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.”
“He just treats you like you’re a dog.”
Best not mistreat a dog in my presence.
I forget where I saw the chronology of November 21-22, but it was....interesting.
But even simply treating one has nothing intellectual to say and is to basically eat out of a bowl on the floor and not at the table can fit the analogy.
I think the book said they did not start work until noon.
Huh?
Thanks daniel1212.
even simply treating one as though he has nothing intellectual to say and is to basically eat out of a bowl on the floor and not at the table can fit the analogy of “He just treats you like you’re a dog.”
All righty then.
At least the gist partially is now not incomprehensible but maybe almost there.
I’m just funnin’ with ya. :-)
Bump for later.
Everything old is new again!
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