Walter Jenkins: you can hang out with all the boys

Walter Jenkins (right) with successor Bill Moyers and a button that came out after the scandal. Images from txtell.lib.utexas.edu and npr.org

Long before Larry Craig's fateful encounter in a restroom stall at a the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson was caught up in a similar scandal.

Walter Wilson Jenkins was born in the tiny town of Jolly, Texas, in 1918. Graduating high school at the age of 15, he went on to the University of Texas in Austin. When he was 21, he met Lyndon Johnson, then a Democratic congressman, who offered him a job due to his superior shorthand skills. From then on, Jenkins was in the employ of Johnson, except for service in the Army during World War II and his own run for Congress in 1951. After he was discharged from the military, Jenkins married and eventually had six children.

After Johnson became President following John F. Kennedy's assassination, Jenkins joined him in the White House as his top adviser. Often putting in 16-hour days, Jenkins worked from a tiny office and ceded a more ostentatious space to his secretaries. Johnson once referred to him as his "vice president in charge of everything."

On October 7, 1964, Jenkins attended a party celebrating the opening of the new Washington, D.C. offices of Newsweek. After a few drinks, Jenkins walked to a YMCA located not far from the White House. In the men's room at the club, he met Hungarian immigrant and timekeeper named Andy Choka, whose age in primary sources ran the span between 60 and 62. The two entered a pay toilet stall, where Jenkins began performing oral sex on the older man. The basement restroom, known as a location for illicit homosexual encounters, was under observation by two police officers in an adjacent shower room. Both Jenkins and Choka were arrested.

After paying a $50 collateral that allowed him to forgo any sort of formal charge, Jenkins was released. The incident was leaked to the press by an anonymous source, and the Washington Evening Star called Jenkins' office seeking comment a week after his arrest. The call prompted Jenkins to visit Abe Fortas, a lawyer and friend and future Johnson appointee for the Supreme Court, to let him in on the incident. Though Fortas and Johnson adviser Clark Clifford were successful in getting local newspapers to suppress the story out of deference to Jenkins' family, it still went out the same night over the United Press International wire.

Getting a jump on a popular euphemism for celebrity hospitalization by some 40 years, Jenkins was said to be admitted for treatment for exhaustion and hypertension. The details of the arrest likely got out, although squeamish newspapers related little more than that Jenkins had gotten a "morals charge" related to "indecent gestures." It was also revealed that he had been arrested five years earlier on a similar charge, described as "disorderly conduct, pervert," in the same location. Johnson asked for and received Jenkins' resignation.

In phone calls between Johnson and Fortas and other officials, the President worried about the effect the scandal might have on the upcoming election against Barry Goldwater. "It seems to me that the Presidency is at stake," Johnson said.

Events worked in the President's favor, however. Within days, the scandal was pushed out of the spotlight by bigger international events, including the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev as Premier of the Soviet Union and the successful test of a Chinese nuclear weapon.

Still, the Republican national chairman accused Johnson of attempting to cover up the incidents involving Jenkins. Fortunately for the President, Goldwater refused to use the scandal against Johnson in his campaign; as fortune would have it, Goldwater had been the commander of Jenkins' Air Force reserve unit and personally knew the man. When the election came, Johnson soundly defeated Goldwater.

Despite the lurid charge, Jenkins was met with a fair amount of sympathy. Even J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sent flowers and a get well card to Jenkins' hospital room. Lady Bird Johnson said, "My heart is aching for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country."

LBJ and others continued to rely on the exhaustion belief, or the theory that Jenkins had been framed, and Jenkins himself was said to have blamed alcohol consumed at the party and fatigue for the liaison. Fortas told the President that he thought it was "just a case of a fellow going off his rocker long enough to get involved in that kind of thing."

Both Democrats and Republicans worried that Jenkins' bathroom escapade may have jeopardized national security. He had a security clearance for top-secret Air Force and Defense Department information, as well as the top-secret "Q" clearance for the Atomic Energy Commission. In a lengthy article on the scandal, Time wrote that "it is axiomatic that sexual deviates are susceptible to blackmail," and posited that Jenkins may have compromised nuclear secrets.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists thought the incident bolstered the idea of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that homosexuals had been behind JFK's assassination as a way to get into higher positions of governmental power. It has been proposed that the Johnson Administration's move to characterize the arrest as an isolated incident instead of homosexuality on Jenkins' part may have been an attempt to counter these fears.

In what today seems a downright farcical use of intelligence resources, Johnson ordered 50 to 100 FBI agents to see if national security had been affected by the YMCA tryst. The Central Intelligence Agency also investigated whether foreign blackmail occurred. In a matter of weeks, the FBI had interviewed 500 people on every aspect of Jenkins' life and determined that no national secrets had been compromised and that Jenkins had not been framed. It was also confirmed that Jenkins had lobbied to reinstate an Air Force major who had been forced to resign his commission after making lurid phone calls to the wife of an enlisted man. Some months after the whole affair, Hoover denounced a "vulgar" letter bearing his signature and addressed to Jenkins as a forgery from a Soviet smear campaign.

Jenkins returned to Texas after the scandal. He never came out of the closet. Though he and his wife never divorced due to their Catholic religion, they separated in 1972. Jenkins worked as a certified public accountant and management consultant. He and Johnson remained friends, and Jenkins was a welcome guest at the ex-President's ranch. In 1985, Jenkins died after suffering a stroke.

Sources: "Johnson Aide Quits After Morals Arrest" in the St. Petersburg Times on Oct. 15 1964, "Jenkins Case Stirs Probe" in the St. Petersburg Times on Oct. 16 1964, "The Senior Staff Man" in Time on Oct. 23 1964, "The Jenkins Report" in Time on Oct. 30 1964, "Hoover Says Reds Behind Smear Letter" in the St. Petersburg Times on Jan. 15 1966, "LBJ's Gay Sex Scandal" in Out in December 1999, Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes by Michael R. Beschloss, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson, Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History by Angus McLaren

Robert Potter: kind of nutty

Image from cemetery.state.tx.us

Violent political scandals are fairly rare among the litany of financial or sex scandals that crop up throughout the country's history. Robert Potter, a politician in both North Carolina and Texas, might be one of the most bloodthirsty politicians the country has seen, and certainly the most emasculating.

Potter was born in either 1799 or 1800 in Granville County, North Carolina. He served as a midshipman in the United States Navy from 1815 to 1821, and followed up with a career in law. A member of the state house of commons in 1826 and 1828, he was elected as a Jacksonian Democrat to Congress in 1828 and 1830.

Potter is best known for the incident that forced him out of the Capitol. In a rambling broadside appealing to the residents of four counties in North Carolina, Potter said of the two men he maimed that they "had indeed stabbed me most vitally - they had indeed hurt me beyond all cure." He was probably speaking metaphorically, since he makes no reference to any sort of self-defense against physical attack. He was certainly being melodramatic, for the injury he inflicted on the men was certainly worse than whatever hurt his pride suffered. Believing that they had carried on an adulterous relationship with his wife, Potter castrated Reverend William Lewis Taylor and a teenager named Willie K. Lewis in August of 1831.

In the broadside, Potter said his wife had admitted to having an affair and that his trial was rigged against him, but did not shy away from the castration accusation. "I am consoled by the conviction that in what I have done I have only acted upon those feelings which nature has implanted in the hearts of all men, indeed, I may say, of all animals; and that each of you would have done the same thing under the same circumstances," he wrote. Found guilty in the Granville County court in September of 1831, he was ordered to serve six months in prison and pay a $2,000 fine.

Potter resigned from Congress in November of that year, and he and his wife were divorced. Not long after, the North Carolina house of commons passed an act making castration punishable by death if it was done with malice aforethought. If it wasn't done in such a matter, the punishment was exactly like the one meted out to Potter: six months in prison, with a fine to be determined by the court. Despite this snub by the legislature he once belonged to, Potter was returned to the house of commons in 1834.He was kicked out in January 1835.

The circumstances of this expulsion differ from account to account. He may have cheated at cards; he may have reneged on a gambling debt; he may have pulled a gun during a card game to steal the money up for grabs after losing his own share. The common thread is that he was kicked out due to some sort of misconduct involving a deck of cards.

Potter moved to Harrison County in Texas after this latest embarrassment, and soon regained some political and military clout as the territory sought independence from Mexico. He joined the Nacogdoches Independent Volunteers to help equip men for the siege of Bexar, but resigned soon after to offer services to the Texas navy. A signer of the Texas declaration of independence, he also saw action at the Battle of San Jacinto, where he was part of a group advocating the execution of the captured Mexican president. He remarried, and served as Secretary of the Navy and commander of the port of Galveston during the provincial presidency of David Burnet as well as a representative to the Texas congress.

During an obscure East Texas feud known as the Regulator-Moderator War, Potter became a Moderator leader for Harrison County. In 1842, his home was surrounded by members of the Regulators and he was gunned down while trying to escape into a nearby lake.

Some sources say that Potter went to Texas to escape the ignominious acts marking his public service in North Carolina; if that was the case, it seems to have worked. Buried on a bluff near his home, Potter was exhumed and re-interred in the Texas State Cemetery in 1931. A double-sided headstone lists his political service in both North Carolina and Texas, and Potter County in the latter state is named for him.

Sources: The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, the Texas State Cemetery (cemetery.state.tx.us), American Annual Register edited by Joseph Blunt, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War by David Grimsted, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas by Mark McNeese Carroll, "Mr. Potter's appeal to the Citizens of Nash, Franklin, Warren, and Granville" available at American Social History Online

Robert Bernerd Anderson: from tax policy to tax evasion

Image from nationmaster.com

Like John Swainson, Robert Bernerd Anderson successfully maneuvered a political career before encountering scandal outside of office.

Born in 1910 in Texas, Anderson ran for a seat in the state legislature in 1932, the same year he was wrapping up law school at the University of Texas. After serving one term, he held several posts in the Texas government, including assistant attorney general, chairman of the state's unemployment commission, and tax and racing commissioner. He was exempted from service in World War II due to a childhood case of polio that left him with a limp. He did serve as a civilian aide to the Army Secretary during the war, however. In 1941, he became the manager of a half million-acre cattle ranch, which included supervising oil and gas leases with several Texas oil companies. He served as an officer with the Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association of Texas during the late 1940s.

Originally a Democrat, Anderson supported Dwight D. Eisenhower for President in 1952. The next year, Eisenhower appointed him Secretary of the Navy. It was Anderson, at Eisenhower's request, who desegregated that branch of the military. He later became Deputy Secretary of Defense and resigned from government work, switching parties to become a Republican before Eisenhower's re-election in 1956. While heading a Canadian mining company, Anderson kept close ties with the President, making a trip to the Middle East in 1956 to encourage better relationships between Egypt and Israel. In 1957, he returned to Eisenhower's cabinet as Treasury Secretary. Remaining in the position until the end of Eisenhower's presidency, Anderson encouraged the use of a budget surplus to reduce the national debt instead of lower taxes.

Over the next few decades, Anderson worked as an investment specialist in New York City, served on the boards of several companies, including Pan Am and Goodyear, and was an economic adviser to the Sultan of Oman. He also maintained ties with the succeeding presidential administrations, with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson appointing him to special committees on foreign aid and the federal budget. Anderson was also appointed special ambassador to Panama to address the issue of ownership of the Panama Canal. He resigned from that post in 1973 after a coup overturned a preliminary treaty, and his successor negotiated the treaty which ultimately turned over the canal to Panama at the turn of the millennium.

From 1983 to 1985, Anderson ran the Commercial Exchange Bank and Trust of Anguilla in the British West Indies with a partner, David Gould. Unfortunately, this was an illegal offshore bank, one where anonymous clients could deposit illegally obtained funds or hide income from the Internal Revenue Service. The bank had offices in New York, but was not registered or subject to regulation, and had no deposit insurance. Investors lost about $4.4 million, which Anderson gave to longtime friend Newton Steele. Steele used the funds to buy oil and gas leases in Oregon and pay off debts.

Anderson was charged with tax evasion for the years of 1983 and 1984, under-reporting his income by some $240,000. He was also suspected of being involved in a plot to sell arms to Iran, but never charged. After pleading guilty to the charges in 1987, Anderson was sentenced to serve one month in jail, five months of house arrest, and five years of probation. He was also ordered to pay back taxes to the IRS, pay restitution to the investors, and enter an alcohol treatment program. The judge noted that Anderson had been treated for alcoholism 10 times since 1981 and may have been negatively affected by his struggle to care for his late wife, who had suffered from Alzheimer's, over the course of a decade.

The conviction came very close to the end of Anderson's life. He was disbarred, and in 1989 died from complications after surgery for throat cancer.

Sources: The Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, "Moon Sentenced to 18 Months in Jail" in the Washington Post on July 17 1982, "Ex-Treasury Chief Admits Tax Fraud and Banking Crime" in the New York Times on March 27 1987, "From Treasury Secretary to Guilt in Fraud" in the New York Times on June 16 1987, "Ex-Treasury Chief Gets 1-Month Sentence in Bank Fraud Case" in the New York Times on June 26 1987, "Robert B. Anderson, Ex-Treasury Chief, Dies at 79" in the New York Times on Aug. 16 1989