BLACK PRESIDENT, CHAPTER 13. Disloyal Sal mocks Rudy, who vows to find Sarah in Seattle after his marriage fails. Bobby Kennedy learns from Father, Joe, that brother's Presidency is a sham.

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3.0 out of 5 stars—Good and quite unique

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 September 2009. Vine Customer Review of Free Product(<https://www.amazon.in/vine/about?ie=UTF8>)/

“This is a truly different style and story. Engrossing and a excellent read. The premise that the child can move from unusual beginnings through to the most powerful job in the world is interesting and intriguing. Recommended.”

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

June 21, 1961

It was 6PM. Rudy was in the locker room with the other men suiting up for the nightshift. As he pulled on his overalls he felt a tension in the air. For a while he thought it might be something about him personally, his BO or something, since he repeatedly caught his co-workers shifting their eyes away whenever he looked in their direction. Whatever it was, it was starting to make him feel pretty weird. So he sped up his shoelace tying, got up off the hard wooden bench and walked with purpose into the lunch room to get a few gulps of free coffee before starting work. He poured a cup, but as he dripped in the condensed milk he noticed a group of the guys approaching, staring at him, all with smirks on their faces. Before he could say, “What the hell?” he heard the laughter bust out over his shoulder. Turning, he saw Sal, the newcomer he had bailed out less than a month ago, standing with maybe ten other regulars, all pointing at him and laughing like a pack of hyenas.

“Kennedy fucked your mother! Kennedy fucked your mother!” yelled Sal. To Rudy’s astonishment he repeated it several times, as some of the others began gyrating their hips in Rudy’s direction, laughing so hard they could barely keep up the act.

Porty then shouted, “I’m Kennedy!” and danced Elvis-style, pelvic gyrations around the room. Rudy watched it all, too mortified to respond. Whenever one man got tired of brandishing insults, there was another one ready to jump in. Who could resist such an easy target.

Rudy, his jaw locked and silent, turned and walked straight out of the room. Exiting the Coke plant, he got in his car and drove home. A week later he got a call informing him that he was fired for “failure to report.” Sitting home with a cold beer in his right hand, staring at the TV, Rudy continued to fume over Sal’s disloyalty, saying “fuck-faced turncoat” many times under his breath. He couldn’t believe that the same guy who he had saved that first day had shit all over him. And he got mad at Sarah too. The girl on the plane had set him up. Why had he been so gullible, bought her stupid story? Why had he been dumb enough to tell someone else about it?

Before the end of summer, ’61, Rudy split up with his wife, Lora Ann, inhabited a $35-per-month room in Oakland, and worked at Phillips 76 on Alcatraz Avenue. After alimony payments, the three- dollars-an-hour wage he earned pumping gas didn’t amount to much. But he still retained one last goal in life. He would hitchhike to Seattle, find the Kennedy woman, Sarah, and get her to either confirm or deny her crazy story. All he knew about her was that her husband had an auto-repair business.

***

May 30, 1961

News of Trujillo’s assassination hit the senior Kennedy’s household like a Hyannis hurricane. Joe Kennedy was furious, not only with Allen Dulles who had pushed the plan through with the CIA, but with his President son who had somehow given the OK. He thought he had gotten Jack’s assurance that he would hold off the dogs. His own son, his own flesh and blood, wasn’t giving him the straight dope on matters that directly affected his financial holdings. He was going to lose a lot of money, friends...important connections. And he’d have to answer to his wife Rose, to Charlene Wrightsman, the Cassini brothers, everyone who thought his influence counted for something.

The fact that Joe Kennedy had lost control of his son in the White House was undeniable. His own son had lied to him on the phone, disregarded his best advice. Jack had cost him millions of dollars, caused more damage than any of his adversaries, gangsters he regularly dealt with in the business world.

Even Rose was shocked by the killing of Trujillo. Tight-lipped Rose. She wasn’t one for swearing, but she asked Joe that night why her son had done such a “God damned despicable thing?” Joe’s only answer was that he had been fooled by the CIA. He went to bed that night promising himself to never again completely trust what Jack said, unless he got assurance through an independent channel. He’d have to rely more on Bobby, let him be a backup source for accurate information.

“Damn it Bobby!” Joe Kennedy said when he got him on the phone. “If I didn’t think you could influence your brother in these matters, I wouldn’t have pushed you for Attorney General in the first place!”

Bobby tried to calm his irate father to no avail. He fielded the barrage of questions with minimal responses, waiting for the storm to subside.

“I understand it wasn’t your fault,” Joe conceded. “But I was about to have the fucking guy here for a weekend...spending time here with me on my own goddamn boat!”

Bobby hated it when he was held accountable for his older brother. But he couldn’t figure out any way to argue back, to stand up to his father. It was as if their roles were set in stone. Joe Kennedy would declare and Bobby Kennedy would absorb. Punch and Judy. It seemed impossible for Bobby to reverse the trend that had begun during his and Jack’s childhood, back in the 1940’s. Because Jack was the sick one, the weak one, everyone always worried about him, paid a hundred times more attention to him than his next younger brother. And Teddy, the baby, never hurt for attention either.

Being a middle-child in the Kennedy male hierarchy, Bobby dwelt in the Bermuda Triangle of the family dynamic. He was the invisible one. No unconditional love or automatic respect for him. No. He had to earn every bit of appreciation by his actions alone. So he had become the can-do man, the efficient one, and that had made his skin thicker than anyone else’s. But he was getting sick of taking the hits when somebody else screwed up.

“Jack is the President, not me,” he told his father now, in the curt voice that he lately had adopted in the face of his father’s badgering. “I only know what he tells me, what he passes down to me from whatever intelligence sources he meets with in private.

“Well, what did he say about Trujillo?” Joe Kennedy asked the tough question and waited.

“Nothing. We never discussed it,” said Bobby. “And if he had...I can’t be sure that he isn’t filtering the facts. So I’d appreciate it if I wasn’t blamed for his every mis-step, as you perceive it from your end.

“It just feels like Bay of Pigs all over again,” said Joe, his anger and frustrations boiling over. “The CIA just keeps...”

“Those CIA are tricky bastards,” Bobby Kennedy cut in. “More of the same Cuban shit. It’s like they have their own little government off to the side, that’s been churning along through Truman, Ike, several Presidencies.”

“I agree.”

“Hoover is no better,” Bobby added.

After a pause, it was Joe Kennedy’s turn to spout off again, rub some salt in the wound. He could never understand why his intimidation tactics worked so poorly on Bobby.

“I got you Attorney General, Bobby,” said Joe Kennedy, “even though Jack worried it’d be seen as nepotism. Remember that?”

Bobby was quiet.

“No one...especially Jack...wanted to take the heat for that decision.” Joe Kennedy’s voice grew slightly higher in volume. “But I talked to him, told him that someone was threatening to leak out the business of Daley’s Chicago machine...rigging the Illinois win.”

Bobby remained silent. As his father rolled out the facts, so clear and irrefutable, Bobby experienced a closing down of his mental facilities, in an attempt to dodge concepts too ugly and shameful to be examined. His brother’s presidency was a sham, yet he...HE was supposed to believe in being honorable, the top law enforcement officer of the land, the Attorney General of the United States of America. It was too perverse.

“...told him if you weren’t in place to squelch it, it could get out,” Joe Kennedy continued to spin out the oft repeated logic. “Jack finally agreed and we got you in there.”

Bobby’s mouth remained closed.

“But remember! Those same goons can pull the rug out from under us at any time. Shit...they KILL people. You understand me boy, don’t you?”

“Uh huh,” Bobby forced out, barely audible.

“That’s why you’re in there close to the President – to keep me informed, help Jack through the difficult times. And that way you’re able to have some input from my end so that Jack wouldn’t accidentally make some irreversible mistake that could get him hurt. Yes. That’s right. Physically hurt!”

Suddenly Bobby imagined himself exploding, a lighter fluid canister set off by a match. He imagined the argument that could have followed, screaming at his father, spilling out his guts like he didn’t even allow himself to do with Ethel, letting loose a litany of complaints dating back to early boyhood.

I’m sick of being regarded as Jack’s keeper!

What’s that?

Why do I have to play brother’s keeper, picking up all the doo doo – ushering his women out through security, covering for him with Jackie, lying to press reporters.

Don’t you sass me...

The only fun I have anymore is running with a pigskin from one end of lawn to the other, while my wife and friends frantically chase close after. Is this what my life has become?

You better mind me boy!

All I’ve ever hears from you is, How’s Jack? It’s been’ Jack this and Jack that’ my entire life. I’m so fuckin’ sick of it I could spit. I want to be regarded as my own person. I want people to put me at the center for a change...

How dare you speak to me that way! I’M YOUR FUCKING FATHER, GOD DAMN IT!

Joe Kennedy, oblivious to his son’s mute fantasy, rambled on about President Jack, his dangerous adversaries and his own threatened business interests. By the time the phone call ended, Bobby’s jaw was tight from all the clamping down he had done to avoid a real screaming match. A final thought invaded his tired mind;

Do I have to make some horrible mistake before people in this family will finally acknowledge MY feelings? Do I have to create some horrible dilemma that threatens our entire dynasty before I get a little attention.

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