The Passage of Power (63 page)

After the funeral ceremony in Marlin’s First Methodist Church, mourners filed past the open coffin, and when it was Johnson’s turn, the line stopped as he stood looking down at Connally’s face. He put on his glasses, and continued looking, for a long moment, and then walked out of the church, and the harsh Texas sun spotlit his face, on which was written a depression so deep that Posh Oltorf, who had known Johnson for many years, was shocked.

After following the coffin to the cemetery and watching it being lowered into the ground, Johnson came to Oltorf’s house. “I think it’s a disgrace that there was no delegation there from Congress,” he said, as Oltorf recalls it. “As powerful as he was, and with all he had done, if he had died when he was in office, you wouldn’t have been able to get into Waco for all the airplanes.”

“I had seen him low before,” Oltorf was to say, “but I had never seen him that low.” And having heard Johnson tell him more than once how meaningless a job the vice presidency was—how only the presidency meant anything—Oltorf felt he understood Johnson’s feelings. Tom Connally had been a powerful senator, but no one remembered him. Lyndon Johnson had been a powerful senator. He was thinking he would never be President—and no one would remember him, either.

I
N EARLY
N
OVEMBER, 1963
—the exact date is not clear—Senator
Williams asked
Reynolds to come to his office again, and Reynolds told him about another insurance deal.

In the spring of 1960, Reynolds said, Baker had invited him to a meeting in the Capitol at which the upcoming bidding for the contract to construct a District of Columbia stadium was discussed. Present were the chairman and the chief clerk of the House District of Columbia Committee, and Matt McCloskey, the contractor and Democratic fund-raiser who had been active in the 1960 convention and then had been named Kennedy’s ambassador to
Ireland, and who now announced, as the others in the room already seemed to know, that he was going to be one of the bidders. Baker told McCloskey that Reynolds was his business associate and that if McCloskey won the contract, he would like to have McCloskey consider retaining Reynolds as the broker for the performance bond which would be required. McCloskey won—and selected Reynolds as the broker for the bond, on which McCloskey had paid a $73,631 premium, out of which Reynolds had, he said, kept $10,000 as a commission, and paid $4,000 to Baker as what Reynolds was to describe as a “payoff.” And again, Reynolds produced for Williams documents that he said supported his story: an invoice for a $73,631 premium from the insurance firm through which Reynolds had secured the bond, his check to that firm for $63,631 (the amount of the premium minus his $10,000 commission)—and a personal check, signed by “Don B. Reynolds,” for $4,000, made out to, and endorsed for deposit by, “Robert G. Baker.”

That was all Reynolds told Williams during that interview, but during another session, not long thereafter, he told the senator that there had also been another, more hidden, side to the transaction: that the entire deal had been structured in such a way that it would provide not only the $4,000 payoff to Baker, but a $25,000 contribution to Lyndon Johnson’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The amount of the premium had been $73,631, Reynolds said, but that hadn’t been the amount that
McCloskey & Company had actually paid. McCloskey had paid $109,205, with the understanding that of the approximately $35,000 overpayment, Reynolds would receive a second $10,000 for being the
“bag
man” and the remaining $25,000 would be given to what Reynolds described as “Mr. Johnson’s campaign.” Reynolds said he was instructed to deliver the money to Baker in cash—in installments that were never to be more than $5,000 each. He said he made three such deliveries—each of fifty hundred-dollar bills—although, since the performance bond was not written until after the Democratic convention, McCloskey did not pay the $109,000 until October 17, 1960, and the cash was delivered not for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign but for the “Johnson-Kennedy campaign.”
²

If Reynolds’ story was true, the District Stadium deal violated at least three federal laws: one prohibiting political contributions of more than $3,000, one prohibiting corporations from making any political contributions at all, and one prohibiting the charging of a contribution to a government contract. Reynolds
told Williams that he didn’t have the check that would document his story—the $109,000 check from McCloskey & Company, to be held up against the $73,000 bill to McCloskey & Company—but Williams would try to find a copy and would eventually succeed, obtaining a photostat of the check from someone, never identified, who wanted to cooperate with his investigation; Reynolds’ story was therefore documented. And Baker would, years later, confirm it. Reynolds, who would later discuss other alleged transactions involving Lyndon Johnson and himself, exaggerated about some of them, Baker was to say, and made up others out of whole cloth (and it appears that Reynolds may indeed have done so), but he was apparently telling the truth about the McCloskey deal:
“I
was the man who put Reynolds and McCloskey together, so I know what the understandings were,” Baker was to say. Reynolds
“told
the truth with respect to … the DC Stadium deal.” (McCloskey was later to admit the $35,000 overpayment, but said it had been merely a clerical error that had gone undetected until the Baker investigation started; that someone in his company had assumed the extra $35,000 was the premium on another insurance policy. “Somebody in our organization goofed. We make goofs like that every once in a while.”) And while Senator Williams did not, during that early November interview, learn the whole story of the stadium contract, Bobby Baker knew it—knew it included the cash for the Lyndon Johnson campaign—and Johnson knew that Williams had been talking again to the insurance broker who had been central to it. Suddenly another link between him and Bobby Baker was on the verge of coming to light.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY
, N
OVEMBER 13
, the President convened the first major strategy session for the 1964 campaign in the Cabinet Room at the White House. It included the men who would be directing the campaign: from the family, the attorney general and
Stephen Smith; from the White House staff, O’Donnell, O’Brien and Sorensen; from the Democratic National Committee, Chairman
John Bailey and
Richard Maguire; from the Census Bureau,
Richard Scammon,
“an
expert,” in O’Donnell’s words, “on population trends with many interesting ideas on where to find the most Democratic votes.” It was a long meeting, lasting from four o’clock until the President broke it up well after seven, saying he had a busy week ahead of him, and then, the next week, his trip to Texas.

Lyndon Johnson was not at the meeting, and neither was any member of his staff, a fact that might have had no significance (a Vice President is not invariably included in campaign strategy sessions) except for two factors: first, the main topic of the meeting was the South—the difficulty of holding the gains made there in 1960, and the region’s long-term future in the Democratic Party—and in 1960 the South had been his responsibility; second, that there was such intense speculation over whether, in fact, he would be on the ticket.

In these circumstances, his absence, as Arthur Schlesinger was to put it,
“led
to a burst of talk”—another burst—“that the Kennedys were planning to
dump Johnson.” Such talk, Schlesinger says, was wrong.
“The
non-existence of any dump-Johnson plan is fully and emphatically confirmed by Stephen Smith,” he was to write. “Johnson’s place on the ticket was not discussed on November 13 because (barring illness or scandal) it was a given,” is a summary in a book published in 1977 that is in line with that given in virtually all books on Kennedy or Johnson. But of course there had never been any discussion about putting Lyndon Johnson
on
the ticket in 1960—not even with Bobby—until Jack Kennedy suddenly announced, to the astonishment of everyone, that he was doing so. And, in fact,
Evelyn Lincoln says that when, the morning after the strategy session, she was reading material from the meeting and Kennedy came over to her desk, he made a remark that contradicted his other quotes. She was to write that when she told the President that the 1964 convention wouldn’t be as exciting as the 1960 version,
“because
everyone knows what is coming,” he replied:
“Oh
, I don’t know, there might be a change in the ticket,” before walking away. And, she wrote, when a week later Kennedy, sitting in a chair in her office, started talking about the reforms he wanted to make in government if he was re-elected, he said,
“To
do this I will need as a running mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.… It is too early to make an announcement about another running mate—that will perhaps wait until the Convention.” When she asked whom the announcement might name, she wrote, Kennedy didn’t hesitate. Looking straight ahead, he said,
“At
this time I am thinking about” another, more moderate, southerner, the young governor of North Carolina,
Terry Sanford. “But it will not be Lyndon,” he said.

Mrs. Lincoln says that she wrote down the conversation
“verbatim
in my diary,” but before her book,
Kennedy and Johnson,
was published in 1968, at a point at which, it should perhaps be mentioned, Robert Kennedy was hoping for Johnson’s support in his campaign for the presidency, Schlesinger saw an advance copy, and, he says, “alerted Robert Kennedy,” who reiterated that there had been no intention of dumping Johnson, and added, “Can you imagine the President ever having a talk with Evelyn about a subject like that?” The reaction of the Kennedy partisans to her book is a case study in reversal. Prior to its publication, references to Mrs. Lincoln in their books and oral history reminiscences had all emphasized the respect Jack Kennedy had for her (
“in
eleven years he never called her Evelyn,” Sorensen wrote) and her faithfulness to the President;
“soft-hearted
” is an adjective used about her by Sorensen, who calls her
“unruffled
and devoted,” and praises her “unfailing devotion and good nature”; Schlesinger talks of her “welcoming patience and warmth” with people insistent on seeing the President. When, decades later, the author asked these same partisans about this woman, whom President Kennedy had regarded highly enough so that he kept her as his private secretary for eleven years, she was described to the author by these same men as a flighty, rather rattlebrained woman. Following the publication of her book, the terms they use to describe the conversation she claims to have had with Kennedy about the 1964 ticket are
skeptical; she “claimed to remember” the conversation, Schlesinger said. When the author of this book went to see her himself, she repeated the conversation as she had written it, saying that the President wanted Johnson off the ticket, and
“the
ammunition to get him off was Bobby Baker.”

A
ND FOR
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
, 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.