The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [474]
As Kennedy went on, John Jr. entered the room, his entrance signaled by a high-pitched squeal. “Say hi,” the president said.
“Hello,” John Jr. said, speaking into the microphone. “Naughty naughty, Daddy.” An endearing little boy to whom the White House was a great castle, John Jr. would be three years old later in the month and he already had the public presence of a child actor.
“Why do the leaves fall?” Kennedy asked, turning this moment into a learning exercise both humble and poetic.
“Because,” John said.
“Why does the snow come on the ground?” “Because.”
“Why do the leaves turn green?” “Because.”
“And when do we go to the Cape?” the president asked. Hyannis Port was the scene of the most profound and joyous moments of his family life, first as a child and now as a father.
“Summer,” John Jr. answered, though summer was far away.
When John Jr. left his father, he let out a whooping laugh. It was not like the laughs the president usually heard, calculated gestures modulated by what seemed to please him. This was a loving, taunting, wondrous laugh from a son who saw only the happiness of the world.
As his son left, Kennedy turned finally to the most painful matter of all, and he spoke of it without a hint of emotion:
I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nonetheless over a ten-year period he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether … public opinion in Saigon, the intellectuals, students, etc., will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not-too-distant future.
While Kennedy looked eastward toward the jungles of Vietnam and fretted about his nation’s future there, Bobby continued to be consumed with Cuba. He was so disdainful of the structures of government that he had gone far toward privatizing the American policy. As attorney general of the United States, he had no institutional right to claim sovereignty over America’s Cuban policy. But he was the force behind the U.S.-funded “autonomous anti-Castro groups.”
There were already important bases in Costa Rica and Nicaragua run by Manuel Artime, and a new operation headed by another exile leader, Manolo Ray, was beginning to establish its working base in Central America. The leaders were the attorney general’s friends, comrades he invited to his home, and against them on the island stood implacable enemies. By November 1963, they were ready to escalate their attacks. “Bob Kennedy, it seems, was the person who was pushing them [the CIA] and making them do it,” recalled Rafael Quintero, the deputy leader. “I mean, [he] put the Cubans in charge of their own operation—but they definitely didn’t want to do it.”
At the same time the CIA was preparing a series of dramatic initiatives of its own. That November a group of Cuban exiles led by an American CIA operative, Bradley Earl Ayers, trained for an operation against the major Cuban oil refinery in Matanzas Province. It was an ambitious enterprise in which teams of commandos were to sail from Florida on two fishing trawlers. The first group of commandos would make shore in Cuba in a small boat, to prepare the way for their comrades carrying rocket launchers. One of the men would climb the fence surrounding the refinery and enter a tin shed where a lone watchman