ABSTRACT
On October 16, 1964, a correspondent for The Times of London made the following observation about the intertwining of sexuality and nationalistic ideology in the United States: “In the post war political primer for beginners, perversion is synonymous with treason. A surviving McCarthyism is that homo sexuality and other sexual aberrations are both dangerous to the national secu rity and rife in Washington. These remarks were prompted by the disclosure, less than three weeks before America’s Presidential election, that Walter Jen kins, Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff, had been arrested with another man (identified, significantly, as “Hungarian-born”) and charged with performing “indecent gestures” in a basement restroom of the Y.M.C.A. two blocks from Jenkins’ office in the White House. This arrest, which Laud Humphreys would later characterize as “perhaps the most famous tearoom arrest in America,”2 precipitated the furor of a political scandal, one that some thought capable of swaying the election, when it was learned that Jenkins had not only been arrested in the very same men’s room five years earlier-leaving him with a
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police record on which had been marked “disorderly conduct (pervert)”—but also that this prior arrest had escaped detection by both the White House and the F. B. I. Jenkins, therefore, had had access to a variety of classified materials, including documents that were submitted to the National Security Council, and he had been granted the top-secret “Q” clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission.
