Bobby Baker - Scandal

Scandal

Baker frequently mixed politics with personal business. He was one of the initiators and board-members of the Quorum Club located in the Carroll Arms Hotel adjacent a Senate office building. The society was alleged to have been a place for lawmakers and other influential men to meet for food, drink, and women. Baker, and one of his colleagues, lobbyist Bill Thompson, are said to have arranged for Quorum Club hostess Ellen Rometsch to meet John F. Kennedy. Rometsch was of East German origin, and had been a Communist party member prior to coming to the United States.

During 1962, Baker established the Serv-U Corporation with his friend, Fred Black. The company was designed to provide vending machines for companies working for federally granted programs. Though a part of numerous other deals involving both politics and private financial affairs, this particular business venture would cause a scandal. Baker was investigated by the Senate Rules Committee for allegations of congressional bribery using money and arranged sexual favors, in exchange for votes and government contracts.

In a biography of Robert Kennedy, author Evan Thomas described an arrangement in which the President's brother, and then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, was able to arrange a deal with J. Edgar Hoover in order to quell the Senate investigation of Bobby Baker. This prevented public scrutiny of Baker from causing exposure of President Kennedy's involvement with Ellen Rometsch. Hoover successfully limited the Senate investigation of Baker by threatening to release embarrassing information about senators contained in FBI files. In exchange for this, Robert Kennedy reassured Hoover that his job as FBI Director was secure and also agreed to allow the FBI to proceed with wiretaps that Hoover had requested, including wiretaps of political activists such as Martin Luther King.

The Serv-U Corporation deal became the subject of allegations of conflict of interest and corruption after a disgruntled former government contractor sued Baker and Black in civil court. This lawsuit eventually generated a great deal of news and a Republican investigation into Baker's business and political activities. Criticized increasingly, Baker resigned his job as Secretary to the Majority on October 7, 1963.

Conspiracy theorists have made much of the fact that Baker's secretary, Nancy Carole Tyler, shared an apartment with Mary Jo Kopechne, an aide to Senator George Smathers and later to Senator Bobby Kennedy. Tyler was killed in an airplane crash during 1965. Kopechne was killed during 1969, in an accident on Chappaquiddick Island in a car driven by Senator Ted Kennedy. Noting these women's unfortunate and untimely deaths, some conspiracy theorists have used this to associate the Bobby Baker scandal with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. However, these theories are widely disregarded by historians and subsequent investigations due to Baker's role in the Democratic Party and well-known friendship with John F. Kennedy, as well as Ted Kennedy's involvement with the second death. Others contend that Baker did not have any relationship to these tragedies other than perhaps coincidentally knowing the people who were killed.