WI Walter Jenkins is not caught in 1964?

rfmcdonald

It's Toronto Fringe Festival time, and I've been spending much of the past week attending high-quality indie theatre. Last night, I went with a friend to catch a new show that deserves the high ratings it has gotten from critics and audiences, The Seat Next To The King by local playwright Steven Elliott Jackson. The Seat Next To The King imagines an encounter, initially sexual but later more complex, in a Washington D.C. restroom in 1963 between African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and long-time LBJ advisor Walter Jenkins.

In coming years, the two men's lives would take rather different trajectories, Rustin becoming one of the first out national political figures, and Jenkins' political career being destroyed in October 1964 when he was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge in a Washington D.C. washroom. Jenkins later returned to Texas and relative anonymity as a chartered accountant.

The arrest of a high-ranking advisor to LBJ for alleged homosexual behaviour could have had national political import. Indeed, some Republicans seem to have tried to publicize this arrest as much as possible, in the hope that the scandal would have an effect on that year's election. Somewhat to the surprise of many observers at the time, the Jenkins arrest did not have a significant effect on the election, LBJ's lead over Goldwater and Goldwater's reluctance to make the arrest a campaign issue. That said, the disappearance of Jenkins from LBJ's administration might well have had subtler longer-run consequences on American policy, some people suggesting that American policy in Vietnam might have been different (or not) had Jenkins been present to give advice.

Let's say that Jenkins does not get arrested, not in October of 1964 and not later. What happens next? How is the United States changed with Jenkins still providing advice to LBJ?
 

ejpsan

From what I have read Walter Jenkins was LBJ b.s. detector who was able to stop Johnson's more impulsive decision making.
Maybe Jenkins could get Johnson from getting deeper in to the conflict in Vietnam by bringing other voices in the decision making process.
 

Seandineen

He would have encouraged it to be handled more like the crisis in the Dominican Republic. Greater use of counterinsurgency and other organizations. The ASEAN, or in Pesci plans.
 

David T

I am afraid that Jenkins was just too much of an LBJ loyalist, and too little of an original thinker, to change LBJ's policies in any meaningful way. At most, he would sometimes delay making public something LBJ had rashly said for a day or so, to give LBJ time to rethink it. But the Vietnam war escalation was not like that. It was not an impulsive decision, but the product of a real dilemma: there was just no way in January 1965 to prevent South Vietnam from becoming Communist except for US escalation. Jenkins could not have dissuaded LBJ from thinking the latter the lesser evil, and probably would not even have tried. (And by the way, support for LBJ's escalation policy was widespread at the time; a lot of Democrats who later earned antiwar reputations didn't oppose it until 1968 or even later...)

In short, Jenkins was no Louis Howe. Louis Howe was an FDR loyalist, of course--and the sort of man whose loyalty was so unquestioned that he could and did argue violently with his boss and sometimes change his mind. Witnesses remembered Howe shouting at FDR, "can't you get it through that thick Dutch skull of yours?..." It would just be unthinkable for Jenkins to try something like that.
 
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