(Socotra’s offending left leg at Willow, with cane adjacent. Photo Jon-with-no-H).

I think I still have time to deal with the North Koreans, their prospective launch of an allegedly peaceful ICBM, the deployment of a really cool X-Band radar to the region by the Missile Defense Agency, and the prospects that the Japanese are going to use the SPY-1 Aegis radar system to identify and shoot down (with the Standard Missile-2 Extended Range missile) any parts of the rocket that are going to come down on the Home Islands.

The North, for their part, are said to be contemplating launching to the south, which any good missileer will tell you is dumb, since it sacrifices the inherent advantage of launching east, against the earth’s spin and harnessing all that free energy (1180 kilometers/hr. at the Equator) to the rocket’s loft.

Best of intentions and all that. The North is apparently not going to launch until the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Song’s birth next week (I will get around to the tour of the birth farm outside Pyongyang, I hope) so there is still time.

There are other loose threads, as I am sure you are aware. I have been beating up the players in the Great Red Scare of the early 1950s here in Our Nation’s Capital, and had a story going to talk about Harold “Hal” Ware, the Communist spy at the Agriculture Department in the 1930s. I was going to link him to the strange Soviet scientists and agronomist Trofim Lysenko (Ware did extensive consulting in the USSR during the liquidation of the Kulaks and collectivization of agriculture) and his wild-ass theories.

The upshot of which, in the looking glass world of State Socialism, became the notion that disbelief in Lysenko’s (and the State’s) theory of the moment was a reflection of mental illness, and hence deserving incarceration in the loony bin.

You cannot make this stuff up. You may have thought that the Evil Empire was consigned to the ash-bin of history, but Lysenkoism is back. It was the subject of one of the earnest papers presented at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London, one of the preparatory conferences in which advocates of Catastrophic Anthropomorphic Climate Change fly all over the world to stay in posh hotels in glamorous cities spewing carbon to warn us that we have to make immediate and profound changes to society to stop spewing carbon dioxide.

My favorite paper at the conference was presented by Dr. Kari Marie Norgaard. She is a proclaimed expert in social and gender issues, who opines that those who are skeptical of Climate Change are ill, and need treatment.

(Dr. Kari Norgaard, here to help the public health. Photo University of Oregon.)

That treatment would enable the public to more enthusiastically support profound and immediate social change to save the planet. That is not the first time I have seen non-climate scientists advance the bar on the discussion, but it is one of the more honest, if delusional.

Apparently Dr. Norgaard’s opinions are a little more progressive than the University of Oregon can handle, and the good doctor suddenly became a non-person back in the States. That was going to be the hook to a story linking Hal Ware, Lysenko and unsettled science as a vehicle for social change.

Oh, just for the record, I think the climate is changing. That is what it does. Whether my tepid enthusiasm for significant and immediate change warrants confinement I will leave up to the good Doctor.

Anyway, on the way to that I stumbled into something else. I have been conducting a vigorous dialogue with my attorney about the significance of the Red Menace and what it meant. He took umbrage at my treatment of the reality of the Soviet penetration of the US Government, and is of the opinion that the matter is a smoke screen for another land-grab by the national security-industrial complex to go to war with Iran.

I told him I was personally opposed to going to war with the Persians, though mostly because I had been at war with them for most of my professional career and was bored with it. To deflate the argument, I pointed out the marvelous LBJ article that was in the 02 April issue of The New Yorker.

LBJ Biographer Robert Caro has penned “a detailed account of the events of November 22, 1963,” the day LBJ became president through a hail of sniper bullets. I have not been able to not think of it since.

(LBJ being sworn as President of the United States.)

An abstract of his article says it: “Describes the shots fired at Kennedy’s car as the procession passed through Dealey Plaza. Tells about events at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy died, and the decision by Johnson to go to Air Force One. Describes two telephone calls between Johnson and Robert Kennedy in the hours after the assassination. The dispute over the conversations later became a crucial element in the great blood feud between them. Considers why Johnson decided to have the oath of office administered in Dallas.”

I talked with Old Jim about the article at Willow last night, my first excursion outside without the knee brace, though with my trusty cane. Jim knew a lot of the players in town, back in the day, and it was a rollicking conversation.

We stayed away from whether the article did anything to contribute to the assertion of a mutual and respected associate who was in the government then that LBJ was behind the killing. There were several really strange aspects to the story. Caro brings a fresh approach to that awful day, a whole new perspective on things we thought we already knew. For example, at the very moment the gunfire erupted, LBJ crony Bobby Baker was being strongly questioned about corruption directly connected to the Vice President.

Anyway, as a footnote to all that, my attorney sent along his recollection of meeting Mr. Baker, back in the day when he worked on the Hill:

“I met Bobby Baker in DC when I worked there in summer 1966, either in Jim Delaney’s office or while running an errand over to the Senate. He was a DC dandy, with a pale fuchsia shirt, cuffs and cufflinks, gray-white hair turned up in locks at his collar like so many DC Dandies wear, a gold tie clasp and thin gold bracelet, and wearing strong cologne of some sort. As a young Paisan schooled in macho, I thought he might be gay.”

I wrote him back that I loved the commentary on Lyndon’s pal, and that I probably was not going to get to the New Lysenko-ists this morning. “Motive, Motive Motive,” I thought, and then the memories of the other stories came sweeping back. What a town this is.

(Bobby Baker and his pal, Lyndon Johnson.)

Bobby Baker had come up through the Senate ranks, from page to assistant to the Majority Leader. He also ran the Quorum Club, a private facility located in the Carroll Arms Hotel, conveniently located adjacent to the Senate Russell Building.

In his 1978 book, “Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator,” Baker referred to the place where “membership was comprised of senators, congressmen, lobbyists, Capitol Hill staffers, and other well-connecteds who wanted to enjoy their drinks, meals, poker games, and shared secrets in private accommodations.”

(Quorum Club picture- Carroll Arms at left, “Q” entrance at right. The photo is available on eBay).

I love this town. It used to be even more fun than it is now.

One of the women who frequented the Quorum Club was an eerie beauty named Ellen Rometsch, wife of a West German military attaché. She had been born in what was now East Germany.

Before the assassination, Director Hoover went to Robert Kennedy and said, “We have information that not only your brother, the president, but others in Washington have been involved with a woman at the Quorum Club whom we suspect as a Soviet intelligence agent, someone who is linked to East German intelligence.” The price of his silence was continued service as FBI director for Hoover- not the first nor last bit of Hoover blackmail against a sitting President.

(Ellen Rometsch)

RFK spoke with Senate leaders Ev Dirksen and Mike Mansfield and asked them to keep the report to themselves, and had the FBI files on the matter transferred to his personal custody and naturally sat on it.

Following the assassination, LBJ encouraged further investigation into the Rometsch case. Specific results were withheld, and files were destroyed or heavily redacted. More lost history.

Beyond Bobby, the story brought back some other characters of the time- Billie Sol Estes and Walter Jenkins.

(Smooth-talking Billie Sol Estes.)

Estes was a trip- I remember well the scandal back in the day. As you may recall, he was a high-rolling LBJ associate and financier, who is still alive. In the late 1950s, he was heavily involved in the Texas Anhydrous Ammonia fertilizer business. He generated mortgages on nonexistent ammonia tanks by convincing local farmers to purchase them on credit, sight unseen, and lease them back from the farmers for the same amount as the mortgage payment, paying them a convenience fee as well. The fraudulent mortgage holdings were in turn used to obtain loans from banks outside Texas who were unable to easily check on what was actually in- or not in- the tanks. Nice piece of fraud, it was.

He also had an innovative (and equally fraudulent) scam on cotton that took advantage of Department of Agriculture subsidies to purchase large numbers of cotton allotments, by dealing with farmers who had been dispossessed of land through eminent domain. He convinced the farmers to purchase land from him in Texas and transfer their allotments there, with a mortgage agreement delaying the first payment for a year.

Then, he would lease the land and allotments back from the farmer for $50 per acre. Once the first payment came due, the farmer would intentionally default and the land would revert to Estes; in effect, Estes had purchased the cotton allotments with the lease fees. However, because the original sale and mortgage were pretexts rather than a genuine, it was patently illegal.

Eventually, the schemes collapsed and he went to the slammer for 24 big ones on charges related to the fraudulent ammonia tank mortgages. He appealed and got out after eight years, but almost a decade later he was again convicted on additional fraud charges and served four more years.

Congress held hearings into the matter and other Estes activities that led to the highest levels of the JFK Administration, specifically Lyndon, who had been a business associate with Estes in several matters. Some historians say that Kennedy may have considered dropping Johnson from the ticket in 1964, partly because of the Johnson-Estes connection, not to mention the Bobby Baker matter that was discussed in the New Yorker article- and happening simultaneously with the murder of the sitting President of the United States.

(Disorderly Walter Jenkins.)

And who could forget Walter Jenkins? That one resonated with the description of Baker, not that there is anything wrong with it. He began working for LBJ in 1939 when Johnson was in the House (D-TX-10) and was with him for the next quarter century.

Bill Moyers credits much of LBJ’s political success to Jenkins, but there are some things that could not be countenanced in the early 1960s. DC cops busted him in the rest room of the YMCA on “disorderly conduct” charges, which was the code-word for Senator (R-ID) Larry Craig’s “wide stance” cruising. Ick.

Jenkins and his partner were booked, convicted and fined $50. The incident caused a minor furor, and was attributed by an embarrassed Administration to stress and overwork. That did not serve to defuse the matter, though it even tried “combat fatigue,” since Walter had been a soldier in the war two decades before.

It didn’t work. The papers and Republican operatives would not drop the matter with a national election in the offing. Other walk-on characters in the scandal included almost Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and one-time SECDEF Clark Clifford who was the unofficial White House counsel at the time. I had a chance to interact with Clifford in his declining years when he made a call to me at the duty desk at the Bureau, seeking to have a pal interred at Arlington. (Nothing inappropriate was required of me, I was relieved to find. The pal wore the Silver Star and was entitled to the plot at the national cemetery.)

Anyway, friend or not, loyal retainer or not, LBJ told Fortas Jenkins had to go. When the matter was acknowledged by the White House, press secretary George Reedy was “openly weeping” as he confirmed the story to reporters.

Jedgar was in the mix again, too. Anticipating the charge that Jenkins might have been blackmailed, Johnson immediately ordered an FBI investigation. He probably knew about an earlier Jenkins conviction (1959) that the FBI should have known about (but didn’t?) The Bureau gave him a clean bill of health on the security front, and LBJ reportedly said later that he “couldn’t have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I’d heard that Lady Bird had tried to kill the Pope.”

The incident embarrassed the administration but had little impact on the campaign against Barry Goldwater. One columnist noted at the time that “Walter Jenkins has revived and dramatized all the harsh feelings about morals, and political cliques, and the Texas gang in Washington.”

Ware, Lysenko, Norgaard, Estes, Baker, Rometsch and Jenkins. Ah, those were the days, and apparently they still are! Let the games continue!

Did I mention I love this town?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com