Marcos Sueiro Bal
Marcos Sueiro Bal is the Senior Archivist at New York Public Radio.
Lyndon Johnson reacts to the Walter Jenkins incident, 1964
Tuesday, October 07, 2014 - 06:00 AM
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Established in the year 2000, the New York Public Radio Archives are the station's physical link to its rich and storied past.
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“ I couldn't have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I'd heard that Lady Bird had tried to kill the Pope
50 years ago presidential aide Walter Jenkins, a father of six, was arrested for having sex with a man in a YMCA bathroom, weeks before the 1964 presidential election.
Rumors of the arrest circulated for days and eventually Republican Party operatives promoted it to the press. On October 14, after the White House unsuccessfully tried to lobby the Washington papers not to publish the story, the scandal broke in the Washington Star. President Johnson, already facing pressure over the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes affairs, was clearly not pleased, as you can hear in the clip above; Jenkins resigned immediately. For a few days afterward Johnson's opponent Barry Goldwater made veiled references to the incident by mentioning LBJ's "curious crew," and his campaign headquarters printed buttons with slogans such as "ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ, BUT DON'T GO NEAR THE YMCA." But the event ended up not influencing the outcome of the election (Johnson swept Goldwater), as it was soon eclipsed by other international news at the time such as Khruschev's deposition and the United Kingdom's elections. Lyndon Johnson later stated "I couldn't have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I'd heard that Lady Bird had tried to kill the Pope."
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