Nation: The First Baker Witness

Into the Senate committee hearing room came a wan blonde. Her hair was done up in a sort of beehive style. Her name was Gertrude Novak, and she was a $7,385-a-year clerk of the Senate Small Business Committee. Appearing last week before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration as the first public-hearing witness on the affairs of Bobby Baker, former secretary to the Democratic Senate Majority, she told a story of stock ventures and mortgages that would have baffled brighter-looking blondes.

She recalled how her husband had given Baker $12,000 in February 1960 to buy 3,600 shares of stock in Milwaukee’s Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., then split a $54,000 profit with Baker 13 months later. Wisconsin’s Republican Representative John W. Byrnes was another who bought that stock; his 100 shares, for which he paid $2,300, are now worth around $24,000. Byrnes, who had helped Mortgage Guaranty get a tax-relief ruling from the Internal Revenue Service, insisted that the stock deal was not a conflict of interest. Still, Byrnes had promised to sell his shares and donate the profits to charity.

The Mortgage Guaranty stock profit was about the only pleasant memory Trudy Novak could muster. The Novaks, she said, lost every penny of a $107,000 investment in Baker’s Carousel motel in Ocean City, Md., when Baker sold out at a loss. A $15,000 investment in a Baker-suggested electronics stock was nearly wiped out when the price fell. Then, 21 months ago, Alfred Novak was found dead in the garage at his home; the District of Columbia coroner ruled the death a suicide.

What Trudy Novak seemed to remember most vividly was the way Bobby Baker tossed bundles of money about like so much laundry. Frequently, she said, she would stop by Baker’s Capitol office to pick up sizable sums for the Carousel’s operating expenses. It was always in cash. Once, she said, she found his desk stacked with nearly $15,000 in $100 bills. Baker himself rushed off to the Senate floor, leaving Trudy and his secretary to count out $13,300 for the motel. “That’s where I lost some faith in Mr. Baker,” she said, “in that he was handling that much cold cash.”

Most of what Witness Novak had to say was already public knowledge (TIME, Nov. 8). But her appearance did accomplish one thing: it at least generated some sort of start to the hearings —after eight weeks of shilly-shallying by a Senate committee all too obviously reluctant to undertake an investigation that might hit close to home.