Master of the senate6/9/2023 ![]() ![]() When she sent him a kindly note to buck up his spirits, he replied: “Bobby Baker don’t quit.” And he didn’t. In a letter to one of his hometown teachers, Baker initially acknowledged profound homesickness. He moved to Washington in the fall of 1942, donned his uniform of dark-blue knickers, attended classes at the crack of dawn at a special high school for pages, and quickly learned his way around the Senate floor as, in his own words, he replenished inkwells and emptied ashtrays, “brought the senators public documents, newspapers, telephone messages, or anything they desired.” From an early age, he was “so vivacious,” one of his teachers recalled, “just a little trigger.” Baker was working part-time at a local drugstore-displaying, by his own later assessment, the same “hustle” that would endear him to Johnson-when Senator Burnet Maybank offered him a patronage appointment as a page. ![]() So began a roughly 15-year association that would see both men rise to heights of considerable power and wealth-and which nearly ruined Johnson’s presidency even before it officially began.īorn in 1928, Baker, who died on November 12 at the age of 89, was the ambitious son of a mailman in Pickens, South Carolina. Johnson made a point of introducing himself to Bobby Baker, a man who knew “where the bodies are buried,” another senator explained. ![]() ![]() In late 1948, weeks before he was to be sworn in as the junior senator from Texas, Lyndon B. ![]()
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