Read Online If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History by Jeff Greenfield - Free Book Online
Authors: Jeff Greenfield
much as a word with Lyndon, or with Lady Bird. For her part, Lady Bird was obsessing over the impending visit of the Kennedys later that evening to the LBJ Ranch after the Austin fund-raiser. Would they have the right food, the right liquor, the right wine, the right bath soap? Would the entertainment be welcomed, or scorned as the stuff of rubes, hicks?
Nor was Johnson in any mood to exchange pleasantries. His thoughts were back in Washington, where a threat to his political future was growing more serious by the day. His longtime Senate protégé, Bobby Baker, a young man he’d installed as secretary of the Senate, his vote counter, his dispenser of campaign cash and favors of every sort, had become caught up in a firestorm. A small legal dispute over a vending machine contract—Baker owned a piece ofthe company—had exploded into charges of influence peddling, pay-to-government contracts. The press began asking how a man with a net worth of $11,000 in 1954 could have a net worth of nearly $1.8 million nine years later while serving full-time on the government payroll. And then sex had been added to the combustible mix: Baker owned the Carroll Arms Hotel, close by Capitol Hill, where, the stories went, important government officials and prostitutes found common ground.
From the moment the Baker story surfaced, Johnson had panicked; he’d cut short an official visit to Europe and used his clout in Texas to make sure none of the state’s papers published a story by a Washington journalistic gadfly named Sarah McClendon (the story appeared in an obscure wire service, but that was enough to put the tale in circulation). Johnson then tried to distance himself from Baker; he claimed he barely knew the man, that his fellow Democrats had chosen Baker as secretary of the Senate, but the idea was laughable on its face (Baker’s nickname on the Hill was “Little Lyndon”), and when
Life
magazine published a cover story on the scandal—THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL: CAPITAL BUZZES OVER STORIES OF MISCONDUCT IN HIGH PLACES—the piece made prominent mention of the close ties between Baker and Johnson.
So on this late morning of November 22, riding through the light rain in downtown Dallas, the Vice President of the United States was not having a good day.
What he did not know was that he was having a much, much worse day than he could have imagined.
• • •
In Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building, a Maryland insurance executive named Don Reynolds was being questioned by theDemocratic and Republican staff lawyers of the Senate Rules Committee. Reynolds claimed that in return for selling Johnson a $100,000 insurance policy on his life—a policy difficult to get for a man who’d had a near-fatal heart attack a few years earlier—Reynolds had been compelled to buy advertising time on the Johnson-owned Austin TV station and had been forced by Baker to buy Johnson a high-end stereo set. What had begun as an investigation into a staff aide was now directly implicating the former Senate majority leader and current vice president.
And as the lunch hour grew near, Reynolds produced two checks; one to KTBC for the advertising time, one to the Magnavox Company for a stereo, to be delivered to the Johnson home.
And then a secretary burst into the room, sobbing hysterically, barely able to get the words out . . .
Two hundred miles to the north, on the ninth floor of the Time
&
Life Building on Manhattan’s Fifty-First Street, a dozen reporters and editors were meeting in the office of managing editor George Hunt.
Life
magazine’s look into the finances of Bobby Baker had yielded a much richer vein of inquiry: if it was a mystery how Baker had accumulated a net worth of nearly $2 million, it was an even deeper mystery how Lyndon Johnson, who had been on the public payroll all his adult life, had managed to accumulate a network many times greater—an estimated $14 million worth. How had he managed to win a
Nor was Johnson in any mood to exchange pleasantries. His thoughts were back in Washington, where a threat to his political future was growing more serious by the day. His longtime Senate protégé, Bobby Baker, a young man he’d installed as secretary of the Senate, his vote counter, his dispenser of campaign cash and favors of every sort, had become caught up in a firestorm. A small legal dispute over a vending machine contract—Baker owned a piece ofthe company—had exploded into charges of influence peddling, pay-to-government contracts. The press began asking how a man with a net worth of $11,000 in 1954 could have a net worth of nearly $1.8 million nine years later while serving full-time on the government payroll. And then sex had been added to the combustible mix: Baker owned the Carroll Arms Hotel, close by Capitol Hill, where, the stories went, important government officials and prostitutes found common ground.
From the moment the Baker story surfaced, Johnson had panicked; he’d cut short an official visit to Europe and used his clout in Texas to make sure none of the state’s papers published a story by a Washington journalistic gadfly named Sarah McClendon (the story appeared in an obscure wire service, but that was enough to put the tale in circulation). Johnson then tried to distance himself from Baker; he claimed he barely knew the man, that his fellow Democrats had chosen Baker as secretary of the Senate, but the idea was laughable on its face (Baker’s nickname on the Hill was “Little Lyndon”), and when
Life
magazine published a cover story on the scandal—THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL: CAPITAL BUZZES OVER STORIES OF MISCONDUCT IN HIGH PLACES—the piece made prominent mention of the close ties between Baker and Johnson.
So on this late morning of November 22, riding through the light rain in downtown Dallas, the Vice President of the United States was not having a good day.
What he did not know was that he was having a much, much worse day than he could have imagined.
• • •
In Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building, a Maryland insurance executive named Don Reynolds was being questioned by theDemocratic and Republican staff lawyers of the Senate Rules Committee. Reynolds claimed that in return for selling Johnson a $100,000 insurance policy on his life—a policy difficult to get for a man who’d had a near-fatal heart attack a few years earlier—Reynolds had been compelled to buy advertising time on the Johnson-owned Austin TV station and had been forced by Baker to buy Johnson a high-end stereo set. What had begun as an investigation into a staff aide was now directly implicating the former Senate majority leader and current vice president.
And as the lunch hour grew near, Reynolds produced two checks; one to KTBC for the advertising time, one to the Magnavox Company for a stereo, to be delivered to the Johnson home.
And then a secretary burst into the room, sobbing hysterically, barely able to get the words out . . .
Two hundred miles to the north, on the ninth floor of the Time
&
Life Building on Manhattan’s Fifty-First Street, a dozen reporters and editors were meeting in the office of managing editor George Hunt.
Life
magazine’s look into the finances of Bobby Baker had yielded a much richer vein of inquiry: if it was a mystery how Baker had accumulated a net worth of nearly $2 million, it was an even deeper mystery how Lyndon Johnson, who had been on the public payroll all his adult life, had managed to accumulate a network many times greater—an estimated $14 million worth. How had he managed to win a
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