndon Johnson—“As Baker was Johnson’s errand boy, would he have given the Steering Committee the wrong information all by himself?” And, in the Daily News, perhaps for the first time in print, appeared the suggestion that the witnesses summoned to testify should include not only the instrument but the man who, the Daily News said, had wielded it: the man who was now Vice President of the United States. “If Baker is to be quizzed by the investigating Senate Rules Committee about this specific incident, it would appear only fair to have the Vice President called to give his version.” On that same day, November 18, the Monday of the week the President was to leave for Texas, a new Life article hit the newsstands. Its headline was still THE BOBBY BAKER CASE (SCANDAL GROWS AND GROWS IN WASHINGTON), and the text, written by Keith Wheeler and based on the work of a nine-member Life investigative team, was in part merely a recounting of Baker’s personal financial saga that had been public since the filing of the Serv-U suit and of the role of sex in his rise to wealth (“in the peculiar Washington world here under review, wives were not the only women included in social activity.… One way or another, young women become more or less legal tender in the ancient and crafty commerce of getting things done”), although it added, in chops-licking prose, some new details—one of the Quorum Club hostesses “kept a tambourine and harem pants” handy “as costume for the oriental dances she sometimes performed.… Sometimes she did other dances which required no costume whatever”; during one exercise in which a number of naked young women poured champagne over each other in a bathtub, Elly Rometsch was bitten in the behind by another bather but “apparently bore her wound with fortitude and no ill will”—and was illustrated by a new photograph of Carole Tyler, no longer a blonde but a brunette, who had “posed graciously for Life’s cameras,” not in the surf but on a sofa, in a demure suit. But the article was also about the Senate—and about Lyndon Johnson.
The Senate had been Baker’s “base of operations,” Wheeler explained, and the Senate was controlled “rigidly” by a small group that was its “Establishment,” and “In a very real sense the … Establishment is the personal creation of Lyndon Baines Johnson who, from the day he took over as majority leader until he went to the Vice Presidency, ruled it like an absolute monarch.… It was Johnson who sponsored Bobby Baker’s election as majority secretary and fashioned him into his legman, mouthpiece and satrap of power.”
And the article demonstrated that Johnson had used Baker in that way at the beginning of his vice presidency as well. Quentin Burdick had been independent, Life said, quoting “a man in a position to know,” and “Lyndon Johnson wasn’t likely to forgive” that. “So Bobby Baker shivved Burdick. It was typical.”
The article gave examples of Baker’s use of campaign funds—how he gave Paul Douglas only $3,000 of the $12,000 that had been donated for him—and an example of how, as Wheeler put it, such “campaign money might carry its own corrupting price tag”: “In 1958, when Frank Edward Moss was running for the Senate in Utah, an emissary was dispatched from Washington to offer him ‘a big chunk’ of money to boost his campaign along.… But then the messenger let him know there was a catch. He could have the swag only in return for his signature on a letter avowing that he had studied the 27?% oil depletion allowance and concluded that its continuance was in the national interest.” And the article disclosed, in addition, that much of the campaign funding was in cash. “When there was a lot of it, somebody—not necessarily Baker, but somebody in the entourage—carried it in a money belt strapped around his belly.” But the article also made clear that it wasn’t Baker who had directed the collection and distribution of the money. He had done so, the article explained, in his post as secretary of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “It was a committee in name only, for Johnson controlled it absolutely,” Life said, and money was given only to senators and senatorial candidates whom Johnson felt he could control; in the words of a Senate insider quoted by the magazine, “what Lyndon wanted was a nice, cozy little majority … with no back talk. No mavericks.” Bobby Baker, this source said, had simply been “Lyndon’s bluntest instrument in running the show.” Famous though Bobby might have become, he was no more than Lyndon’s acolyte. “He always spoke of LBJ as ‘The Leader.’ … He even tried to be Johnson. He copied Johnson’s clothes and mannerisms. When he came into the Senate chamber, he’d take the Johnson stance.” After the publication of that article, in that immensely influential magazine, it was clear that the Bobby Baker case was inevitably going to become the Lyndon Johnson case as well.
FOR SOMEONE WHO was poring over every word in the Life article—as Lyndon Johnson was poring over every word—one of those words in it was, according to George Reedy, particularly distressing. Baker’s new home, it said, was near “millionaire Lyndon Johnson’s” home. “Millionaire”—this was perhaps the first time that Johnson had ever been identified as such in print, at least in a national publication; he had perhaps never been identified in a national publication even as a wealthy man, let alone a very wealthy man; for Life to do so, it must know something about his personal fortune that he had previously been able to keep hidden.
And, in fact, it did.
The magazine’s investigative team had been working since the end of October, and, during that time, says its leader, Associate Editor William Lambert, “I began to pick up all these hints” about Lyndon Johnson, not merely about Johnson and his relationship with the newly rich Bobby Baker, but about Lyndon Johnson “and the acquisition of his fortune.” Following up on the hints, the team had found, in the words of Russell Sackett, one of its members and also an associate editor, that “The deeper you got, the more serious they were; he was far richer than anyone had expected,” that he was, in fact, very rich indeed.
“I was very indignant,” Lambert said, and during the week of November 11, he had gone to the office of George P. Hunt, Life’s managing editor, and said of Lyndon Johnson, “This guy looks like a bandit to me.” Although “bandit” is, of course, a synonym for “robber” or “thief,” Lambert didn’t feel he was misusing the word. “I felt that he had used public office to enhance his private wealth.” He told Hunt, “We’re going to have to spend some money [to investigate]. I need some people, and a lot of time.” Johnson’s entire financial picture should be looked into, he said. “It was almost a net worth job, and you know that takes an enormous amount of time. I told Hunt, ‘He’s got a fortune, and he’s been on the [public] payroll ever since he got out of college. And I don’t know how he got it, but it’s there.’ ” By the time he went in to see Hunt, Lambert was to recall, “We knew he was a millionaire many times over.”
After listening to Lambert’s description of what the investigation had uncovered thus far, Hunt agreed to allocate the manpower Lambert wanted (the managing editor warned him to be “very careful” in checking the facts “because he [Johnson] is only a heartbeat away from the presidency”), and, Lambert recalls, “we put together a kind of
task force,” and by the end of that week, no fewer than nine reporters were digging, not only in Washington but in Austin and Johnson City, into a story which, if it was told in any detail, would be a story that was being told for the first time: what Sackett calls “The story of Lyndon Johnson’s money.” By the middle of the week of November 18, even while Wheeler’s Bobby Baker story was still on the newsstands, the investigative team had uncovered enough new material so that, in Sackett’s words, “We knew there was a much bigger story. We were finding more and more on Lyndon.” Wheeler and Lambert felt Hunt should be informed about their findings, and a meeting in the managing editor’s office, at which all the members of the team who were in New York would be present, was scheduled for the late morning of that Friday, November 22.
And also on that Friday, for the first time a Lyndon Johnson financial transaction was going to be described by a witness, seated beside his lawyer, to representatives of the United States Senate—for on November 22, 1963, the witness in a closed hearing with the staff of the Senate Rules Committee was going to be Don B. Reynolds.
He began testifying that morning at ten o’clock.
LYNDON JOHNSON HAD FLOWN to his ranch on Friday, November 15. The President and Jackie were to spend the following Friday night—the 22nd—and Saturday at the ranch after the fundraising dinner in Austin. Kennedy wasn’t looking forward to the visit—when O’Donnell and Dave Powers tried to get out of accompanying him, he told them they didn’t have a chance: “You two guys aren’t running out on me and leaving me stranded with poor Jackie at Lyndon’s ranch. If I’ve got to hang around there all day Saturday wearing one of those big cowboy hats, you’ve got to be there, too”—but since he was going to be in his Vice President’s hometown, not visiting the ranch would have added to the speculation Kennedy was trying to avoid. The Johnsons had flown down a week ahead of time to prepare for the visit.
Tight as were the political tensions—the Senate investigation, the Yarborough feud—that were wound around Lyndon Johnson that week, the visit, being social, gave the screw another twist. “This was important to him to have this go off well,” his secretary Marie Fehmer says. “He was quite tense.” Liz Carpenter recalls “much cleaning and directing of servants to have everything spick-and-span.” Everything had to be perfect. When the President had been asked if there was anything he’d like to do at the ranch, he had said that perhaps he’d like to ride. This casual remark brought an influx of new horseflesh. Wesley West’s thoroughbreds were the finest in the Hill Country; eight of the best were brought to the Johnson Ranch. A Tennessee walking horse, with its easy gait, might be a good horse for Jackie; Lady Bird’s Tennessee walker was at that moment back in Tennessee, undergoing further training; a horse trailer was dispatched to get it back before the Kennedys arrived. Supplies of the President’s preferred beverages—Poland water, Ballantine’s Scotch—were laid in; inquiries were made to determine the temperature (“tepid”) at which he liked to drink the water. Jackie sometimes preferred Newport cigarettes, sometimes Salems; adequate supplies of both were laid in. The champagnes she preferred had of course been purchased, but then it was learned that she sometimes liked to drink them over ice; Bess Abell was assigned to show one of the housemen, James Davis, “This is how you pour champagne on the rocks for Mrs. Kennedy.” A trip to Austin produced new terry-cloth hand towels for Jackie. Then it was learned that she preferred smooth hand towels; another 120-mile round-trip was made. Liz Carpenter recalls “many telephone calls and drives into town … to bring back the very nicest perfumes, scented soaps for Mrs. Kennedy’s bathroom.” And one thing wasn’t perfect. The bedboard and horsehair mattress for the President’s bad back hadn’t arrived on schedule, and the empty bed seemed to loom over all the preparations; Mrs. Abell kept thinking, “Will he wander in to bare springs?” And there was one piece of information that it had proven impossible to determine: the duration of the Kennedys’ visit. Would they be staying until Sunday? Repeated inquiries to the Kennedy staff had produced no response. As Friday neared, “that was still very much a question mark,” Mrs. Abell says.
Then there was the question of entertainment. The ranch’s specialty was a sheepherding show in which two sheepdogs rounded up a small herd of sheep and moved them from one pen to another; it had been decided to stage that show for the Kennedys because it would, Ms. Carpenter says, give them “a real flavor of the hillside of Texas, which Mrs. Johnson wanted very much to show them,” but the decision was continually revisited. “On one hand,” writes one of Mrs. Johnson’s biographers, Jan Jarboe Russell, “she wanted to entertain Mrs. Kennedy in her own unpretentious way, out of doors.… Yet she was also eager to avoid playing the part of the rube.” And Lady Bird had an additional concern—indeed, horror. Because the paved path from the ranch’s airstrip led not to the front door of the ranch house but to the kitchen door in back, she had fallen into the habit of bringing visitors into the house by that entrance, so that they entered through a little room containing a washing machine and dryer, and then came into the kitchen, with its corkboard filled with scribbled messages, and she seemed unable to break herself of that habit. “The image of Jackie Kennedy, immaculately dressed …, being herded through the busy ranch kitchen seemed like a waking nightmare to Lady Bird,” Russell writes. “If you don’t do anything else for me, please be sure that I get the President and Mrs. Kennedy into the living room door and not the kitchen door,” she told Mrs. Abell. “I’m sure to forget about it.” The President was to land at San Antonio’s International Airport at 1:30 on Thursday afternoon, November 21, lead a motorcade through the city to the new Aerospace Medical Center, then fly on to Houston for another motorcade and an Albert Thomas Appreciation Dinner in the Houston Coliseum that evening. After the dinner, he would fly to Fort Worth, where on Friday he would give a breakfast speech before flying to Dallas for another motorcade, which was scheduled to end at the Dallas Trade Mart, where he was to give a luncheon speech before flying down to Austin for the hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner, and, later that night, to the LBJ Ranch. When, on Thursday, at 11:20 a.m., the Johnsons left the ranch in their Beechcraft Bonanza for the short flight to San Antonio, where they would greet the President, they left behind them a staff still agonizing over details of the Kennedy visit.
The President’s arrival in San Antonio brought with it more trouble for Lyndon Johnson—political trouble, but with a personal twist.
Close behind the President and Jackie as they came down the steps of Air Force One was Ralph Yarborough, who, along with most of the twenty-member Texas congressional delegation, had flown to Texas with the President. The senator, Ken O’Donnell was to say, had boarded the plane “in a rage,” having just learned that there was going to be no seat for him at the head table at the Austin dinner and no invitation at all for him to Connally’s reception for the President at the Governor’s Mansion. On the flight down, Ken O’Donnell says, his anger had boiled over when reporters asked his reaction. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “Governor Connally is so uneducated governmentally, how could you expect anything else?” If his anger required additional fuel, it was provided by a group of supporters who, as he came down onto the tarmac, crowded around him to tell him, as one of them says, that “what Connally and Johnson are trying to do to you” was public knowledge. And, as it happened, he did not have to wait more than a few minutes for an opportunity to retaliate for these slights—delivering one of his own that was particularly painful to a man who lived in dread of public humiliation.
A motorcade was forming on the tarmac for the drive from the airport to the Aerospace Medical Center. Behind the lead police car was the long, midnight-blue presidential convertible, carrying the Kennedys and Connallys, followed by the Secret Service security car, which reporters had dubbed the “Queen Mary,” an open, armored, four-ton rolling arsenal with four agents inside and four more standing on the running boards; and then, after the requisite seventy-five-foot security gap, the rented convertible for the V
ice President and a rented car containing his Secret Service detail; and then a car for the four-man press pool, a press bus for the forty reporters not in the pool, a caravan of open cars crammed with still photographers and newsreel cameramen, and other convertibles for congressmen and local officials. Yarborough had been assigned by O’Donnell to ride with the Johnsons—but now he refused to do so. When the chief of Johnson’s Secret Service detail, Special Agent Rufus W. Youngblood, a lanky, balding Georgian with an easy drawl, tried to direct the senator to Johnson’s car, he simply ignored him. Turning to San Antonio congressman Henry Gonzalez, he asked, “Henry, can I hitch a ride with you?” and got into his car instead.
The Passage of Power Page 50