The Secret History of the 116 Club, the Inner Sanctum of the US Political Aristocracy

Part II: Larceny in the Blood

Quorum Club founder and premier Washington string-puller Bobby Baker on the cover of Time a few months after his arrest.

The 116 emerged from the wreckage of the short lived Quorum Club, which was founded in 1961 by Bobby Baker, a longtime political advisor and crony of then-Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Baker, who diligently worked his way through the bottom ranks of Hill staffers and became Secretary to the Senate Majority Leader when LBJ held that title. Baker established the Quorum Club in the Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill, purportedly “for literary purposes, mutual improvement and the promotion of social intercourse.”

It was an immediate hit and grew to include 197 carefully selected members. They included four Democratic senators, including Frank Church, who in the mid-1970s led the congressional hearings into illegal CIA and FBI activities, which became known as the Church Committee, Harrison Williams of New Jersey, a close ally of organized labor, and rarely sober Daniel Brewster from Maryland, who Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer interned for at the time; GOP Congressman and future federal Judge James Battin and his colleague Congressman William Ayres, a liberal Republican, before the species went extinct, who voted for the Civil Rights Act and the creation of Medicare; and other key aides to LBJ, close friends of President John F. Kennedy, Hill staffers, lobbyists, military officers and executives from 90 companies, primarily weapons manufacturers and banks.  

In an interview with the Senate Historical Office in 1990, the late Roy Elson, a former Hill staffer, lobbyist, and future 116 member, said many political operatives, members of congress and their associates became Quorum Club regulars as it was one of only three places near the Capitol to get a drink and was a great “place to relax.” For those looking for late night entertainment, there was a “whorehouse...up the street,” he noted.

It was really all catering to lobbyists. It was going to be the little private place where they could meet with members. I just

didn't like the way the whole thing was put together. I thought it was eventually going to backfire...Bobby was using it to promote his own interests [and] have private luncheons and things like that, but it was a little more than that. There were poker games, and girls, and other things.

Quorum Club membership was restricted to gentlemen only, but associates were allowed to bring their mistresses and for those desiring female companionship, Baker had an ample supply of “play girls,” as FBI agents who monitored the club described them in confidential reports. One of the Quorum Club’s main draws was Ellen Rometsch, a model who worked at West Germany’s Washington embassy and was married to an army officer. 

Baker met Rometsch though his secretary and mistress, Nancy Carole Tyler, whose roommate Mary Jo Kopechne – who died in 1969 when Senator Ted Kennedy left her overnight in a pond on Chappaquiddick Island that his overturned into – worked for Florida Senator George Smathers, an inveterate skirt chaser. Baker approved a request from railroad lobbyist Bill Thompson to take Rometsch to the White House to meet JFK and an affair ensued. “President Kennedy called me and said it’s the best head job he’d ever had, and he thanked me,” Baker recalled years later. 

Alleged East German spy Ellen Rometsch, whose bedroom skills were praised by JFK.

Baker’s net worth climbed from $10,000 in 1954 to more than $2.5 million in 1963, which is what prompted the FBI to put the Quorum Club under surveillance in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the Bureau concluded much of his newfound wealth resulted from corrupt business deals. In October of that year, a month before LBJ became president following JFK’s assassination, Baker lunch at the Quorum Club as the investigative noose was tightening,  and after swilling four martinis to steady his nerves, announced his resignation from government. He was later tried and sentenced to 15 months in prison for grand larceny.

Numerous Quorum Club members were ensnared in the fallout.  Walter Jenkins, a close aide and bagman for LBJ, resigned a few weeks prior to the 1964 presidential election after he and another man were arrested in a public restroom in Washington and charged with "disorderly conduct.”

Fred Black Jr., a prominent consultant for military contractors, was found to be a partner of Baker’s in a vending machine business. He was convicted on related charges of tax evasion, which was overturned on a technicality, but Black’s career went downhill. In 1982, he was sentenced to a 7-year prison stretch for laundering money for a Colombian cocaine cartel.

Meanwhile, even before JFK was assassinated, the FBI had learned of his relationship with Rometsch, which Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover leaked to the media, leading to a front-page story in the Des Moines Register on October 26, 1963 and a big spread in Life magazine that ran the day the president was killed in Dallas. LBJ’s incoming administration clamped down on further disclosures and Rometsch, whose German husband had divorced her the previous month, was deported back to Germany, reportedly at the order of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Hoover loathed RFK but he went along in order to protect the incoming president, who was a close friend and his next door neighbor.

The bad press from the Quorum Club scandal led to its closure in 1965, but a crew of Baker’s closest associates opened the 116 as its successor in September of that year. The founders were keen to minimize public awareness of the new establishment’s ties to the Quorum Club, so they renamed it after its new address at 116 Schott’s Alley, where it operated until 1976, when it moved to its present location on 3rd Street NE. 

However, nothing much of substance changed. Scott Peek, a senior aide to Senator Smathers, both who reportedly made good money via undisclosed commercial partnerships with Baker, was the first chairman at the Quorum Club and was named to the same position at the new 116. Peek’s old boss became a 116 member as did Senator Brewster, who was later convicted of taking payoffs from a lobbyist for mail order retailer Spiegel in exchange for helping keep postal rates low, with some of the money allegedly passed to his trusted aide during a meeting at the 116.

Senator Daniel Brewster, the man indirectly responsible for unleashing Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer on an unsuspecting nation.

Senator Williams of New Jersey, another Quorum Club veteran who joined the 116, resigned in 1982 after he was convicted of taking bribes from federal agents posing as Arab sheiks in the Abscam scandal.

Today, our great country’s political leaders rarely take illegal bribes because there are so many ways they can take legal bribes without running the risk, however infinitesimal, of going to prison. However, rest assured that members and associates of the 116 have accepted and dispensed both types, as will be detailed in upcoming installments.

Part III: The 116’s early years, when regulars included renowned pork barrel practitioners and ethically-challenged Senators Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd, and racial segregationist Strom Thurmond, who made the Club his home away from home in Washington.