The two men, of course, differed in many ways, among which was that Oswald was extremely political, unpatriotic, and tended toward intellectualism, Ruby the exact opposite on all three counts. In any event, the rage and psychic chaos in both men, unharnessed by any emotional stability, ultimately exploded in a way that not only was self-destructive but, particularly in the case of Oswald, changed the world.
As can be seen from the biography of Jack Ruby, two things are very clear. One, he was not a member of organized crime, and two, even if he had wanted to be, they could never have afforded to let him in. In addition to having a volatile, unstable personality, Jack Ruby was not mentally sound. Indeed, as we learned from his trial, he was suffering from organic brain damage. Even Marina Oswald, whose husband Ruby killed, remarked pitifully that just from seeing “his [Ruby’s] picture in the paper now, it is an abnormal face.”482 Even a prosecution witness at Ruby’s trial, the general manager at the parking lot where Ruby parked his car, said that he “sometimes wondered about Jack’s sanity.”483 And a close friend of Ruby’s testified at the trial he “was sure” Ruby was “suffering from some form of…mental disturbance.”484 The mob might want its members to be vicious killers, but not looney birds.
Ruby’s mental infirmity seemed to deteriorate quickly into a pathological paranoia following his arrest and incarceration for Oswald’s murder. Being “deprived of the Preludin and Benzedrine that he had come to know so well” added to the decline of his mental state.485 The close-to-child-like mentality and paranoia, interspersed with periods of normality and lucidity, led to the following type of words and speech by Ruby in his testimony before the Warren Commission on June 7, 1964, in Dallas. To remind the reader, Ruby has by now been convicted of Oswald’s murder and sentenced to death. The setting is formal, he is on the witness stand, and his questioner is Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Among the hundreds of people who gave testimony before the Commission or its staff, not one sounded even remotely similar to Ruby. Apart from the casualness and adolescent innocence in Ruby’s remarks, in which he converses with Warren as if he is talking to a male buddy of his at his club, Ruby, unlike any other Commission witness, all of whom were only on the stand to answer questions, asked most of the questions and did nearly all the talking. Here are some nonsequential excerpts, a small sampling—some of which, in view of the circumstances, approach skit-like humor—to give you a further sense of the man who conspiracy theorists say was closely associated with the Mafia and killed Oswald for them:
Ruby to Chief Justice Warren: “Is there any way to get me to Washington?”
Warren: “I beg your pardon.”
Ruby, not wanting to tell his “story” in Dallas, repeats himself: “Is there any way of you getting me to Washington?…I would like to…go to Washington and…take all the tests that I have to take.”
Ruby, upon seeing Gerald Ford in the room: “What state are you from, Congressman?”
Ford: “Michigan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.”
Later, Ruby: “Unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me…Unless you get me to Washington immediately, I am afraid after what Mr. Tonahill [Ruby’s lawyer who is with him] has written there, which is unfair to me regarding my testimony here—you want to hear what he wrote?”
Ruby, after reading some words: “It is too bad, Chief Warren, that you didn’t get me to your headquarters six months ago.”
Later, Ruby to Warren: “Is there any way of getting a polygraph here?…I wish the president were right here now. It is a terrible ordeal. I tell you that.”
After Ruby attempted to relate what happened chronologically, Warren says to Ruby: “You have told us most of what happened up to the time of the incident.”
Ruby: “This is still only Friday night, Chief.”
Warren: “Yes, that is true.”
Ruby: “Well, I will go to a certain point, and if I stop, you will have to understand if I stop to get my bearings together.”
Ruby, returning with his entreaty to go to Washington: “Gentlemen, if you want to hear any further testimony, you will have to get me to Washington soon, because it has something to do with you, Chief Warren. Do I sound sober enough to tell you this?”
Warren: “Yes, go right ahead.”
Ruby: “I want to tell the truth, but I can’t tell it here. Does that make sense to you?”
Warren replies that he really couldn’t see why Ruby couldn’t tell his story now, but before Ruby responds, Ruby, seeing an unfamiliar face in the room, asks: “What is your name?”
Warren Commission assistant counsel Joe Ball: “Joe Ball.”
Warren: “Mr. Joe Ball. He is an attorney from Los Angeles who has been working for me.”
Ruby to Ball: “Do you know Belli [Ruby’s former lawyer who is not in the room]?”
Ball: “I know of him.”
Ruby proceeds to refer to Warren, Congressman Ford, Sheriff Bill Decker, and several Warren Commission assistant counsels as “boys”: “Boys, I am in a tough spot. I tell you that.”
Ruby to Warren: “Chief Warren, your life is in danger in this city, do you know that?”
Warren: “No, I don’t know that.”
Ruby: “I would like to talk to you in private.”
Warren: “You may do that when you finish your story.”
Ruby: “I bet you haven’t had a witness like me in your whole investigation, is that correct?…When are you going back to Washington?”
Warren: “Very shortly after we finish this hearing.”
Ruby: “If you request me to go back to Washington with you right now, that couldn’t be done, could it?”
Warren: “No, it could not be done. There are a good many things involved in that, Mr. Ruby.”
Ruby, on the stand but cross-examining his questioner: “What are they?”
After Warren fails to satisfy Ruby with his answer, Ruby performs some excellent cross-examination of Warren, who as a former prosecutor undoubtedly had never been cross-examined by a witness before.
Ruby: “You said you have the power to do what you want to do, is that correct?”
Warren: “Exactly.”
Ruby: “Without any limitations?”
Warren: “Within the purview of the executive order which established the Commission.”
Ruby: “But you don’t have a right to take a prisoner back with you when you want to?”
Warren, on the ropes: “No. We have the power to subpoena witnesses to Washington if we want to do it, but we have taken the testimony of 200 or 300 people here in Dallas without going to Washington.”
Ruby, keeping Warren on the ropes: “Yes, but those people aren’t Jack Ruby.”
Warren, beat down by his witness and conceding defeat: “No, they weren’t.”
Ruby finally levels with Warren in a rambling, at times incoherent story as to why he wanted to say what he had to say only if he were taken to Washington. He starts out by stating, “Gentlemen, my life is in danger here…I may not live tomorrow to give any further testimony,” implying that if he told the truth in Dallas he might be killed, but then in a disconnect, he fizzles out by saying that the reason he wanted to go to Washington is that his story has to be said “amongst people of the highest authority [he indicates later, President Johnson] that would give me the benefit of [the] doubt. And following that, immediately give me the lie detector test.” He later returns to his paranoia and broadens the number of those in danger. “I tell you, gentlemen, my whole family is in jeopardy [though he suggests all three of his sisters are already “lost”]…Naturally, I am a foregone conclusion…My brothers Sam, Earl, Hyman…my in-laws…they are in jeopardy of loss of their lives…Does that sound serious enough to you, Chief Justice Warren?”
He maligns his lawyers for not letting him (presumably at his trial before the jury) tell “the truth about Jack Ruby and his emotional breakdown. Of why that Sunday morning—that thought never entered my mind prior to that S
unday morning when I took it upon myself to try to be a martyr…you might say. But I felt very emotional and very carried away for Mrs. Kennedy, that with all the strife she had gone through,…that someone owed it to our beloved president that she shouldn’t be expected to come back to face trial of this heinous crime. And I have never had the chance to tell that, to back it up, to prove it. Consequently, right at the moment I am being victimized as a part of a plot…At this moment, Lee Harvey Oswald isn’t guilty of committing the crime of assassinating President Kennedy. Jack Ruby is…There is an organization here [in Dallas], Chief Justice Warren, if it takes my life at this moment to say it, and Bill Decker said be a man and say it, there is a John Birch Society right now in activity…Take it for what it is worth, Chief Justice Warren. Unfortunately for me, for me giving the people the opportunity to get in power, because of the act I committed, has put a lot of people in jeopardy with their lives. Don’t register with you, does it?”
Warren: “No, I don’t understand that.”
Ruby: “Would you rather I just delete what I said and just pretend that nothing is going on?…I won’t be living long now. I know that. My family’s lives will be gone…Saturday I watched Rabbi Seligman. Any of you watch it that Saturday morning? He…eulogized that here is a man that fought in every battle, went to every country, and had to come back to his own country to be shot in the back.” Ruby starts to cry. “I must be a great actor. I tell you that. That created a tremendous emotional feeling for me, the way [Seligman] said that…
“Sunday morning [I] saw a letter to Caroline, two columns…The most heartbreaking letter…Alongside that letter…was a small comment in the newspaper…that Mrs. Kennedy may have to come back for the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald. That caused me to go like I did…I don’t know, Chief Justice, but I got so carried away. And I remember prior to that thought, there has never been another thought in my mind. I was never malicious toward this person.* No one requested me to do anything. I never spoke to anyone about attempting to do anything. No subversive organization gave me any idea. No underworld person made any effort to contact me. It all happened that Sunday morning.”*
Ruby speaks about driving downtown to send the money order to the stripper in his club, but first stopping in Dealey Plaza to see the wreaths “and I saw them and started to cry again.” He then “walked…from the Western Union to the ramp. I didn’t sneak in…There was an officer…talking to a Sam Pease in a car parked up on the curb…There was no one near me when I walked down that ramp…and there was the person that—I wouldn’t say I saw red—it was a feeling I had for our beloved President and Mrs. Kennedy, that he was insignificant to what my purpose was.” He says that since he had just left the Western Union a few minutes earlier, “you wouldn’t have time enough to have any conspiracy…as it was told about me. I realize it is a terrible thing I have done, and it was a stupid thing, but I was just carried away emotionally. Do you follow that?”
Warren: “Yes, I do indeed, every word.”
Ruby: “I had the gun in my right hip pocket, and impulsively, if that is the correct word here, I saw him, and that is all I can say. And I didn’t care what happened to me.”
Addressing himself to the allegation that he called mob figures in the days before he killed Oswald, he says, “I knew persons of notorious backgrounds years ago in Chicago. I was with the union back in Chicago, and I left the union when I found out the notorious organization had moved in there…Then recently, I had to make so many numerous calls that I am sure you know of…because of trying to survive in my business. My unfair competition had been running certain shows [in violation of] all the rules of the union…and consequently I was becoming insolvent because of it. All those calls were made…in relation to seeing if they can help out with the American Guild of Variety Artists…Every person I…called, and sometimes you may not even know a person intimately, you sort of tell them, well, you are stranded down here and you want some help—if they know of any official of the American Guild of Variety Artists to help me. Because my competitors were putting me out of business. I even flew to New York to see Joe Glazer, and he called Bobby Faye. He was the national president. That didn’t help…All these phone calls were related not in any way…with the underworld because I have been away from Chicago 17 years down in Dallas. As a matter of fact I even called a Mr.—hold it before I say it—[He]…headed the American Federation of Labor…in the state of Texas…Miller. Is there a Deutsch I. Maylor? I called a Mr. Maylor here in Texas to see if he could help me out.”
After Ruby denies knowing Oswald, he speaks of his close friend “Mr. McWillie,” a gambler. “He is a pretty nice boy, and I happened to be idolizing him.” McWillie, he says, was a “key man” at the Tropicana nightclub and casino in Havana that was owned by “the Fox brothers” from “Miami, Florida.” He says McWillie was always asking him to visit him in Havana. He says McWillie finally sent him some tickets and he visited McWillie in Havana but Ruby says he “was bored with the gambling because I don’t gamble.” He speaks of McWillie calling him from Havana once to try to get “four little cobra guns” from a local gun seller, Ray Brantley, who owned Ray’s Hardware, and who knew McWillie, because he felt uneasy with Castro’s new regime and wanted protection. Ruby says he called Brantley and asked him to send the guns to McWillie, saying he didn’t know if this was illegal (Warren said he didn’t either), and says Brantley later denied that Ruby called him, Ruby believing he did this because perhaps it was illegal.
Ruby again returns in his virtual monologue, without transition, to the John Birch Society, saying it was trying to make people believe he was in on the plot to kill Kennedy, and when Warren asks him “what basis” he has for saying this, Ruby says, “Just a feeling of it.” Later, he says, “I am as innocent regarding any conspiracy as any of you gentlemen in the room,” and returning to his past association in Chicago with criminal types, he says he was “in the livelihood of selling tickets to sporting events,” and in doing this, “your lucrative patrons are some of these people, but you don’t mean anything to those people. You may know them as you get acquainted with them at the sporting events or the ballpark…the prizefights…So when I say I know them…personalities that are notorious, that is the extent of my involvement in any criminal activity. I have never been a bookmaker. I have never stolen for a living. I am not a gangster…I don’t know any subversive people that are against my beloved country.”
When Warren asks Congressman Ford, “Congressman, do you have anything further?” Ruby pipes in, “You can get more out of me. Let’s not break up too soon.”
Ruby once again returns to the “very powerful” John Birch Society, saying that “through certain falsehoods said about me to other people, the John Birch Society, I am as good as guilty as the accused assassin of President Kennedy,” suggesting the Birch Society was doing this because he was of the “Jewish faith.” He says he wished “President Lyndon Johnson would…hear me, not accept just circumstantial facts about my guilt or innocence…before he relinquished certain powers to these certain people.” When Warren says he has no idea what Ruby is talking about, Ruby says, “I want to say this to you. The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment. Consequently, a whole new form of government is going to take over our country, and I know I won’t live to see you another time…I am used as a scapegoat and there is no greater weapon that you can use to create some falsehood about some[one] of the Jewish faith, especially at the terrible heinous crime such as the killing of President Kennedy…It may not be too late…if our president, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me. But if I am eliminated, there won’t be any way of knowing…I am the only one that can bring out the truth to our president…But he has been told, I am certain, that I was a part of a plot to assassinate the president.” Ruby says that if the president and his people learn the truth from him, “maybe my people won’t be tortured and mutilated.” The president had to learn, Ruby says, “why I was down in that basement Sunday morning, and
maybe some sense of decency will come out…without my people going through torture and mutilation.”
Warren: “The president will know everything you have said.”
Ruby: “But I won’t be around, Chief Justice,…to verify these things.”
Ruby’s attorney, Joe Tonahill: “Who do you think is going to eliminate you, Jack?”
Ruby: “I have been used for a purpose, and there will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don’t suffer because of what I have done.”
Warren: “But we have taken your testimony. We have it here. It will be in permanent form for the president of the United States…and for the people of the entire world. It will be recorded for all to see. That is the purpose of our coming here today.”
Ruby: “All I want is a lie detector test and you refuse to give it to me…And then I want to leave this world. But I don’t want my people to be blamed for something that is untrue.” Ruby asks Warren, “When are you going to see the president?”
Reclaiming History Page 203