The Graft Remains the Same
Secrets of Presidents and the United States Senate - Part 2
“I can guarantee you that very few disinterested parties go around giving money away to politicians. The assumption of the quid pro quo—something for something—is there, and make no mistake about it.”
“Get me my .38!” Senator Robert S. Kerr shouted. “I’m gonna kill every damn one of you. I can’t believe that my three best friends would betray me!” Kerr had just learned that Lyndon Johnson was going to be John F. Kennedy’s running mate in the 1960 presidential election. He directed his fury at Senate staffer Bobby Baker, as well as LBJ and his wife Lady Bird, who were sitting in their hotel room. To Baker, Kerr seemed extremely serious; he was about to find out just how much he meant it. Baker tried to calm him down, but this only made Kerr get louder, accusing them of conspiring to destroy the Senate, themselves, and him personally. LBJ gestured for Baker to usher Kerr into the bathroom and muttered that Baker should try to explain matters to him.
Kerr was a large man, around six foot four and 250 pounds. Once inside the bathroom, he turned on Baker and struck him across the face with an open hand. The blow landed with a crack that Baker likened to a dynamite cap exploding inside his head. His vision filled with stars, his ears rang, and Kerr, tears pouring down his cheeks, screamed, “Bobby, you betrayed me! You betrayed me! I can’t believe it!” Baker was stunned, both by the force of the blow and by the fact that the senator had nearly knocked him senseless; no one in his entire life had ever hit him harder. When Baker regained his ability to speak, he pleaded, “I’m entitled to a hearing. If you’ll calm down I’ll give you my reasoning.” He reminded Kerr that JFK had been underestimated at every stage: dismissed as unelectable because he was Catholic, yet victorious in the primaries; expected to fail in West Virginia, but he did not; predicted to deadlock the convention, which never happened. Baker argued that Kennedy could defeat Nixon, but only with the right ticket, and that any real hope of carrying the South and Southwest depended on LBJ being on it. “But we need Lyndon in the Senate!” Kerr protested.
Baker explained in detail how Johnson had little to lose and much to gain, calling it an opportunity full of advantages with no real drawbacks. Kerr finally relented after several arguments from Baker were presented. Slipping an arm around Baker, he changed his tone: “Son, you are right and I was wrong. I’m sorry I mistreated you.” The two shook hands. Kerr then spun around, strode back into the bedroom, and embraced both Lady Bird and LBJ in turn. “I’m sorry I lost my head,” he said. “I love you dearly and if you decide to accept Kennedy’s offer I’ll be with you all the way.”
Baker had already delivered to LBJ his advice on Senator Kennedy’s offer, while he and Lady Bird were laying in their hotel room bed: “He knows that Vice President Nixon is running ahead in the polls,” Baker explained of Kennedy’s thinking. “Unless he can carry Texas, he can’t be President, and you’re the only hope in the world for him to do that…I think it would be the smartest move you could make. You’ve had a massive heart attack. You would be a third-rater if he’s President and you’re the Majority Leader, because he calls the program…The best job in America is Vice President. You get to go to every fancy funeral in the world. About twice a year you get to cast a tie-breaking vote. But you get to be a human being.” Lady Bird replied, “Lyndon, that is the best advice you ever got in your life.”
Baker reported that JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was also “full of hate” at not being consulted on the LBJ selection as VP. Their father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., insisted that RFK be named Attorney General. JFK disagreed with this selection and sent an intermediary, Clark Clifford, the head of his presidential transition team, to try to convince his father to change his mind. “Bobby’s going to be the Attorney General,” Joe Kennedy responded to Clifford. “Get out of here.” Baker explained that “his father demanded it and he’d given so much money that [JFK] had to agree to naming Bobby Kennedy to be Attorney General.”
LBJ impressed upon Baker the importance of winning the uphill battle getting RFK confirmed by the Senate: “Bobby, this will be the most humiliating defeat I, as Vice President, could suffer if I don’t have enough influence in the Senate to confirm the President’s nominee, even though it’s his brother.” In particular, Baker was required to “pour the whiskey in Senator Richard Russell because he had the votes to kill it,” as he recalled. In his Secretary of the Senate office, Baker gave it his best effort: “Your best friend and my best friend is pleading with me to talk to you to see if you’ll let us have a voice vote.” Russell agreed to this approach given the “persuasion and the booze,” and most of Kennedy’s cabinet was approved by voice vote on January 21, 1961. One Republican Senator, Gordon Allott, objected that RFK lacked “legal experience” for the position and demanded a standing vote, but Allott was ultimately alone in voting against the Attorney General’s nomination. Baker predicted RFK “would have been defeated” and “would have been lucky to get 40 votes” if a roll-call vote had been the procedure. “The Republicans and Southern Democrats had enough votes to defeat Bobby Kennedy to be Attorney General,” according to Baker.
It was not the first time that RFK had secured a position as a result of his father’s money, with Baker reporting that Joe Kennedy had bribed Senator John L. McClellan to the tune of $50,000 ($600,000 today) to have RFK appointed as chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1955. Baker explained that bribes were often delivered through the senators’ private law practices: “You just channel it to their law firm or give them envelopes with cash.”
Monopoly
It was hardly an accident, Baker thought, that Austin, Texas, remained for years the only city of its size served by just one television station. Lyndon Johnson had cultivated allies at the highest levels of the broadcast establishment. George Smathers acted as his reliable representative in the Senate, while Bob Bartley, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, happened to be the nephew of Johnson’s longtime benefactor, House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Baker believed it was a safe assumption that others within the regulatory bureaucracy, including those responsible for issuing broadcast licenses, were well aware of these friendly ties and of Johnson’s formidable influence.
Johnson obtained the right to select and reject programming for his Austin monopoly station from the offerings of all three major networks. Baker noted that no other television station in America operated under such an extraordinary and favorable arrangement. Baker recalled a revealing incident at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where they had traveled to attend a Bonds for Israel rally. There, he watched LBJ aggressively pressure an NBC network executive in a bid to increase his own profits. Johnson told the executive that he expected his station to be compensated at national advertising rates for the network commercials it carried. “But senator,” the executive replied, “your market isn’t big enough down there. The local affiliate is paid according to its share of the audience. Yours just isn’t large enough to qualify.” Johnson snapped back, “I say it is. I know how you fellows work—you can do anything you want to. Well, want to!” After some deliberation, the network officials concluded that they did want to increase their ad rates for LBJ’s station.
From Baker’s standpoint, it was common in that era for senators to be engaged in private business ventures alongside their public duties. He pointed to Senator Robert A. Taft as one example, noting that his family operated a highly profitable television enterprise, Taft Broadcasting. Baker himself managed to obtain direct contributions to his family’s coffers as a result of his Senate work. He later revealed that the Belgian-American businessman and diamond magnate, Maurice Tempelsman, had once offered Baker a reward for his efforts in securing a “wheat for uranium” swap with the U.S. Department of Agriculture worth $3 billion. “I can’t take anything,” Baker told Tempelsman, who instead gave him “a six carat diamond for me to give my wife.”
Baker recalled traveling with Senator Johnson to New York and sitting in conversations with the presidents of NBC, ABC, and CBS. In those meetings, it was clear to him that the network executives understood exactly where real power lay. Johnson would routinely press them, telling them, “You’re not doing enough advertising,” and lecturing them on what they should be doing. Once LBJ ascended to the presidency, the Johnson Company was merged with the Chandler family’s media interests in Los Angeles, creating a large publicly traded corporation. In Baker’s estimation, Lady Bird Johnson received roughly $50 million in stock from that transaction. He bore her no ill will: “She is revered by the American people and especially by me.”
Champions
With LBJ out of the Senate, Baker went from working 16 to 18-hour days to completing his tasks in 10 hours a day or less. Baker later referred to the new Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield as “a champion of doing nothing.” When a bill came up, Mansfield typically left it to the committee chairman to determine whether it could pass. Legislation itself seemed to hold little personal interest for him. Baker described Mansfield as a solitary figure who preferred to read and smoke his pipe rather than engage actively with the Senate’s legislative agenda. “He’d just go in his office and smoke his pipe and read foreign affairs papers and he basically let the Senate do its will,” Baker recalled. “He never tried to ask anybody for a vote.” After the demanding leadership of Lyndon Johnson, Senators welcomed Mansfield’s more relaxed style, which required far less effort and allowed them to “earn” their pay in a much easier fashion.
Senator Kerr of Oklahoma emerged as one of the most effective figures in Baker’s view given the power vacuum created by Mansfield’s leadership. Baker remained on friendly terms with the Senator despite Kerr’s penchant for violence and disdain for Catholics: “God, when I married a Catholic,” Baker remembered, “he didn’t talk to me for five years…He thought everyone who wasn’t a Baptist was going to die and go to hell.” One of President Kennedy’s top priorities after taking office was passing a tax bill to stimulate business during the recession of 1960-61. Kerr, however, controlled enough votes on the Finance Committee to block it. Kennedy personally summoned Baker to the White House. “Bobby,” the President remarked, “everyone knows Senator Kerr is your dearest friend,” apparently unaware that Kerr had smashed Baker in the face. JFK continued: “I’ll be a one-termer if I can’t get this tax bill through. Will you see if you can get him to support me?” Baker approached Kerr, explaining the President’s request and Kerr replied bluntly that the tax bill was dead unless the Attorney General put forward the judicial nomination of Luther L. Bohanon for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma.
Baker then contacted JFK’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, who put the President on the phone. JFK, who was unfamiliar with the situation, immediately got the Attorney General on the phone, with Baker listening in. RFK pushed back on the idea: “Mr. President, Luther Bohanon, based upon what the American Bar Association says, is the most unqualified man in America to be a judge…I am not sending it down.” JFK was unmoved: “I have just made a deal. Senator Kerr is going to have that nomination and once I sign it, he will report the tax bill. I am the President. You are the Attorney General. Do that.” The legislation ultimately passed thanks to these efforts. “Those are things that you have to do...It is a quid pro quo,” Baker acknowledged. A more direct method was employed by Kerr on a Medicare vote sought by President Kennedy in 1962. Baker was uncertain how Senator Jennings Randolph from West Virginia would vote on the Medicare proposal: “He would never tell me how he was going to vote.” Senator Kerr provided him with $200,000 ($2.15 million today) to secure his support. “It shows you that money can talk,” Baker concluded, confirming that there was an audible gasp when he voted for the bill on the U.S. Senate floor. The Medicare bill was narrowly defeated in July 1962 by a 52-48 Senate vote and later signed into law in 1965.
Baker later reflected on his relationship with Kerr: “I never had a better friend in my life than Senator Kerr. Everything he did was to try and help me, but he also used me to help him. It was a mutual admiration society.” According to Baker, Senator Kerr once told him that he had arranged for friends and relatives of a powerful member of the House Ways and Means Committee to buy into proven oil wells at deeply discounted prices, and that he had extended the same favor to an influential senator on the Senate Finance Committee. During the Eisenhower administration, Kerr influenced Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to ensure that Kerr‑McGee, the conglomerate in which he was a partner, sold all the uranium it could produce directly to the federal government. Later, as chairman of the Senate Space Committee, Kerr worked through a mutual friend, Fred Black, the chief lobbyist for North American Aviation, to establish manufacturing plants in Oklahoma that would employ some 20,000 of Kerr’s constituents if North American secured the Apollo missile contract. Kerr then leaned on James E. Webb, head of NASA, who was also conveniently a Kerr‑McGee executive on loan to government, to look favorably on North American’s bid. Webb did nothing to obstruct the effort and the company won the contract. Executives told Kerr they could indeed provide 20,000 Oklahoma jobs, but warned that some equipment would be so massive it could only be transported by water. Kerr offered to change the landlocked terrain at the taxpayers’ expense: “Tell me how wide and deep you want the ditch and the government will dig it.”
In 1962, Baker discovered that Kerr was willing to sell himself if the price was sufficient. President Kennedy had proposed a tax bill that would raise the tax rate on savings and loan associations to match that imposed on commercial banks, a roughly five‑percent increase, amounting to some $43 million ($460 million today). The savings and loan industry reacted with outrage and lobbyists swarmed Washington, DC, but the bill passed and moved to a conference committee, where Kerr sat as a key member to decide what would be included in the final version. Baker was approached by Glenn Troop, chief lobbyist for the United States Savings and Loan League and a longtime friend. Troop was frantic. “Bobby, that fucking bill will ruin us,” he said. “We figure it will cost us a minimum of $43 million annually…Help me.” Troop asked Baker to intervene with Senator Kerr, but Baker was skeptical Kerr would do anything to undermine a bill he had sponsored. Troop was adamant: “Bobby, we’ll do anything to kill that bill. Anything!” At Troop’s insistence, Baker attended lunches with some of the nation’s most powerful savings and loan executives, first at the Statler‑Hilton and later in his Capitol Hill office. He found their arguments unconvincing, but out of loyalty to Troop he eventually agreed to raise the matter with Kerr.
Kerr cut Baker off mid‑sentence as he started his pitch, with Kerr stating bluntly that he had no sympathy for the savings and loan executives. Still, he added, if Baker trusted these people, Kerr would intervene for a price: “Tell them it will cost them $400,000 ($4.3 million today) if I’m successful in their behalf.” He insisted the money be delivered in cash and warned that he would be fighting the combined power of the White House and Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Troop was aghast when informed of the amount requested by Kerr, but within hours the lobbyist called back: “Tell your man he’s got a deal.”
As Baker and Kerr walked together near the Capitol, the staffer informed the senator that the deal was on. Kerr wondered if Troop drank too much or talked too freely, but Baker vouched for him. Troop soon confessed to Baker that his clients could not raise the full amount; only $200,000 was possible, to be split into two instalments. Kerr erupted into a fit of rage when he heard this: “I told you those bastards were no fucking good!” he yelled while he slammed his fist on a desk. “Those pricks have always tried to do everything on the cheap and they always will. They’ll be sorry for this, those cocksuckers! I’m gonna fuck ‘em at every turn from now on.” Once he ran out of steam, he instructed to Baker: “Alright. If that’s it, then that’s it. But they’re gonna regret it. Get me my money.” Over the following weeks, Baker acted as courier, receiving envelopes of cash in hotel suites, counting money in restrooms and airplanes, and personally delivering partial payments to Kerr, who deposited them in his lockbox. “You’re $33,700 short,” Baker said of their payments against the initial payment of $100,000. Their continued inability to pay in full provoked further anger from the senator. “Goddammit, Bobby, this has gone far enough,” Kerr complained. “Tell those pricks to quit dribbling this in.” The pair then walked to the senator’s bank where Kerr deposited the latest instalment of cash in a safe deposit box.
Baker pressed Troop for the balance, flying to California to collect additional funds from savings and loan executives. Even then, the final payment came up short, this time by only $400. Kerr remarked, “I’m not a damn bit surprised,” when told of the insufficient funds. Senator Kerr died on January 1, 1963 before any further payments could be made. Kerr’s secretary Marjorie Banner, whom Baker considered to be a personal friend, told him that Kerr had stashed “$2 million cash in his safe when he died and she was the only one that had the key to it,” Baker explained in 2009. “So she told me that to get [Congressman Michael J.] Kirwan to go along with his canal in Oklahoma, that Senator Kerr gave [trucking industry leader] Neil Curry a $100,000 in hundred dollar bills, that went to Mike Kirwan, and Mike Kirwan withdrew his objection. And so that’s one of the ways that big money talks. I don’t think it’s changed in my lifetime.”
Baker, who came from modest means and had a Senate salary of $19,600 annually, saw his own net worth balloon to over $2 million ($21 million today) by 1963 through private business involving livestock, vending machines, insurance, and gambling licenses. While working on a hotel venture, Baker ran into trouble when his business partner committed suicide and he was left to pay for the enterprise on his own. Baker approached LBJ, who referred him to Senator Kerr. Kerr arranged a loan to save the company. “I will love him until the day I die,” Baker remarked of the senator. After Kerr’s death, Baker attempted to convince the President of Kerr-McGee, the energy company the Senator had co-founded, to offer the Governor of Oklahoma $1 million over 10 years to appoint Senator Kerr’s son to the now vacant Senate position. “He didn’t understand about politics and that never happened,” Baker explained. Baker later had a chance to meet the Governor, J. Howard Edmondson, once he was elected to the Senate in 1963. Baker described the rejected bribery plot he had advanced and Edmondson replied, “I’d have taken it in a New York minute.”
Crisis
Baker resigned as Secretary to the Senate Majority Leader on October 7, 1963, a month after the Senate Rules Committee began an investigation into whether Baker’s private business deals violated conflict of interest rules or involved other wrongdoing. Baker declined to answer the Committee’s questions when testifying, taking the Fifth Amendment. Republicans sought to broaden the inquiry to include senators themselves, campaign finances, and additional witnesses, while the Democratic majority narrowly interpreted its mandate and resisted these efforts. This produced repeated party-line votes, accusations of “whitewash,” and widespread press criticism that the Senate was shielding its own. “Baker grew up in the Senate and is in large measure its creature,” David Kraslow wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “He is in effect, not cause; symptom, not condition…it seems hardly fair for Baker to take it all, for the committee to zero in on the pupil without bothering to inquire what he may have learned from his eminent teachers and sponsors.”
Baker believed that press attention was intensified because he took the Fifth Amendment, later reflecting on his fleeting notoriety: “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.”
Baker’s mistress Carole Tyler resigned her Senate position not long after Baker left his, and like him she invoked the Fifth Amendment when testifying before the Senate Rules Committee. She returned temporarily to her home in Tennessee, but once press attention subsided, she came back to Washington to work for Baker, a move that sparked renewed publicity. Their romantic relationship continued but Baker refused to abandon his family for her, a decision that produced volatile confrontations in which she sometimes wept or threatened suicide. Even so, Baker was completely unprepared for the events of a Sunday in early May 1965.
At the time, Tyler was staying at Baker’s Carousel Motel in Ocean City, Maryland, where she handled the bookkeeping. On the morning of May 9, she and her roommate, a young woman named Dee McCartney, began drinking with Robert Davis, a fellow Carousel guest. Tyler had planned to take an aerial sightseeing trip over the resort island, flying in Davis’ private plane, but the weather that morning was considered too dangerous to fly safely. The drinking continued, and later observers reported that the pilot appeared to be heavily intoxicated. Around 2 p.m., after the skies cleared and turned sunny, Davis and Tyler drove to the Ocean City airport and took off. Witnesses later recounted that the small plane flew back toward the Carousel, swooping low over it several times, before turning sharply toward the Atlantic Ocean. The aircraft never recovered from this maneuver and plunged into the water at high speed near the Carousel Motel.
In Washington when the call came, Baker, his wife, and his physician, Dr. Joseph Bailey, immediately chartered a small plane to visit the crash site. By the time they arrived that evening, Baker boarded a Coast Guard vessel engaged in the search. He was present when the wreckage was finally raised from the depths shortly after 1 p.m. the next day. Seeing Tyler’s body, wearing a green pantsuit he had given her, overwhelmed him: “I broke down and cried like a baby.” Dr. Bailey later told him that both Tyler and the pilot had died instantly from their head injuries. Baker still had to notify the next of kin: “The hardest thing I ever had to do was call Carole’s mother and tell her that her daughter was dead.”
At Tyler’s funeral, Baker felt utterly spent, convinced that he had reached the lowest point of his life and that happiness might never return. She was only twenty-six, he thought. She had only started to live. God, what a waste of beauty and goodness. Sitting in a small red-brick church adorned with flowers, surrounded by her family and friends, he found himself wondering whether he was somehow cursed. Whatever strains Baker had endured in his marriage, or would later endure, he never forgot the strength his wife displayed during that ordeal. The pair ultimately divorced in 1977 after a long separation. Reflecting on his personal situation in 1978, Baker called Tyler’s death “the greatest emotional crisis I’ve ever had in my life.”
Future President Sex Tape
The Senate investigation into Baker unfolded in two phases (1963–64 and 1964–65). The Democratic majority’s first report in 1964 found Baker guilty of “gross improprieties” tied to the use of his office for personal gain but rejected claims of criminal conduct; Republicans denounced the report as a “whitewash.” New allegations raised in late 1964, particularly involving the District of Columbia Stadium contract and an alleged illegal campaign contribution, prompted the Senate to reopen the inquiry.
In June 1965, the Committee issued a supplemental report. The Democratic majority again concluded there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the stadium contract or related insurance transactions, rejecting key testimony from insurance broker Don B. Reynolds as unreliable. Baker later recalled a phone call with Walter Jenkins, a top aide to LBJ, in which they discussed a letter Lady Bird had given Reynolds expressing her gratitude for a stereo Reynolds had sent them for Christmas. “Bobby, this Don Reynolds is a nut,” Jenkins stated. “There’s a lady standing on Connecticut Avenue to take the bus and he pulled out this letter and almost tries to rape her.” Baker concluded that Reynolds was skilled in the insurance field but was “a lying, thieving son of a bitch...Don Reynolds was a genius nut, I guess. You know, he had loose screws in his head.”
While the the Senate majority acknowledged numerous ethical lapses by Baker, especially his exploitation of influence for financial benefit, it largely reaffirmed the conclusions of the first report. The Republican minority sharply disagreed, arguing that evidence of illegality had been ignored, witnesses discredited, and lines of inquiry improperly curtailed.
Baker was indicted by a federal grand jury in January 1966 on nine felony counts, including income tax evasion, fraud involving the Kerr cash, aiding in the filing of false tax returns, and conspiracy. After years of investigations, surveillance, and public scrutiny, the indictment did not surprise him. Prosecutors offered a plea deal requiring him to plead guilty to a single count. While he later admitted to having committed illegal acts, he felt that he was indicted for the wrong crimes.
His trial began in early 1967 and the central issue was the Kerr cash, money Baker claimed he had lawfully handled on behalf of Senator Kerr, who was deceased by the time of trial. Prosecutors depicted Baker as a corrupt political operator driven by greed, while savings-and-loan executives testified that Baker had coerced them into providing funds allegedly meant for lawmakers.
Baker was warned bluntly by his lawyer that accepting a plea would amount to admitting to something he insisted was untrue. His counsel laid out the stakes as they drove home one evening: “I want you to fully realize the consequences of what can happen if you are convicted. You could get a ton of years. I got the impression from talking to [prosecutor William O.] Bittman that if you’ll plead to a single count, you’ll get no more than ninety days to six months. I can’t guarantee it, but that’s my gut feeling.”
Baker pushed back: “But if I plead guilty to one count then the assumption’s gonna be made that I’m guilty of every goddamned one of ‘em. It will appear that I stole money from my friend and benefactor, Bob Kerr. I didn’t do that, and I’ve got too much pride for people to go on thinking that I did.”
His lawyer tried to narrow the issue. “I believe we’re in good shape on the tax questions,” Williams replied, “but it’s tough to say whether a jury will believe you about the Kerr money. He’s dead and he’s not here to speak for himself. That could backfire on you.” Baker would not yield. “Hell, I don’t have to prove I didn’t take it. The government’s gotta prove that I did.”
Williams cautioned him again: “Bobby, you can never figure what a jury will do. It’s a roll of the dice. Think about it. Bill Bittman’s tough. Bobby Kennedy put him on the Jimmy Hoffa case because he’s like a bulldog, and he put Hoffa in jail. There’s a lot of press hysteria connected with your case and the political implications are grave.”
Williams drove in silence while Baker weighed the consequences. Finally, Baker put his foot down: “Ed, absolutely under no circumstances do you have authority to tell Bittman I’ll plead guilty to one damn thing. If I do, the press will play it that I got my wrists slapped, that I copped out, that a fix was in. The assumption of total guilt will be with me the rest of my life.” Williams answered quietly, “Well, it will be with you if a jury finds you guilty, too.”
From what Baker had learned about Bittman’s tactics, which included wiretaps, electronic surveillance, and intense pressure on potential witnesses, he expected an all-out assault. He was aware, for example, that the FBI had bugged the Sheraton-Carlton hotel suite of the aerospace lobbyist Fred Black for six months. When recounting the story in 1978, Baker lied about one of the recurring visitors to the suite, a politician who happened to still be alive at the time. He later revealed the reason behind the deception: the episode involved secretly recorded sexual encounters and the blackmailing of a future President of the United States.
