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Jenkins was more deeply implicated in the Bobby Baker scandal. During the Senate investigation, Maryland Insurance Broker Don Reynolds testified under oath that while he was trying to sell a $100,000 policy to Lyndon Johnson, Jenkins forced him to buy $1,208 worth of advertising time on Lady Bird Johnson's KTBC television station in Austin. Reynolds said he had no use for the advertising, but bought it anyway "because it was expected of me." "Who conveyed that thought to you?" asked Nebraska's Republican Senator Carl Curtis. Replied Reynolds: "Mr. Walter Jenkins."
Jenkins sent the committee an affidavit swearing that he "had no knowledge" of such an arrangement. But when the three Republicans on the nine-member investigating committee demanded that Jenkins be subpoenaed to testify, the Democrats turned them down cold. After the Baker flare-up, Jenkins withdrew even deeper into the shadows.
"Little Brother." Bom March 23, 1918, in Jolly, Texas, Walter Jenkins was the youngest of six children of a farmer. He grew up in nearby Wichita Falls. "Walter was the baby of the family, and they all doted on him," recalls Mrs. Macon Boddy, a rancher's wife who went to high school with Jenkins and used to date his older brother Bill, a veteran FBI agent now stationed in Amarillo, Texas. "We called him 'Little Brother.' He was a wonderful person, and a sort of child genius in school."
Jenkins finished high school at 15, junior college at 17, worked for a couple of years, and then entered the University of Texas. Just before he was to graduate in 1939, he quit and went to work for Lyndon Johnson, then a bright young second-term Congressman. He has worked for Lyndon ever since, except for a four-year stint in the Army, which he entered as a private and left as a Quartermaster Corps captain after serving in North Africa and Italy. Even when he ran for Congress, from Texas' 13th District in 1951, it was at Lyndon's behest. Jenkins finished second in a field of eight candidates, was probably hurt by the fact that though he was raised a Baptist, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1947, two years after his marriage to Marjorie ("Babe") Whitehill, a Catholic.
Johnson's life became Jenkins' life. He was a stockholder in the LBJ Co., and its treasurer until December 1963. He handled many of Lyndon's personal and financial affairs, looked after the lobbyists for him, kept tab on the Texas delegation in Congress. He named one of his six children Lyndon, and his daughter Beth, now at Marquette University, became one of Luci Baines Johnson's closest friends.
The Best Man. "There were two great devotions in his life," said a friend of Jenkins', "L.B.J. and his own family." But as Lyndon moved up from the Senate to the vice-presidency and to the White House, Jenkins saw less and less of the family. "The only time he could call his own was when he was driving home," says an old friend. "And then Lyndon had him put a phone in his car so he could talk to him on the way to and from home."