Oswald's Tale (92 page)
MR. PAUL.
No; he didn’t discuss it. He told me he was going to close down.
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Unless it was Paul who told him to. Ralph Paul, as the message bearer, could well have said: “Jack, you’ve got to close down for the next couple of days. You are going to need all your free time to find a way to bring this off.”
Posner presents evidence that would oppose such an assumption. Ruby is very emotional in the office of the
Dallas Morning News
after he first hears of the attack, and speaks already of how awful it is for Jackie Kennedy and her children. He is crying when he leaves the newspaper office. This, however, is only by Ruby’s own account to the Warren Commission: “I left the building and I went down and got my car, and I couldn’t stop crying . . .”
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But he may have been lying, particularly if he did not start crying until later that day.
In any event, he visits his sister twice that afternoon, and by then must certainly have been given the word. His sister was ill in bed, having just returned to her home a few days before from an abdominal operation, and he had gone out to shop for her.
Posner:
Ruby was back at Eva’s by 5:30 and stayed for two hours.
Eva said he returned with “enough groceries for 20 people . . . but he didn’t know what he was doing then.” He told her that he wanted to close the clubs. “And he said, ‘Listen, we are broke anyway, so I will be a broken millionaire. I am going to close for three days.’” In dire financial straits, and barely breaking even with both clubs open seven days a week, his decision to close was an important gesture . . .
But his sister Eva witnessed the real depth of his anguish, and unwittingly contributed to it. “He was sitting on this chair and crying . . . . He was sick to his stomach . . . and went into the bathroom . . . He looked terrible.”
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As she says to the Warren Commission:
MRS. GRANT.
. . . he just wasn’t himself, and truthfully, so help me, [he said] “Somebody tore my heart out,” and he says, “I didn’t even feel so bad when pops died because poppa was an old man.”
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This, she indicates, is the worst state she has ever seen him in. That he has brought more food than anyone can eat is natural. Food is life, and his life may soon be over. It is all very well to take a shot at Oswald, but what if he, Jack Ruby, is mowed down in the process?
Once he left his sister’s house, he went over to police headquarters at City Hall, where Oswald was being interrogated. He never had had trouble getting in before, and now, given the exceptional influx of newsmen, there was no difficulty at all. From 6:00
P.M.
on, he was there, expecting, but not knowing whether he would have, an opportunity to get near enough to Oswald to do the job.
Posner:
John Rutledge, the night police reporter for the
Dallas Morning News,
knew Ruby. He saw him step off the elevator, hunched between two out-of-state reporters with press identifications on their coats. “The three of them just walked past policemen, around the corner, past those cameras and lights, and on down the hall,” recalled Rutledge. The next time Rutledge saw him, he was standing outside room 317, where Oswald was being interrogated, and “he was explaining to members of the out-of-state press who everybody was that came in and out of the door . . . . There would be a thousand questions shot at him at once, and Jack would straighten them all out . . . .” Soon several detectives walked by, and one recognized him. “Hey, Jack, what are you doing here?” “I am helping all these fellows,” Ruby said, pointing to the pack of reporters . . .
Victor Robertson, a WFAA Radio reporter, also knew Ruby. He saw him approach the door to the office where Oswald was being interrogated and start to open it. “He had the door open a few inches,” recalled Robertson, “and began to step into the room, and the two officers stopped him . . . . One of them said, ‘You can’t go in there, Jack.’”
Ruby probably left police headquarters shortly after 8:30 . . .
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He had failed in his first attempt. Now he made a quick trip to his apartment, where he found George Senator, his roommate, at home. Senator later stated in an affidavit that it happened to be the “first time I ever saw tears in his eyes.”
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Then Ruby went on to his synagogue. No surprise if he was ready to pray.
Posner:
He cried openly at the synagogue. “They didn’t believe a guy like Jack would ever cry,” said his brother Hyman. “Jack never cried in his life. He is not that kind of a guy . . .”
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Yes, he will tell people, he simply cannot bear the thought of that beautiful woman, the former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, being obliged to return to Dallas and testify. You pay your money and you take your choice, but as a betting proposition—with all due respect to Jacqueline Kennedy—it must be 18 to 5 that Ruby is thinking of himself. And if it were anyone but Jacqueline Kennedy, the odds might be 99 to 1 that he is brooding about no one but himself. All he has is his life, and it is being taken away from him. A precious gem, a ruby, is about to be thrown into the crapper.
After the synagogue, he went right back to police headquarters.
Posner:
When he arrived at the third floor of the station, he encountered a uniformed officer who did not recognize him. Ruby saw several detectives he knew, shouted to them, and they helped him get inside. Once there, he said he was “carried away with the excitement of history.” Detective A. M. Eberhardt, who knew Ruby and had been at his club, was in the burglary-and-theft section when Jack “stuck his head in our door and hollered at us . . . . He came in and said hello to me, shook hands with me. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was a translator for the newspapers . . . . He said, ‘I am here as a reporter’ and he took the notebook and hit it.”
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He has taken cognizance of the situation. He has not been a vendor in ball parks and burlesque houses and a street hustler for too little: He is laying the groundwork to become indispensable to any number of reporters. He never knows when the right door will open and the opportunity will be there. This is the field of operations, and he may have a chance to try again before midnight.
Posner:
In less than half an hour, Oswald was brought out of room 317 on the way to the basement assembly room for the midnight press conference. Ruby recalled that as Oswald walked past, “I was standing about two or three feet away.”
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The challenge has to be equivalent to jumping for the first time into a quarry pool from a height of forty or fifty feet. And Ruby cannot take the step. All he has to do is pull out his gun and finish Oswald off, but he cannot make the move. It is, after all, a vertiginous leap.
He is sick at his own cowardice, even as all of us are when we fail to take that daring little jump which some higher instinct, or a bully, or a parent, or a brother, is commanding us to take.
Posner:
In his first statement to the FBI, Ruby admitted he had his .38 caliber revolver with him on Friday night (Commission Document 1252.9). Later, when he realized that carrying his pistol might be construed as evidence of premeditation, he said he did not have his gun on Friday. However, a photo of the rear of Ruby, taken in the third-floor corridor that night, shows a lump under the right rear of his jacket. If he was a mob-hired killer with a contract on Oswald, he would have shot him at the first opportunity. Certainly, any contract to kill Oswald would not have been one Ruby could fulfill at his leisure. Yet when he had the perfect opportunity, with Oswald only a couple of feet away, Ruby did not shoot him.
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Posner may lack empathy here. Just because you are told to kill Oswald doesn’t mean you can do it. Indeed, Ruby may still be looking for some way to perform the act and yet get out scot-free. That is a fantasy, but then, he is not a professional killer. What he cannot stomach is that there seems no way he will be able to follow orders without paying a prohibitive price.
In the meantime, to cut the losses to his ego, he continues networking.
MR. PAPPAS.
It was at this point that I ran into Ruby—the first time that I recall. He came up to me as I was waiting for Wade and he said . . . “Are you a reporter?” I said, “Yes.” . . . And he reached into his pocket, and he pulled out a card. It said the Carousel Club on it. And I was amazed. I didn’t know who he was or what he was. My immediate impression of him was that he was a detective. He was well dressed, nattily dressed, I imagine. [A little later] he said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “I am trying to get Henry Wade over to the telephone.” He said, “Do you want me to get him?” . . . I said, “Yes, I would like to have him over here.” And he went around the desk, over to Henry Wade on the telephone . . .
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Ruby is investing more and more of himself in a role that enables him to hang around the third floor, waiting to pick up a better opportunity. It helps that he loves the role. As long as he can live within it, he can, like an actor, feel vital and alive; he can keep the dread of his real mission apart from himself.
Once he leaves police headquarters, however, he has to pass through a
Walpurgisnacht.
He wanders back and forth to newspaper offices and takes sandwiches to the people working at KLIF. In between, he spends an hour in a car talking to a couple, Kathy Kay, a former stripper at the Carousel, and Harry Olsen,
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a policeman, and all three are talking in Olsen’s car about how terrible it must be for Jackie Kennedy. The stripper begins to weep and the men join her with a few tears. In the moil and meld of such mutual compassion for Jackie Kennedy, all three feel respect for each other, deep respect, and each expresses it so.
After more wandering through the Dallas night, Ruby goes back to his apartment and wakes up George Senator.
MR. SENATOR.
Yes; it was different. It was different; the way he looked at you . . .
MR. HUBERT.
Had you seen him in that condition before?
MR. SENATOR.
. . . I have seen him hollering, things like I told you in the past, but this here, he had sort of a stare look in his eye . . .
MR. GRIFFIN.
I didn’t catch that. What kind of a look?
MR. SENATOR.
A stare look; I don’t know . . . I don’t know how to put it into words.
MR. HUBERT.
But it was different from anything you had ever seen on Jack Ruby before?
MR. SENATOR.
Yes.
MR. HUBERT.
And it was noticeably so?
MR. SENATOR.
Oh yes.
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Ruby then calls up his handyman, Larry Crafard, at the Carousel, wakes him up, and drives the youth and George Senator out to a billboard in Dallas that says:
IMPEACH EARL WARREN.
Ruby had been very upset earlier that day when he saw an ad, taken out by a man named Bernard Weissman, in the
Dallas Morning News
alluding to Jack Kennedy as a Communist supporter. He is now convinced that the John Birch Society invented the name Weissman in order to blame the Jews.
Now he, Jack Ruby, will soon be one of the Jews being blamed for the death of Kennedy, even if he will only be blamed in the secondary sense that
they
have selected him to be the one to kill Oswald. So Jack Ruby, a Jew, will pay the second heaviest price. He is a scapegoat, just like the Jews in the Holocaust, and just like all Jews who will soon be blamed for the Weissman ad.
In his distraught state, he takes photographs of the billboard
—IMPEACH EARL WARREN—
as if this is not only evidential material of some sort but may even prove sacramental for someone in his position. If he is acting a little loopy, well, very few hit men out on a mission are reputed to comport themselves as one hundred percent sane.
It is daybreak on Saturday before he drops Larry Crafard off at the Carousel and the handyman promptly goes back to sleep on the sofa in Ruby’s office.
Crafard has his revenge, however, by telephoning Ruby at eight-thirty in the morning. There is no food for the dogs at the Carousel, he tells his boss. Ruby flies into a rage for having had his sleep disturbed and proceeds to chew Crafard out as he never has before. Indeed, his language is so personal that Crafard packs his stuff and takes off. He is angry enough or uneasy enough to hitchhike back home to Michigan.
Somewhat later that morning, we learn from Posner,
Ruby turned on the television and saw a memorial service broadcast from New York. “I watched Rabbi Seligman,” he recalled. “He eulogized that here is a man [JFK] that fought in every battle, went to every country, and had to come back to his own country to be shot in the back. That created a tremendous emotional feeling for me, the way he said that.”
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Doubtless, Ruby is trying to find impressive reasons for his intended act. He is too big a man to do such a job just because the Mob has ordered it; no, he is potentially an honorable Jewish patriot who wishes to redress a wrong in the universe. We have to recognize that Ruby, now that he has been given his assignment, does not have to justify it with Mob motivations or by Mob professionalism—“I’m there to do the hit, that’s it”—no, Ruby, being an amateur, would look to ennoble his task.
In any case, he seems to move without large purpose until mid-afternoon, when he goes to Dealey Plaza. As he sees the multitude of wreaths laid out for Jack Kennedy in the plaza, he weeps in his car, or so he testifies.
Posner:
When he left Dealey Plaza, it appears Ruby once more went to the third floor of the police headquarters, expecting an Oswald transfer that never took place. He later denied being there Saturday because, again, he probably feared it might be interpreted as evidence of premeditation. The Warren Commission said it “reached no firm conclusion as to whether or not Ruby visited the Dallas Police Department on Saturday.” Yet credible eyewitness testimony shows he was there.
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