Baker also recounted stories of the legendary characters of the Senate from his time there in the 1950s and 60s, offering vivid descriptions of their sexual peccadillos, proclivities and various other vices.

“Senator [Clinton] Anderson [D-N.M.] was a big disappointment. He was full of hate. I had a little Mexican-American kid as a page boy and he told me, he said, ‘Senator Anderson is the meanest son of a bitch I have ever met.’ He said, ‘He just treats you like you’re a dog.’ And he was also sort of a sex maniac…”

“Senator [Estes] Kefauver [D-Tenn.] had a drinking problem. He smelled like booze all the time, but he was not a mean man. His staff loved him … a tragic figure, but he was way ahead of all his Southern colleagues because when he first was elected to the Senate, he proposed a [Fair Employment Practices Commission] bill [to outlaw employment discrimination], which, oh, the Southerners, they hated. He was despised among all the Southern Democrats. Not a one of them liked him. But he had a bad alcohol problem and he also had a very bad record of wanting to go to bed with every woman he ever met. He got some of these young kids testifying, you know, before his Juvenile Committee or something and then he couldn’t wait to go to bed with them.”10

“Senator [Jacob] Javits [R-N.Y.] was a publicity hound. He was a very, very bright man, but he was another one—like Senator Jack Kennedy—he was a sex maniac. One of the postmen went in and caught him on his couch having a sexual affair with a Negro lady. He couldn’t wait to come and tell me.”

“I was always very fond of Senator Tommy Kuchel [D-Calif.]. He was a fun guy. … The difference between he and Senator Richard Nixon was that Senator Nixon could get 20 votes and Senator Tommy Kuchel could get 51. … Kuchel was having a relationship with his secretary, so he’d come over to me and ask me if I could send a page boy to buy him some rubbers—true story!”

“Senator [Herman] Talmadge was an extremely conservative Democrat from Georgia who had a monumental alcohol problem. He liked Senator Lyndon Johnson. He would hold his nose and vote for some things that Senator Johnson was proposing, but it turned out he was basically for hire. He was a crook, a bad crook. … He had a bitter divorce. I think she leaked the story that he had $100 bills in his top coat [in presumably ill-gotten gains] or something like that. He died with a broken heart… When I was in charge of Senator Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential trip through the South, he was too drunk to show up.” 11

On frequent occasion, Baker was asked to dispense delicate advice…

“When Johnson was vice president, he invited me to go with him to Senator Styles Bridges’s [R-N.H.] funeral. … Dolores Bridges was very fond of Vice President Johnson. She said, ‘Lyndon, I need some advice.’ She said, ‘Styles has got $2 million in cash here and I don’t know how to handle it.’ Vice President Johnson, being the true coward, he said, ‘Talk to Bobby.’ So I told her, ‘The banks are the government. If you put it in the bank, you are dead meat. Whatever you do, do not put that money in the bank.’ I don’t know what the hell she did with it.”12

10. In 1955, Estes Kefauver (1903-1963) conducted extensive Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency and interstate adoption practices. Writing in the Atlantic, the historian David Greenberg reported that as Kefauver’s 1956 vice presidential campaign bus pulled into an Upper Midwest town, the candidate was heard to exclaim (within earshot of The New York Times’s Russell Baker), “I gotta fuck!”

11. In fact, Herman Talmadge (1913-2002) embraced sobriety and happily remarried Lynda Cowart Pierce.

12. Styles Bridges (1898-1961) was one of the least wealthy men ever elected governor of New Hampshire, before winning his Senate seat in 1936. Nevertheless, his biographer, James J. Kiepper, reported in his 2001 book, Styles Bridges: Yankee Senator, that Bridges’s widow, Doloris, told Johnson that he had left her “a million dollars in cash” at his death.

As treasurer of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee when Johnson was majority leader, Baker himself had the job of dispensing campaign funds to selected members…

“My rule was if you’re five percentage points ahead, I cut the money off. But if you are tied, or something, I tried to get all the money I could for that particular senator. That was one of the reasons that Senator Johnson was so successful is that those people who you had a chance to elect, you would get money to, and as a consequence they were very grateful. But once again, you are selling your office. … It made my job much easier because a man that you have helped when he is running for his life, and he’s run out of money, and you send him $50,000, boy he is grateful…. We had no rules.”

While working in the Senate, Baker earned a law degree and found a way to put it to use in some sharp extracurricular dealings—after all, in his day there were no rules against senators or staffers running private businesses on the side.

“No, no. None whatsoever. Just as long as you paid your taxes, you could do what you wanted to. Senator George Smathers, [D-Fla.], who was my dear friend, he made a lot of people wealthy peddling Winn-Dixie stock. Anytime Winn-Dixie wanted to build a new supermarket, they would tell him and he would go buy the land and build a shopping center, and he did not die broke. … He was … by far … the brightest and ablest guy between Nixon, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.”

Smathers’s best friend in the Senate was John F. Kennedy, and on a tour of the Senate Democratic cloakroom in 2009, Baker spied familiar furnishings and was moved to recollect…

“We had these sofas and chairs, and there’s the mirror where … Kennedy said, ‘God, why did you make me so beautiful?’”13

13. George Smathers (1913-2007) served three terms in the Senate, and was a childhood friend of his fellow Floridian Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. After a career supporting racial segregation, he became only one of four Southern senators to support the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Eventually, Baker’s investments would spell his downfall, starting with his partnership in building the Carousel Motel in Ocean City, Md. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and a raft of senators and reporters attended the resort’s gala opening in 1962, but by then construction delays and other troubles had left Baker deeply in debt to his friend Sen. Robert Kerr (D-Okla.).

“I was probably the biggest wheeler-dealer around—and I enjoyed it, I’ll tell you. Ocean City was nothing until we built the Carousel…. I was working around people—Senator Lyndon Johnson and Senator Bob Kerr—who were multimillionaires. And so I wanted to be like them. I never neglected my Senate duties, but I had all this time when the Senate wasn’t in session. The way I went into the hotel business was my wife had hay fever and she breathed much better when we’d go to Ocean City.”14

14. Robert Kerr (1896-1963) was born in Oklahoma when it was still a territory and created the giant oil company Kerr-McGee. In 1942, he became the first native Oklahoman to be elected governor of his state. He was probably the richest senator of his day and was widely regarded as one of the chamber’s most unself-conscious operators.

Desperate for cash, Baker went into another business, with backing and loans arranged by Senator Kerr. The venture, called the Serv-U Corporation, would furnish vending machines for large corporations and government offices. But Baker promptly ran afoul of a major industry rival, Canteen, which was owned by supporters of Sen. Everett Dirksen from Chicago, and had held the contract for the Senate’s own vending machines.

“It was going to be big, big business. Senator Dirksen’s friends, who owned Canteen, had the contract and they went bonkers. … And Dirksen put a lot of heat on to get Canteen back. … They got the contract to run the Senate restaurants and Senator Dirksen did not die broke, I can tell you that.”

Rep. H.R. Gross (R-Iowa) during the 1963 Senate inquiry into Bobby Baker’s alleged misdeeds. | AP Photo

But the business that got Baker into the hottest political water was the Quorum Club, a private after-hours joint upstairs in the Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill, where lobbyists and legislators could repair for a drink (or three) with attractive women out of the sight of prying journalists’ eyes. Baker had begun an office affair with a pretty blonde named Carole Tyler, who lived with her roommates in a townhouse he owned. The most notorious habitué of the club was Ellen Rometsch, the wife of a West German army officer stationed at the German embassy in Washington, though she was suspected by the F.B.I. of being an East German spy…

“Oh, sure, all of the administrative assistants, every one of them had a girlfriend just like I did. Carole Tyler and I were both mutually stupid. … Ellen Rometsch was … as pretty as Elizabeth Taylor. … She was sort of like me. She’d come from Germany broke. She really loved oral sex. So any time – 90 percent of the people who give you money want to know if you can get them a date. I don’t give a damn who they are. They’re away from mama and their wives and they have a tremendous desire to party. … Bill Thompson [a lobbyist] … said [of Rometsch], ‘Baker, where did you get that good-looking woman? ... You think if I invited her to my apartment she’ll go to the White House and see President Kennedy?’ I said, ‘She would jump at the chance.’ So she went to the White House several times. And President Kennedy called me and said it’s the best head-job he’d ever had, and he thanked me….

Baker claims that Rep. Gerald Ford and President John F. Kennedy each had sexual encounters with reputed East German spy Ellen Rometsch. | AP Photos

“Any time I had a rich guy in town, my secretary called her to see if she could go out. She told me that of all the people she had met … the nicest one was Congressman Jerry Ford [R-Mich.]. [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover could not find out the happenings when the Warren Commission was investigating the killer of President Kennedy. … J. Edgar Hoover could not find out what they were doing. So, he had this tape where Jerry Ford was having oral sex with Ellen Rometsch. You know, his wife had a serious drug problem back then. … Hoover blackmailed … Ford to tell him what they were doing. That’s the reason I don’t like him. It’s just a misuse of authority.”15

15. Ford’s back-channel communications with Hoover during the Warren Commission investigation have been well established, via documents from Ford’s own FBI files, the most recent of which were released after the former president’s death. But this account by Baker appears to be the only one suggesting that Ford’s cooperation was coerced—much less the result of sexual spying. “It seems so out of character for the Ford that I knew,” said David Horrocks, the former chief archivist of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Michigan. “I just find it hard to believe.”

By 1963, Baker’s public and private worlds were beginning to collide. That summer, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became so concerned about the rumors involving President Kennedy and Ellen Rometsch that he had her secretly deported back to Germany. That fall, a rival vending machine operator sued Baker, alleging that he was peddling influence to win contracts for Serv-U. The suit drew the attention of journalists, and the Senate Rules Committee, which began an investigation into Baker’s dealings. Baker’s high-flying life came crashing down around him—and everyone he knew, especially Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had not been involved in Baker’s investments, but Baker had helped arrange a life insurance policy for Johnson after his 1955 heart attack—and later, for the gift of a stereo set as a kind of kickback from the broker who wrote the policy. Johnson was terrified that he would be tarred by association with Baker, while the Kennedy administration—and senior senators of both parties—worried about being drawn into the Rometsch affair. On Oct. 7, 1963, Baker was set to meet with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Minority Leader Dirksen to review the allegations against him. Instead, hoping to stop the investigation, Baker downed four Tanqueray martinis at the Quorum Club at lunch, and then resigned. He hoped his resignation would end the investigation, but it did not.

He would never tell me how he was going to vote on President Kennedy’s Medicare bill. … But Senator Kerr gave him $200,000 for that vote. It shows you that money can talk.”

On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, Don Reynolds, the Maryland broker who had written the life insurance policy for Johnson, was telling investigators for the Senate Rules Committee that he had been pressured to buy advertising time on an Austin television station owned by Johnson—even though the insurance salesman was unknown in Texas and could hardly expect to generate business there.

“And on November 22 … after lunch, in the Senate Rules Committee investigation [of] Bobby Baker, Don Reynolds was going to really spill his guts. But when President Kennedy was killed, it basically killed the Baker investigation. You know, President Johnson acted like he did not know me. … I think the Reynolds testimony plus the absolute hatred of Bobby Kennedy of Johnson [would have forced LBJ off the 1964 Democratic ticket if Kennedy had lived]. Poor old Walter [Jenkins, one of Johnson’s most trusted aides, who had worked with Reynolds to buy the advertising time on the Johnson station], had President Kennedy not been killed, he either would have had to take the Fifth Amendment and quit, or tell the truth and Vice President Johnson would have definitely been off the ticket in 1964, had it [been] shown that he had really been the party in the back of this.”

But he had a bad alcohol problem and he also had a very bad record of wanting to go to bed with every woman he ever met.”

The press furor and Senate investigation of Baker continued in the aftermath of the assassination, and on Feb. 19, 1964, Baker was called to testify. On the advice of his lawyer, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams, he took the Fifth Amendment. In 1966, Baker was indicted on charges of income tax evasion, stemming from financial transactions he had handled for Sen. Robert Kerr, who by then had died. Baker was tried and convicted the following year, and his appeal was ultimately rejected. He served 18 months in the federal prison at Allenwood, Pa. before his release in 1972. He and his wife, the former Dorothy Comstock, were married for 27 years, and divorced for 15, but later reconciled and live together today in northern Florida. In 2008, he voted (for Barack Obama) for the first time in more than 40 years, because Florida passed a law restoring the franchise to convicted felons who have served their time.

“When I see my Negro friends, I tell them, ‘You go say a little prayer for LBJ.’ Because I said, ‘The Voting Rights Act made us all equal.’ The only way in hell that Senator Obama ever got elected president was because of the Voting Rights Act. I said, ‘It’s the greatest thing that’s happened to our country.’

I’ll tell you, the people who disliked me are dead and I’m still alive. Had I not had trouble … you cannot work seven days a week, 18 hours a day, and drink as much and eat the wrong foods. It saved my life. Now I wait till 5 o’clock to take a drink, take two drinks and I’m through. I attribute it to my troubles. Had I not had it, I’d been dead a long time ago…. You cannot believe the amount of ill press I received for about 10 years. But time is a great healer. So when you walk down the street and meet 100 people and you say, ‘Do you know who Bobby Baker is?’ they don’t have a clue.”

Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

For the full text of interviews between Bobby Baker and Donald A. Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office, see next page.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Gale McGee as a senator from Nebraska. He was born in Nebraska, but served as a senator from Wyoming.