Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “I am proud that I’m a Jew,” Ruby says, “and ashamed that anyone named Weissman would criticize the president.”1504

  Ruby says that he also read in the newspapers about Oswald’s forthcoming trial and he thought that Jackie Kennedy would have to return to Dallas for the trial and he did not think she should have to undergo that ordeal.

  “I saw Bobby Kennedy on television,” Ruby says, “and I thought about how much he must have loved his brother. I read articles about the president’s children and thought of the sorrow that had been brought upon them. I thought about how Bobby Kennedy would like to do something to Oswald but couldn’t. I knew the Dallas police were also helpless to do anything to Oswald.”1505

  Ruby tells the FBI agent that he entered the basement from the Main Street side, but says he did not wish to say how he got into the basement (which he had already told Detective Clardy and Sergeant Dean).

  Ruby says he’s proud of the city of Dallas, thinks it is the greatest city in the world, particularly the way it’s handled racial problems.

  “I wanted to be something,” Ruby says, “something better than anyone else.”1506

  5:00 p.m.

  With the murder of Oswald, the Secret Service knew that it needed a more secure place for the Oswald family (Marguerite, Marina, Lee and Marina’s two children, and Robert) to stay, and the Service chooses the Inn of the Six Flags, a large modern motel in Arlington, Texas. It becomes like an armed camp. Secret Service men, carrying M-1 carbines, and Arlington police officers patrol the perimeter around two adjoining rooms, 423 and 424, in the most isolated part of the inn. A few months out of the year the inn is overrun with people eager to see the “Six Flags over Texas” exhibition, but at this time of the year the place is nearly deserted. It becomes the perfect spot to keep the Oswalds under Secret Service protection. More Secret Service men turn up at the motel every few minutes, flying in from Washington, D.C., California, and other parts of the United States. It seems that the motel is serving as some sort of regional headquarters.

  “All we need is to have one more of you killed,” an agent tells Robert Oswald.

  Although at least some of the agents have been thinking they would be turning the operation over to the FBI at any moment, it doesn’t turn out that way. After a telephone call from Secret Service inspector Kelley, Agent Howard tells Robert Oswald, “It looks like we are going to take care of Marina and your mother.” But Howard adds that “it seems to me that they’re overlooking you.” Mike Howard checks back with Inspector Kelley, who apparently consults with a higher authority in Washington. Later, Howard tells Robert, “They’ve talked to the president and he has expressed concern for you and the entire family. So has the attorney general.”

  Robert is struck by the reference to Robert Kennedy. Is the attorney general concerned simply because he is the nation’s top law enforcement official, or can Kennedy, out of the depths of his own grief, have fashioned some genuine personal concern for the mother, wife, brother, and children of the man accused of assassinating his brother?1507

  6:00 p.m.

  The eleventh-floor offices at the Dallas headquarters of the FBI in the Santa Fe Building at 1114 Commerce Street (just two blocks west of Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club) are quiet. Most of the stenographers and clerks, having worked late on Friday and Saturday, are off duty. Jim Hosty is filled with foreboding when Ken Howe, his supervisor, stops at his desk to tell him that both of them have been summoned by the special agent-in-charge, Gordon Shanklin. They make their way to the twelfth floor together.

  Shanklin, it seems to Hosty, is not bearing up well under the strain. Working on as little sleep as his men and under far more pressure, Shanklin is additionally fielding repeated calls from Hoover and other top bureau officials in Washington. Hosty knows that every aspect of the bureau’s conduct concerning the Oswald file is under intense scrutiny and that both he and Agent John Fain, who handled parts of the case earlier, are in the hot seat.

  Now, to make things worse, the bureau has turned up some newspaper articles from a couple of years ago, interviews with Marguerite Oswald when she visited Washington, D.C., to buttonhole lawmakers about her son, then living in Russia. Even then, she was telling anyone who would listen that Lee was an FBI agent. There isn’t a scrap of evidence in the files that points to any FBI involvement with the defector, but that will hardly mollify J. Edgar Hoover, whose jealous guardianship of the bureau’s reputation is a watchword in the FBI.

  The interview is short, tense, and unpleasant. Shanklin, standing behind his desk, does not invite Hosty to be seated. Looking over his shoulder, Hosty sees that Howe is standing in the doorway, watching. Shanklin reaches down into a desk drawer and comes up with Oswald’s scrawled threat and the memorandum Hosty filed on it.

  “Jim, now that Oswald is dead, there clearly isn’t going to be a trial,” Shanklin says, handing the note and memorandum to Hosty. “Here, take these. I don’t ever want to see them again.”

  Hosty looks perplexed and Shanklin can read it in an instant.

  “Look, I know this note proves nothing,” Shanklin says, cigarette smoke billowing from his nostrils, “but you know how people will second-guess us.”

  Hosty knows that those “people” are Hoover and his assistants, whose Monday-morning quarterbacking is legendary within the bureau. Hosty begins tearing up the Oswald note on the spot.

  “No! Not here!” Shanklin practically screams. “I told you, I don’t want to see them again. Now get them out of here.”

  Hosty walks back to his desk. There’s a shredder in the office, but Hosty realizes he can’t do it there—he has to be alone. He walks out to the stairwell, down a half flight of stairs, and into an empty men’s room. He continues tearing up the note, and his accompanying memorandum, into tiny bits and tosses them into the toilet.

  Two short paragraphs, poorly written by a half-wit no one could have taken seriously, have become dynamite. To some, they might prove that the FBI knew, or should have known, two weeks before the president’s visit, that Lee Harvey Oswald was potentially dangerous, and should have notified the Secret Service so Oswald could have been put on the Secret Service’s “risk list,” or security index, of the loonies who are detained or watched when the nation’s chief executive comes to town. Worse yet, someone might even conclude that it was Oswald’s rage at the FBI that tipped him over the edge and sent him off to murder the president.

  Hosty flushes the toilet and watches the swirling water suck the fragments of paper into the oblivion of the Dallas sewer system. He fears his career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation is going down with them.1508

  7:30 p.m.

  Robert Oswald gets a call from Parkland Hospital from somebody who wants to know what is to be done with his brother’s body. In the rush of the afternoon, Robert hasn’t even thought about funeral arrangements. He turns to Secret Service agent Mike Howard for help. Howard puts in a call to a friend, Paul J. Groody, the director of the Miller Funeral Home. In a moment, Groody is on the line and asks Robert, “What kind of casket do you want?”

  Robert isn’t interested in an elaborate casket, but he does want an outer vault that will be safe from vandals. The funeral director promises to take care of everything as soon as the hospital releases the body to him.1509

  Official Washington is increasingly concerned about the wave of paranoia building up in the country as the inevitable result of the fragmentary and halting flow of information from Dallas about the assassination. The media in the United States have been remarkably reluctant to speculate about the possibility of involvement of others in an assassination plot, but the Europeans have not been so circumspect. Speculation in the foreign press is running wild, partly because unlike the United States, European leaders are rarely assassinated by lone gunmen, conspiracies being the norm.

  Communist Party newspapers in France, unable to cope with the idea that the killing of Oswald by Ruby is without broader political significance, are convinced th
at Oswald was eliminated in the execution of a plot. Even the staid Le Monde, France’s journal of record, hit the streets in the early afternoon with an entire page devoted to “serious doubts” about the Dallas police and to what the two killings appear to reveal about American society. That question is of peculiar interest to Europeans, who, although they rarely question America’s assumed right to lead the world, are often uneasy about it.

  “What’s happening, what’s going on?” a bewildered diplomat asks as he leaves the requiem mass for the president in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. “This isn’t the America we look to for leadership. How do we answer our anti-American radicals now?”

  The state of Texas and the Dallas police have already emerged as the villains. Le Monde notes that Texas, “rich and conservative,” is a state that largely financed the late Senator Joe McCarthy. Reporting on the pamphlets distributed in Dallas accusing the president of treason, the paper says this indicates “the enormous publicity Americans give to the most fantastic accusations.” The French want to know how Jack Ruby ever got close enough to kill Lee Oswald, and they frankly do not believe the story given by the Dallas police.

  The English are putting the same questions to the American press: Is there a plot in which the Dallas police are involved, and is lawlessness taking over in the United States? Americans in London—or anywhere else, for that matter—have no easy answers, but there is a general feeling that the evidence against Oswald must be brought out fully and very quickly.

  The Justice Department is moving swiftly to do just that, insofar as it is able. Although there is “strong evidence” for Oswald’s guilt, a department spokesman assures the press that “the case will not be closed until all the facts are in and every lead followed up.”1510

  Premier Fidel Castro, one head of state who was conspicuously not invited to the funeral, airs his views on the assassination in a two-hour televised address to the Cuban people. He calls Kennedy’s murder “grave and bad news from the political point of view.” He notes that it could change U.S. foreign policy regarding Cuba from bad to worse.

  “As Marxist-Leninists,” he says, “we recognize that the role of a man is small and relative in society. The disappearance of a system would always cause us joy. But the death of a man, although this man is an enemy, does not have to cause us joy. We always bow with respect in front of death. The death of President Kennedy can have very negative repercussions for the interests of our country, but in this case it is not the question of our interest, but of the interest of the whole world.” Noting that President Johnson has assumed office without the moral authority of having been elected, Castro fears the ascendancy of reactionary forces.1511

  9:25 p.m.

  Around five o’clock, Dallas district attorney Henry Wade awakened from a brief nap and heard a national television commentator accuse the Dallas police of letting Oswald be killed, and giving Wade hell for saying the “case was closed,” even though Wade knows he never made any public statement to this effect. Three hours later, Wade makes his way to police headquarters on the third floor and meets with the police brass; everyone except Chief Curry, who is not available.

  “People are saying that you had the wrong man and you led Oswald out there to have him killed, intentionally,” Wade tells them. “Somebody ought to go out on television and lay out the evidence that you have on Oswald and tell them everything.” Wade is told that Curry would have to approve. Meanwhile, determined to see that it is done, the district attorney walks down the hall to Captain Fritz’s office, grabs a notepad and pencil, and begins listing from memory the crucial pieces of evidence against Oswald. It isn’t long before the police brass get a hold of Curry and he tells them no statement will be made like this by the Dallas police, that he had given his word to the FBI that he would no longer speak out on the evidence.

  “Look, you’re the ones that know about this,” Wade pleads. “If you’ve got the right man, the American people ought to know. You can’t use the evidence anyway, he’s dead. You can’t try him. Tell the public what you have on Oswald. I think you’ve got a good case.”

  Wade’s pleas have no effect on Curry’s decision; the police will not make a statement and that’s final. When Wade asks police to give him details about the evidence so he can present it to the press, they refuse to cooperate. Stubbornly, and foolishly, Wade decides to face the press anyway.1512

  “The purpose of this news conference,” Wade tells an assembly room full of reporters and cameramen, “is to detail some of the evidence against Oswald for the assassination of the president.”

  Pulling from his memory and a page of hastily jotted notes, the district attorney offers a hodge-podge of fact and misinformation that ultimately causes more harm than any good he intended.

  “As all of you know,” he says, “we have a number of witnesses that saw the person with the gun on the sixth floor of the Book Store Building.” (Many took Wade to mean that Oswald was seen by a number of witnesses; however, the only eyewitness who claimed to have seen Oswald, specifically, was Howard Brennan.) Among many accurate statements in his recitation of the evidence against Oswald, Wade went on to make about nine or ten misstatements, including, for example, telling the press that right after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Oswald’s name and description had gone out over the police radio (only his description had); that Oswald told the bus driver the president had been shot (he didn’t); that the Tippit killing took place a block or two from Oswald’s rooming house (the distance was nine-tenths of a mile); and that three witnesses saw Oswald shoot Tippit three times (the evidence thus far is that Tippit was shot four times, and only one witness, at that time, was known to have actually seen Oswald kill Tippit).

  After running through the list of evidence, Wade fields questions from the reporters.

  “Do you know whether Oswald’s been recognized as a patron of Ruby’s nightclub here?” a reporter asks.

  “I don’t know that,” Wade replies.

  “Do you know of any connection between Mr. Ruby and—?”

  “I know of none,” Wade shoots back.

  “Are you investigating reports that [Oswald] might have been slain because Ruby might have feared he would implicate him in something?”

  “The police are making an investigation of that murder,” Wade says. “I don’t know anything about that. Although charges have been filed, it will be presented to the grand jury on Ruby immediately within the next week and it’ll probably be tried around the middle of January.”

  “Has the district attorney’s office closed its investigation of the assassination of the president?”

  “No, sir,” Wade replies. “The investigation will continue on…with reference to any possible accomplice or—that assisted him in it.”

  “Do you have any suspicions now that there were?” someone asks.

  “I have no concrete evidence nor suspicions at present,” Wade says.

  “Would you be willing to say in view of all this evidence that it is now beyond a reasonable doubt at all that Oswald was the killer of President Kennedy?”

  “I would say that without any doubt he’s the killer,” Wade answers firmly.

  “That case is closed in your mind?” a reporter asks.

  “As far as Oswald is concerned, yes,” Wade tells them, asserting the very thing that angered Wade when a national television commentator accused Wade of saying it.

  “What do you think Oswald’s motive was?” someone asks.

  “Don’t—can’t answer that,” Wade says.

  “How would you evaluate the work of the Dallas police in investigating the death of the president?” a reporter asks.

  “I think the Dallas police did an excellent job on this,” Wade replies, “and before midnight on [the day Kennedy] was killed had the man in custody and had sufficient evidence to convict him.”

  “Is there any doubt in your mind that if Oswald was tried that you would have him convicted by a jury? With the evidence you hav
e?”

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that we would have convicted him,” Wade replies. “But, of course, you never know what—we’ve had lots of people we thought—but somebody might hang the jury or something, but there’s no question in my—”

  “As far as you are concerned,” a reporter interrupts, “the evidence you gave us, you could have convicted him?”

  “I’ve sent people to the electric chair on less,” Wade replies.

  Speaking of the electric chair, a reporter wants to know if Wade will also seek the death penalty against Ruby. Wade says, “Yes.”1513

  By the time the district attorney gets back to the third-floor police administrative offices, there is a phone call from an FBI inspector, asking him, “Please don’t say anything more about the case.”1514

  9:45 p.m.

  Robert Oswald finds that getting his brother’s body released from the morgue for burial turns out to be more difficult than it sounds. Parkland Hospital refuses to release the body merely on the basis of a phone call, even from a Secret Service agent. Eventually a procedure is worked out. Parkland will give a message to the Dallas police with a secret password. The police will pass it on to the Secret Service at the Six Flags motel. They will tell Robert, and Robert will call the hospital, saying only the password to the person who answers. When the time comes, Robert places the call to Parkland. Administrator Bob Struwe answers the phone.

  “Malcolm,” Robert says.

  “All right,” Struwe replies and hangs up.

  The password was the first name of one of the emergency room surgeons, Malcolm Perry, who tried so hard to save the lives of both Jack Kennedy and Lee Oswald.1515

  All through the night, the three national TV networks silently cover the endless procession of mourners past the president’s bier, only making periodic observations, such as that the music in the background in the rotunda is Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, second movement—a dirge; of the changing of the guard every half hour; of Washington police announcing that mourners were still lined up for three miles, five abreast; the temperature dipping to thirty-two degrees, freezing, at 3:15 a.m. EST; Jersey Joe Wolcott, former heavyweight champion of the world, filing past the coffin; and so on.1516 The president’s body would lie in state for eighteen hours. By the time the viewing in the rotunda is over at nine Monday morning, a quarter of a million mourners have filed silently past the body of the fallen president, and five thousand have been turned away. At the tail end of the line allowed in before the rotunda was closed were a group of nuns, who had been waiting since 1:00 a.m.1517