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Bobby's Business. For being "it" around the Senate, Bobby got $19,612 a year, and his wife got another $11,757 a year as records manager for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Bobby always dressed well (black suits with vest and silver silk tie). But few realized that he was becoming wealthy—at least not until July 1962, when Bobby and two partners opened a $1,200,000 luxury motel in Ocean City, Md., advertised it as a "high-style hideaway for the advise and consent set," and kicked it off with a champagne party. The inauguration drew 200 Washington VIPs—including Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson.
Bobby had other business interests—and last month some of them began coming home to roost. A Washington vending-machine firm named him as a defendant in a $300,000 civil suit. In short, it charged that Baker used his influence to control vending-machine contracts let by a Government aerospace contractor and that Baker once told a North American Aviation representative "that he was in a position to assist in securing contracts" for North American.
No sooner was the civil suit filed than the FBI announced that it, too, had been looking into Bobby Baker's business. Bobby cried that he was innocent, said cockily, "I'm going to take care of myself, don't you worry." But last week he not only resigned as Democratic secretary of the Senate, but refused for the first time in his busy, brief life to talk with reporters. Wild rumors sped around Capitol Hill that this was only the beginning of the story about Bobby Baker, the young fellow who knew who was drunk, who was out of town, and who was sleeping with whom. At week's end, and at the insistence of Delaware's Republican Senator John Williams, the Senate reluctantly authorized its Rules Committee to start hearings into the activities of Bobby Gene Baker.