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He Don't Give Up. Bobby was only 14 when he deserted Pickens. But he had already made a lasting impression. A high-school teacher, Lucille Hallum, recently recalled him as "so vivacious, just a little trigger. If you wanted something done, you gave it to Bobby and you knew it would be done."
Bobby was the eldest of Postman Ernest Baker's brood of eight. The Bakers lived in a big frame house on Hampton Avenue, and all the youngsters worked to help out. "We've never been poor," said Ernest Baker, "but we weren't rich either." When South Carolina sent Burnet Maybank to the Senate in 1941, Maybank owed a political favor to a man in Pickens, offered to make his son a Senate page. The boy turned it down, and Bobby Baker was recommended in his place. He had never been away before, and upon reaching Washington he became miserably homesick. Teacher Hallum heard about it and wrote him a letter: "I asked him not to give up, to stay there and fight because we were all proud of him and we were with him." Bobby's reply was scrawled in pencil upon a sheet of tablet paper. "Miss Hallum," he wrote, "Bobby Baker don't quit."
He sure didn't. Within two years the homesick boy from Pickens had eager-beavered his way to the position of chief Senate page. Meantime, he put himself through George Washington University, and, later, the American University law school.
In 1949 two men who were to be come the most powerful of Senate Democrats entered the hallowed cham ber. They were Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Robert Kerr of Oklahoma. Bobby Baker spotted them as real comers—and he made certain that they saw him the same way. The relationship with Kerr was cemented first; before very long Kerr was tipping Baker to profitable stock investments, something that the tough, rough oil millionaire did for few others. Next, Baker ingratiated himself with Johnson. Recalls a former Johnson staffer of Baker: "He was an unabashed lackey, a bootlicker. He'd think of all manner of ex cuses to come in the office and see Johnson, and he'd tell him about all the things he was doing for him, all the little ways he was helping him."
Leaking Stories. Bootlicker he may have been, but Baker was also an extremely agile, able young man. Concedes a Democratic Senator who is not listed among Baker's foremost admirers: "Bobby always knew more about what was going on around here than most anybody else." But life was not all work for Bobby: in 1950 he wooed and wed Dorothy Comstock, a slender blonde from Springfield, III., who worked then and now on the Hill as a clerk of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Their wedding reception, to Baker's everlasting gratification, was held in one of the old Senate Office Building's ornate committee rooms—not far from where Baker last week was called to testify.