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A good intelligence system was held dear by Lyndon in running the Senate, and Bobby was the expert at estimating the overall mood. While so engaged, Baker was forever scurrying back and forth across the Democratic side of the floor. Indeed, at times he looked like a busy, busy squirrel that owned a great oak tree and spent its days dashing about the limbs to make sure all the acorns remained in place. Part of Baker's job was keeping track of the voting. On important measures, he usually kept tab on narrow white tally sheets. On the more routine votes, he would more than likely be found just inside the rear center door, telling arriving Democrats what was at issue and how the leadership—meaning Johnson—wanted them to vote.
Sometimes, of course, his highhanded ways enraged rank-and-file Democratic Senators. There was the time when North Dakota's Quentin Burdick and Ohio's Stephen Young, both Democrats but a bit too liberal to be members of the Johnson fan club, badly wanted two vacancies that had occurred on the Judiciary Committee. Both had applied for the places in writing. When the committee-assigning Democratic steering committee met, however, Baker appeared before it and announced that Burdick and Young had withdrawn their requests. No one questioned his word, and the seats were given to Missouri's Edward Long and Texas' William Blakley, both Johnson enthusiasts. As it turned out, neither Burdick nor Young had agreed to withdraw.
When Johnson became Vice President, Baker stayed on as majority secretary. To some, it seemed that Johnson was not really gone at all: Baker slavishly tried to effect a Johnsonian pose, took to standing on the Senate floor as Johnson was wont to do, bracing his shoulders and smoothing his sideburns. Said one observer: "The only thing that was wrong with his act was that he was six inches too short."
That did not bother Bobby. He was growing bigger every day—too big, in fact, for his britches. Once, during this period, he told a group of visiting political-science scholars: "On any issue, I have at least ten Senators in the palm of my hand." At the same time, says a Senate aide, who watched Bobby's rise with some awe, "the lobbyists were swarming around his office like flies. They buttered him up, kept telling him how great he was, and I think a lot of his trouble now comes because he got to believing it."
A Lot of Laughs. Well he might have. Baker had long since begun to maneuver outside the Senate as well as in the cloakrooms. For one thing, he had acquired Carole Tyler as his secretary. Back home in Tennessee, she had won a "Miss Loudon County" award, and she was a natural beauty-pageant type —35-26-35. Daughter of a Lenoir City dry-cleaning plant operator, Carole arrived in Washington in 1959, three years later was Baker's private secretary and confidante. As the former she received $8,000 a year, as the latter a lot of laughs and good times. When Baker established her in the lavendercarpeted cooperative townhouse in December 1962, he had a more convenient base of operations for his extracurricular activities. They were many and diverse: