Nation: The Senior Staff Man

See Cover His head bowed, his face lined with weariness and worry, the President of the U.S. sat glumly on the dais in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. To his right and to his left, white-tied politicians traded good-natured gibes in the spirit of the Al Smith memorial dinner that Francis Cardinal Spellman stages each year. But the guest of honor smiled wanly or not at all. When his time came to speak, he cut his talk in half, delivered it in a hoarse monotone. Lyndon Johnson looked for all the world as if he had just lost one of his best friends.

In a sense he had, for just before the banquet began, the news broke that Special Presidential Assistant Walter W. Jenkins, 46, one of Lyndon's oldest, closest friends and most trusted aides, had been arrested on the night of Oct. 7 in a Y.M.C.A. washroom just two blocks from the White House and charged with "disorderly conduct (indecent gestures)." Moreover, newsmen checking into Jenkins' police record discovered that on Jan. 15, 1959 he had been arrested in the same washroom on a charge of "disorderly conduct (pervert)."

Even while President Johnson was brooding in the Waldorf ballroom, White House Press Secretary George Reedy summoned reporters to a special briefing in a makeshift press room near by. Red-eyed and visibly shaken, Reedy announced: "Walter Jenkins submitted his resignation this evening as special assistant. The resignation was accepted, and the President has appointed Bill D. Moyers to succeed him."

Into the Limelight. Sordid in its details, tragic in its personal consequences, and of unmeasured significance in its political effects, the story was splashed atop front pages all over the country. Ironically, the man around whom the storm swirled had been the most self-effacing, quiet and publicity-shy member of Johnson's White House team. Quartered in Sherman Adams' old office in the southwest wing of the White House, he was the mysterious, slightly-out-of-focus fellow who seldom had his picture taken or got in the papers but who knew everything that was going on. A whiz at shorthand, he sat in on meetings of the Cabinet, on breakfasts with congressional leaders, and occasionally on sessions of the National Security Council. He had access to any national secret.

The senior White House staffer, Jenkins was the one to whom such other aides as Reedy and Jack Valenti went when L.B.J. was busy. During the Democratic Convention in August, he was Lyndon's chief of staff in Atlantic City; when the summons finally came for Hubert Humphrey to be anointed the vice-presidential candidate, it was Jenkins who did the summoning.

Despite his aversion to the limelight, Jenkins was exposed to its glare on two notable occasions before last week. After the Billie Sol Estes scandal broke in 1962, it was learned that Jenkins, on behalf of then Vice President Johnson, had spoken to the Agriculture Department about Estes during the previous year. Jenkins requested information about any decisions involving Estes' cotton-acreage allotments, which were then being scrutinized for irregularities. But his involvement was at most peripheral, and no evidence was ever presented to prove that Jenkins or his boss ever tried to pressure the department in the Estes case.