Al Weisel - Lyndon Johnson & Walter Jenkins
Al Weisel
LBJ's
Gay Sex Scandal
By Al Weisel
Out, December 1999,
pp. 76-131
Long before a girl named Monica was even born, the White
House was embroiled in a controversy that threatened the presidency of Lyndon
B. Johnson. The drama began in October 1964, when Walter Jenkins, LBJ's trusted
friend and top adviser, was arrested for having gay sex in a YMCA men's room
mere blocks from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It seemed like a typical night at the LBJ White House: Nearly midnight on
October 7, 1964, just three weeks before the presidential election, and, as
usual, Walter Jenkins was working late. The first staff member to arrive in the
morning and the last to leave at night, President Lyndon B. Johnson's dedicated
aide often put in 16-hour days. From his tiny, undistinguished office, no
bigger than a walk-in closet, one would never have known that Jenkins was the
president's most trusted adviser. (In a typically modest gesture, he had given
the sizable, prestigious office with the large French windows and fireplace
that had been assigned to him to his secretaries.) Few would have suspected
that this mild-mannered 46-year-old White House staffer—with horn-rimmed
glasses, a rumpled suit, a middle-aged paunch, and a face often flush from
high-blood pressure exacerbated by overwork—was one of the most powerful men in
Washington. Although Jenkins was preoccupied that night with something other
than the upcoming election and the many phone calls he still hadn't returned,
he gave no hint of what was on his mind, not even to his private secretary,
Mildred Stegall. "I never did know anything was wrong," she says
today. "He didn't mention anything. We just did our work until pretty
late." She had no idea that Jenkins had just been through a terrible
ordeal, that a few hours earlier he had been arrested, then fingerprinted and
interrogated at a police station just blocks from the White House. It was one of
many secrets Jenkins kept.
A week later, Liz Carpenter, press secretary to the
first lady, got a phone call from Charles Seib, then the assistant managing
editor of Washington's Evening Star. "'Look,
we've got a story that's going to press,' " Carpenter recalls Seib telling
her. " 'Has Walter been hospitalized? Has he had a breakdown?'" he
asked her. Carpenter could hardly believe what the reporter told her next: The Star
was investigating a report that Jenkins had been arrested on a sex charge. When
Carpenter called Jenkins to inquire about the story, he said he would call her
back. He never did. Instead he called his friend Abe Fortas, a sharp Tennessee
lawyer whom Johnson later appointed to the Supreme Court, and told him, "A
terrible thing has happened." Jenkins immediately headed to Fortas' house,
but by the time he arrived he was so distraught that Fortas had trouble getting
the story out of him. Jenkins rambled incoherently that he was "destroying
President Johnson" and threatened to shoot himself. Through his tears he
mentioned the YMCA and the police. Although Fortas was unable to get any more
details, he easily figured out what had happened: Jenkins had been arrested far
having sex with another man in the health club's men's room. As Fortas later
explained to an FBI investigator, "It was common knowledge among
Washington attorneys that the YMCA was the home of homos."
The next day, Jenkins' arrest was front-page news
across the country. After having labored over the course of his entire career
in relative obscurity and anonymity, and at pains never to call attention to
himself—despite his enormous power and influence—Jenkins became, for a few
short weeks in 1964, the most famous homosexual in America. A Harris poll taken
at the time found that 87 percent of Americans knew his name. Then, just as
quickly, other news knocked the Jenkins story off the front page—within days,
Soviet premier Khrushchev was sent packing to his dacha, British voters elected
Harold Wilson and tossed out the Tories*, and the Chinese dropped their first
nuclear bomb. And despite the hopes of the Republicans and the fears of the
Democrats, the Jenkins scandal had virtually no effect on the presidential
election a few weeks later: Johnson humiliated Barry Goldwater in what was then
the biggest landslide in American history. According to the Harris poll, more
than two thirds of the American people said the scandal made no difference to
them (about the same number who shrugged their shoulders when confronted with
revelations about President Clinton's sex life last year). The public's
reaction is even more astonishing when one considers that, at the time,
homosexuality was still a tremendous taboo; the same year, Life magazine
published a widely read article that characterized gay life as a "sad and
often sordid world." Yet the incident signaled a transformation of public
attitudes toward homosexuality—if not outright acceptance, then at least an
acknowledgment that gay men and lesbians existed, and even a sympathy for them
that would one day make acceptance possible. "It was just at the stage
where people were becoming aware that there were gay people," says
Carpenter. "We got a lot of mail that said, 'I have that in my family.' So
did Walter, very heartfelt letters. It was becoming accepted as a situation
that wasn't unusual." But it was too late for Jenkins. His 25-year
political career destroyed, he faded once again into obscurity, his life
reduced to little more than a footnote in history.
* * *
"When they came to canonize political aides, [Jenkins]
will be the first summoned, for no man ever negotiated the shark-infested
waters of the Potomac with more decency or charity or came out on the other
side with his integrity less shaken," wrote journalist Bill Moyers, a
former Johnson aide, in Newsweek in
1975. "If Lyndon Johnson owed everything to one human being other than
Lady Bird, he owed it to Walter Jenkins." Johnson and Jenkins were one of
the most remarkable pairings in American political history. Though they shared
a rural-Texas background and the vision that government could help improve the
lives of the ordinary working man, it would be hard to find two men more
different from each other. Johnson was the towering, macho, domineering
politician, commanding attention wherever he went, while Jenkins acted as the
genteel, retiring aide who worked quietly behind the scenes. They complemented
each other perfectly. "Jenkins was the nicest White House aide I ever met
in any administration," says Joseph Califano, who was undersecretary of
defense for both John F. Kennedy and Johnson, and secretary of health,
education, and welfare under Jimmy Carter. "He was never overbearing. It
was quite remarkable."
Jenkins was born on March 23, 1918, in Jolly, Texas
(population: 63), a lonely patch of dirt in the middle of the north Texas
prairie. When Jenkins was two, his family's house burned down while they were
away at a state fair, and his father, a farmer, moved them to nearby Wichita
Falls, Texas, where he opened a hardware store. They were strict, old-fashioned
Southern Baptists; his mother always called his father "Mr. Jenkins."
After an early graduation from high school at the age of 15, Jenkins attended
the University of Texas at Austin. There he met John Connolly, who later became
governor of Texas. In 1939, when Jenkins was 21, Connolly introduced him to
Lyndon Johnson, then a U.S. representative for Texas' 10th District. Though
only a freshman congressman, the ambitious 31-year-old legislator had already
ensconced himself as a protégé of the powerful representative Sam Rayburn of
Texas and had even caught President Roosevelt's eye through his staunch support
of the New Deal. Johnson, impressed with Jenkins' ability to take shorthand, an
unusual skill for a man at the time, immediately offered him a job. (Jenkins'
predecessor had quit after suffering a nervous breakdown as a result of being
overworked by his unrelenting boss.) Jenkins would work for Johnson until 1964
with only two interruptions—from 1941 to 1945, when he served in the Army, and
in 1951, when he returned to Wichita Falls to run for Congress.
After his discharge from the Army in 1945, Jenkins
had planned to make a life of his own, apart from that of the charismatic,
overbearing congressman, and he proposed to Marjorie Whitehill, a hometown girl
he had met while playing bridge. Whitehill was, in some ways, also his complete
opposite. "My mother was much more volatile, much more fun-loving,
vivacious, and very strict," says Beth Bromberg, the oldest of the
Jenkins' six children (including a son named Lyndon), while she describes her
father as "understated, kind, and gentle." But despite Jenkins'
desire to live his own life, Johnson wanted his aide back and would not take no
for an answer. While at the processing station in Richmond, Virginia, following
his discharge, Jenkins was paged to come to the telephone. "It was
Congressman Johnson saying he wanted me back right away," Jenkins later
recalled in an unpublished oral history prepared for the Johnson Library.
"I told him I was getting married a few days later and we wanted to take a
honeymoon." Three days into his honeymoon in New Orleans, Jenkins got
another call. "I need you badly. Can't you cut it short?" Johnson
asked him. Jenkins ended the honeymoon early and rushed back to Washington. If
Marjorie Jenkins had previously had no inkling of her husband's priorities and
the tremendous power Johnson had over him, she knew now.
In 1951 Jenkins tried once again to strike out on
his own, returning to Wichita Falls to run for Congress. It was a bitter, ugly
campaign. Almost a decade before Kennedy was elected as the first Roman
Catholic president, Jenkins was viciously attacked for having converted to
Roman Catholicism when he married Marjorie. He lost the election. "There
was a sense he was too gentle to be a political figure," says fellow Texan
Ramsey Clark, attorney general under Johnson in 1967 and 1968. According to
Bromberg, "My father always said that losing that election was the best
thing that ever happened to him because it meant he went back to work for Mr.
Johnson."
Having won a Senate seat in 1948, Johnson was, by
1953, the undisputed leader of his party. "In the Senate, Jenkins was the
heart of the staff," Clark recalls. "He was almost an alter ego. If
he told you something, it wouldn't be much different from Senator Johnson
telling you himself. Walter was much more compassionate [than Johnson]. The
means were very important to him. Johnson was more pragmatic."
In 1960 Johnson ran for president but lost the
Democratic nomination to Kennedy, who selected him as his running mate. Being
No. 2 was uncomfortable for Johnson, who spent much of his term as vice
president taking goodwill tours. Jenkins accompanied Johnson to such far-flung
destinations as Egypt and Vietnam. Although Jenkins had helped plan the trip to
Texas that Johnson and Kennedy took on November 22, 1963, he stayed behind in
Washington. He was eating lunch at the Congressional Hotel when he heard on the
television news that Kennedy had been assassinated. He immediately rushed to
the Executive Office Building, where he received a call from Johnson, asking
him to look up the words to the oath of office. With little help from the
stunned Kennedy aides, Jenkins suddenly found himself the de facto chief of
staff for the new president of the United States.
As idealistic as President Johnson's policies
were—from civil rights to the war on poverty (Johnson "believed in doing
things for the folks," as Carpenter puts it)—he was an ambitious
politician who would do almost anything for power. Jenkins understood his
volatility better than anybody. "Sometimes [Johnson would] do things in
haste," says Carpenter. "Walter had a sense of that, and he'd hold it
up for 24 hours if he thought the president was acting too hastily."
Jenkins would witness the moments when the ruthless, self-assured leader was
seized with self-doubt and patiently help him regain his footing. Jenkins and
Johnson were close, but they were never equals. Just as his mother never called
his father by his first name, Jenkins always called his boss "Mr.
Johnson." And neither was able to confide in the other about the intimate
details of his personal life. Jenkins would later recall an awkward moment with
Johnson in their early days together, while accompanying him on one of his long
drives around his mostly rural congressional district. "I remember during
one conversation he talked about sex," Jenkins recounted in the oral
history. "I think [he] was trying to shock me, an innocent young kid. [He
said] he didn't see anything wrong with people having sex outside of marriage.
I said, 'Well, wouldn't that bother you in your own
family?' He said, 'Well, not really,' but I know it would have. If it ever
happened, which I'm sure it didn't." Whether Jenkins was merely being
loyal or really had no idea, Johnson is known to have had several affairs.
Despite his professed sophistication about sexuality, Johnson was in fact
stunned when the revelations about Jenkins' double life surfaced.
On October 7, 1964, Newsweek magazine celebrated the opening of its new offices a few
blocks from the White House with a party that was attended by dozens of
Washington luminaries including Washington
Post publisher Katharine Graham, UPI correspondent Helen Thomas, and at
least seven cabinet members. Jenkins, along with the secretary of agriculture,
arrived at approximately 7:15 p.m. and met his wife there. He drank three or
four martinis and, at 8 p.m., escorted his wife down to a car that took her to
another dinner party; he then returned to the event and had another martini.
After leaving the Newsweek building
sometime before 8:30, Jenkins walked around the corner to the YMCA on G Street,
which stood in the shadow of the White House. He descended the stairs to the
basement men's room, which Time magazine would later describe as a
"9-foot by 11-foot spot reeking of disinfectant and stale cigars."
There he met Andy Choka, a 60-year-old divorced Hungarian immigrant and guard
at the Army-Navy Club, who later told an interviewer that he only had sex with
men because of his "age and lack of funds." Without exchanging a
word, Jenkins and the man 14 years his senior entered a pay-toilet stall.
The men had no idea that behind the locked door to
an old shower room, two policemen were watching them through peepholes; a third
policeman had placed a stool outside the door and peered over the transom.
Within minutes the police burst into the room and led the pair away in
handcuffs. Choka begged the officers not to arrest him because he had just
gotten a new job so that he could pay his back taxes. At the police station,
Jenkins told the officers he worked as a clerk at the White House and asked to
see an attorney. "You don't need a lawyer," a lieutenant told him.
"You are a person whose name appears in the paper," he added,
implying that unless Jenkins cooperated, the police could leak the story to the
press, which, in the end, they likely did anyway. Jenkins elected to pay the
$50 fine and not contest the charge. Instead of calling a lawyer, he telephoned
the White House and told a staffer that he would be a little late getting back
to work that evening. According to the arresting officers, Choka shook so
violently throughout the ordeal that they were afraid he would have a heart
attack, while Jenkins was calm, resigned to his fate.
Though Jenkins seemed unruffled that night, when the
story brake publicly on October 14, his condition so alarmed Abe Fortas that he
summoned a doctor, who had Jenkins admitted to George Washington University
Hospital, sedated, and put on a 24-hour suicide watch. Meanwhile, Fortas called
presidential adviser Clark Clifford and together they made the rounds of the
Washington newspapers in an effort to have the story suppressed. Remarkably,
they were successful in convincing the editors of the Evening Star, the Post,
and the Daily News to hold
publication of the story. According to the Evening
Star's Seib, Fortas and
Clifford sat down with him and Newbold Noyes, the Star's editor, and
made a persuasive case: "Their argument was, Jenkins was going to go into
the hospital and it would be a humanitarian thing to hold it up," recalls
Seib. "Those were the days when journalists still did that sort of thing.
That wouldn't happen now."
Although Jenkins told Fortas that he had never
before been arrested, Fortas soon learned otherwise. In 1959, while Johnson was
majority leader of the Senate and running for president, Jenkins had been
arrested for soliciting a policeman. In fact, the arrest had occurred in the
very same YMCA men's room. Jenkins, who had been alone in the rest room except
for the arresting officer, claimed he was entrapped because the officer had
"enticed" him by fondling himself (just as George Michael would claim
years later). This earlier arrest made it difficult to dismiss the later charge
as an aberration.
Although the newspapers held the story, at 8:25 on
the evening of October 14 the news went out over UPI wires. Later that night
Johnson's press secretary, George Reedy, confirmed the story for the press,
weeping as he made the announcement. "Could this be true?" a
bewildered Johnson asked Fortas when told of Jenkins' arrest. The president,
who was attending the annual Al Smith dinner in New York that night,
immediately asked Fortas to seek the resignation of his closest aide, despite
pleas to wait from friends and advisers. Jenkins, groggy from the drugs he had
been given, tendered his resignation without protest. Then Johnson summoned his
pollster to determine the incident's effect on his re-election campaign.
"I had a profound disappointment in the president," says Ramsey
Clark. "His immediate decision was to completely insulate himself from the
issue, to protect the power of his political and presidential position. Nothing
should be extended from that to help Walter." But while he acted with
chilly decisiveness in severing Jenkins, Johnson was at a loss to explain what
had happened. Days later he would tell the press, "I was as shocked as if
someone had told me my wife had murdered her daughter." In the hours after
he learned of the arrest he said little publicly, releasing only a perfunctory
statement to the press announcing Jenkins' resignation. Lady Bird Johnson,
however, knew exactly what to say. Against her husband's wishes, she issued her
own statement of compassion and support for Jenkins. It was the only time she
publicly defied her husband in their 39 years of marriage.
In a White House recording of a telephone
conversation, Lady Bird tells Johnson that if "we don't express some
support to him, we will lose the entire love and devotion of all the people who
have been with us." Though he tries to dissuade her from getting involved,
telling her patronizingly, "We have the best minds working on it,"
she refuses to budge. Finally she responds, in a voice dripping with honey and
heartache: "My love, my love, I pray for you along with Walter. You're a
brave, good guy, and if you read some things I said in Walter's support they'll
be along the line that I just said to you." Her emotional statement, which
began, "My heart is aching today for someone who has reached the end point
of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country," transformed the
climate surrounding the scandal. In its wake, a host of newspaper editorials
recommended compassion for Jenkins.
Privately, Johnson speculated that Jenkins' arrest
was a Republican dirty trick, but Senator Barry Goldwater, in the midst of a
desperate campaign for the presidency, refused to exploit the incident. His
extremist comments ("I want to lob one in the men's room of the Kremlin
and make sure I hit it," he said in one campaign speech) had alienated
many voters, and the Jenkins scandal must have seemed like the trump card he'd
been waiting for. But despite the advice of many in his campaign, Goldwater
would not make an issue of Jenkins' arrest. The split in his camp—between the
libertarian Goldwater, who would many years later come out in favor of gay
rights, and the conservative moralists, who would evolve into today's Christian
Right—was the genesis of a rupture that haunts the Republican Party to this
day. But for Goldwater, who knew Jenkins from the Senate and served as
commanding officer of his Air Force Reserve unit, the most important reasons
were personal. "It was a sad time for Jenkins' wife and children, and I
was not about to add to their private sorrow," Goldwater later wrote in
his autobiography. "Winning isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty to
friends or lasting principle, are more important."
Even J. Edgar Hoover, a man now widely known to have
been gay but who was no friend to gay people, behaved with uncharacteristic
decency. Jenkins had served as Johnson's liaison to the FBI and was a friend of
Hoover's, so when the FBI director heard what had happened, he sent flowers to
Jenkins in the hospital. Hoover's gesture was condemned by some who accused him
of giving aid and comfort to a "pervert." On October 15, Johnson had
asked the FBI to investigate the incident, and many critics felt Hoover's
action compromised the FBI's objectivity.
The main purpose of the FBI investigation was to
discover whether or not Jenkins, who possessed a high security clearance,
threatened national security. At this time gay men and lesbians were
automatically denied clearance because they were believed to be vulnerable to
blackmail; the policy was not overturned until President Clinton signed an
executive order in 1995. It was an exhaustive, weeklong inquiry in which more
than 500 people from around the country were interviewed, people who had known
Jenkins as far back as grammar school, The final report, released on October
22, cleared Jenkins of violating national security but, to Johnson's
disappointment, failed to link his arrest to the Republicans.
Nor was the FBI able to shed much light on Jenkins' personal.
life. Almost everyone the Bureau interviewed said they were shocked by the
revelations and had no reason to think Jenkins was gay. Still, Johnson was
acutely interested in finding some explanation for Jenkins' actions besides
homosexuality. At Johnson's instruction, Fortas attempted to persuade Jenkins'
doctor to tell the FBI that Jenkins was suffering from brain damage.
The doctor refused. Johnson would request only one change to the final
report, which Hoover begrudgingly granted, despite objections that it wasn't
true. A convoluted sentence was added to a press release summarizing the
report, stating that Jenkins "did not recall any further indecent acts and
if he had been involved in such acts he would have been under the influence of
alcohol and in a state of fatigue and would not remember them."
Now public for the first time under the Freedom of
Information Act, the full FBI report shows that Jenkins actually told
investigators a different story. He had had his first gay experience, he said,
as a child, though he could not recall if he was "5, 7, 9, 12, or 16 years
of age at the time." In adulthood, he said, he "practically
never" had gay encounters, but on those "extremely rare occasions he
must have been under the influence of alcohol," and he denied ever going
to any gay bars, clubs, or parties. He was questioned at length about his
association with "suspected sexual deviates"—a Capitol policeman who
had solicited a young boy, an "effeminate" Senate staff member, a
friend from Texas "rumored to have become involved with homosexual
activity," an old friend with "the affectation of long hair,"
Jenkins denied having sexual relations with any of these men or having any
knowledge whether they were gay. Jenkins was also asked about a member of Johnson's
Senate office who had called him after being arrested outside the Lafayette
Park men's room. Jenkins had gone down to the police station and paid the $25
to bail him out.
At the conclusion of the interview, the agents
reported that Jenkins had told them that "his admiration for the opposite
sex is the very same one would expect of a normally oriented man. When
completely sober and when in complete possession of his faculties, he feels no
inordinate sexual attraction for men." But after consenting to be
interviewed, Jenkins apparently regretted what little he had told them. On
October 22, when the report's results were released to the press, he threatened
to call a news conference denying everything. Under orders from Johnson, the
phone was removed from his hospital room, visitors were banned, and he was
given a strong sedative.
Weeks after the incident, Johnson was still trying
to grapple with the news of his friend's double life. In a telephone
conversation with Hoover, he remarked, "I guess you're gonna have to teach
me about this stuff. I swear I can't recognize (gay people)." "It's a
thing that you just can't tell sometimes," Hoover replied. "There are
some people who walk kind of funny that you might think may be queer. But there
was no indication of that in Jenkins' case." Johnson was no doubt well
aware of rumors about Hoover's own sexuality. A few months after Jenkins'
arrest, copies of a letter Hoover had purportedly written to Jenkins circulated
to dozens of prominent Washingtonians. The letter, which began,
"Darling," had Hoover telling Jenkins, "I hope to see you soon
at our hideout." Although it seemed like an obvious forgery, Hoover was
enraged by the missive, launching an exhaustive investigation to find the
source. "Is there no way we can mow down this filth?" he scrawled in
a memo to subordinates. He directed agents to attempt to match fingerprints on the letter to an unlikely suspect:
Martin Luther King, Jr. Eventually he would claim that Soviet agents sent the
letter as part of a disinformation campaign. The actual source was never
discovered.
Johnson did not replace Jenkins, instead dividing
his responsibilities among several staff members. "A great deal of the
president's difficulties can be traced to the fact that Walter had to
leave," Johnson's press secretary, the late George Reedy, once told an
interviewer. "All of history might have been different if it hadn't been
for that episode." By 1968 the administration was in such disarray because
of the war in Vietnam that Johnson decided not to run for re-election. "It
deprived the president of the single most effective and trusted aide that he
had," says Ramsey Clark of Jenkins' resignation. "The results would
be enormous when the president came into his hard times. Walter's counsel on
Vietnam might have been extremely helpful."
It's difficult to judge the impact of one man. The
statistics on the McCarthy-era purge of employees in the State Department—some
for being homosexual, others for being suspected Communists—don't tell us how
the firing of each individual affected history. In his book In Retrospect, Johnson's secretary of
defense, Robert McNamara, provides one example of how devastating those losses
could be. "The top East Asian and China experts in the State Department
had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the '50s. Without men like
these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we badly misread China's
objectives" during the Vietnam War. How many people died in Vietnam
because McNamara didn't have accurate information no one can say. Nor do the
statistics tell us about the impact on each individual; of the destroyed
careers and shattered lives, they are just as mute.
* * *
On a snowy day in January 1965, Jenkins, along with his wife and their
friend the Reverend Luther Holcomb, watched Johnson's inauguration—not from the
dais, but on television in the basement rec room of Jenkins' Washington home.
When the president took the oath of office, Jenkins called his children into
the room to witness the event. "His facial expression was very much like a
battle-scarred soldier watching the armistice," Holcomb later recalled.
"The announcers would mention [staff members], 'We see Jack Valenti here,
we see Bill Moyers here,' and here was the No. 1 [staff member] of all."
At the dawn of Johnson's Great Society, when it looked as if all the ideals he
had worked for 25 years to realize would finally have their day, Jenkins found
himself on the outside looking in.
When Jenkins returned to Texas a month later, he was
greeted by a protest staged by the American Nazi Party in front of his home.
His friends gave him a warmer welcome. "He didn't have any trouble getting
business because people rallied round," says Carpenter. A certified public
accountant, Jenkins did bookkeeping and became a management consultant to
several major corporations. Although he was officially exiled, "It wasn't
like we were in outer Siberia," says Bromberg. In fact, Bromberg says, her
father continued to look over the president's tax returns each year while he
was in office—as he had since the 1940s—and members of both families attended
her wedding and the wedding of Johnson's, daughter Luci. Jenkins never lost
faith in Johnson and his policies. "He absolutely believed in the role of
government to provide for our fellow man," says Bromberg. "He thought
Johnson was a great man."
In 1972 Jenkins and his wife separated, though, as
Roman Catholics, they never divorced. "My mother was a horrible
alcoholic," says Bromberg. "I think my father stood by her as long as
he could, probably out of guilt because she stood by him, but they never
completely disconnected. He paid her bills and took care of her, but he didn't
have to put up with her." She died in 1987.
Bromberg became her father's close companion,
playing with him in bridge championships around the country. They didn't talk
about the incident that had ended his government career. "My father never
came out," she says. "I assume he was gay, but it was a different
time and a different place. It was nothing we ever discussed. He didn't bring
it up and neither did I, in spite of the fact that we were exceedingly
close." According to Holcomb, "No one outside of perhaps the
psychiatrist and any FBI agents" ever asked him about the incident.
"I suppose if he was going to talk to anyone about it, he perhaps would
have talked to me." But it's difficult to see how Jenkins could have
confided in his friend. Like most of Jenkins' acquaintances, Holcomb clung to
the belief that Jenkins was "framed," that someday it would "come
out that it was not true." In 1985 Jenkins died in an Austin hospital,
five months after suffering a stroke. His friends were with him even to the
end. "I don't know if he knew who I was, but he did reach out and catch my
hand," Stegall says of the last time she saw him in the hospital.
Despite the FBI report's conclusion, Johnson never
stopped blaming the Republicans for Jenkins' downfall. Years later he would
outline his theory to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, claiming the waiters at
the Newsweek party were in fact
members of the Republican National Committee. Most of Jenkins' colleagues would
come up with equally tortured explanations of his behavior. Some attributed it
to a momentary lapse due to overwork and exhaustion. Some pointed out that he
had been drinking at the Newsweek party
and even suggested that his martinis had been drugged. White House aide Richard
Nelson told an interviewer he believed Jenkins suffered from something called
the Samson syndrome: "He was under such tremendous pressure that it goes
beyond being suicidal; it's tear down the walls of the temple." Anything
to avoid the simplest, most plausible—yet for some, most
unfathomable—explanation: that Jenkins was gay.
In contrast to Johnson's seemingly cold, calculated
public response to the Jenkins incident, privately he agonized about what had
happened. "He never, never got over it," says Stegall. "Dozens
of times he asked me, 'What do you think really happened?' He was absolutely
heartbroken." Califano says, "I heard Johnson say often that when he
left the White House there were two things he was going to do: He was going to
start smoking again, and he was going to throw his arms around Walter Jenkins
and hug him. And he did it. He started smoking on the plane on the way back,
and he met Walter Jenkins at the airport in Texas." Until his death in
1973, just days before the Paris peace accords ended America's involvement in
the Vietnam War, Johnson never again turned his back on his old friend. Jenkins
was a frequent guest at the LBJ ranch, where the former president spent the
last years of his life, presiding over meetings of ranch hands instead of
cabinet officers.
One day at the ranch, Carpenter recalls, the retired
president was relaxing with a group of friends, including Jenkins. Oddly, he
had begun to look like the hippies whose protests against the war had driven
him out of office, letting his white hair grow long until it curled down to his
shoulders. The burdens of office lifted, he seemed momentarily at peace.
"It's worth being out of office," Johnson remarked, "to have
Walter back with us."■
*In the original piece because of an editing error this originally read
"…voters tossed out Harold Wilson's Tories…"
Al Weisel is the co-author,
with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young:
The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, published by Simon
& Schuster.
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