BLACK PRESIDENT, Chapter 23. Birdie out of a job, and Bobby Kennedy follows the logic of his brothers death--can't help seeing how his own father Joe's criminal connections figure in.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

All at once Birdie found herself retired from White House service. She was barely able to get her stuff out of the locker in the kitchen before the LBJ staff moved in: cooks, maids, chauffeurs, house boys, dog trainers, cleaning staff, caterers, along with Lady Bird and her girl birds. Birds in, Birdie out. All the new Texas folks she met seemed like upstanding folks, but they certainly had rushed the transition process. The Kennedy blood had barely dried before the replacement First Family boarded the plane for Washington. Where was the graciousness, the concern? It was just, “We’re here, where are the lockers?” And, “We need your stuff removed right now!” OK, OK. Birdie never assumed she had a lifetime pass to the White House, but in her mind she’d always envisioned the final departure of the Kennedy clan as an official occasion, with all the help lined up ceremoniously in the Rose garden for fond farewells and picture-taking. Now that sweet man, President Kennedy, lay in state, his body finely dressed, his face made-up for people to stare at.

And how sad, thought Birdie, for Mrs. Kennedy to raise those two little kids alone. There were some things that power and money couldn’t buy, and one was bringing back the dead. All the money in the world wasn’t going to give Caroline and John John their daddy back.

There had been no decent moment of goodbye between Birdie and those little ones. She had wiped Caroline’s tears with a Kleenex while they sat in the cement underbelly of the White House. The secret service men had huddled too close, whispered too furtively, been too nice to Birdie after they listened on the phone. They were surprised when Caroline blurted out the question, Is my daddy is dead? Neither Birdie nor the security man, Donald, could respond properly, wanting to leave the conveying of this hard reality to their mother. He fended off a direct response before Birdie would have been forced to deflect it.

“Well, honey, we don’t know everything, being down here. When your mommy joins us she can tell us all about it, OK?” Donald had handled it intelligently, thought Birdie, who was relieved to be off the hook. But Caroline wasn’t through.

“I saw you on the phone.” Her blue eyes bore down on Donald, unblinking. The tears began to well, a signal for Birdie to move in to comfort her as the agent moved away and returned to his men at the table.

“Honey...” Birdie gently told her, “You just gotta wait for your mommy. Here, let old Birdie get those wet spots off.” John John watched Birdie dab his sister’s eyes and pointed to his eyes as well.

***

November 26, 1963 Dear Journal,

Today the funeral of President Kennedy was on the TV all day. I held you boys up to the TV one at a time, carrying you so close that you reached out with your fingers and touched the screen. I wanted you to at least have seen it, seen that horse with boots in the stirrups backwards, seen John John and Caroline standing there, watched all them dignitaries walk down behind the hearse.

I’m now busy filling up the rest of this book with pages from newspapers, magazine articles, pictures of his handsome face, so the light that has been born to you sweet boys will burn forever in your hearts.

***

Bobby Kennedy awoke with the sweats again, but was relieved to see that this time he hadn’t awakened Ethel. He had to pee, so he eased himself out from under warm covers, slid into his soft leather slippers and walked quietly into the master bathroom. Once the door was closed he snapped on the small overhead light. He did his duty, washed his hands, dried them, and took the smallest glance at the face reflected back in the mirror. He saw a grizzled man with red eyes. That was enough. He still existed, though his brother didn’t. He clicked off the light and went out the second bathroom door which opened into the main part of the house. He wandered over to the couch and he sat down stiffly, looking out the large picture window as his eyes adjusted to the low light. The heavy snow that had fallen the day before still covered the ground, making the night exceptionally quiet. Slowly the familiar fixtures of the room came into focus: Windsor desk, Tiffany lamp, TV set, dinner table, drapes, rugs. Everything was just as he expected it to be. But what had happened to his life? People he had loved, worked and played with were dead. The deaths of Jack and Marilyn had left two hollow spaces in his heart.

It hadn’t helped to talk to his father about it...or with Ethel for that matter. The secrets couldn’t be shared, ever. He returned to bed and tried to sleep, but his mind wouldn’t quit. Deep down he knew who had ordered the hit on his brother. And, he imagined, so did his father. It was as if everything Joe Kennedy had done in the last few years, making deals with the Mafia, had led ineluctably to his middle son’s death. Joe had pressed for turning up the heat on organized crime and he, as Attorney General of the United States, had gone along. The newspapers and TV commentaries had backed him up, his office’s popularity ratings soaring. So the signs seemed right for grinding the criminals into the mat.

But why hadn’t his father seen the potential for backlash? There was his father’s past, those connections to the Mafia when he was young. He had never had the guts to confront his father about his rum- running days. He had not wanted to think about his own father stuffing the ballot boxes in Illinois with help from old crime connections, to get Jack elected in a close count. And he had not wanted to think of an American president owing the mob. But with his brother dead, and so clearly a victim of a mob-style hit, all the pieces seemed to fall into place. Joe Kennedy had risked the life of his child when he got Giancana involved with the election. Jack wasn’t prepared to do the bidding of criminals. Jack was too astute not to notice when his father strong-armed certain lobbies, determined to make things happen his way.

Bobby had seen a corner of the process, had recognized his father’s slick approach, the smiling gum line, the persuasive voice uttering misleading phrases as he worked to seduce Jack into leaning his way on critical issues. Vietnam was one. Joe Kennedy wanted that war. That much was clear. Joe Kennedy wanted the war against communists so that somehow Cuba would fall back under US control and profits from his interests could start flowing again. Bobby had read enough on mob holdings in Cuba to figure that his father’s investment in the island made him a bedfellow of Lansky, Meyers, Bonanno, Giancana, the very same crime families he was hunting down as Attorney General.

Getting back in bed, pressing his face against the cool Egyptian linen, didn’t help. Bobby groaned and shifted his position, flipped his pillow over and sank back down. He felt a great dread deep in his bones. However indirectly, his own father had had a hand in the assassination of his brother.

Bobby continued to toss and turn, his reved up brain keeping his weary body from regaining sleep. He had tried to disregard the tidbits of conversation he had heard all his life, but the pieces had fit together more neatly since November 22.

Why would his father first make him the Attorney General of the United States, then press for a “War on Crime,” knowing the very same criminals he owed for getting Jack elected would be the prime targets? Sitting there in the dark, the obvious answer suddenly hit hard, like a jab to the solar plexus. Of course, thought Bobby, it was so obvious! By using the unlimited resources of the government, his Attorney General’s office in particular, his father would never have to repay his debt. Joe Kennedy would save millions of dollars.

And where was his brother’s brain? Who had taken it? Some doctor paid off by the Giancana or Marcello family? With that crucial piece of evidence missing, no one could conclusively determine how many shooters were involved. It had to be more than just that Oswald guy who had Jack in their sights. Anyone looking at the old bolt-action rifle could tell it would have been impossible to squeeze off even three accurate shots from that distance in the Book Depository window. Wrong angle too. How could the American public be so gullible as to buy that line of logic?

The sky outside was dark, meaning that it was not yet six o’clock Eastern Time. Soon the sun would rise, thought Bobby, the cloak of night lifting to reveal the churning waves of the Atlantic rolling toward shore. He imagined watching their white foamy tips closeup, rising, holding high for that instant, almost frozen in time before bending slightly, curling, then crashing down, discarding the reflections of a new day. Each wave would be followed by hundreds more, a never-ending parade of power and constancy. If the first wave didn’t get you the next ten or twenty (twenty thousand...) would. Silent power until they reached the shore, small stored-up springs of energy roiling silently beneath the surface. That’s the kind of power he was after. No one would see him coming until it was too late. He’d secretly pursue the killers of his brother, then smash them, crush their faces, watch them turn blue and die.

————-

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(Chapter 24 next)