Quotes from the Book

“How come I haven’t heard about this?”

– Jim Dedelow, Announcer, WJOB Radio, Hammond, Indiana, October 11, 2023Epigraph

“Don, we are Masons. I just want to tip you off. Leave the country, leave the States. If you don’t, LBJ will have you killed.”

– J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to Don Reynolds; as recounted by Don Reynolds to a family friend in 1969Epigraph

“I guess you won’t need these. Giving testimony involving the Vice President is one thing, but when it involves the President himself, that is something else. You can just forget that I ever said anything if you want to.”

– Don Reynolds to Senate investigators, Washington, D.C., November 22, 1963Page 23

As reported in Despoilers of Democracy by Clark Mollenhoff (Doubleday & Company, 1965).

“It’s almost unbelievably dramatic in terms of the time sequence. … Nobody had connected LBJ to the Bobby Baker scandal. At the very moment that morning, back in Washington, in a closed little room in the Senate office building, the man who was going to connect Johnson to that scandal, a man named Don Reynolds, was testifying before Senate investigators.

And he was pushing across the table to them the checks and the invoice that would prove that LBJ was involved in the Baker scandal, which was the huge scandal of that time. He was doing this at approximately the time that the motorcade was going through Dallas and the shots rang out.”

– Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning LBJ biographer, on NPR’s Fresh Air, February 20, 2023Pages 28–29

“I feel that as an American citizen, ex-service man and civil servant, my rights have been abridged and my character is at stake. It appears you have permitted a conspiracy to discredit my testimony for having known these people and embarrassing them.”

– Don Reynolds, in a letter to Senator Everett Jordan of North Carolina, March 14, 1964Page 43

“Earlier today I talked to Clark Mollenhoff and he was concerned that Mr. Reynolds may be planning to leave the country rather than to testify. He was not sure whether this was as the result of fear of his life or for his family or whether someone had reached him.”

“At 6:00 PM tonight I received a call from Don Reynolds. He said he was in Arizona incognito, and he admitted that he was considering going to a country for an asylum. He said he was in fear of his life and his wife was on the verge of a complete breakdown. The Justice Department had harassed them to the point of destruction. He had been advised that Baker as the result of the elections had said that he was in the clear now and they were going to get Reynolds, discredit him, and put him behind bars, and that they would get John Williams.”

– From the personal papers of Senator John Williams of Delaware, November 6, 1964Page 58

Written a year after the assassination, as the Senate prepared to reopen the Baker investigation and the star witness had gone into hiding.

“I never met him. He’s a bum that’s got us involved. I don’t have a thing in the world to hide … I don’t want history to say these things. I don’t want to be a Harding!”

– President Lyndon B. Johnson to Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, March 4, 1965, regarding Don Reynolds and his allegationsPage 61

President Warren G. Harding’s time in office became synonymous with corruption after the Teapot Dome bribery scandal: LBJ feared being remembered the same way.

“To the extent that I was able to contribute anything toward getting this Baker investigation underway, I owe a lot of that to Mr. Reynolds and his cooperation. I’m not defending Mr. Reynolds. He admitted himself that what he did was wrong, and to use his own language, he told the committee that he acted as a ‘bagman’ – handling some of the political payoffs.

But I was glad that I was able to persuade him not to take the 5th Amendment, but to talk. It is significant that those who are most critical of Mr. Reynolds today, and trying to discredit him, are those who were associating with him in a business way prior to the time that he began to talk. I think the great crime that Mr. Reynolds made in their eyes, is talking.”

– Senator John Williams, on the program Opinion in the Capitol, August 8, 1965Page 74

“On February 19, 1966, at some time between 1:30-2:00 AM, I was awakened by the telephone ringing in my apartment in Nassau. The operator connected me with a person who said, ‘This is Bobby Baker and I am making one more effort to protect myself from further difficulties brought about by you talking to John Williams and the two attorneys appointed by the Justice Department for the prosecution of my case.’

Bobby said, ‘You’d better believe me – if you do not take heed, just remember, you hope to return to the U.S. someday and that he, Black, Webb, and Don Murchison have friends who would have me physically taken care of.’ Bobby said, ‘Don, you have caused problems for some big men. What is done is done and they have survived without too many problems. They are willing to forget the whole mess, but this is my final warning to you, from myself and from them: if you talk any more with the attorneys, Williams, or agree to return to the U.S. to testify as a state witness – you won’t survive.’”

– Don Reynolds, in a never-before-published letter to Senator John Williams detailing a threat from Bobby Baker, March 6, 1966Page 86

“It has been my personal experience … that this was the most difficult, labor-intensive project that I have ever worked on. Over two years of attempting to obtain 17,000 plus pages of material taking over 79 months … This project was so full of delays, roadblocks, tabling, reestablishing goalposts, and then finally when the material was being produced, it was heavily redacted.

“All in all, I made three separate FOIPA record requests and all FOIPA were made only to the FBI for Bob Nelson’s book. Only two were only slightly successful in getting anything of use and much was redacted. … I don’t think I would do this again as this task from the start in 2021 to this book being published in 2024 was just too much FBI policy and procedure to handle.”

– Greg Smith, Professional Research Historian, on the FBI FOIPA record requests behind the bookPages 128 & 130