The Passage of Power (62 page)

T
HE
S
ENATE’S REACTION
to the Baker revelations had been indignation—at the fact that someone had had the effrontery to make them.
Baker had not been asked to resign, Majority Leader Mansfield told reporters on October 4; he had not offered to resign—and there was no reason he
should
resign.
“Bobby’s
work in the
Senate has been excellent,” he said. “The other matter [Serv-U] affects his activities outside the Senate.” Even in that other matter, he said, Baker might vindicate himself. “We will not attempt to prejudge it.” Some senators tried to duck reporters—Majority Whip Humphrey, cornered by the
Associated Press shortly after a visit to Mansfield’s office and asked if they had talked about Bobby Baker, replied,
“Not
entirely”—and others, even
Wayne Morse of Oregon, usually as far outside the Senate establishment as Williams, tried to defend the eager little man who had done them all so many favors. Speaking
“for
once with the united voice of the Senate,” as
Murray Kempton put it, Morse said on the Chamber floor that “Bobby Baker performed many effective services for each and every one of us.… I am not going to walk out merely because a friend may have made mistakes.”

However, Williams kept bringing Mansfield and Republican Leader
Everett Dirksen reports on what his interviews were turning up, and Mansfield asked Baker to meet with him, Dirksen and Williams on Monday, October 7, to give his side of the story, and that morning, Lyndon Johnson didn’t have to leaf through the
Washington Post
to find the story he was worried about: there it was, big and black in a headline that stretched across the top of the front page:
BAKER CALLED IN INFLUENCE PROBE
.

Bobby Baker knew what his side was. Had he talked, he was to write in his memoirs,
“many
senators would have found themselves in highly embarrassing circumstances, to say the least.” And so would the man he revered. The “wound” Johnson “might have incurred” by his revelations could indeed have been “mortal,” he said. “They could have denied him the presidency, or driven him from office.” Shortly before the meeting was scheduled to begin, he resigned, and the next day, the storm broke on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States, and almost every article, it seemed, not only contained the word that Lyndon Johnson hated, but gave short shrift to his contention that it had not been him who had raised Baker to power.
“Baker
is a protégé of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson,” the
Washington Post
explained. “Johnson named Baker to the position of Secretary to the Senate Majority.… At the time, Baker was twenty-six and still at law school.”
“Theirs
was a close relationship,”
Mary McGrory explained to the readers of the scores of newspapers that ran her column; during the 1960 campaign, “it was he [Baker] who put ‘The Yellow Rose’ on the record player. And Mr. Johnson, to please Bobby, made a long detour to a South Carolina mountain hamlet called Rocky Bottom, where Bobby was greeted triumphantly as a native son who had made good.”

Baker had hoped, he was to say, that his resignation would make the affair
“magically
disappear from the front pages and come to a grinding halt,” but nothing could have been further from the truth. Declaring on the Senate floor that
“the
integrity, not just of Baker, but of the Senate,” is involved, Williams said the case “cannot be closed by resignation,” and introduced a resolution calling for a Senate investigation. The Senate had little choice but to pass it. Although it had been expected that the investigation would be carried out by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee chaired by the hard-bitten Senator McClellan, it was referred instead to the Rules Committee, a decision which, as
Newsweek
said,
“had
old Senate hands chuckling.… The Rules Committee has as its most weighty duty, approving Senate press passes.” The committee’s chairman, sixty-seven-year-old
B. Everett Jordan, a first-term southern conservative from North Carolina, was slow-talking and slow-thinking—even Baker had to say he was
“something
of a bumbler”; in contrast to McClellan, one columnist was to say,
“He
is as hard a negotiator as Neville Chamberlain.” Not only had he been an admiring, indeed subservient, “Johnson Man” during Johnson’s time as Majority Leader, moreover, Jordan had been a “Bobby Baker Man” as well. He was fond of telling how much he had relied on Bobby; asked how he had spent his first day in the Senate, he said, “Oh, I went over to the Senate Chamber, and I stayed there until Bobby Baker told me I could come home.” Although he now hastily removed it, an autographed picture of Bobby had hung in a prominent position on the wall of his office. And he was almost immediately to confirm fears that, as one columnist delicately put it, he “is
too
soft-hearted to head the investigation,” by postponing indefinitely what the
Chicago Daily News
called “the logical first step in a hard-hitting investigation—a request to examine Baker’s income tax returns and the sworn statements of his assets that he had given to various federal agencies.”

But Williams was still conducting his own, independent investigation, and so now was a whole pack of reporters, and all through October there was a drumfire of disclosures in the press: that Baker was a partner not only in Reynolds’ insurance business and in the vending machine company that was the talk of its industry, but also in a travel agency and a law firm; that the
Carousel wasn’t the only motel in which he had an interest: he was a partner in one in North Carolina as well; that he had, not a month before the investigation opened, moved from a modest home to a $125,000 “mansion” in “swank” Spring Valley—
“near
the home of Lyndon Johnson”—where, the
Chicago Daily News
reported,
“a
Chinese houseboy fends off callers.” And then, as the month was coming to an end, and October, 1963, was drawing close to November, 1963, the stories began growing bigger and bigger, for the Bobby Baker case, it was revealed at the end of October, had every ingredient necessary for it to become a scandal of truly major proportions—not only money, it was turning out, but
sex as well.

During the last week of October, newsmen, searching through District of Columbia real estate
transactions, had discovered that Baker was the owner not only of the Spring Valley house but of a Capitol Hill townhouse—one that was occupied by shapely twenty-four-year-old blond
Carole Tyler of Tennessee, a
former Miss Loudon County, who had been Baker’s administrative assistant before he resigned, and who had continued as his mistress. And they discovered, and began to print, at first in hints and then more openly, that at the townhouse
“chain-smoking
, martini-drinking, party-loving” Carole and a group of other “attractive young women” were assigned “to
dwell
and entertain,” in all-night parties at which
“Baker’s
high-flying circle of acquaintances” entered and left through a back door; headline writers named it the
“party
house.”

And a “party house” was, innuendo-wise, thin gruel beside another venue that, over the weekend of October 26 and 27, began to appear in newspaper stories as part of the Bobby Baker case. It was a small hotel, the
Carroll Arms, situated not a hundred yards from the Senate Office Building,
“just
an ice cube’s throw from the Capitol,” as one article put it. On its second floor, the stories said, was an
“intimate
” club, a
“discreet
little private club,”
“smoky
and dimly lit,” a spot where
“the
ceiling is red and the lights are low”—an “intimate and elegant gathering place” named the “
Quorum Club” that Baker had, the stories said, organized for
“romantic
caucuses” of senators, lobbyists and congressmen. And there were stories also about the caucusees, the young women, the “hostesses,” or “party girls,” the articles called them, in a euphemism for call girls—and in particular about one of the hostesses. For those who didn’t prefer blondes like Carole Tyler, this one was a brunette—and on any scale of scandal material, she was off the charts.

“Clad
,” as one account put it,
“in
a brief, revealing, skin-tight costume and black net stockings,” sultry, dark-haired, dark-eyed
Ellen Rometsch, the spectacularly exotic and sensual-looking wife of an East German army sergeant, had worked at the Quorum Club, and at the Carousel Motel, for more than two years before, in August, 1963, she had been
expelled
from the United States and hustled back to East Germany because, as
Clark Mollenhoff reported that weekend in the
Des Moines Register,
she had been “associating with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the ‘executive branch’ ”—and because of fears that she was an East German spy.

As it happened, Lyndon Johnson had no more association with Elly Rometsch than he had with the Quorum Club, which had not even been established until after he left the Senate; he was not even a subject of her boasts. The official with whom she was rumored to have had sex was
John F. Kennedy. Apparently she had bragged that she had had sex with the President, and in July, 1963, an informant had reported the boast to the FBI, which was already investigating rumors that she was a spy, the agency’s suspicions “fueled,” as one account puts it, by her
“expensive
lifestyle,” which, the FBI investigators concluded, “hardly could have been maintained on the pay of a German army enlisted man.”

The FBI had found no evidence to corroborate either rumor; a summary, written in July, of its preliminary inquiries concluded that
“Investigation
has not substantiated the security allegations against subject nor does she apparently have the high-level sex contacts she originally boasted of.” Not a week earlier,
however, Harold Macmillan had resigned as prime minister of Great Britain, brought down by the “Profumo Affair,” in which the British defense minister,
John Profumo, was caught in “impropriety” with a call girl who was also the mistress of a Russian naval attaché—a concatenation of circumstances that raised the spectre of security breaches. The parallels between the Profumo affair and the rumors about Elly Rometsch’s White House connections and about her spying would turn her boasting into a big story if the press got wind of it. Robert Kennedy, who, as
Evan Thomas puts it,
“From
the outset … understood that the merest whiff of a sex-and-spies scandal could be threatening to the president,” had, in August, arranged to have her quietly deported, and the matter had appeared closed.

If she had no connection to Johnson or Kennedy, however, Ms. Rometsch certainly had one to Bobby Baker’s club, and now, with Baker big news, she was news, too, and she certainly had the figure (35–25–35) and face (an
“Elizabeth
Taylor look-alike,” one reporter called her) and, apparently, sexual proclivities (
“Lesbian
prostitute,” was how Mollenhoff described her in his notes; the
German Defense Ministry was to mention her
“somewhat
nymphomaniacal inclinations”; another source said simply,
“She
would do anything”) to elevate a scandal to new heights.
OUST BEAUTY TO HEAD OFF DC SCANDAL
was the
New York Daily News
story that Sunday: “A beautiful German beauty with a lusty yen for men was rushed out of the country in August after bragging about affairs with important Washington figures, informed sources disclosed tonight.” And with reporters tracking down every fact and rumor about her, how long could it be before the identity of the most “important Washington figure” of all was in print?
HILL PROBE MAY TAKE PROFUMO-TYPE TWIST
was the
Washington Post
headline over a story that promised “a spicy tale of political intrigue and high-level bedroom antics” when the Senate Rules Committee took up the Baker case that week.

Robert Kennedy headed off the threat to his brother. On Monday morning, October 28, he asked
J. Edgar Hoover to persuade Senate leaders that the Rules Committee investigation should not include sexual matters, and Hoover, meeting with Mansfield and Dirksen, did so, assuring them that none of Rometsch’s—or Bobby Baker’s—activities had anything to do with national security. The attorney general may have had to guarantee the FBI director that his job was secure to persuade him to do it. But nothing could head off the threat to Johnson. Rometsch was undoubtedly linked to Bobby Baker—and Bobby Baker was Lyndon Johnson’s protégé. And the issue of
Life
magazine that landed on newsstands during the first week of November had Baker on the cover, and inside, illustrating a story headlined
THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL
, was not only a full-page photograph of Bobby and Lyndon grinning together in their Senate heyday (the caption was “Legman and Leader”) but, on the page facing them, two other photographs, one of Elly Rometsch, one of
Carole Tyler—the brunette hugging some sort of fluted upright object, the blonde bounding out of ocean surf in a white bathing suit, every inch the beauty contest winner—that guaranteed the
attention of at least the male portion (and, in the case of Ms. Rometsch, perhaps of part of the female portion, too) of
Life
’s thirty million readers.

O
N
O
CTOBER 30
, Lyndon Johnson had attended
Tom Connally’s funeral in Marlin, Texas, flying to Waco, the nearest city with a sizable airport, and then continuing on by a small plane to the little town.

All during Johnson’s years as a congressman’s secretary and a congressman—and into his first term as senator, until Connally retired in 1953, at the age of seventy-six, at the end of his fourth term in the Senate—Connally had been a great power in Washington, chairman for almost a decade of the Foreign Relations Committee, as well as an icon in Texas, his frock coat, string tie, black hat and great mane of silver-gray hair familiar in every corner of the state: a man to be courted and feared. As a newly elected senator in 1948, Johnson had made a pilgrimage to Marlin to solicit Connally’s help with committee assignments, and had been careful not to take offense when Connally patronizingly refused it. Johnson had told his staff never, under any circumstances, to antagonize him. But in 1963, Connally had been retired for ten years, and the turnout of officials at his funeral was slim. Although Presidents Kennedy and Truman had sent elaborate floral arrangements, the Presidents weren’t there themselves, and neither were any senators or congressmen, not even the representative from the local district.