Lyndon Johnson reacts to the Walter Jenkins incident, 1964

50 years ago presidential aide Walter Jenkins, a father of six, was arrested for having sex with a man in a YMCA bathroom, weeks before the 1964 presidential election.

After rumors of the arrest had circulated for days, Republican Party operatives promoted it to the press. The White House immediately went into gear and tried to lobby the Washington papers not to publish the story, to no avail —on October 14, the scandal broke in the Washington Star.

Democratic President Johnson, already facing pressure over the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes affairs, was not pleased and Jenkins resigned immediately.

For a few days afterward Johnson's opponent Barry Goldwater made veiled references to the incident by mentioning LBJ's "curious crew," and his campaign headquarters even printed buttons with slogans such as "ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ, BUT DON'T GO NEAR THE YMCA." In the clip above you can hear president Johnson's reaction to the low-blows.

But in the end the Jenkins incident did not influence the outcome of the election (Johnson swept Goldwater). The event was soon eclipsed by other international news of 1964, such as Khrushchev's ousting and the United Kingdom's elections.

Lyndon Johnson later stated "I couldn't have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I'd heard that Lady Bird had tried to kill the Pope."