Bill Moyers & Walter Jenkins
Lyndon Johnson had a few problems with staff playing in men’s rooms.
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.
This is a Labor Day Weekend OTB & Linkfest for August 31-September 3, 2007.
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