BLACK PRESIDENT, CHAPTER 7. Leon has an accident (the kind that makes U feel stupid...), and Joe Kennedy conceals much from his Presidential son.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Leon couldn’t believe it. The radiator cap had flown all the way up on top of the garage roof. He had tried to nudge the hot cap open with a stick and the overheated radiator had shot the cap sky high. That was the funny part of the day. While Woofy and Sam watched from the unused pump stations, and Sinclair remained inside guarding the cash register, Leon stood up on a couple of old oil drums along the side of the building and shimmied himself up onto the metal gutter. His friends tried to watch Leon’s progress, but the late afternoon glare off the metal roof hampered visibility. By the time Leon had pulled himself onto the roof he noticed small razor-like cuts on both hands.

“Shit,” he muttered, as he clumsily fumbled with the tab on his jacket, finally getting a grip and unzipping it to expose the clean cloth of his t-shirt upon which he could daub his hands, put pressure against the flow of blood. Turning his head back to the business at hand, he caught sight of the radiator cap and started crawling up the steep incline toward the flat center section where it had landed. When he was in range he reached out and grabbed it, checking it for damage. Satisfied that there was none, he slid it into his deep pants pocket. One of the old men down below made a loud comment, something about “popping champagne cork.” Leon broke into a smile and lifted his hand up off the slick surface to punch a high-five sign in the air, which was all it took to start him sliding.

“FU.....CK!” Leon shouted, as he careened toward the edge. He caught sight of a blinding sun as he rocketed off the roof, his right heel catching the top of one of the oil drums on his way down. Everything went crashing around him as he spun toward the ground, landing hard on his back while his feet bounced off the wire fence alongside a pile of discarded oil cans and rags. It took a moment to recover from the shock of the fall.

When Leon opened his eyes he saw the faces of his tribe close- up, their sad, scared expressions. When he tried to move he felt some pain in his neck and quickly stopped. Someone, maybe old Sam, said they had called an ambulance...a doctor.

“Damn,” Leon groaned. “I...screwed up.”

The old fellows cautioned him to stay as still as possible for the next few minutes, worried that their friend might have broken his neck. As he lay there in the dirt and debris, his mind seemed to run at half-speed, slowly re-creating the last few minutes. He berated himself for allowing the radiator to launch the cap in the first place – he should have been more cautious right from the get-go, let the radiator hiss more, vent its steam and cool down. Why didn’t he just throw a thick rag over the cap, leave it, and tend to other chores around the station? Why did he have to keep fussing with it like that? And the business with the stick was just plain dumb. You don’t hit a radiator cap with a stick, don’t make a game out of work. That was kid’s stuff, trying to get it to explode. Are you a kid? NO! Then why did you do it? Boredom. Really? Is it boring to earn a living? Is it boring to have a beautiful wife? Is it boring to become a father? Was it boring to be a man?

Secondly, what the hell was he doing up on a roof? Well, someone had to get the thing down, didn’t they? He was the likeliest candidate. Should he have sent Woofy up there? No...of course not...he’s seventy-two years old. Maybe older.

Leon’s friends walked back and forth, watching him with worried looks while they waited for help to arrive. And Leon lay perfectly still, listening to the monologue playing in his head. You’re even older than your father was when Ma had you, that voice reminded him now .

Remember him when you were growing up? Remember how scared you were of being around him. How old he looked. And how your mother acted scared of him too. You took turns avoiding contact with him. He was five years younger than you are now! Old people were strange and dangerous. And now you’re one of them yourself! It snuck up on you, baby. You didn’t even see it coming.

A few minutes before the medics arrived, Leon looked to his right side and noticed a sharp metal spike protruding about eight inches up from the ground. It was an ugly and lethal-looking thing, rusty and sharp at its point, a mere twenty inches or so from where he’d fallen. Dirt and vines clung to its sides making it almost invisible, some green enamel paint still showing through at ground level. If his trajectory had taken him over just a couple of feet, just a little to the left, his head would have been split open like a watermelon. The thought of this near-impalement set his body into an uncontrollable, shivering spasm.

***

April 20, 1961

Sometime around 4 AM President Kennedy met Pierre Salinger and his appointments secretary, Ken O’Donnell in the Oval office. Robert Kennedy and Allen Dulles were also in the room. But midway through a sentence the President walked out, just opened the doors to the Rose garden and disappeared. For an hour he wandered around in the wet grass, still dressed in his white shirt and tails from the White House reception honoring members of Congress. His most surreal moments of the last three days of international drama had been when the White House orchestra had struck up the song, “Mr. Wonderful” as he and Jackie appeared at the top steps of the front entrance. After mingling graciously with guests, he had slipped away around midnight to hear updates.

The CIA chiefs were still begging for over-flights. Dick Bissell and Admiral Arleigh Burke still insisted that the war could be won. But it couldn’t. Wrong, thought Kennedy. They’d gotten hundreds of Cuban exiles and numerous CIA operatives either killed or captured, which, in most cases, simply meant tortured, punishments too gruesome to imagine. At the very moment that he was being serenaded at the party, heroic men were being subjected to unimaginable horrors. Hideous images invaded his tired mind. He’d been set up, misled...but he was responsible. Mr. Wonderful.

Outside, in the garden, Kennedy felt his dress shoes getting wetter and wetter, but cared little about it. Passing a line of rose bushes full of red buds ready to burst open he wondered just how far could a man be stretched and still function as a sane human being. He placed his index finger on one side of the stem, right up to a thorn, and pressed hard from the other side with his thumb as the skin pulled tauter and tauter. Finally the thorn broke through, puncturing his fingertip, a small drop of blood bursting out one side. A small wound, tiny, really. Not life threatening. A small, stinging pain. And what about the big pricks? The really big ones? The human kind? They had to be dealt with swiftly and decisively. That morning he decided to remove all the men responsible for the Bay of Pigs miscalculation, even if it meant dismantling the entire CIA.

With the worst of timing, Rose Kennedy, the mother of the President, had upset her son with her constant complaining about having to use a footstool to climb the high sides of the Lincoln bed to get a night’s rest. And the phone call from his father Joe had been particularly upsetting.

“Hi son,” Joe Kennedy had spoke into the poolside phone, one arm pressed across his knees to keep the towel from blowing off his lap. “Just didn’t think Castro would have been that well organized. How you holding up?”

While his son rambled on about his mother, the lack of privacy in the White House, bad press and so on, Kennedy Senior stopped listening and went automatic pilot, trying to sort out what had happened in Cuba. The strings to the past were so myriad that to untangle them required that he make a careful, systematic review of recent events: General Somoza’s brother Anastasio had been so gracious at their meeting, as promises were made, backed by intel from the CIA, that the Bay of Pigs was finally going to move forward. They had clinked glasses, hugged, kissed on both cheeks, sealed the pact. Nicaragua would be ever indebted for the eradication of Cuban dominance South of the Pecos, Joe was told. And based on that, the US could rely on “real friendship.”

He had even thought he’d get a call from old General Ike this time, with some well-wishes and compliments for “a job well done” regarding Cuba. The call he had really looked forward to (but knew not to expect) was that one from the Pope, slobbering all over himself, wetting his white tunic in praise of Mr. Joe Kennedy, Esq., who would have removed the Catholic children from Cuba, got them all relocated and reeducated in Miami after the invasion. Maybe that was where the cookie started crumbling. Castro somehow read the tea leaves and pulled every single kid out of tobacco fields to strap on a rifle and sit on the beach.

“Yes, son.”
“You had some real incompetents there.”

“Y es.”
“Should have known....”
Joe thought back to how his wife, Rose, had struck up a friendship with those Wrightsmans, and that daughter of theirs, Charlene. And of course that was right up Jackie’s alley, so she also hung out with the summer set, started shopping with the Wrightsmans, met Charlene’s husband Igor Cassini, and not much later got introduced to his brother Oleg, who then, of course, became Jackie’s premiere clothing designer. So far so good. Then the Wrightsman’s friend, Allen Dulles, came to visit, and being head of the CIA, linked old Joe to South American interests in a way that was clearly prescient. Joe suddenly had access to a fortune teller -- and more! Dulles was capable, when the mood (and martinis) struck him, of adding predictability to the flow of historical events. An uprising here, a coup there, were all the business of the CIA. It was ideal to hear about things before they happened, thought Joe, and make business deals accordingly.

After that, when Joe Kennedy had taken Dulles to the links, Dulles told him Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic was likely to fall behind a Castro-induced coup. It was that damn “People-thing,” as Kennedy Sr. liked to call it when things went against his interests. To finish up, he decided to list the facts as he understood them, in shorthand, trying to anticipate the outcome. Pulling a small palm-sized notepad and pen from his jacket pocket, he wrote the entries in a fast scrawl:

Trujillo’s son Porfirio Rubirosa --my and Igor Cassini’s friend. Good start. But possible coup by the communists. Can Trujillo be replaced (?) without damage to interests. More acceptable moderate to lead Dominican Repub. (?) -- Jack & CIA for that.Main damage--sugar holdings in Cuba. Told Igor Cassini (same PR co. as Trujillo in NY.) to get down to D. R. and talk sense to Trujillo. CIA determined to use force against Trujillo, and Allen Dulles swayed in that direction...

With Trujillo deposed, the house of cards would collapse. Kennedy followed out the logic in a few more sentences. Igor blackened by the Trujillo connection. Oleg ruined too. Cassini fashions off-limits to Jackie/no White House access. Jayne Wrightsman/Charlene, removed from society “A" list = tension w/ Dulles = no golf = no classified info.

About the most incomprehensible moment for Joe Kennedy in the last month had been reading the New York Times article of April 6th, which described how six thousand Cuban exiles had trained for nine months and were ready to hit Cuban beaches in an assault. Didn’t the words TOP SECRET mean anything anymore? Who would have leaked the figures? And when he heard how Adlai Stevenson had begged the President not to use American B-26 planes (Stevenson, Ambassador of the UN, had pledged that America should have “no direct involvement”), Joe had smelled disaster. That, plus the note delivered to Rose two weeks before Bay of Pigs, threatening the kidnapping of John and Caroline if the Cuban invasion occurred. That had really shaken the entire family. Joe Kennedy gulped down the last of his gin.

“Yes, son, I’ll look into it...
“No...no, it’s going to come around.
“Yes...new people, but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwa...
“Not stupid...

“No, Allen is smart. Just bad links and sources. “That can be cleaned up...
“OK, let’s talk later tonight.
“I will.

“Love you too, son.”

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(Chapter 8 next)