BLACK PRESIDENT, CHAPTER 2. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NWCN6XG

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NWCN6XG (The "KENNEDY'S TWINS" Mini-Series)

CHAPTER TWO

Back to work at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Oakland, California, Rudeworth Tempers was relieved to hear the familiar roar of the machines, the rattling, thumping, hissing, clinking sounds forcing their way into his brain in spite of the Kent filtertip plugs wedged into each ear. The racket helped tame his thoughts about the airplane ride, the young woman seated next to him, and her outlandish story. What a tale she had spun. Rudy found it hard to believe that a nice woman like her, Sarah she had called herself, would tell a complete stranger on a plane about her affair with President Kennedy. Crazy, for sure, but she must have bet that she’d never see the guy in seat 14a again. At any rate, Rudy had remained speech- less, not knowing how to respond. On every flight he’d ever taken he had looked forward to being the lucky one to sit next to an attractive member of the opposite sex, to get squashed up against a sexy woman in the narrow seats. But now that it had actually happened it had been a demanding and confusing experience. While he had been flattered that Sarah had opened up to him, his low self-esteem had made him wonder if it wasn’t just an act to humiliate him after the flight. (You really bought all that Kennedy stuff ? God, are you stupid!) It was too bad, because . . .’

Rudy was caught mid-daydream when a co-worker, Fredericks, threw a damaged Coke bottle into the nearby trash barrel. The unexpected noise of shattering glass snapped Rudy back to the present.

‘Motherfuck . . . HEY!’ he shouted, jerking his head forward to shake a few chips of glass off the brim of his hat. His protest could barely be heard above the din of the machinery.

‘Sorry, man!’ Fredericks called back, grimacing. ‘But your White ass should have been on the belt!’

Rudy only heard the ‘White ass’ part and responded, ‘Yeah, and you lazy niggers gonna put an eye out!’

Fredericks shook his head and shrugged before walking back to the bottle inspection station. Maybe a hundred Coke-filled bottles had passed by the scanner unexamined during the brief altercation. He hoped he hadn’t missed any rats or rat turds stuffed in the bottles. As he sat himself down on the stool and idly stared at the lit panel, the blur of brown liquid going by made him tired and bored again, so he plucked a bottle off the line and popped it open, taking a good swig.

‘Watch the fuck out!’ were Rudy’s last words on the subject, heard by no one in particular.

At lunch hour, sitting along the sidewalk next to the Quick Mart where Coke employees gathered for easy access to bolstering snacks like chips, gum, and beer, Rudy ate his food silently like everybody else. But after about ten minutes, around the time he’d polished off two sandwiches and had cleared his throat with some cold Coke, he got restless. He was preoccupied with the desire to test the legitimacy of Sarah’s wild tale. Sure, she had confided in him, trusted him with her private, precious secret, and that gave Rudy a good feeling about himself. Trustworthy, loyal, discreet. That was all fine, except for the fact that he couldn’t really believe a word of it. It was a crazy story – unless someone else bought into it as well.

‘Hey, Fred. You know that Jack Kennedy guy?’ asked Rudy, making sure he had the fellow’s complete attention, as well as the ears of others in range of his piercing voice.

‘Don’t know him personally like you do, Rudy,’ countered Fred Gimberland, a heavy-set Black man with a disarmingly friendly face. A laugh ripped out of two of the others, while a third coughed into his sandwich before delivering a more substantial guffaw, once the ham and cheese had been washed down with beer.

‘Go Fred,’ exclaimed a skinny Black man, Porty, the words half- muffled by the ham sandwich he was devouring.

‘Tell us ’bout your school days wit’ President Kennedy,’ Fred added, looking at the others to gauge the effect. There were chuckles all around, but Rudy wasn’t going to be deterred.

‘This woman...I sat right next to her on an airplane...she told me all about it. How she and Kennedy . . . well . . . they had sex in the White House,’ Rudy blurted out, his stuttering lead-in giving the bizarre information no chance to fly. His co-workers were more than ready to taunt him.

‘Baby,’ said Porty, ‘you must have been drinking from them midget bottles.’ Laughter overtook his reply while Big Fred jumped in again.

‘If I’d been fucked by a President of the United States I would have told you too, Rudy, figuring by your honest, sensitive-looking face . . .’ Fred paused momentarily, waiting for the laughs, hoops and hollers, ‘. . . that you could be deeeescreeeet.’ He took a swig of beer, then added in a high-pitched, girlish voice, ‘I trusted you!’ Fred’s body language – stooped posture, drooping shoulders, raised arms, and open palms – along with the faked look of disappointment on his pouting lip as he drawled out the words, drew an even bigger laugh from the sidewalk peanut gallery. ‘She told you, man, and you betrayed her,’ said Porty, feigning a deeply offended sense of righteousness. ‘Now we all fuckin’ know!’ ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ Coke-ball!’ Rudy retorted, angry and frus- trated. He had supplied the lunch hour entertainment all right, but not in the way he’d planned. Instead of gaining popularity points, he’d lost the few he had. ‘Fuck you all,’ he said, pulling himself up quickly from the sidewalk. With his sandwich wrapper and pop bottle cradled awkwardly in his hands he strutted off the curb, and was halfway to the front door of the bottling plant before he heard the final comment. ‘Did you get any, Rudy?’ The words echoed off the brick facade, but Rudy kept on walking, not bothering to turn around.

On Saturday afternoon, Jack Kennedy flew down to Glen Ora where Jackie had rented a house in the Virginia countryside. What was it about Jackie and horses, he wondered? He had finally realized that while everyone else did their level best to avoid unpleasant odors, she actually yearned for the pungent, warm leather smell of the big animals, mixed with the stink of straw and shit. And now she was initi- ating four-year-old Caroline into the rituals of the paddock.

With the sun hitting his face intermittently, as the trees beside the stables swayed rhythmically in the light breeze, he once again contem- plated his major concerns about the upcoming Cuban invasion, and the CIA’s plan to overthrow Fidel Castro. JFK had told his advisers that he would retain the option to cancel the operation up until noon on Sunday, April 15th, but it wasn’t clear whether the CIA would easily honor a change of heart. They wanted a World War Two-level beachhead at the Bay of Pigs, jets strafing the island, a full-out war, and anyone who opposed that scenario caught the flack. Richard Bissell, his liaison and chief of operations at the CIA, a long-time expert in Intelligence and the father of the U-2 program in the mid- 1950s, had expressed his doubts that anyone could really call it off. He had explained to Jack that the build-up over many months and the final attack plan had too much momentum.

Allen Dulles, another CIA old-timer, had agreed with Bissell, noting that the company, including on-the-books operatives, spooks, and other part-timers, had already been too vast before 1960. It had spun out of control, its many activities, covert and otherwise, far too numerous for any one person to fully comprehend. In an operation like the Bay of Pigs, with bases dotted across various continents, and operatives funneling in from across South America, it was impossible to know how many people were involved. Complicating matters further, crime families from the Southern states had also kicked in support after losing their holdings in the casinos, so well-trained mob mercenaries counted among the recruits.

There were some at the CIA who wanted an even wider approach, as the President well knew. General Charles Cabell, Deputy Director, was demanding more soldiers for the invasion. In a short time, the budget for the operation had escalated from four million dollars to over forty-six million. Some station heads had questioned the need to conceal US involvement when it was already out in the open: several articles in the New York Times had discussed a possible Cuban inva- sion, to the dismay of the planners. Kennedy had been briefed about the operation a few times during his time as President-elect, but had been spared most of the details and risks. All he had learned back then was that Cubans were being trained in Guatemala and a few other covert locations, as authorized by his predecessor Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon. Nixon had made some strong connections in New Orleans and east Texas, and had received political backing from some right-wingers in the area who had investments in Cuba. Nixon even counted Joe Kennedy, Jack’s father, as one of those ‘friends’.

At any rate, Operation Zapata had numerous agents on board, including many Cubans from Florida and elsewhere who had been recruited as the operation had widened in scope. Bissell had heard that George Bush, a Yale graduate and low-level CIA operative with an oil company cover, had hitched up some good people. He also knew of Felix Rodrigues, a guy named Sturgis, Howard Hunt, and other CIA men who could be trusted. Leaflets alerting the Cuban population to the invasion were being printed by the thousands for an air-drop, to rally their support. In the meantime, the bases had kept multiplying, first one in Miami, then Key West, New Orleans, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Bush and others were coordinating the purchase of the necessary arms cache, gathering boats for transportation, preparing for the military assault.

President Kennedy had received communications from his father on several occasions with regard to the Cuban plan. ‘It’s a good thing ...a noble thing,’Joe explained, soft-pedaling the risks. He and others were still stung over the way Castro had locked down the casinos after promises to him and his fellow investors that they would remain open. Foolishly, Castro had double-crossed several mafia families, so it wasn’t surprising that the mob bosses had ordered men to join the cause. Their well-trained fighters, together with the steadfast conviction of the US government, seemed like enough muscle to win back the casi- nos and the sugar fields, and defeat Castro.

While Jack Kennedy never enjoyed opposing his father, he felt compelled to express his minority viewpoint. ‘Just feels like we’re outnumbered, Dad. Only a few thousand troops against their thirty thousand-plus.’

‘Son . . . Son! There’ll be a rallying cry and the people will rise up and join. It’s just that simple,’ replied Joe, repeating what he’d heard from Alan Dulles the previous weekend at the Wrightman’s. It had been a rewarding coincidence when his neighbors in Florida had invited Dulles as a house-guest; Kennedy Sr. had learned a lot over two martinis.

‘And if the people don’t rise up we can blow the fuckers to smithereens with our air force. The CIA knows how to handle these things, son.’

It was impossible for Jack to budge his father’s pro-invasion stance. He had no idea that Joe Kennedy’s holdings in Cuba were close to forty million dollars in land and racketeering, and that protecting those investments was his first concern.

(Chapter 3 next)