Posted on 02/09/2020 4:15:25 PM PST by daniel1212
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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