Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [131]
“Were you a real SEAL?” one of the boys asked. I told a few of my favorite tales from my frogman days, and pointed out to them that their grand-uncle JFK had started the Navy SEALs. Actually, Robert said, it was his father who was the impetus, because he loved all that kind of covert action stuff. Somehow I got inspired to show him and the boys the tattoos on my chest. Which prompted Robert to show one of his own, on the upper thigh. We all thought that was pretty damned funny.
“Okay,” he said as we munched away on some delicious fajitas that Mary had cooked up, “we’d better head down to the dive shop or we’ll be late.”
Along with the oldest boy, Conor, we left the Pedregal and headed for the Cabo marina. As we neared the parking lot, Robert turned to me and asked: “What were your numbers in Minnesota?” This was politics talk, and I knew exactly what he meant.
“My numbers? Oh, the power-brokers try to pretend I didn’t happen. To them, those four years were just a bad dream.” Robert cracked up laughing. “But my numbers were 73 [percent approval] when I came in, and 45 was the lowest they went.”
“Not bad,” Robert said, and grinned at me.
We were walking toward the dive shop when I raised the fact that we’d both had private visits with Fidel Castro. “I was with him for an hour,” I said.
“We were with him for four-and-a-half hours,” Robert said, “starting at one o’clock in the morning!”
“Oh, well, he met with me at noon,” I said. Looking back on it, there may have been a little friendly competition between us over our visits with Fidel.
The dive shop wanted to see my certification. I brought out my Navy Underwater Demolition Team card. “That will do,” the man checking us in said.
So they gave us our gear, and a female guide who spoke good English, and we boarded a boat bound for Pelican Rock. We put on our tanks and went overboard. The plan was that we’d be down for about forty-five minutes, at depths as much as eighty feet. It was incredible down there. The tropical fish were abundant and beautiful. At one point, a moray eel came out from under a rock and momentarily came right toward me. That was exciting.
I was first to resurface. When Robert and Conor soon joined me on board, Robert said: “That was kind of existential.” He was referring to our having gone right to the edge of the continental shelf and watched sand pour over the abyss like a waterfall.
As we all returned to shore again, I was telling a few tales about my teaching fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
“What did you teach?” Conor asked.
“Third-party politics,” I told him, and added: “Something your dad doesn’t know anything about!” Robert cracked up laughing again.
Driving back to the house, he started asking me some more personal questions. About where I lived in Minnesota and, when I said it was on a lake, whether I fished. I told him the story of Terry catching the bigger muskie. “What’s your wife like?” Robert asked. I explained that Terry’s health was the biggest reason that I hadn’t run for governor again, but that her condition had improved immensely since we came to Baja.
Once back inside at the round table, Robert wanted to know more about my visit with Castro. So I related the whole story, including my being tailed by the CIA in Havana. Robert asked Finn, the nine-year-old, if he remembered seeing Predator. “The governor was the guy with the Gatling gun,” he told the boy, and Finn grinned and said, “Oh yeah.”
This got us talking about Arnold and his wife, Maria Shriver. Robert, in fact, had been instrumental in forging Schwarzenegger’s forward-thinking environmental policies since he became California’s governor. Mary recalled how Arnold and Maria had first met at Ethel Kennedy’s tennis tournament in New York. They all knew something was up when Maria was spotted dashing for a seat next to him on the private