August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:45 PM EST One of the biggest scandals involving politics and men’s room indiscretions involved Walter Jenkins, perhaps Lyndon Johnson’s closest aide, who had been with Johnson since 1939. On the night of October 7, 1964, in the midst of the presidential election of that year, Jenkins attended a party at the new Washington headquarters of Newsweek, where he had several martinis, and then visited the men’s room at the nearby YMCA, where he was arrested for having sex with another man by policemen who had the place staked out (using peepholes). See here. Jenkins paid the $50 fine and went back to work at the White House, hoping—like Senator Craig—that the story would not come to light. However, when newspapers began calling about it a week later, he went to see Abe Fortas, Lyndon Johnson’s legal Mr. Fixit (and later Supreme Court appointment) and was nearly incoherent. Fortas put Jenkins in George Washington Hospital and tried mightily to get the story spiked, unsuccessfully. After it hit the front pages, on October 15, Jenkins, married and with six children, resigned immediately. Jenkins and President Johnson had a tremendous stroke of luck when, the very day the story broke, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in a Kremlin coup d’état and the British government of Sir Alex Douglas Home fell on a no-confidence vote in Parliament. The day after that Mainland China exploded its first atomic bomb, and the Jenkins story was pushed far into the back pages. Although Barry Goldwater was way behind in every public opinion poll, he exhibited a decency not common in Washington when he refused to exploit the story in any way.
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