Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  Bobby Kennedy was learning that reality the hard way. He had jumped into the New York Senate race in late August, making fun of his own carpetbagger status: “Now where is the Hudson River again?” But by mid-September, it was clear that the campaign would be no lark, nor an easy restoration of Camelot. Polls showed him trailing the Republican incumbent, Kenneth Keating. Relations between Bobby and Johnson had never been worse, but with less than a month to go before the election, it was clear that the popular president could help the struggling candidate. Bobby Kennedy relying on Lyndon Johnson for help: more than any poll, this made the president feel on top.

  But then Fortas’s voice came over the phone line in the Waldorf and the bottom dropped out. “Walter came over to see me this morning,” the attorney told the president, “and he got involved in a quite serious situation. We hope that we have it under control.”

  The details of the situation were so serious, and so clearly uncomfortable for Fortas to discuss, that it was several minutes before Johnson could gather what on earth Fortas was talking about. Eventually he got the salient details of a complicated story: a week earlier, Jenkins had attended a party for Newsweek’s new Washington offices. Apparently he’d been drinking heavily. Afterward, he’d gone to, of all places, a nearby YMCA known to be a favorite haunt of homosexuals seeking clandestine assignations. And that was where plainclothes policemen had discovered Walter Jenkins, the quiet family man, the most understated man on the Johnson staff, the closest aide to the president, in sexual congress with another man.

  Both men were arrested promptly and hauled into police custody. Jenkins paid a fine and was released. He returned to his desk at the White House that night. For a week he’d gone about his business as usual, telling no one what had happened. But that morning, after the White House had received word that The Washington Star planned to print an article on the event, Jenkins had come to Fortas, desperate. Fortas and Clifford soon learned that the story had been circulating in the capital for several days. Not only did the Star have it, The Washington Post and the Washington Daily News did as well. Worse, the Star had the record of a prior Jenkins arrest, in 1959, in the same location on a similar charge.

  The two lawyers believed they had persuaded the papers to kill the story. With the help of Jenkins’s family doctor, they’d persuaded him to check in to George Washington University Hospital, where he was undergoing treatment for nervous exhaustion. There, he would be away from the prying eyes of reporters.

  The president, taking this all in, spoke softly. Despite his famous temper, it was usually dumb quiet that first came over him in moments when catastrophe seemed at hand. He groped for more information. “Does his wife know about this?”

  “We’re not going to ever tell her anything,” said Fortas, “except that he was exhausted and in the hospital.”

  Johnson’s mind was turning over. “I just can’t believe this!”

  The implications for Johnson of Jenkins’s troubles were significant—anyone could see that. In recent weeks, Goldwater, desperate to make something stick on Johnson, had been talking up other scandals surrounding the president. A year earlier, Bobby Baker, a colorful Capitol Hill fixture who’d served as secretary to the majority leader, had come under investigation on corruption charges and had to resign. Baker had been a Johnson retainer during his years in the Senate, and there were rumors that he’d also done dirty dealing at Johnson’s direction and with his assent. The Republicans had been looking for anything they could find to suggest Johnson lacked morality. Now, in Jenkins, was the proof.

  In a way, the whole business had a sort of ironic justice. For months on end, Johnson had been unable to accept the pleasant forecast for the November election. He’d waited with vigilance and apprehension for something that could destroy his chances, for a nameless, faceless phantom to appear. Now at last it had come. It had a form and a face. A face he had been staring at every day.

  Johnson’s voice took on a tone of fatalism. “You don’t foresee that you can keep this lid on for three weeks, do you?” he asked. It was more a statement than a question.

  “No sir,” Fortas replied. “I think that, however, if we can keep it out of the news stories that it won’t assume a great deal of dignity. And I think that Walter ought to stay in the hospital a while, and then be sent off somewhere … to recuperate.”

  It was fantasy to believe that a story like this could stay out of the news pages. Johnson had been around Washington long enough to know that. Sure enough, shortly after eight o’clock, the wire service UPI published a bulletin obliquely describing Jenkins’s arrest.

  Later that night, from the Waldorf, Johnson spoke to John Connally, the one person in Johnson’s political world who went further back with Walter than he did.

  “Now, I don’t think I have any choice, once I know the facts, but to have him resign, do you?”

  Connally answered with quick certainty: “None whatever.”

  “And I ought to do it tonight, don’t you think—”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The two time frames Johnson mentioned—once I know the facts and I ought to do it tonight—could not long coexist. Talking with Clifford and Fortas, Johnson had expressed little interest in Walter’s well-being and no interest in making a call to his room at the George Washington University Hospital. “Tonight” was all that mattered. As Johnson and Connally spoke, editors in various newsrooms throughout Washington and New York were working to get the breaking Jenkins news into their morning editions. Everyone thought this story would be big. In the coming days, journalists would stretch the art of euphemism to simultaneously preserve the standards of a family newspaper, titillate their readers, and make naughty in-jokes. Jenkins, said Time, had been caught in the YMCA’s “basement men’s room … a 9-ft. by 11-ft. spot reeking of disinfectant and stale cigars … a notorious hangout for deviates.” The Wall Street Journal would write that Jenkins’s crime could range “from the seemingly trivial—‘reaching over and touching a person’s leg’—to the unprintable.”

  In his hospital room, Jenkins was saying he did not want to go on living. He said he couldn’t remember much from that night. That was convenient, but also understandable. It had been a harrowing ordeal. He had no prior acquaintance with the other man, a sixty-year-old Hungarian immigrant who lived in Washington’s Old Soldiers Home. They had rendezvoused in a pay toilet stall, unaware that they were being watched by three policemen—two through a peephole, with the third hovering on a stool outside the stall. These observers had come in search of easy prey in a locale known to be favored by men of a certain kind. Finding their quarry, the cops had barged in and arrested the two men and taken them to the police station. There, they had asked Jenkins what he did for a living. He replied that he was a clerk at the White House. He accepted the charge, paid his fine, and went on his way, praying that somehow the whole thing would stay out of the papers.

  Now, as the night wore on in New York, President Johnson was working to ensure that when the name Walter Jenkins did appear in the papers it would be as a former White House aide. On the phone from Washington, Clifford read him a prepared statement:

  Walter W. Jenkins submitted his resignation this evening as Special Assistant to the President. The resignation was accepted and the President has appointed Bill D. Moyers to succeed him.

  After requesting some minor changes, Johnson approved the statement. They all agreed it was best for it to go out that night.

  In passing, the president wondered if there was something they could whisper to reporters, off the record, to urge charity, reminding them that “nearly every family has had some problem.”

  “No,” said Clifford, flatly. “Every family has problems, but they don’t happen to have this kind.”

  George Reedy, the press secretary, read the statement to reporters later that night, tears in his eyes. Walter Jenkins’s twenty-five-year term of service as Lyndon Johnson’s closest aide had come to an abrupt end. The political worl
d would convulse in the coming days, trying to absorb the implications. But in Jenkins’s hospital room, the change was already unmistakable. For once, there was not a single call from Lyndon Johnson all night.

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, Liz Carpenter found the First Lady in her bedroom, looking as though she’d barely slept. She had just spoken with a confused and angry Marjorie Jenkins on the telephone. Marjorie felt her life was ruined. And she felt the Johnsons were to blame.

  The call had left Lady Bird distraught. It had been a long month, and a long year. In that year, the country had seen Lyndon as the picture of confidence and calm, collected certainty. She alone knew how frequent and how deep had been his moments of despair: in those agonizing first days in office, in the endless days of conflict with Bobby, in the awful last days of August when he’d almost thrown off the presidency altogether. She had sat with her husband through all of it, abiding witness in his time of trial.

  Meanwhile, she had borne trials of her own. Her whistle-stop tour of the South that month had been hard. She had known at the outset that her journey would be a daring one, so daring that Southern politicians were reluctant to guarantee her safety. There was too much hostility toward the president in the South, they said, too many people who thought Lyndon was a traitorous native son. But the First Lady knew her husband. She knew that no matter how large his margin of victory in the election, a Goldwater sweep of the South—the Johnsons’ home territory—would leave Lyndon’s pride bruised. So she had brushed off the warnings and set out to make her case as a fellow southerner. On a train dubbed the Lady Bird Special, she headed deep into the old Confederacy, carrying six thousand straw hats stitched with the initials LBJ.

  The South did not welcome her with open arms. At Charleston, South Carolina, she encountered protesters, indignant over Lyndon’s policies on civil rights. A sign in the crowd called the First Lady BLACK BIRD. In the state’s capital, Columbia, she’d struggled to be heard over a booing mob. Pleading for silence, she held her white-gloved hand in the air. “This is a country of many viewpoints,” she said. “I respect your right to express your own. Now it is my turn to express mine. Thank you.” And, miraculously, the startled mob had hushed.

  Now, back in Washington, came the hardest trial of all. Her heart ached for Marjorie and Walter. Never mind what little she knew of what went on in YMCA basements. In a way, there was no one better suited to sympathize with Walter Jenkins than Lady Bird. After all, there was no one but Walter Jenkins whose role in Lyndon’s life more closely resembled her own. Both of them worked tirelessly to handle the countless details and arrangements to which Lyndon never deigned to give a second thought. Both of them praised Lyndon and soothed him. Both of them, on so many occasions, had absorbed the full force of his rage. And both of them had stood by him even in the darkest hours when he could not stand by himself.

  Now she would stand by Walter. With Carpenter’s help, she set to work on a statement of support. And to make sure he and Marjorie were provided for, she would offer him a job at the Johnsons’ television station in Austin, KTBC. She had spoken to Fortas and Clifford. She knew that her speaking out would not go over well with them. She had to go over their heads. She had to reach out to Lyndon. She did not like to quarrel with her husband; she sought, whenever possible, to do his will. But sometimes she had to displease him. Sometimes she was the only one brave enough to tell her husband what was real—and what was right.

  She reached him that morning. “I would like to do two things about Walter,” she said. The connection was bad and she had to fill her words with force. “I would like to offer him the number two job at KTBC.” She paused. “Do you hear me?”

  The president was wary. His wife was forcing him to admit what he’d been doing: giving preference to his own interests above those of a man who had served them for so many years. “I wouldn’t do anything along that line now,” Lyndon said. “I’d just let them know … that they have no problem in that connection. Go ahead, next?”

  “I don’t think that’s right,” said Lady Bird. Her voice swelled with emotion but she went on stating her case. “Second, when questioned, and I will be questioned, I’m going to say that this is incredible for a man that I’ve known all these years. A devout Catholic. The father of six children. A happily married husband. It can only be a … period of a nervous breakdown, balanced against—”

  “I wouldn’t say anything,” interrupted the president. “It’s not something for you to get involved in now.” He advised her to leave it to the lawyers.

  Lady Bird was silent. She knew what the lawyers were working on—and it didn’t concern the best interests of Walter Jenkins.

  Seeing that he wasn’t getting through to his wife, Lyndon tried another, softer approach. “I don’t want you to hurt him more than he’s hurt. And when we move into it, we do, we do that.” His words came haltingly, as though he were trying to convince himself.

  “All right,” said Lady Bird, refusing to match the gentleness in her husband’s voice. “I think that if we don’t express some support to him, I think that we will lose the entire love and devotion of all the people who have been with us. Or so drain them—”

  Johnson cut her off. “Well you get ahold of Clark and them and … see what advice I’m getting. And I’m late now and I’m going to make three speeches and you can imagine what shape I’m in to do it. So don’t create any more problems than I’ve got …”

  No one was more willing to listen to the woes of Lyndon Johnson than Lady Bird. But this time she would not give in. “All right,” she said quickly, playing a new card. “Abe approves of the job offer. Abe approves of the statement.”

  Johnson, hearing something he didn’t like, suddenly was having trouble with the phone line. “What?” he asked.

  Lady Bird said it again, slowly and loudly. “Aaa-be … approves … of the job offer … Aaa-be … approves … of such a statement … when questioned.”

  They volleyed back and forth for some time. But Lady Bird would not be deterred. “I think a gesture of support,” she insisted, “on some of our part is necessary to hold our own forces together.”

  At last Lyndon’s voice sank into resignation. “Well, talk to Abe and Clark about it. And, uh—”

  He sounded tired. And he sounded as if he might give in. For Lady Bird this was enough. Lyndon was not going to be brave, but he was not going to prevent bravery on her part. “My poor darling,” she told her husband. “My heart breaks for you, too.”

  Later that day, Liz Carpenter delivered a statement from the First Lady. “My heart is aching today,” it read, “for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country. Walter Jenkins has been carrying incredible hours and burdens since President Kennedy’s assassination. He is now receiving the medical attention he needs.”

  LADY BIRD’S POLITICAL instincts were superior to those of her husband, and to those of the rest of Washington as well. The print publications, assuming their readers would be equal parts titillated and horrified by the Jenkins news, played up the moral outrage. “If any responsible person,” The Christian Science Monitor editorialized, “most of all the President, knew of Mr. Jenkins’ trouble, he was inexcusably reckless in permitting him to remain in office.”

  To the political establishment, the broader implications were obvious. In America in that era, homosexuality was synonymous with conspiracy. The city swirled with speculation about who else had shared in Jenkins’s secret. George Reedy chased down rumors of other alleged White House connections to the gay underworld. Most of this talk never made its way into the press beyond snide nudging and winking. Time noted that in the hospital, Jenkins received “a bouquet of mixed fall flowers. With it came a card signed ‘J. Edgar Hoover and Associates.’ There was some doubt about just who those ‘associates’ might be.”

  But the country wasn’t interested. As the scandal broke, word came from Moscow that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been ousted. Shortly t
hereafter came the news that China had successfully tested an atomic weapon, joining the nuclear club. The two events reinforced the central message of the Johnson campaign, that an era of fragile global peace was no time to have a dalliance with extremism. A week after the Jenkins incident first came to light, Johnson’s poll numbers were the same.

  It helped that Barry Goldwater had refused to use the Jenkins episode as ammunition against Johnson. High officials in his campaign tried to push it. “Walter Jenkins came to the White House,” his running mate, Bill Miller, told a crowd in Dayton, Ohio, “and ever since has attended meetings of the National Security Council, the Cabinet of the United States, and has had access to information vital to the security of all mankind and to the survival of the world … Can we stand for four more years of that?” But Goldwater himself hated this kind of talk. “What a way to win an election,” he said with disgust, “Communists and cocksuckers.” Showing a private decency that belied his harsh public persona, he forbade his aides to take advantage of Jenkins’s plight.

  For once, Goldwater saw things the same way the voters did. “The really remarkable thing was the mail that came to the White House in the aftermath,” Liz Carpenter said later. “So many people saying, ‘I have that problem in my family.’ … People are more civilized if you give them the chance to be.”

  The last-minute reversal in campaign fortunes wouldn’t happen. The Johnson landslide was now inevitable. Inside the Goldwater campaign the mood was bleak. “If they don’t want us,” the candidate concluded, “they don’t have to take us.” On the stump, he appeared more and more unhinged. “Just think about it for a moment,” he implored. “Do you want my opponent to ‘let us continue’? We simply can’t continue!—unless we want to commit national suicide!”