Three weeks before the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s closest aide was being fingerprinted and interrogated in a police station near the White House. Walter Jenkins was a practicing Catholic and father of six who was, as far as everyone knew, happily married to his wife, Marjorie. But in a matter of days, he would become, as OUT magazine put it in 1999, “the most famous homosexual in America.” LBJ would swiftly disown the aide who had been by his side for 25 years, effectively ending the political career of a man who had dedicated his life to him.

But Jenkins would find an unlikely ally in the White House: Lady Bird Johnson. It was at turns a small but very important display of public solidarity in a time when such a gesture was rare.

After attending a Newsweek party with his wife on October 7th, Jenkins had gone to the nearby YMCA, where he had sex with a man in the changing room while police officers watched through a peephole. He was arrested on “morals charges” and booked at the station nearby. Instead of using his one call to speak with a lawyer, he called the White House and informed a staffer that he would be late getting back to work that night. When he returned a few hours later, his secretaries suspected nothing.

Jenkins, like Johnson, was born in Texas, and raised by strict Southern Baptists. Johnson hired him when Jenkins was 21, and for the next quarter century, he remained in “total rapport” with Johnson. When Johnson called on him during Jenkins’ honeymoon, he obediently packed his bags and left. He even named one of his sons Lyndon. Jenkins was a quiet, behind-the-scenes operator. He worked from a tiny closet of an office, giving the large one with French windows to his secretaries. Another Johnson aide, Bill Moyers, said of Jenkins in 1975, “When they come to canonize political aides [Jenkins] will be the first summoned, for no man ever negotiated the shark-infested waters of the Potomac with more decency or charity or came out on the other side with his integrity less shaken. If Lyndon Johnson owed everything to one human being other than Lady Bird, he owed it to Walter Jenkins.’’

Lyndon B. Johnson reclines on a couch in his Austin, Texas, home as he receives voting returns in the Democratic run-off primary for U.S. Senate in 1948. A young Walter Jenkins keeps count in the background. (AP)

Not long after his YMCA arrest, Jenkins got a call from an editor at the Washington Evening Star asking for a comment. He told the editor he would call him back. Instead, he called a lawyer friend, Abe Fortas, who Johnson would later appoint to the Supreme Court. “A terrible thing has happened,” he said. Fortas told him to come to his house and by the time he arrived he was so distraught, he was raving about “destroying President Johnson,” and threatening to kill himself. Fortas called a doctor and Jenkins was placed on a 24-hour suicide watch at George Washington University hospital.

The next day, Jenkins was all over the headlines. Johnson appealed to some aides for advice, but by all accounts had already made up his mind. When one confidant counseled waiting and seeing how it played in the news, Johnson replied, “I think that the presidency is something that we’ve got to protect, and you can’t protect it by procrastinating,” adding that “whatever the treatment is, we know the facts. The facts are that he’s got to get out of the White House.” Johnson sent word through Fortas that he wanted a resignation, and Jenkins complied. Johnson immediately got down to what mattered to him most: gauging the damage to his election bid. But not before Lady Bird had her say.

In 1998, tapes of Johnson’s conversations with his wife were released. While on the campaign trail, the president received a call from her. She wanted to help Jenkins. What if she got him a job with one of their television stations in Texas? Johnson said no. “I don’t think that’s right,” Lady Bird told him. She thought that it was important that the president make a gesture of support, and again the president refused, saying that any attempts to redeem Jenkins were a lost cause. “The average farmer just can’t understand your knowing it and approving it or condoning it,” he told her. Lady Bird had been criticized as submissive and it was said that she “would have followed [him] to the guillotine.” But in this case at least, she went with her conscience and completely ignored him. She called Washington Post top editor Russell Wiggins to the White House. Wiggins recalled that she came into the room, “like a vessel under full sail,” and read a statement she had prepared.

“My heart is aching today for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country,” she said. She explained what had happened in medical terms, claiming that Jenkins was just exhausted, never insinuating that he was gay. “He is now receiving the medical attention he needs.”

It certainly didn’t amount to support for gay rights, but nonetheless, according to OUT, Lady Bird’s support of Jenkins “transformed the climate surrounding the scandal.” After her statement, a slew of newspapers ran editorials that, while not condoning homosexuality, did advocate compassion for Jenkins. Johnson never bothered to defend his aide of a quarter century, though over the years Lady Bird would visit the Jenkins home, offer the family a piece of land, and hire Jenkins for some small accounting tasks. She would later defend her husband’s decision to entirely shed Jenkins as a necessary political move, but would say that the incident was one “of the two or three most painful things in my life — more painful than the death of many close to me.”