The political perils of the security state
by digby
In this week of commemoration of the 50 year anniversary of the Kennedy Assasination, Politico magazine has published a fascinating bit of historical gossip that’s just plain fun to read, featuring the recollections of Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s BFF who was drummed out of Washington on corruption charges back in the day:
Exactly 50 years ago this fall, in the face of a widening official investigation into his private business dealings and vivid social life—an inquiry that threatened to engulf the Kennedy White House in a sex scandal and destroy Baker’s political patron, Vice President Lyndon Johnson—Baker drank four martinis at lunch and impulsively resigned his post. He had been as close as a son to Johnson, privy to the vice president’s deepest secrets. On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination short-circuited the Baker investigation, and spared Johnson career-ending ignominy.
Still, prosecutors eventually caught up with Baker, if not his patron, and he ended up serving 18 months in prison on federal tax evasion charges. In 1978, he co-wrote Wheeling and Dealing, a rollicking memoir with Larry L. King, best known as the author of the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
But Baker in recent years quietly recorded an even more unvarnished account of his anything-goes-era in Washington, which Politico Magazine now publishes for the first time. His recollections—of an age when senators drank all day, indulged in sexual dalliances with secretaries and constituents, accepted thousands of dollars in bribes and still managed to pass the most important legislation of the 20th century—were collected by Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office in interviews with Baker in 2009 and 2010. The resulting 230-page manuscript was so ribald and riveting, so salacious and sensational, that the Historical Office refrained from its usual practice of posting such interviews online.
I doubt that any sentient person can believe that powerful men have changed so fundamentally that none of this could ever happen again (if nothing else, yesterday’s congressional cocaine bust proves otherwise)so I think it’s important to consider this one little detail:
“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. [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.”
The fact that Ford funneled information to Hoover about the Warren Commission is established fact. People have always wondered why he would do that.
The reason I bring this up is not to talk about politicians getting blow jobs, although that’s always fun. It’s because this story about the foibles of powerful people in Washington points up the fact that all this information “collection” can serve a very useful purpose for people inside the secret government if they choose to use it such ways. It’s been done before and it can be done again. I don’t care about the inner lives of politicians or their sexual proclivities. But no humans can live like humans under a microscope and I think it’s quite clear that politicians are human. The ability to spy on people in powerful positions and use that information to manipulate the government has always been a problem. This “metadata collection” puts that danger on steroids.
The big question I have is why the politicians who so vociferously support these programs do so. It might be that they do it on principle. It might not be.
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