The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [404]
“Wait just a minute,” Kennedy interrupted. “My father is calling. He isn’t able to talk much, but every now and then he tries to make a call.” It did not matter who sat with him, or what issue consumed him, when his father rang, his son took the call.
“He can’t speak … Hello there, how are you…. How are you getting along up there…. How is everything?”
Joe spoke scarcely more than grunts, but Kennedy imagined a dialogue, willing his father into verbal coherence. “I’m sitting here with General MacArthur, and he wants to be remembered to you…. How are you getting on up there? Well, I’ll be up the weekend after next, and we’ll go out in the boat … good. Let me talk to Ann.”
Ann Gargan had become Joe’s keeper, jealously protective of any who got too near, rationalizing whatever she did in the name of her charge’s health. Gargan took over the phone. “He seemed a little upset,” Kennedy said. “Tell him I’ll call tomorrow. All right. Good.”
Kennedy hung up the phone. “What’s going on up there?” he asked more to himself than to MacArthur. There was a pain that the president felt over his crippled father that nothing could assuage. Joe had taught him that everything could be fixed, everything, it turned out, but his father’s condition. On one of his weekend trips to Hyannis Port that fall, he had learned that his father had a seizure when his mother came waltzing into the room showing off an exquisite gown she was planning to wear to a ball. Rose had apparently only been trying to get her husband to nod his approval, but her visit had affected him terribly.
Kennedy had hurried up to Joe’s room when he arrived in Hyannis Port. He was incredulous when he discovered as he walked into the upstairs bedroom that no one was there, no doctor, no nurse, no maid, no one. The president was not a man who shouted often, but he had shouted that afternoon, his screams of anger and disbelief sounding through the house.
“He’s a great fighter,” MacArthur said, an obligatory aside.
“Yeah, he is, but he can’t speak anything, so he gets …” the president’s words drifted into the air.
“The South Korean army should have several so-called grand maneuvers,” MacArthur began again, segueing back into his monologue.
At the same time that Kennedy was listening to MacArthur, he faced the continued dilemma of Cuba. A year and a half into his administration, Castro was as ensconced in Cuba as the day the president had taken office. Despite all the efforts at sabotage and subversion and attempts to isolate the Caribbean island from the world, General Maxwell Taylor had to admit to Kennedy that the American government was unable to “assess accurately the internal conditions” and that there was “no likelihood of an overthrow of the government by internal means and without the direct use of U.S. military force.”
That analysis could have led to a self-critical evaluation of Operation Mongoose and America’s diplomatic strategy and a gut-wrenching acceptance of the possibility that Castro’s Cuba might be there for years. Instead, the administration, following Bobby’s lead and with the president’s approval, went forward with phase two of Operation Mongoose. Gone was the heady supposition that the CIA’s activities would lead to the overthrow of the Communist leader. Nonetheless, the scale of covert actions would be increased and the “noise level” would rise to