String-puller snared in Senate scandal
Bobby Baker, a onetime Senate page who, through his close ties to Lyndon B. Johnson and others, became one of the most influential nonelected men in the American government of the 1950s and early ‘60s, only to be investigated for and eventually convicted of tax evasion and other crimes, died last Sunday, his 89th birthday, in St. Augustine, Florida.
His death was confirmed by the Craig Funeral Home of St. Augustine.
Mr. Baker arrived in Washington as a teenage Senate page and by 1955 had risen to secretary of the Senate Democrats, an important behind-the-scenes role in which he counted votes on pending legislation, served as a conduit for influence trading and saw to senators’ needs, including extracurricular ones.
He became so powerful that he would refer to himself as the 101st senator, and as he and Johnson, the Senate majority leader, formed a symbiotic relationship, others took to calling him Little Lyndon.
Mr. Baker was a man who knew many secrets, and he spilled some in a 1978 memoir and even more in an oral history recorded by the Senate Historical Office in 2009 and 2010.
But his power and knowledge did not make him immune from scrutiny. In 1963 he became the focus of a corruption investigation, one that for a time threatened to envelop Johnson, by then the vice president, and even President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 took some steam out of the investigation — once Johnson became president, there was little inclination to pursue him — but Mr. Baker was convicted in 1967 of tax evasion, conspiracy to defraud the government and theft. After appeals, he went to prison in 1971 and served 15 months.
Robert Gene Baker was born on Nov. 12, 1928, in Easley, South Carolina, the oldest of eight children. His father, Ernest, was a postal worker; his mother was the former Mary Elizabeth Norman.
When he was 14 he received an appointment to the Senate Page School after another local boy turned the offer down.
Sen. Robert S. Kerr, DOkla., became a particular mentor, and so did Johnson.
When Johnson became Senate majority leader in 1955, he made Mr. Baker secretary to the majority. Mr. Baker proved especially adept at the math of the Senate — he would usually know precisely how many votes a piece of legislation could garner at any given moment, a valuable skill in the horse-trading world of Washington politics.
He also helped establish the Quorum Club, a private retreat where members of Congress, their staff members and lobbyists would mingle and, it was said, arrange sexual liaisons.
During his time as a public servant, Mr. Baker was also pursing various business ventures: real estate, hotels, a vending machine company. In 1963, an associate in the vending business brought a civil suit against him, and the resulting publicity soon drew the scrutiny of the Justice Department and other investigative bodies. They wondered, among other things, how Mr. Baker could have become a millionaire when his government job paid less than $20,000 a year.
Mr. Baker resigned from his post in October 1963, hoping to quiet the inquiry, which had begun to seem as if it might embroil Johnson and, through the sexual goings-on at the Quorum Club, perhaps Kennedy. The investigation resumed once the turmoil of the assassination had receded, and though it was now largely confined to Mr. Baker, it fueled a view that Washington as a whole was cancerous.