Walter Jenkins was a married father of six, a convert to Catholicism, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s most trusted aide through LBJ’s time in Congress, his vice presidency, and the early part of his presidency. But Jenkins’s world changed when he was arrested for having sex with another man in a public restroom on Oct. 7, 1964.
While the arrest ended Jenkins’s tenure in the White House, the Johnson administration handled it so there was public sympathy for Jenkins, characterizing the incident as the result of a mental health crisis.
Jenkins’s story is told in the new book Outed: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency by Timothy Stewart-Winter, from the University of Chicago Press.
Stewart-Winter, a former Chicagoan, is now associate professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and is the author of 2016’s Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics. He was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame the following year.
He was drawn to Jenkins’s story because, “It was a way to use a single episode to tease out the official response and how ordinary people, straight and gay, reacted,” Stewart-Winter toWindy City Times. In researching the book, he had access to Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, plus the cooperation of Jenkins’ family members and LBJ’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson. He is indebted to all who spoke to him, he said, particularly Jenkins’s eldest daughter, Beth Jenkins Bromberg, who died before the book came out.
Jenkins started working for LBJ in 1939, and by 1964 he had become Johnson’s most trusted aide, handling policy, communications and more while shepherding legislation through Congress. When Jenkins was arrested in a YMCA restroom in Washington, D.C., the presidential election was just a month away, with Johnson running for his first full term, after having assumed the presidency upon John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Johnson, a Democrat, was up against archconservative Republican Barry Goldwater.
It turned out that Jenkins had been arrested for cruising in the restroom once before, in 1959, but that escaped media attention. The 1964 arrest did not.
When the story of the latter arrest broke, Johnson’s team secured his resignation and spirited him away to a hospital. The official story from the Johnson administration was that Jenkins had suffered a mental breakdown. Lady Bird Johnson, the first lady, issued a sympathetic statement, chalking the incident up to overwork and exhaustion. She and the president both characterized Jenkins’s arrest as a private misfortune, Stewart-Winter notes.
The GOP tried to use the arrest against LBJ; at the time, gay people were considered not only immoral but security risks subject to blackmail. But the public largely reacted with the same sympathy as the president and first lady.
“The revelation was all these people who wrote letters to Walter Jenkins,” Stewart-Winter said. “The vast majority of letters were taking the White House’s line that he had a nervous breakdown.” About 20 letters were from people who were gay or had taken similar risks, he added.
“We see another side of Lyndon Johnson in his response,” the author said, as Johnson showed kindness, contrary to his tough image. The president “successfully portrayed this as a private matter and kind of defused the notion that Jenkins was a security risk,” Stewart-Winter said, and was “less disgusted than puzzled” by the incident. And he won the 1964 election in a landslide, with 61 percent of the popular vote and 90 percent of the electoral vote, carrying all but six states.
It helped, too, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent flowers to Jenkins in the hospital, which the press reported.
“Now, if we think of Hoover, we think of him as a closeted gay man,” Stewart-Winter noted. “But at the time, he was a symbol of law and order and anti-Communism.”
After his release from the hospital, Jenkins went back to Austin, Texas, to rebuild his life. The Johnsons persuaded Democratic donors to send checks to the family, and Jenkins’s wife, Marjorie, had a job at a TV station owned by the first family. Jenkins founded a consulting firm, which thrived after a slow start, as did other business ventures. LBJ could not be seen publicly with Jenkins until he left office, but the two men and their families exchanged phone calls and Christmas cards.
Jenkins never came out as gay, although members of his family now realize he was—and they are accepting.
“Not everyone was waiting for a movement to come along or a chance to come out,” Stewart-Winter said. It’s important for queer history to include those who had same-sex experiences but didn’t identify as gay, he added. The nascent gay rights movement distanced itself from Jenkins because of the stigma of the arrest, but his case helped erode support for the policing of gay lives, the author pointed out.
Jenkins was sorely missed in the White House. “There was no one person who was juggling that many balls,” Stewart-Winter said.
LBJ is remembered today for his advancement of civil rights and the social safety net programs known as the Great Society but also for his escalation of the Vietnam War, which many Americans opposed and led to the end of Johnson’s presidency.
“Jenkins might not have advised Johnson to get out of the Vietnam War, but he surely would have influenced how he conducted it,” Stewart-Winter writes in the book.
By the late 1970s, the public memory of Jenkins’s arrest had faded, and he was known mostly as an eyewitness to the Johnson administration. When he died in 1985, obituaries noted the arrest but emphasized his long service to LBJ.
Still, he has a place in queer history, Stewart-Winter told Windy City Times. “Queer history is American history,” he said. “We’re everywhere, including places where people might not think to look.”
Photos are at this Google Drive link–let me know if you have trouble with access. No credit needed for book cover, although I guess you could do courtesy of University of Chicago Press. Tim’s photo is by Matthew Leifheit. Jenkins and LBJ in the Oval Office (the one with the flag) credit is LBJ Library/Photo by Yoichi Okamoto. The other picture of Jenkins and LBJ together is at the LBJ ranch, but I don’t know the credit for it. I have called and emailed Tim and am waiting to hear back, but I didn’t want to delay turning this in any longer.