Posted on 02/09/2020 4:15:25 PM PST by daniel1212
“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 …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.
“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.”
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
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.”
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...
[Wikipedia informs that the (Republican-led) "investigation included allegations of bribery 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."
"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.[16]"
"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.[18] 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.[19] Baker, however, was convicted of tax evasion and spent 18 months in prison."]
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...
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. (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/sex-in-the-senate-bobby-baker-099530)
Such behavior does warrant righteousness indignation but reproving others of wrongs requires that we have repented from those ourselves. Thus the question is whether witch-hunting Democrats have reformed themselves from the practices of
Epic In The Making: Biographer readies next LBJ volume (Robert Caro Book On The WAY!!!) Free Republic; January 1, 2002
A former friend who had been Miss Florida went to American University and then became a WH intern. She told me that LBJ impregnated one of the secretaries and one of LBJ’s aids married her to cover it up.
But that’s hardly the worst thing LBJ was accused of doing. He was a ruthless corrupt man.
How can anybody not be for term limits!
We taxpayers ought to be! Can you imagine forcing those greedy power mongers out of their own kingdoms?
Holy Toledo. Sounds as if those Senators in those days focused on drinking, money, and women. Sounds exhausting. How did they get any actual work done, do the jobs they were elected to do?
El BJ was a real bastard.
Christine Pelosi claims there are rapists in California Capitol, Gonzalez Fletcher wants to know who
Not one thing has changed except that they get more cover and protection today.
So, what else is new?
Today it's cocaine, money, and little boys. And a life lived in terror, wondering who knows and might talk.
I always wondered if JFK’s affairs with young women and LBJ’s corruption was on the verge of being exposed. That the whole sordid mess was unraveling and the compliant media could no longer hold back the coming eruption... that would blow the then Swamp like a nuclear bomb!
Then there was November 22, 1963, in Dallas... and it ALL went away. One wonders?????????
But they were mere pikers next to another inmate, one Andrew Stone of St. Louis who was not in politics but had managed to siphon off over $175 million (a $ billion plus today) in Navy defense contracts for the Vietnam war.
Weekly visits from a US Navy officer handing Stone a single envelope eventually drew media attention. A St. Louis reporter did some research and reported that the envelope contained a deposit receipt and bank balance from Union Bank in Zug Switzerland, interest on Stone’s funds deposited there. The Navy had a lien on the funds but had at that time no way of taking custody and under an agreement with Stone’s lawyer was required to carry the report on the funds in person to Stone. The story goes that Baker was so envious that when asked, about Stone he said “he’s richer than us (he and Estes) but he still eats in the prison mess.” The Washington establishment made sure Bobby was eating, drinking and being properly entertained with ladies for his brief stay.
Yet the wikipedia page on him says nothing really negative of his character, and the reason I point it out is their double standard.
“in those days” ? Dilbert San Diego you can’t be serious. You need to pay more attention on what is happening today.
The way the Democrats blast Pres. Trump it seems they think they it is all new to them, or that they have all been reformed.
‘Medicaments’
So naïve are you, the powerful in DC now shakedown foreign countries, like Ukraine.
George Sr took care of it.
“How did they get any actual work done, do the jobs they were elected to do?..,”
The sons of bitches got the Gun Control Act of 1968 passed.
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