Nation: Johnson & the Jenkins Case

Emerging from his presidential jet at San Diego’s airport one night last week, Lyndon Johnson stopped to chat with newsmen. When one of the reporters referred to the Jenkins affair, the President suddenly exploded: “President Eisenhower had the same type of problem with his appointments secretary. The only difference is, we Democrats felt sorry for him and thought it was a case of sickness and disease, and we didn’t try to capitalize on a man’s misfortune. We never mentioned it.” Lyndon’s comment sent reporters scrambling for phones, caused many an eyebrow to arch in puzzlement—including Dwight Eisenhower’s. Leaving Walter Reed Hospital after treatment for a respiratory ailment that resulted in sinus and ear infections, Ike declared when newsmen questioned him about Johnson’s statement: “I can’t recall it.

I never heard of it.” Enormous Differences. Ike’s bewilderment was understandable. The newsmen who heard Lyndon’s remarks deleted the reference to “appointments secretary” for fear of libeling the three men who actually worked for Ike in that post—Robert Gray, Thomas Stephens and Bernard Shanley, who this year is running for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey on the G.O.P. ticket. The fact is that all three were fully cleared by security agents before they took their posts, and by no stretch of anyone’s imagination could any of them have been the man Johnson was talking about.

Actually, Johnson’s reference was to a man who had worked faithfully for Ike during the 1952 campaign and was, indeed, designated by the President-elect to fill the post of White House appointments secretary. But, immediately after the election, Ike had all of his tentative appointees subjected to security checks. Only days before the inauguration, it was learned that the man had a homosexual history. He was quietly dropped from the presidential staff even before Ike took office.

The differences in the two cases are enormous. Unlike Walter Jenkins, one of Lyndon’s closest confidants for a quarter of a century, the man dropped from Ike’s staff had worked only briefly for him. Unlike Walter Jenkins, he never served in the White House, thus had no access to the kind of secret documents that Jenkins handled almost routinely. Unlike Walter Jenkins, who was given a slipshod security screening by the Secret Service after Lyndon became Vice President in 1961 and no screening at all after he became President, Ike’s aide underwent a stringent screening and thus was filtered out before he ever served a day.

Oblique Swipe. Far from putting the Eisenhower Administration in a bad light, Lyndon’s blunder in bringing up the case only highlighted some grave defects in his own security and personnel procedures. Still, Lyndon seemed confident that the Jenkins case could do him no harm, pointed to those reassuring polls in his coat pocket as proof. Even the week after Jenkins’ resignation, one nationwide survey showed that Lyndon’s popularity had gone up —not down—two points.

Johnson’s confidence was reinforced by 44 leading clergymen, many of them accredited liberals, who took a gratuitous, though oblique, swipe at Barry Goldwater and the whole Republican Party for using the Jenkins case “as a weapon in this campaign.” In a 350-word statement issued by Union Theological Seminary President John C.

Bennett, vice chairman of New York State’s Liberal Party, the clergymen complained that “nothing justifies the smears” being circulated on the Jenkins case.* “A few episodes involving personal morality are allowed to obscure fateful moral issues related to public life —moral issues such as the full civil rights of all citizens, the shameful squalor and poverty in our cities and the danger of nuclear war,” said the statement. “We see the Jenkins episode as a case of human weakness. If there is a security factor involved, let that be dealt with on its own terms and let it not serve chiefly as an excuse for dwelling on this one episode to cater to the prurient curiosity or to the self-righteousness of part of the public.”

The Day After. The clergymen’s statement appeared the very day after Lyndon himself had revived the Jenkins case with his own dirty dig at the Eisenhower Administration, and on the very day after Barry Goldwater protested about “the clerical spokesmen who now become loud advocates of President Johnson” and suggested that they “get back to their business” of protecting the nation’s morals.

* Among the other signers: Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, United Presbyterian Church Leader Eugene Carson Blake, Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord, American Hebrew Congregations President Maurice Eisendrauth, Washington National Cathedral Dean Francis B. Sayre Jr.