Landslide (32 page)

It helped, too, to have a familiar face. Jenkins certainly had that.
Practically all of official Washington knew him. He had stumbled into town in the late 1930s, twenty-one years old, just out of the University of Texas at Austin. At the university, he’d fallen into the orbit of John Connally, the tall, handsome student body president. After graduation, Connally was headed to Washington, where he had a job in the office of a young, ambitious Texas congressman. Jenkins, without a better plan, followed along. In that congressman’s office, Walter Jenkins would find a calling. And in that congressman—Lyndon Johnson—he would find a cause to define his life.

In Jenkins, meanwhile, Johnson found a man with any number of invaluable qualities: a strong work ethic and cool efficiency, a fierce loyalty and perfect discretion. And, perhaps most important, Walter Jenkins had an uncommonly high tolerance for pain. By the time Johnson reached the Senate, Jenkins was his closest aide. Officially, he was in charge of the “Texas office”—Johnson’s Senate Office building lair—but unofficially he was a second set of eyes for every aspect of Johnson’s life. He dealt with the Johnson family’s taxes, their Texas business holdings, the LBJ Ranch. In time, Jenkins earned a reputation around town as the man to see on all things Johnson, a man who knew Johnson’s mind well enough to answer questions and fulfill requests on his behalf. For the other guests at the
Newsweek
party, Jenkins’s face was indeed familiar. It was the face you saw when you needed something from Lyndon Johnson but weren’t quite up to facing Lyndon Johnson himself.

There is one asset, however, that provides greater confidence at a Washington cocktail party than any other: power. And despite all the things he had seen, despite his extraordinary ability to get things done, power was not the first thing anyone would think of when they
looked at Walter Jenkins. Too many people in Washington had watched Lyndon Johnson berate Jenkins in their presence. Too many had seen Johnson treat him, as one Jenkins friend put it, “
like a nigger slave.” Too many people had seen the way Jenkins jumped when Johnson gave an order. Too many had heard the old knock on Johnson—he was such an awful boss, he could only keep mediocre men,
like Walter Jenkins
, on his staff. Washington is a ruthlessly transactional city. As Jenkins made his way through the
Newsweek
reception, people smiled. But they were smiling at the proximity to power, not at power itself.

To the people who worked for Johnson, however, Jenkins did have power—the power of mercy, and salvation. Over the years, more than one hapless staffer was saved when Jenkins decided to pocket an order Johnson had given in the heat of anger. They knew that Jenkins could be counted on to pick up the slack if something came up, or, if they were in the doghouse, to put in a kind word with the boss on their behalf. And they knew that when Johnson’s rage came raining down, Jenkins would stand in the full force of it, absorbing as much as he could.

That was what Walter Jenkins did better than anyone else: suffer, and carry on. The sacrifice was physical. His body grew hunched, his face became covered in blotches. In time, the agony of Walter Jenkins became an insiders’ joke. Tax time was always a stressful period for Jenkins. He had to ensure that the Johnsons’ complicated business interests did not leave an impolitic paper trail. One year, as April 15 approached, an exhausted Jenkins stole a quick nap on an office couch. Entering the room, Bill Moyers discovered the slumbering Jenkins and crept back outside. Then, Harry McPherson would later say, he threw open the door and, in an impersonation of Johnson, bellowed: “
Goddamn it, Walter, what are you doing out here? Aren’t you working on my taxes?” Jenkins, said McPherson, “came off the sofa, levitating … just came right straight up off of it in total terror of Lyndon Johnson.”

It was perhaps this capacity for suffering that made Walter Jenkins
so uniquely valuable to Lyndon Johnson. In three decades in Washington, Johnson had worked harder than anyone else, ruffled more feathers than anyone else, encountered pressure that would have toppled anyone else. It had come with a cost—harsh attacks, wounding criticism—that he had counted on Jenkins to bear.
In Bill Moyers, Scotty Reston once wrote, Johnson saw his “ideal of what the President himself would have liked to be at 29”: quick-witted, composed, and urbane, a polished Texan who was going places. Jenkins was the other side of the coin. When Johnson looked at
him
—lumpy and provincial, weak and worn down—he saw the man that he secretly feared he was. He would do anything not to be that man in the eyes of the world. He hated that man. And he let Jenkins know how much.

The
Newsweek
party wore on. There was Katharine Graham, the evening’s hostess, the owner of the magazine and of
The Washington Post
. There were seven members of the cabinet, and leading lights of the press. Jenkins had another martini and then another after that.

Marjorie had dinner plans in another part of town. At eight o’clock, Walter took her downstairs and put her in a taxi. He then returned to the gathering. But when a man filled with alcohol steps out of a party and then reenters, he can find the room subtly but irrevocably altered. Friends have vanished; something darker reigns. After just a few minutes, Jenkins was back outside again on Pennsylvania Avenue, alone.

It was not yet nine o’clock. He did not go to join Marjorie at dinner. He did not head home to his children. He did not return to his office, to the pile of papers and to the ringing telephone and to the voice at the other end of the line that very well might be the president of the United States. He was steps away from the White House, the pulsing center from which Lyndon Johnson ruled over the city, over the country, and over him. And for once, he turned away.

For there was another city near at hand, a city that only certain men could see. It was a city where strangers sat quietly on the benches
of Lafayette Park after nightfall, waiting. A city where anonymous faces, peering through the glass of telephone booths, made brief eye contact and then quickly darted their glance away. A city filled with strangers hurrying into alleys, stairwells, and restrooms. A dark city where Walter Jenkins had no famous boss and no important title saying just how special he was. It was a city where he did not even have a name.

It was toward that other city that Jenkins now turned. As he stepped onto G Street, he could see it in the sign over the entrance to the YMCA. He knew this place; it had been the scene of a great catastrophe in his past. And he had some idea what he would find inside. He passed through the doorway, walking toward danger, self-destruction, and desire. For certain men, on certain nights, they are all the same thing.

O
NE WEEK LATER
, Lyndon Johnson was resting in his hotel room at Manhattan’s Waldorf Tower when he received a phone call from Abe Fortas, his old friend and counselor. Explaining that Clark Clifford was in the room with him, Fortas told the president they had a “very serious problem” to discuss.

Johnson listened, weary and weak. It had been an exhausting fall of flying back and forth across the country, trying to run up his margin against Goldwater. At stop after stop he’d refused to leave until he’d shaken nearly every hand. Inevitably, he’d come down with a bad cold.

He was trying to get some rest before leaving for an evening at Jackie Kennedy’s new apartment with his predecessor’s widow and brother. It didn’t promise to be an easy event. Leaving the Justice Department a few weeks earlier to launch a campaign for a Senate seat from New York, Bobby had written an almost hostile letter of resignation. The best that Johnson could hope from the evening ahead was civility.

The truth was, he needed the Kennedys less now than ever before. Three weeks earlier, on September 27, the Warren Commission
had published its final report on the events in Dallas.
The next day, twelve thousand people crowded the Government Printing Office to buy copies of the 888-page report. Most were there to buy a piece of history. Hardcover copies—at a cost of $3.25—outsold $2.50 paperbacks by a two-to-one margin.

“
WARREN COMMISSION FINDS OSWALD GUILTY AND SAYS ASSASSIN AND RUBY ACTED ALONE
” read the banner headline in that day’s
New York Times
. Press coverage of the report was almost exclusively adulatory. In the write-up of the report that led the
Times
, Anthony Lewis claimed “
the commission analyzed every issued [sic] in exhaustive, almost archeological detail.” “
From Mexico City to Moscow and Minsk,” wrote David Kraslow in the
Los Angeles Times
, “the Warren Commission probed for any shred of evidence to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald did the bidding of others. The commission found none.”
In a twenty-four-page cover story on the report,
Newsweek
declared that “most Americans … will probably agree with Lyndon Johnson’s words discharging the commission last week: ‘You have earned the gratitude of your countrymen.’ ” The cover image for the story was a new bronze bust of JFK by the artist Robert Berks. The late president looked like a figure of antiquity. The Kennedys were the past.

Bobby Kennedy was learning that reality the hard way. He had jumped into the New York Senate race in late August, making fun of his own carpetbagger status: “
Now where is the Hudson River again?” But by mid-September, it was clear that the campaign would be no lark, nor an easy restoration of Camelot.
Polls showed him trailing the Republican incumbent, Kenneth Keating. Relations between Bobby and Johnson had never been worse, but with less than a month to go before the election, it was clear that the popular president could help the struggling candidate. Bobby Kennedy relying on Lyndon Johnson for help: more than any poll, this made the president feel on top.

But then Fortas’s voice came over the phone line in the Waldorf and the bottom dropped out. “
Walter came over to see me this morning,”
the attorney told the president, “and he got involved in a quite serious situation. We hope that we have it under control.”

The details of the situation were so serious, and so clearly uncomfortable for Fortas to discuss, that it was several minutes before Johnson could gather what on earth Fortas was talking about. Eventually he got the salient details of a complicated story: a week earlier, Jenkins had attended a party for
Newsweek
’s new Washington offices. Apparently he’d been drinking heavily. Afterward, he’d gone to, of all places, a nearby YMCA known to be a favorite haunt of homosexuals seeking clandestine assignations. And that was where plainclothes policemen had discovered Walter Jenkins, the quiet family man, the most understated man on the Johnson staff, the closest aide to the president, in sexual congress with another man.

Both men were arrested promptly and hauled into police custody. Jenkins paid a fine and was released. He returned to his desk at the White House that night. For a week he’d gone about his business as usual, telling no one what had happened. But that morning, after the White House had received word that
The Washington Star
planned to print an article on the event, Jenkins had come to Fortas, desperate.
Fortas and Clifford soon learned that the story had been circulating in the capital for several days. Not only did the
Star
have it,
The Washington Post
and the
Washington Daily News
did as well. Worse, the
Star
had the record of a prior Jenkins arrest, in 1959, in the same location on a similar charge.

The two lawyers believed they had persuaded the papers to kill the story. With the help of Jenkins’s family doctor, they’d persuaded him to check in to George Washington University Hospital, where he was undergoing treatment for nervous exhaustion. There, he would be away from the prying eyes of reporters.

The president, taking this all in, spoke softly. Despite his famous temper, it was usually dumb quiet that first came over him in moments when catastrophe seemed at hand. He groped for more information. “
Does his wife know about this?”

“We’re not going to ever tell her anything,” said Fortas, “except that he was exhausted and in the hospital.”

Johnson’s mind was turning over. “
I just can’t
believe
this!”

The implications for Johnson of Jenkins’s troubles were significant—anyone could see that. In recent weeks, Goldwater, desperate to make something stick on Johnson, had been talking up other scandals surrounding the president. A year earlier, Bobby Baker, a colorful Capitol Hill fixture who’d served as secretary to the majority leader, had come under investigation on corruption charges and had to resign. Baker had been a Johnson retainer during his years in the Senate, and there were rumors that he’d also done dirty dealing at Johnson’s direction and with his assent. The Republicans had been looking for anything they could find to suggest Johnson lacked morality. Now, in Jenkins, was the proof.

In a way, the whole business had a sort of ironic justice. For months on end, Johnson had been unable to accept the pleasant forecast for the November election. He’d waited with vigilance and apprehension for something that could destroy his chances, for a nameless, faceless phantom to appear. Now at last it had come. It had a form and a face. A face he had been staring at every day.

Johnson’s voice took on a tone of fatalism. “
You don’t foresee that you can keep this lid on for three weeks, do you?” he asked. It was more a statement than a question.

“
No sir,” Fortas replied. “I think that, however, if we can keep it out of the news stories that it won’t assume a great deal of dignity. And I think that Walter ought to stay in the hospital a while, and then be sent off somewhere … to recuperate.”

It was fantasy to believe that a story like this could stay out of the news pages. Johnson had been around Washington long enough to know that. Sure enough, shortly after eight o’clock, the wire service UPI published a bulletin obliquely describing Jenkins’s arrest.

Later that night, from the Waldorf, Johnson spoke to John Connally, the one person in Johnson’s political world who went further back with Walter than he did.