In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Bobby Baker, R.I.P.
Bobby Baker was the second most powerful man in the United States Senate when Lyndon Johnson was Senate Democratic Leader. When LBJ was Vice President, serious allegations surfaced that might have kept Johnson off the ticket in 1964. Then JFK was assassinated. LBJ became President. Bobby Baker served eighteen months in a federal prison, for income tax evasion. Baker retired to Florida. He lived here, between St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach, in the gated community at Marsh Creek Country Club. He once spoke on his career at the Council on Aging. He died Sunday at age 89. So far, no obits in The New York Times or The Washington Post.
Below are the paid obit from the St. Augustine Record, which did not treat it as a news story; a shallow news obit from USA Today's DelMarVa McPaper; a Wikipedia entry; and Todd Purdum's 2013 article from Politico, with a link to Bobby Baker's oral history interview. UPDATE: Further below are the obituaries from The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Paid obituary from St. Augustine Record, which ran no news obituary:
Robert G. "Bobby" Baker
Obituary
Robert (Bobby) G. Baker, beloved husband of Dorothy Comstock Baker (deceased) was chosen by God to come home on his 89th birthday, Nov. 12, 2017, at around noon. He was a loving dad to his five children and their families:
Robert G. and Norma Barnes Baker, James and Elizabeth Robertson Baker, Dan and Cissy Baker Allison, Lynda Baker, and Lyndon J. Baker (deceased); loved deeply by his seven younger siblings and their families, Betty Claire Chapman and Clyde Chapman (deceased), Mildred (Mimi) Jenkins and Loring (Lefty) Jenkins (deceased), Mary Frances Nealy (deceased), Ernest Russell and Linda Baker, Charles Norman Baker and Darrell, Joan Marie Hendricks (deceased), and Jack and Faye Baker. He was the doting grandpa (the great Gup) to 14 and their families, Robert and Renee Baker III, Timothy Baker and Dana Evans, Jason and Rya Baker, Christopher and Jennelle Baker, Cameron Baker, Spencer Baker (deceased), Angelica and Jeremy Goldman, Daniel and Elise Allison, Alexandra Allison and Kiel Reid, Patrick and Diana Allison, Kathryn And Shane McAnespie, Jonathan Allison, Megan Allison, and Brian and Mariah Baker; and the awesomest great-grandpa to 14, Robert Baker IV, Kevin Baker, Lillian Baker, Bridgette Baker, Leah Baker, Alexander Baker, Randall Carver II, Isabella Marie Novak, Genevieve Mae Goldman, Horatio Gene Goldman, Kylie Allison Reid, Kaiden Alexander Reid, Killian Archer Allison and Khloe Carmichael.
Born Nov. 12, 1928, in Easley, South Carolina, to Ernest Russell Baker and Mary Elizabeth Norman, he was the eldest of eight children. As a ninth grade student at Pickens High School, he received an appointment to the U.S. Senate Page School and arrived in Washington D.C., in January 1942. He was head page by 1945, assistant secretary to the minority by January 1954 and elected by acclamation to secretary to the majority in the senate by January 1955. Meanwhile he graduated The Page High School went on to college and received his law degree from American University. He knew so many different presidents beginning with FDR but was closest to LBJ.
After leaving the government he went into real estate and motel businesses. He was a true force of nature, a fabulous raconteur, and simply loved meeting and greeting everyone. Most of all, he enjoyed all the generations of children in his life.
He will be best remembered as a loving, kind, and generous son, brother, husband, dad, grandpa, great-grandpa, uncle, and friend.
Services will take place at St. Anastasia Catholic Church on Dec. 1, at the 9 a.m. service. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the charity of your choice.
Craig Funeral Home Crematory Memorial Park (www.craigfuneralhome.com) is assisting the family.
Funeral Home
Craig Funeral Home Memorial Park
1475 Old Dixie Highway
St. Augustine, FL 32086
(904) 824-1672 Published in St. Augustine Record on Nov. 15, 2017
News obituary from USA Today network and local DelMarVa affiliate:
Robert Gene “Bobby” Baker, Washington, D.C., politician and Ocean City hotel founder, died Sunday on his 89th birthday.
Baker helped build the Carousel Oceanfront Hotel & Condos in 1962 after leaving a government position.
Baker was born Nov. 12, 1928, in Easley, South Carolina, the oldest of eight children. While attending Pickens High School in Easley, he was appointed to the U.S. Senate Page School in Washington, D.C., in January 1942, later studying at American University where he received his law degree.
An organizer for the Democratic Party, he would rise in Washington’s political ranks to become President Lyndon Johnson’s political adviser and later the Senate's secretary to the majority leader, a position from which he would eventually resign amid numerous scandals.
Sen. Jim Mathias, a former mayor of Ocean City, said Baker was a “legend and a pioneer in Ocean City.”
“He came to town from Washington — a deal-maker — and he helped build the Carousel Hotel, which is an icon to this very day," Mathias said. "It was the northernmost outpost in the city at that time, and at the time there was nothing there but sand dunes and that hotel.”
Mathias said Baker helped grow the Maryland resort town and saw its possible prosperity when the Carousel was built.
“Bobby Baker staked out the future of Ocean City,” Mathias said.
Michael James came to Maryland in 1980, got his first job in the state at the Carousel as a waiter and later met his wife there. Today, he is president of Hospitality Partners and a managing partner of the Carousel Group.
“He had the vision to build up on the beach and make not just a hotel, but a center of entertainment," James said. "Back then, people came for the excitement. Celebrities came, political individuals came.”
In forming the hotel, Baker created something that became a “happening; a destination to go to,” James said.
“The hotel became the place to be for people in D.C. to get away from it all,” he said. “To have that in the state of Maryland, and Ocean City in particular, it really put the town on the map.”
Baker's impact is considered "legion," according to Nancy Howard, president of the Ocean City Life-Saving Museum.
"There were so many stories of his successes surrounding him during his life," she said. "He was a pioneer; a forerunner in Ocean City... Ocean City said that ‘if he can do it, we can do it too,’ and moved right up to him."
Contact Reed Shelton at rshelton@delmarvanow.com, 302-344-1510 or @ReedAShelton
Robert Gene "Bobby" Baker, (November 12, 1928 – November 12, 2017) is a former political adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson, and an organizer for the Democratic Party. He became the Senate's Secretary to the Majority Leader. In 1962, he and a friend, Fred Black, established the Serv-U Corporation which was designed to provide vending machines for companies working for programs established under federal grants. During the following year, an investigation was begun by the Democratic-controlled Senate into Baker's business and political activities. The investigation included allegations ofbribery and arranging sexual favors in exchange for Congressional votes and government contracts. The Senate investigation looked into the financial activities of Baker and Lyndon Johnson during the 1950s. Baker resigned from his position in October 1963. The investigation of Lyndon Johnson as part of the Baker investigation was later dropped.
Baker was born in Pickens, South Carolina, the son of the town postmaster, and lived in a house on Hampton Avenue. He attended Pickens Elementary and Pickens High School, until he achieved an appointment when he was 14 years old as a U.S. Senate page with the help of Harold E. Holder.
In 1942, Baker became a page for Senator Burnet Maybank,[1] and quickly became friends with several important Democrats.[clarification needed] When Lyndon Johnson was elected to the Senate in 1948, he was told[who?] that Baker knew "where the bodies are buried," and established a close relationship with him.[2] Baker quickly became Johnson's protégé.[3]
Baker was eventually promoted to the position of the Senate's Secretary to the Majority Leader, who at the time was a Democrat; this was his highest-ranking official position, as well as the position from which he would later resign. Prior to resigning, Baker had been a major power on Capitol Hill. He resigned eventually due to allegations of misconduct and a well-publicized scandal involving government contracts, and served 18 months in prison for tax evasion.
In 1978, he coauthored a memoir entitled Wheeling and Dealing with Larry L. King.
Baker frequently mixed politics with personal business. He was one of the initiators and board-members of the Quorum Club located in the Carroll Arms Hotel adjacent to a Senate office building. The society was alleged to have been a place for lawmakers and other influential men to meet for food, drink, and ladies. Baker and one of his colleagues, lobbyist Bill Thompson, are said to have arranged for Quorum Club hostess Ellen Rometsch to meet John F. Kennedy. Rometsch was of German origin. As a youth, she had been a Communist Party member in East Germany before fleeing with her parents and then coming to the United States.[4][5]
In 1962, Baker established the Serv-U Corporation with his friend, Fred Black. The company was designed to provide vending machines for companies working for programs established under federal grants. Though a part of numerous other deals involving both politics and private financial affairs, this particular business venture would cause a scandal.[6] In November 1962 bugs in Ed Levinson's office at the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas picked up references to Baker. The FBI agent notified FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover of the references early in 1963 because, "I thought it was important for Washington to be aware of the possible political influence of Ed Levinson."[7]Levinson and Benjamin Seigelbaum arranged with an Oklahoma City bank for a $400,000 start-up loan for the Serve-U Corporation to buy equipment and supplies.[8] The Serv-U Corporation deal became the subject of allegations of conflict of interest and corruption after a disgruntled former government contractor, represented by David Carliner, sued Baker and Black in civil court. That lawsuit eventually generated a great deal of press.[6]
In September 1963, an investigation was begun by the Republican-led Senate Rules Committee into Baker's business and political activities.[9] Baker was investigated for allegations of bribery using money allocated by Congress and arranging sexual favors in exchange for votes and government contracts. Criticized increasingly, Baker resigned as Secretary to the Majority Leader on October 7, 1963.[10]
According to author Evan Thomas, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother, was able to arrange a deal with J. Edgar Hoover to quell mention of the Rometsch allegations in the Senate investigation of Bobby Baker. Hoover successfully limited the Senate investigation of Baker by threatening to release embarrassing information about senators contained in FBI files. In exchange for this favor, Robert Kennedy assured Hoover that his job as FBI Director was secure. Robert Kennedy also agreed to allow the FBI to proceed with wiretaps that Hoover had requested on Martin Luther King to try to prove King's close confidants and advisers were communists.[11] Although Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so," Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy.[12]
Even though Lyndon Johnson was not involved in Baker's business dealings after 1960, the Senate investigation looked into their questionable financial activities in the 1950s. This was such a problem for Johnson that there were rumors he would be dropped from the 1964 presidential ticket.[13] After word of the assassination of John F. Kennedy reached Washington on November 22, 1963, the Senate investigation was delayed. Thereafter, any investigation of Lyndon Johnson as part of the Baker investigation was dropped.[14] Baker, however, was convicted of tax evasion and spent 18 months in prison.[15]
In the 1964 Presidential Election, Republican candidate Senator Barry Goldwater in speeches and campaign materials brought up the Bobby Baker scandal as an issue against Johnson, demanding that Johnson bring the issue out into the open.[16][17] He died on his 89th birthday in St. Augustine, Florida.[18]
Sex in the Senate Bobby Baker's salacious secret history of Capitol Hill.
By TODD S. PURDUM
November 19, 2013
On Jan. 1, 1943, Robert Gene Baker arrived in Washington at the height of World War II to become a Senate page. Two decades later, this son of a mailman from Pickens, S.C., had become the reigning Washington wheeler-dealer and fixer of his day as secretary to the Senate’s Democratic majority. In the era of President John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Baker was indispensable on Capitol Hill: The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Exactly 50 years ago this fall, in the face of a widening official investigation into his private business dealings and vivid social life—an inquiry that threatened to engulf the Kennedy White House in a sex scandal and destroy Baker’s political patron, Vice President Lyndon Johnson—Baker drank four martinis at lunch and impulsively resigned his post. He had been as close as a son to Johnson, privy to the vice president’s deepest secrets. On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination short-circuited the Baker investigation, and spared Johnson career-ending ignominy.
Still, prosecutors eventually caught up with Baker, if not his patron, and he ended up serving 18 months in prison on federal tax evasion charges. In 1978, he co-wrote Wheeling and Dealing, a rollicking memoir with Larry L. King, best known as the author of the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
But Baker in recent years quietly recorded an even more unvarnished account of his anything-goes-era in Washington, which Politico Magazine now publishes for the first time. His recollections—of an age when senators drank all day, indulged in sexual dalliances with secretaries and constituents, accepted thousands of dollars in bribes and still managed to pass the most important legislation of the 20th century—were collected by Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office in interviews with Baker in 2009 and 2010. The resulting 230-page manuscript was so ribald and riveting, so salacious and sensational, that the Historical Office refrained from its usual practice of posting such interviews online.
Today, Baker is alive and well and living in Florida, managing the successful real estate investments that he somehow retained through his darkest days. Earlier this month, he turned 85. In the reminiscences that follow, he offers indelible proof that the good old days were not always good: One senator died with $2 million in unexplained cash; another took a $200,000 payment to switch his vote; some showed up for work drunk. But he also explains the ways in which the old days might well have offered a better model than the present for how to do business on Capitol Hill: his was really a time when senators knew and respected each other, and bipartisan cooperation was the norm. It’s a close question whether the sanctioned immorality of 50 years ago was worse for the legislative process than the codified corruption of today. Readers, be the judge. But harken, meantime, to the words of perhaps the last living man who saw it all.
What follows, in quotes, are Baker’s recollections; the author’s notes are in italics.
***
“My first impression was when I saw all of the soldiers with their bayonets guarding the Capitol. It scared [the] hell out of me because I had never been 50 miles beyond Pickens when I came to Washington on a bus…I tell you, for a hillbilly from South Carolina, I could not believe the grandeur of the Capitol and Washington…
Baker on the patron who had brought him to Washington, Sen. Burnett Maybank (D-S.C.).
“He was very, very kind. …He had one weakness. He had to have about a half a tumbler of bourbon when he woke up in the morning. He died, I think, when he was about 51…” 1
and Sen. Clyde Hoey (D-N.C.)…
“Senator Hoey used to wear a swallowtail coat. The secretaries used to call me in the cloakroom because back then we always got paid in cash, twice a month. They’d say, ‘Is that old son of a bitch out there by the water fountain?’ Because what he would do, when a pretty girl would come by, he’d call her over and then he would try to play with her breasts.” 2
Baker on meeting Lyndon Johnson, who would become his mentor—though the relationship began a bit the other way around, as Johnson sought advice from the 20-year-old after his election to the Senate in 1948.
“I was a skinny little boy, I weighed about 120 pounds. He weighed about 280. So when [Johnson’s aide] John Connally took me in to introduce me to Senator-elect Johnson, Johnson jumped up and he said, ‘Mr. Baker, they tell me you’re the smartest son of a bitch over there.’ I said, ‘Well, whoever told you that lied.’ I said, ‘I know all of the staff on our side. I know who the drunks are. And I know whose word is good.’ He said, ‘You’re the man I want to know.’ So we became great friends…”
By the time of Johnson’s arrival, Baker had already become the Democrats’ “chief telephone page,” responsible for tracking action on the Senate floor and being able to tell inquiring Senate aides whether their bosses were needed for a vote. He came to know all the Senate’s byways and personalities, including the secretary to the Democratic majority, Felton “Skeeter” Johnston, a laconic Mississippian. Like other pages, who boarded full-time on Capitol Hill, Baker would attend school each morning before the Senate day began.
“Skeeter had an alcohol problem, but back then the Senate didn’t go in session until 12 o’clock, so I’d get out of class [in the page school] around 12, be back to the Senate around 12:20. After then, I was basically in charge of what was happening, because he loved being in the Secretary of the Senate’s office, which was a fabulous bar for Democratic senators.” 3
In 1953, when Johnson became the Senate’s Democratic floor leader, he promoted Baker to the post of secretary to the majority. The two collaborated so intimately that Baker became known as “Little Lyndon” and operated as Johnson’s eyes and ears. After Johnson’s 1955 heart attack—which involved prolonged absences for recuperation—Baker’s counsel became all the more important. As the years went by, he became the Senate’s leading expert at counting votes. He explained the importance of getting to know members in relaxed, after-hours settings.
“They let their hair down when they’ve had a few drinks, tell you their likes and dislikes, and you file it away. You find out who likes to take trips around the world, and then you try to repay those who voted against their conscience to help you. Senator Johnson was very adept at taking care of senators and their wishes, and the bills that they wanted…”
We had these sofas and chairs, and there’s the mirror where … Kennedy said, ‘God, why did you make me so beautiful?’”
Friendships—and employment relationships—stretched across the partisan divide, as Baker recalled of his first acquaintance with Richard Nixon. In 1949, Baker had married Dorothy Comstock, a secretary to Senator Scott Lucas (D-Ill.), but she left that job for a better-paying one with Nixon after his election to the Senate in 1950.
“I knew him when he was first elected to the Senate. He had a lovely wife and two pretty daughters. My wife went on his payroll, because he had a surplus of cash from his California campaign. The Senate Sergeant at Arms kept a list of people who knew the Hill, and he recommended my wife to Senator Nixon’s secretary, Rose Wood[s]. She worked there until I was in law school and needed more money, and Senator [Pat] McCarran’s [D-Nev.] administrative assistant, Eva Adams, gave my wife a fat raise, and she resigned from Senator Nixon’s staff.
“Especially at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, I would see Mr. [Roy] Wilkins and all of the lobbyists for the NAACP in and out of Vice President Nixon’s little old office right off the Senate floor. He was really courting them. And they were ready to make a deal, because he was much, much more liberal on the Negro question than the Democrats were. For the life of me, I do not understand how he wound up with so much hate, dislike—he didn’t like Jews, he didn’t like anybody…” 4
Baker recalled the power of lobbyists to influence issues, recounting an exchange with the long-serving Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.)…
“One time Senator Dirksen called me down to his office. … He had… the right-wing bomb-throwers [assembled there]. Senator Dirksen started off by saying, ‘Mr. Baker, you are the best vote-counter in the history of the Senate. Will you tell my colleagues how many votes you have on this issue?’ I said, ‘Mr. Leader, I have 40 votes on my side and 12 votes on your side.’ They said, ‘Goddamn you! How can you have 12 votes on our side?’ I said, ‘Well, my lobbyist friend from the Railway Union, Cy Anderson, showed me his sheet. He secured vote pledges from the following…’ I’d go down the list. They said, ‘Those bastards!’ They were really upset. Dirksen said, ‘Take another drink. Let’s go get a unanimous consent agreement and have a long weekend.’ That’s the way he worked. … Dirksen became a wonderful friend. I mean, had it not been for Senator Dirksen, the [1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965] Voting Rights Act would never have passed…. So I’ll tell you, I have great admiration for him…. He never saw a $100 bill he didn’t like.” 5
She said, ‘Lyndon, I need some advice.’ She said, ‘Styles has got $2 million in cash here and I don’t know how to handle it.’”
Asked how he went about counting heads, Baker offered the following explanation….
“Well, basically I knew a senator’s position or leanings, whether a senator was a conservative or a liberal. Basically, they don’t deviate from that. If you have 30 liberals and 20 conservatives, you have it. One of the few times I did not know how the vote was going to turn out was when President Kennedy was seeking Medicare. I did not learn until later why Senator Jennings Randolph [D-W.Va.] voted against it. Senator [Robert] Kerr, [a Democrat from Oklahoma, and a wealthy oil magnate] had made a deal with the doctors in Oklahoma to kill Medicare. He was just adamant in his opposition to Medicare. Now, Senator Jennings Randolph was a wonderful senator. … Ninety-nine times out of 100, I knew how he was going to vote. … But he would never tell me how he was going to vote on President Kennedy’s Medicare bill. … But Senator Kerr gave him $200,000 for that vote. It shows you that money can talk.” 6
Baker explained the method used by Walter Reuther, the longtime head of the United Autoworkers Union, to get cash to senators at a time when unions were barred from making political contributions.
“He had to be very careful with cash money that came to his union in the United States. But he had no such rule in Canada. So as a consequence, Walter Reuther, probably because of his cash contributions, had a minimum of 20 senators that would vote any way he wanted. … He bought more United States Senate seats than anybody in my life. I’m telling you, it was unreal for Senator Ted Moss [D-Utah] or Gale McGee [D- Wyo.], coming from basically Republican territory, to get elected. Because Walter Reuther gave money. But boy, when I needed to get them to help on a vote, if Walter Reuther called them, I could never change them.” 7
Baker believed cash for votes was not limited to the Senate, recounting how Rein Vander Zee, an aide to Hubert Humphrey, had described Humphrey’s famous loss to JFK in the West Virginia Democratic presidential primary in 1960.
“Vander Zee, until his dying day, said that Humphrey would have defeated Kennedy … had it not been for that massive cash old man Joe [Kennedy] bought the election with. Ryan, being an ex-FBI man, had every sheriff in each of those counties committed to voting for Humphrey. And, boy, when Election Day came, it was total news to him. They changed on Thursday before the Tuesday. Vander Zee said, ‘They wouldn’t even return my call.’’’8
…and he described the challenge of getting Robert F. Kennedy confirmed as attorney general in his brother’s administration…
“The President had said, ‘Lyndon, I need your help,’ because Senator [Richard] Russell [D-Ga.] and the Republicans were solid against Bobby being attorney general. He had really no legal experience. Johnson said [to me], ‘If the president is defeated by my supporters, it’s a terrible, terrible, can’t do situation for me.’ He said. ‘See what you can do with our mutual friend Senator Russell, because if you get enough bourbon in him, he gets more reasonable.’ So I took him out to the secretary of the Senate’s office and I said, ‘Your best friend loves you and he called me and he needs your help and will you please let me have a voice vote?’ And he said, most reluctantly, ‘You can have a voice vote.’ And Senator Dirksen, being a decent man, let it go through that way. But had it had a roll-call vote, Bobby Kennedy would have never been attorney general. He would have been lucky to get 40 votes. That’s how the Senate that I knew thought of him.” 9
Russell was the most revered—and feared—senator of his day. But his staunch segregationist views and implacable opposition to civil rights legislation made him anathema to the national Democratic Party…
“Being from Georgia and being much more conservative than the Democratic Party, there was no chance that he would take any position. Had he conceded that the South lost the Civil War, and after the Brown v. Board of Education had he stated that our customs in the South are totally different, but if you’ll go with me, we’ll start in kindergarten and we’ll integrate, he would have been president. He actually could have been president and he wanted to be president. But civil rights killed him, and that’s all he knew, Rule [XXII] [the filibuster rule.]”
Baker also recounted stories of the legendary characters of the Senate from his time there in the 1950s and 60s, offering vivid descriptions of their sexual peccadillos, proclivities and various other vices.
“Senator [Clinton] Anderson [D-N.M.] was a big disappointment. He was full of hate. I had a little Mexican-American kid as a page boy and he told me, he said, ‘Senator Anderson is the meanest son of a bitch I have ever met.’ He said, ‘He just treats you like you’re a dog.’ And he was also sort of a sex maniac…”
“Senator [Estes] Kefauver [D-Tenn.] had a drinking problem. He smelled like booze all the time, but he was not a mean man. His staff loved him … a tragic figure, but he was way ahead of all his Southern colleagues because when he first was elected to the Senate, he proposed a [Fair Employment Practices Commission] bill [to outlaw employment discrimination], which, oh, the Southerners, they hated. He was despised among all the Southern Democrats. Not a one of them liked him. But he had a bad alcohol problem and he also had a very bad record of wanting to go to bed with every woman he ever met. He got some of these young kids testifying, you know, before his Juvenile Committee or something and then he couldn’t wait to go to bed with them.” 10
“Senator [Jacob] Javits [R-N.Y.] was a publicity hound. He was a very, very bright man, but he was another one—like Senator Jack Kennedy—he was a sex maniac. One of the postmen went in and caught him on his couch having a sexual affair with a Negro lady. He couldn’t wait to come and tell me.”
“I was always very fond of Senator Tommy Kuchel [D-Calif.]. He was a fun guy. … The difference between he and Senator Richard Nixon was that Senator Nixon could get 20 votes and Senator Tommy Kuchel could get 51. … Kuchel was having a relationship with his secretary, so he’d come over to me and ask me if I could send a page boy to buy him some rubbers—true story!”
“Senator [Herman] Talmadge was an extremely conservative Democrat from Georgia who had a monumental alcohol problem. He liked Senator Lyndon Johnson. He would hold his nose and vote for some things that Senator Johnson was proposing, but it turned out he was basically for hire. He was a crook, a bad crook. … He had a bitter divorce. I think she leaked the story that he had $100 bills in his top coat [in presumably ill-gotten gains] or something like that. He died with a broken heart… When I was in charge of Senator Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential trip through the South, he was too drunk to show up.” 11
On frequent occasion, Baker was asked to dispense delicate advice…
“When Johnson was vice president, he invited me to go with him to Senator Styles Bridges’s [R-N.H.] funeral. … Dolores Bridges was very fond of Vice President Johnson. She said, ‘Lyndon, I need some advice.’ She said, ‘Styles has got $2 million in cash here and I don’t know how to handle it.’ Vice President Johnson, being the true coward, he said, ‘Talk to Bobby.’ So I told her, ‘The banks are the government. If you put it in the bank, you are dead meat. Whatever you do, do not put that money in the bank.’ I don’t know what the hell she did with it.” 12
As treasurer of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee when Johnson was majority leader, Baker himself had the job of dispensing campaign funds to selected members…
“My rule was if you’re five percentage points ahead, I cut the money off. But if you are tied, or something, I tried to get all the money I could for that particular senator. That was one of the reasons that Senator Johnson was so successful is that those people who you had a chance to elect, you would get money to, and as a consequence they were very grateful. But once again, you are selling your office. … It made my job much easier because a man that you have helped when he is running for his life, and he’s run out of money, and you send him $50,000, boy he is grateful…. We had no rules.”
While working in the Senate, Baker earned a law degree and found a way to put it to use in some sharp extracurricular dealings—after all, in his day there were no rules against senators or staffers running private businesses on the side.
“No, no. None whatsoever. Just as long as you paid your taxes, you could do what you wanted to. Senator George Smathers, [D-Fla.], who was my dear friend, he made a lot of people wealthy peddling Winn-Dixie stock. Anytime Winn-Dixie wanted to build a new supermarket, they would tell him and he would go buy the land and build a shopping center, and he did not die broke. … He was … by far … the brightest and ablest guy between Nixon, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.”
Smathers’s best friend in the Senate was John F. Kennedy, and on a tour of the Senate Democratic cloakroom in 2009, Baker spied familiar furnishings and was moved to recollect…
“We had these sofas and chairs, and there’s the mirror where … Kennedy said, ‘God, why did you make me so beautiful?’” 13
Eventually, Baker’s investments would spell his downfall, starting with his partnership in building the Carousel Motel in Ocean City, Md. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and a raft of senators and reporters attended the resort’s gala opening in 1962, but by then construction delays and other troubles had left Baker deeply in debt to his friend Sen. Robert Kerr (D-Okla.).
“I was probably the biggest wheeler-dealer around—and I enjoyed it, I’ll tell you. Ocean City was nothing until we built the Carousel…. I was working around people—Senator Lyndon Johnson and Senator Bob Kerr—who were multimillionaires. And so I wanted to be like them. I never neglected my Senate duties, but I had all this time when the Senate wasn’t in session. The way I went into the hotel business was my wife had hay fever and she breathed much better when we’d go to Ocean City.” 14
Desperate for cash, Baker went into another business, with backing and loans arranged by Senator Kerr. The venture, called the Serv-U Corporation, would furnish vending machines for large corporations and government offices. But Baker promptly ran afoul of a major industry rival, Canteen, which was owned by supporters of Sen. Everett Dirksen from Chicago, and had held the contract for the Senate’s own vending machines.
“It was going to be big, big business. Senator Dirksen’s friends, who owned Canteen, had the contract and they went bonkers. … And Dirksen put a lot of heat on to get Canteen back. … They got the contract to run the Senate restaurants and Senator Dirksen did not die broke, I can tell you that.”
But the business that got Baker into the hottest political water was the Quorum Club, a private after-hours joint upstairs in the Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill, where lobbyists and legislators could repair for a drink (or three) with attractive women out of the sight of prying journalists’ eyes. Baker had begun an office affair with a pretty blonde named Carole Tyler, who lived with her roommates in a townhouse he owned. The most notorious habitué of the club was Ellen Rometsch, the wife of a West German army officer stationed at the German embassy in Washington, though she was suspected by the F.B.I. of being an East German spy…
“Oh, sure, all of the administrative assistants, every one of them had a girlfriend just like I did. Carole Tyler and I were both mutually stupid. … Ellen Rometsch was … as pretty as Elizabeth Taylor. … She was sort of like me. She’d come from Germany broke. She really loved oral sex. So any time – 90 percent of the people who give you money want to know if you can get them a date. I don’t give a damn who they are. They’re away from mama and their wives and they have a tremendous desire to party. … Bill Thompson [a lobbyist] … said [of Rometsch], ‘Baker, where did you get that good-looking woman? ... You think if I invited her to my apartment she’ll go to the White House and see President Kennedy?’ I said, ‘She would jump at the chance.’ So she went to the White House several times. And President Kennedy called me and said it’s the best head-job he’d ever had, and he thanked me….
“Any time I had a rich guy in town, my secretary called her to see if she could go out. She told me that of all the people she had met … the nicest one was Congressman Jerry Ford [R-Mich.]. [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover could not find out the happenings when the Warren Commission was investigating the killer of President Kennedy. … J. Edgar Hoover could not find out what they were doing. So, he had this tape where Jerry Ford was having oral sex with Ellen Rometsch. You know, his wife had a serious drug problem back then. … Hoover blackmailed … Ford to tell him what they were doing. That’s the reason I don’t like him. It’s just a misuse of authority.” 15
By 1963, Baker’s public and private worlds were beginning to collide. That summer, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became so concerned about the rumors involving President Kennedy and Ellen Rometsch that he had her secretly deported back to Germany. That fall, a rival vending machine operator sued Baker, alleging that he was peddling influence to win contracts for Serv-U. The suit drew the attention of journalists, and the Senate Rules Committee, which began an investigation into Baker’s dealings. Baker’s high-flying life came crashing down around him—and everyone he knew, especially Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had not been involved in Baker’s investments, but Baker had helped arrange a life insurance policy for Johnson after his 1955 heart attack—and later, for the gift of a stereo set as a kind of kickback from the broker who wrote the policy. Johnson was terrified that he would be tarred by association with Baker, while the Kennedy administration—and senior senators of both parties—worried about being drawn into the Rometsch affair. On Oct. 7, 1963, Baker was set to meet with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Minority Leader Dirksen to review the allegations against him. Instead, hoping to stop the investigation, Baker downed four Tanqueray martinis at the Quorum Club at lunch, and then resigned. He hoped his resignation would end the investigation, but it did not.
He would never tell me how he was going to vote on President Kennedy’s Medicare bill. … But Senator Kerr gave him $200,000 for that vote. It shows you that money can talk.”
On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, Don Reynolds, the Maryland broker who had written the life insurance policy for Johnson, was telling investigators for the Senate Rules Committee that he had been pressured to buy advertising time on an Austin television station owned by Johnson—even though the insurance salesman was unknown in Texas and could hardly expect to generate business there.
“And on November 22 … after lunch, in the Senate Rules Committee investigation [of] Bobby Baker, Don Reynolds was going to really spill his guts. But when President Kennedy was killed, it basically killed the Baker investigation. You know, President Johnson acted like he did not know me. … I think the Reynolds testimony plus the absolute hatred of Bobby Kennedy of Johnson [would have forced LBJ off the 1964 Democratic ticket if Kennedy had lived]. Poor old Walter [Jenkins, one of Johnson’s most trusted aides, who had worked with Reynolds to buy the advertising time on the Johnson station], had President Kennedy not been killed, he either would have had to take the Fifth Amendment and quit, or tell the truth and Vice President Johnson would have definitely been off the ticket in 1964, had it [been] shown that he had really been the party in the back of this.”
But he had a bad alcohol problem and he also had a very bad record of wanting to go to bed with every woman he ever met.”
I’ll tell you, the people who disliked me are dead and I’m still alive. Had I not had trouble … you cannot work seven days a week, 18 hours a day, and drink as much and eat the wrong foods. It saved my life. Now I wait till 5 o’clock to take a drink, take two drinks and I’m through. I attribute it to my troubles. Had I not had it, I’d been dead a long time ago…. You cannot believe the amount of ill press I received for about 10 years. But time is a great healer. So when you walk down the street and meet 100 people and you say, ‘Do you know who Bobby Baker is?’ they don’t have a clue.”The press furor and Senate investigation of Baker continued in the aftermath of the assassination, and on Feb. 19, 1964, Baker was called to testify. On the advice of his lawyer, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams, he took the Fifth Amendment. In 1966, Baker was indicted on charges of income tax evasion, stemming from financial transactions he had handled for Sen. Robert Kerr, who by then had died. Baker was tried and convicted the following year, and his appeal was ultimately rejected. He served 18 months in the federal prison at Allenwood, Pa. before his release in 1972. He and his wife, the former Dorothy Comstock, were married for 27 years, and divorced for 15, but later reconciled and live together today in northern Florida. In 2008, he voted (for Barack Obama) for the first time in more than 40 years, because Florida passed a law restoring the franchise to convicted felons who have served their time.
“When I see my Negro friends, I tell them, ‘You go say a little prayer for LBJ.’ Because I said, ‘The Voting Rights Act made us all equal.’ The only way in hell that Senator Obama ever got elected president was because of the Voting Rights Act. I said, ‘It’s the greatest thing that’s happened to our country.’
Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
For the full text of interviews between Bobby Baker and Donald A. Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office, see next page.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Gale McGee as a senator from Nebraska. He was born in Nebraska, but served as a senator from Wyoming.
The full transcript of interviews between Bobby Baker and Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office.
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Bobby Baker, String-Puller Snared in Senate Scandal, Dies at 89
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Mr. Baker on Capitol Hill after he appeared before the Senate Rules Committee in 1964.CreditUnited Press International
Bobby Baker, a onetime Senate page who, through his close ties to Lyndon B. Johnson and others, became one of the most influential nonelected men in the American government of the 1950s and early ’60s, only to be investigated for and eventually convicted of tax evasion and other crimes, died on Sunday, his 89th birthday, in St. Augustine, Fla.
Mr. Baker arrived in Washington as a teenage Senate page and by 1955 had risen to secretary of the Senate Democrats, an important behind-the-scenes role in which he counted votes on pending legislation, served as a conduit for influence trading and saw to senators’ needs, including extracurricular ones.
He became so powerful that he would refer to himself as the 101st senator, and as he and Johnson, the Senate majority leader, formed a symbiotic relationship, others took to calling him Little Lyndon.
Mr. Baker was a man who knew many secrets, and he spilled some in a 1978 memoir and even more in an oral history recorded by the Senate Historical Office in 2009 and 2010.
But his power and knowledge did not make him immune from scrutiny. In 1963 he became the focus of a corruption investigation, one that for a time threatened to envelop Johnson, by then the vice president, and even President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 took some steam out of the investigation — once Johnson became president, there was little inclination to pursue him — but Mr. Baker was convicted in 1967 of tax evasion, conspiracy to defraud the government and theft. After appeals, he went to prison in 1971 and served 15 months.
“Russia wouldn’t have treated me the way this country has,” Mr. Baker said as he was beginning his sentence. “But I have no great resentment. No, this is a great country. It’s done a lot for me. I like to think I have done a lot for it.”
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Mr. Baker with President Lyndon B. Johnson in an undated photo. From the time he was the Senate majority leader, Johnson had been a mentor to him.
Robert Gene Baker was born on Nov. 12, 1928, in Easley, S.C., the oldest of eight children. He was named after two sports figures, the golfer Bobby Jones and the boxer Gene Tunney. His father, Ernest, was a postal worker; his mother was the former Mary Elizabeth Norman.
When he was 14 he received an appointment to the Senate Page School after another local boy turned the offer down. Mr. Baker would later receive a law degree from American University.
But it was the Senate page job that paved the way for his career. Senator Robert S. Kerr, an Oklahoma Democrat, became a particular mentor, and so did Johnson. Mr. Baker, in a 2015 interview with Coastal Style magazine, recalled his first meeting with Johnson, in 1948. Johnson, a congressman from Texas, had just been elected to the Senate.
“I went in,” Mr. Baker said, “and Senator-elect Johnson said, ‘Mr. Baker, they tell me you’re the smartest son of a bitch over there.’ That was my introduction to him.”
When Johnson became Senate majority leader in 1955, he made Mr. Baker secretary to the majority. Mr. Baker proved especially adept at the math of the Senate — he would usually know precisely how many votes a piece of legislation could garner at any given moment, a valuable skill in the horse-trading world of Washington politics.
He also helped establish the Quorum Club, a private retreat where members of Congress, their staff members and lobbyists would mingle and, it was said, arrange sexual liaisons.
During his time as a public servant, Mr. Baker was also pursing various business ventures: real estate, hotels, a vending machine company. In 1963, an associate in the vending business brought a civil suit against him, and the resulting publicity soon drew the scrutiny of the Justice Department and other investigative bodies. They wondered, among other things, how Mr. Baker could have become a millionaire when his government job paid less than $20,000 a year.
Mr. Baker resigned from his post in October 1963, hoping to quiet the inquiry, which had begun to seem as if it might embroil Johnson and, through the sexual goings-on at the Quorum Club, perhaps Kennedy. The investigation resumed once the turmoil of the assassination had receded, and though it was now largely confined to Mr. Baker, it fueled a view that Washington as a whole was cancerous.
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Mr. Baker in 1978. After his release from prison he went into real estate and the hotel business.CreditDave Pickoff/Associated Press
“The Baker case is strongly symptomatic of a chronic amorality that has been eroding the public conscience, within government principally but in other spheres of national life as well, for a long time,” Cabell Phillips, Washington correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in January 1964. “It is the distortion of values as between greed and deed. It is the compulsive temptation to misappropriate a bestowed advantage for selfish ends.”
Mr. Baker validated that portrait with his memoir, “Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator,” written with Larry L. King, the author of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
“Bobby Baker’s Senate is composed of crooks, drunks and lechers,” the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1978, “marching from bar to boudoir to bank, concerned mainly with lining their pockets and satisfying their appetites.”
As Mr. Schlesinger noted, Mr. Baker suggested in the book that whatever his misdeeds, he was merely taking his cue from the formidable political figures he had been surrounded by since he was a teenager.
Mr. Baker wrote: “As they presumed their high stations to entitle them to accept gratuities or hospitalities from patrons who had special axes to grind, so did I. As they used their powerful positions to gain loans or credit that otherwise might not have been granted, so did I.”
He named names in the book, and he named more in his oral-history interviews with the Senate Historical Office. The office, contrary to its frequent practice, did not post transcripts of those interviews online, but in 2013 the journalist Todd S. Purdum summarized them in an article for Politico titled “Sex in the Senate: Bobby Baker’s Salacious Secret History of Capitol Hill.”
Mr. Baker married Dorothy Comstock in 1949. She died in 2014. His survivors include two sons, Robert and James; two daughters, Lynda Baker and Cissy Baker Allison; 14 grandchildren; 14 great-grandchildren; and several siblings. He lived in St. Augustine.
He worked in the real estate and hotel business after his release from prison.
In 1971, as he was starting his prison sentence, Mr. Baker, who had many stories involving large amounts of cash and politicians, spoke of a need to reform the campaign financing system, sounding very much like a critic of the system today.
“It will destroy this country unless something is done,” he told Time magazine. “People are selling their souls. They have to. They are human. There is not a human being who can take money from somebody and not be influenced.”
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From Washington Post:
Bobby Baker, protege of Lyndon Johnson felled by influence-peddling scandal, dies at 89
Bobby Baker appears on the June 6, 1978, episode of ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America.” (AP)
By Jon ThurberNovember 17 at 9:39 PM
Bobby Baker, a protege of future president Lyndon B. Johnson whose career of wealth and privilege came crashing down in an influence-peddling scandal, died Nov. 12 — his 89th birthday — in St. Augustine, Fla.
The death of Mr. Baker, once the most influential staffer in the U.S. Senate, was confirmed in an announcement by the Craig Funeral Home in St. Augustine. No cause was reported.
“Mr. Baker, I understand you know where the bodies are buried in the Senate. I’d appreciate it if you’d come to my office and talk with me,” the newly elected Sen. Johnson (D-Tex.) said in his first telephone conversation with Mr. Baker in late 1948.
Mr. Baker was just 20 at the time and a staffer for the Senate leadership, keeping track of legislation and when it would be coming up for a vote. His vast knowledge of the operations of the Senate and his facility in the art of accommodation — moving pet legislative projects ahead for some senators or helping fulfill the proclivities of others for drink, sex or cash — would make him an invaluable asset to Johnson.
He would come to be known as “Little Lyndon,” and he became the eyes and ears in the Senate for the man he would refer to simply as “Leader.” As majority leader, a post Johnson was elected to in 1955, the Texas senator never wanted to be on the wrong side of a vote, and Mr. Baker developed an uncanny knack of giving him a precise head count for any upcoming tally.
“He is the first person I talk to in the morning and the last one at night,” Johnson once said.
For his part, Mr. Baker made it fairly clear he would do anything to curry favor with Johnson. He copied his mentor’s clothes and mannerisms and named two of his children after the senator.
As Johnson’s power grew, so did Mr. Baker’s. President John F. Kennedy once referred to the young aide as the “101st senator.”
Using his guile, political skill and finesse in the art of the deal, Mr. Baker amassed a fortune of more than $2 million in his moonlighting activities with holdings in cattle, insurance, vending machines, real estate and gambling operations in the Caribbean. He lived in the Spring Valley section of Washington, close to the far wealthier Johnson. He achieved all of this on an official salary of $19,600 a year.
“Like my bosses and sponsors in the Senate, I was ambitious and eager to feather my personal nest,” Mr. Baker wrote in the book, a collaboration with author Larry L. King.
“As they presumed their high stations to entitle them to accept gratuities or hospitalities from patrons who had special axes to grind, so did I,” Mr. Baker added. “As they took advantage of privileged information to get in on the ground floor of attractive investments, so did I. As they used their powerful positions to gain loans or credit that otherwise might not have been granted, so did I.”
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Mr. Baker’s world of privilege and political connections came crashing down in the fall of 1963. A former business associate, Ralph Hill, filed a lawsuit against him, charging that Mr. Baker had taken thousands of dollars in cash from Hill to use his influence with North American Aviation Corp. to steer a vending machine contract Hill’s way. And then, Hill charged, Mr. Baker double-crossed him.
The lawsuit piqued the interest of Senate Republicans, who pressed for an investigation. And Johnson, who was then the vice president and feared that his own questionable financial dealings would come under scrutiny, went to extraordinary lengths to deny his close relationship with Mr. Baker, the man he once declared was “like a son to me because I don’t have one of my own.”
He basically cut his protege off without a word.
The beginning of a downfall
Mr. Baker soon showed up on the cover of Time magazine, and Life ran an article detailing his highflying career and pointing to his relationships with certain “party girls.”
It was discovered that Mr. Baker owned a condominium where high-profile Washington figures were entertained by women who were not their wives. Time quoted one neighbor as saying: “A lot of people used to come through the back door. That struck us as strange. Most of our guests come through the front door.”
It was also disclosed that Mr. Baker was the co-founder of the Quorum Club, located in the Carroll Arms, a small hotel on Capitol Hill. It was a place where lawmakers, lobbyists and other interested parties would drink, play cards and dally with young women.
The club was outfitted with a buzzer that alerted senators when measures were coming up for a vote so they could scurry across the street for a roll call. One report from the time said that the club was just “an ice cube’s throw from the Capitol.”
Mr. Baker thought he could control the damage from the calls for an investigation by quietly resigning his Senate post in the fall of 1963, just before a Senate panel was starting a probe.
The Democratic-controlled Senate conducted a lukewarm inquiry and offered a whitewashed report. Kennedy’s assassination that November and the fact that Johnson was now president may also have dampened enthusiasm for a vigorous probe. It certainly dampened the news coverage of Mr. Baker’s relationship with the new president.
But Mr. Baker’s troubles were far from over.
His legal downfall came in 1967, when he was indicted on charges of tax evasion, theft and fraud. Mr. Baker had allegedly been asked by savings and loan industry officials in California to deliver a six-figure sum to Sen. Robert Kerr (D-Okla.), who died in 1963. According to Mr. Baker’s memoir, that money was to have been an inducement to derail a bill that would have been costly to the savings and loan industry. Mr. Baker’s transgression, according to the grand jury, was that he kept nearly $50,000 for himself.
Mr. Baker denied the charges, but he was convicted and by January 1971, all of his legal challenges had been rejected. He prepared himself for federal prison, where he served 16 months of a one- to three-year sentence.
The eldest of eight children, Robert Gene Baker was born in Easley, S.C., on Nov. 12, 1928. His father, Ernest, was a postal worker. Years later, during the Eisenhower administration, when his son was enjoying considerable influence in the Senate, Ernest Baker was appointed postmaster of Easley.
At an early age, Bobby Baker was working at a local Rexall drugstore. He wrote in his memoir that he developed an aptitude for sizing up the wants and desires of some of the town’s leading citizens: “As a delivery boy, I witnessed secret drinkers and occasionally found a strange man in another man’s house. Very early I concluded that things are not always what they seem.”
He was just 14 when he was offered the chance to go to Washington as a page in the Senate after the son of a local political boss turned the opportunity down. He earned a high school degree from the Capitol Page School and received a bachelor’s degree from American University in 1955.
His marriage, in 1949, to Dorothy Comstock, a clerk for the Senate internal security subcommittee, ended in divorce. Their son Lyndon died at 16 in an automobile accident. Survivors include four children; several siblings; 14 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.
After leaving prison, Mr. Baker lived in South Florida and worked for a time for a waste management firm.
A few months before Johnson’s death in January 1973, the former president asked Mr. Baker to visit him at his ranch in Texas, with the understanding that the visit would be kept private before and after it occurred.
According to Mr. Baker, Johnson explained his failure to speak out in his protege’s defense by saying: “Everything within me wanted to come to your aid. But they would have crucified me,” Mr. Baker recalled in his memoir.
At the end of the weekend visit, Mr. Baker wrote that he passed by the guest book that Johnson and his wife had kept on a table in the hallway of their sprawling ranch house. Although Mr. Baker had signed it numerous times in the past, on this last visit the invitation to do so again was not extended to him. Johnson was still taking no chances.
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