The coffin was covered in moleskin, and supposedly, the grave-diggers did not know that its occupant was Lee Harvey Oswald. They were told that the dead man’s name was William Bobo.16
Of course, they soon found out. A horde of newsmen had arrived at the cemetery.
Robert Oswald: We drove down a curved road to the grave site. Just before we reached it, one of the Secret Service men turned to Bob Parsons and said, “All right, now. You stay in the car with the carbine. If anything happens, come out shooting.”
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to mow down fifteen or twenty reporters,” Bob said.
The Lutheran minister who had promised to be there at four had not appeared, and the Secret Service received word that he would not be coming out. The Reverend Louis Saunders, of the Fort Worth Council of Churches, had driven out to Rose Hill by himself just to see if he could be of any help to Marina and the family. When he was told that the other minister would not be there, the Reverend Mr. Saunders spoke the simple words of the burial service . . .
I motioned to Mike Howard, and when he came over I told him that I planned to have the coffin opened and would like to have all reporters and spectators moved back some distance from the grave site. He nodded, and almost immediately six or eight plainclothesmen from the Fort Worth police department formed a kind of protective semicircle between us and the crowd, insuring a certain amount of privacy.
Mother, Marina, the children and I then got up and walked toward the open coffin. After I had taken a last, long look at my brother’s face, I turned to go back to the place where we had been sitting. I then noticed the semicircle of plainclothesmen standing guard, solemn and stony-faced . . . .17
They are stony-faced, and Robert has been weeping. For two days now he has been unable to control himself. His emotions seem to be the most poignant among the assembled, but then, the love of an older brother for a younger one is rarely without its paradox, since the kid brother is the first human being one has been able to control, scorn, bully, scold, tease, and torment, while beneath, sometimes wholly concealed from oneself, a reservoir of love can well up through the years. Lee wrote a long letter to Robert one month after coming to Moscow in 1959, and one can wonder whether Robert was recalling its contents now in the hours after Lee was shot. The letter was certainly at a distance from recent events, and it could hardly have been a communication Robert enjoyed—indeed, it denied everything he believed—but yet, its tone suggests a bond between the brothers. Is that now part of Robert’s grief? Written in a lonely hotel room by a young man just turned twenty, the sentiments are so steeped in the passion, innocence, and idealism of a very young man that the words could have rested silently in the very center of Robert’s feelings for his kid brother. Now, even as Lee is buried, it may be worth going back to this letter to note how much has changed in four years:
Nov. 16, 1959
Dear Robert,
. . . I will ask you a question, Robert: What do you support the American government for? What is the ideal you put forward? Do not say “freedom” because freedom is a word used by all peoples through all of time. Ask me and I will tell you I fight for communism. This word brings to your mind slaves or injustice, this is because of American propaganda . . . you speak of advantages. Do you think that is why I am here? For personal, material advantage? Happiness is not based on oneself, it does not consist of a small home, of taking and getting. Happiness is taking part in the struggle where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world and the world in general. I never believed I would find more material advantages at this stage of development in the Soviet Union than I might have had in the U.S . . . .
You probably know little about this country so I will tell you about it. I did find, as I suspected I would, that most of what is written about the Soviet Union in America is for the better part fabrication. The people here have a seven hour work day now and only work till three o’clock on Saturdays with Sundays off. They have socialization which means they do not pay for their apartments or for medical care. The money for this comes from the profit they help to create in their labor, which in the U.S. goes to capitalists . . . Most important [here] is the fact they do not work for employers at all, a milkman or a factory supervisor are both socially equal. This does not mean they have the same salary, of course. This just means their work goes for [the] common good of all.
These people are a good, warm, alive people. They wish to see all peoples live in peace, but at the same time, they wish to see the economically enslaved people of the West free. They believe in their ideals and they support their government and country to the full limit.
You say you have not renounced me. Good, I am glad, but I will tell you on what terms I want this arrangement.
I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly or unknowingly, since I have been in the military as you know, and I know what war is like.
1. In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government—any American.
2. That in my own mind I have no attachments of any kind in the U.S.
3. That I want to, and I shall, live a normal, happy and peaceful life here in the Soviet Union for the rest of my life.
4. That my mother and you are (in spite of what the newspapers said) not objects of affection, but only examples of workers in the U.S.
You should not try to remember me in any way I used to be since I am only now showing you how I am. I am not all bitterness or hate, I came here only to find freedom. In truth, I feel I am at last with my own people. But do not let me give you the impression I am in another world. These people are so much like Americans and people the world over. They simply have an economic system and the ideal of communism which the U.S. does not have. I would never have been personally happy in the U.S . . . .
It is snowing here in Moscow now, which makes everything look very nice. I can see the Kremlin and Red Square and I have just finished a dinner of mjaso i kartoshka, meat and potatoes. So you see the Russians are not so different from you and I.
Lee18
Doubtless, he had not only written the letter for Robert but for Soviet eyes as well. Certainly, he had wanted to impress his new country with his desire to serve. He did not know that he was orating into the face of general agreement among Soviet authorities that this young American was essentially ignorant of Marxism. Indeed, he was—his knowledge of Marxism was pre–World War I. He had no idea of the ponderous immensity of the new system or of the elephantiasis of that bureaucracy which had burgeoned out of Lenin’s vaulting confidence that human nature was a river like any other, there to be dammed and channeled by the foresight of social engineers imbued with the correct revolutionary spirit.
So, that earlier letter to Robert now sits on the page with all the irony of a repudiated testament, equal in its romantic excess to a declaration of love to a former mate. We can measure the hardening of Oswald’s spirit in the journey he has taken from that impassioned outburst to where he presently rests in a grave bought in the name of William Bobo.
PART VII
THE AMATEUR HIT MAN
1
The Amateur Hit Man
The mystery of Oswald subsumes the enigma of Jack Ruby. Yet, if the first mystery has haunted the American intelligence establishment with the fear that it is implicated, Jack Ruby buggers reasonable comprehension for the rest of us. A minor thug from the streets of Chicago with a mentally unbalanced and often hospitalized mother, he has Mob connections. While they are no more impressive than those cherished by a hundred thousand other petty hoodlums in fifty American cities—which is to say, connections so tenuous and yet so familial that one can make a whole case or no case out of the same material—he has grown up among the Mob, and is on a first-name basis with Mob figures of the middle ranks. He is of the Mob in the specific values of his code, and yet never a formal member in any way—too wacky, too eager, too obsessed with himself, too Jewish even for th
e Jewish Mob. All the same, he is pure Mafia in one part of his spirit—he wants to be known as a patriot in love with his country and his people. He is loyal. Select him and you will not make a mistake.
We all know his famous story or cover story. He was grief-stricken by the death of JFK, so bereaved that he shut down his strip-joints for the weekend, and was so appalled at the possibility that Jacqueline Kennedy might have to come to Dallas to testify in Oswald’s trial that he decided to shoot the accused—“the creep,” as he would call him. But only at the last moment did he so decide. No premeditation. At 11:17 on Sunday morning, after waiting on line at a Western Union office to send $25 to one of his strippers who was desperately in need of money, he crossed the street, went down the ramp into police headquarters, and ran smack into Oswald, who was being filmed by TV cameras in the basement as he walked with his police escort to a car that would take him to the County Jail. There, imprinting the American mind forever with the open-mouthed expression of the victim and the squint-eyed disbelief of his guards, Ruby killed Oswald. Never before in history was a death witnessed by so many people giving full attention to their television sets. Much of the world now believed that Ruby was a Mafia hit man. The logic of such an inference suggested a conspiracy not only to kill Kennedy but Oswald as well, because he knew too much.
The concept, clear as a good movie scenario, ran into one confusion that has never been resolved: Why was Ruby standing on line in Western Union waiting his turn to send $25 to a stripper while time kept floating away and Oswald might be moved at any moment? The question could not be answered. How many confederates—and most of them had to be police—would be necessary to coordinate such a move? No one who is the key figure in a careful schedule that will reach its climax just as the target is being transferred is going to be found dawdling across the street at a Western Union office with only a few minutes to go. It would take hours for a stage director to begin to choreograph such a scene for an opera.
Ruby himself would say in the last interview he gave before he died of cancer that there was no way he could have been part of any calculation to bring him there at just the instant Oswald passed unless “it was the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world . . . the difference in meeting this fate was thirty seconds one way or the other.”1
So, the death of Oswald is filled with the groans of thwarted logic. Yet never on the face of it has a crime seemed to belong more to the Mafia.
In a brilliant book exploring the rifts within the American establishment, The Yankee and Cowboy War, Carl Oglesby was the first to advance the notion that Ruby was trying to tell Earl Warren that the Mafia certainly did order him to commit the deed. If Warren would just fly him, Jack Ruby, back to Washington on that same day, he, Jack Ruby, could furnish Warren with all the truth and, to prove it, would take a lie detector test on the spot.
As one reads these declarations in Jack Ruby’s testimony, it is difficult not to believe that Oglesby is right. In the course of a half hour, Ruby repeats his request five times.
MR. RUBY. Is there any way to get me to Washington?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. I beg your pardon?
MR. RUBY. Is there any way of you getting me to Washington?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. I don’t know of any. I will be glad to talk to your counsel about what the situation is, Mr. Ruby, when we get an opportunity to talk.
MR. RUBY. I don’t think I will get a fair representation with my counsel, Joe Tonahill. I don’t think so . . . 2
He disavows Joe Tonahill. He is all but saying that he cannot know whom his lawyer is working for.
In another minute, he repeats himself:
MR. RUBY. . . . Gentlemen, unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me.
If you understand my way of talking, you have got to bring me to Washington to get the tests.
Do I sound dramatic? Off the beam?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. No; you are speaking very rationally, and I am really surprised that you can remember as much as you have remembered up to the present time.
You have given it to us in detail.
MR. RUBY. Unless you can get me to Washington, and I am not a crackpot, I have all my senses—I don’t want to evade any crime I am guilty of.3
Five minutes go by. They speak of other matters.
Then Ruby pushes his request again, even takes it another step:
MR. RUBY. . . . 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?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. Yes; go right ahead.
MR. RUBY. I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here. I can’t tell it here. Does that make sense to you?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. Well, let’s not talk about sense. But I really can’t see why you can’t tell this Commission.4
Well, he can’t. Not in Dallas. Ruby all but shrieks at them: You dummies!—can’t you see that I can’t tell it here? You people don’t run this town. You can’t protect me in Dallas. I’ll get knifed in my cell, and the guards will be looking the other way.
MR. RUBY. . . . My reluctance to talk—you haven’t had any witness in telling the story, in finding so many problems?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. You have a greater problem than any witness we ever had.
MR. RUBY. I have a lot of reasons for having those problems . . . If you request me to go back to Washington with you right now, that couldn’t be done, could it?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. No; it could not be done. It could not be done. There are a good many things involved in that, Mr. Ruby.
MR. RUBY. What are they?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. Well, the public attention that it would attract, and the people who would be around. We have no place there for you to be safe when we take you out, and there are not law enforcement officers, and it isn’t our responsibility to go into anything of that kind . . . 5
Ruby tries to explain it to them in the simplest terms. “Gentlemen, my life is in danger.” Then he adds, “Not with my guilty plea of execution.” (He has been sentenced to death by a jury in Dallas.) No, he is trying to tell them: I will be killed a lot sooner than that.
MR. RUBY. . . . Do I sound sober enough to you as I say this?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. You do. You sound entirely sober.
MR. RUBY. From the moment I started my testimony, have I sounded as though, with the exception of becoming emotional, have I sounded as though I made sense, what I was speaking about?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. You have indeed. I understood everything you have said. If I haven’t, it is my fault.
MR. RUBY. Then I follow this up. I may not live tomorrow to give any further testimony . . . the only thing I want to get out to the public, and I can’t say it here, is with authenticity, with sincerity of the truth of everything and why my act was committed, but it can’t be said here . . .
Chairman Warren, if you felt that your life was in danger at the moment, how would you feel? Wouldn’t you be reluctant to go on speaking, even though you request me to do so?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. I think I might have some reluctance if I was in your position, yes; I should think I would. I think I would figure it out very carefully as to whether it would endanger me or not.
If you think that anything that I am doing or anything that I am asking you is endangering you in any way, shape, or form, I want you to feel absolutely free to say that when the interview is over.
MR. RUBY. What happens then? I didn’t accomplish anything.
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. No; nothing has been accomplished.
MR. RUBY. Well, then you won’t follow up with anything further?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. There wouldn’t be anything to follow up if you hadn’t completed your statement.
MR. RUBY. You said you have the power to do what you want to do, is that correct?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. Exactly
.
MR. RUBY. Without any limitations?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. . . . We have the right to take testimony of anyone we want in this whole situation, and we have the right . . . to verify that statement in any way that we wish to do it.
MR. RUBY. But you don’t have a right to take a prisoner back with you when you want to?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. 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, I would imagine, here in Dallas without going to Washington.
MR. RUBY. Yes; but those people aren’t Jack Ruby.
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. No; they weren’t.
MR. RUBY. They weren’t.6
In the pause, Ruby tries to inform them of the incalculable depth of the peril he feels:
MR. RUBY. I tell you, gentlemen, my whole family is in jeopardy. My sisters, as to their lives.
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. Yes?
MR. RUBY. Naturally, I am a foregone conclusion. My sisters Eva, Eileen, and Mary . . .
My brothers Sam, Earl, Hyman, and myself naturally—my in-laws, Harold Kaminsky, Marge Ruby, the wife of Earl, and Phyllis, the wife of Sam Ruby, they are in jeopardy of loss of their lives . . . just because they are blood related to myself—does that sound serious enough for you, Chief Justice Warren?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. Nothing could be more serious, if that is the fact . . . 7
At this point, Ruby begins to despair of reaching Warren with his message. He cannot know how great the odds are that Lyndon Johnson has already reached Earl Warren more than half a year earlier with an even more secret message—lone gunman; no conspiracy; the calm and well-being of our country is asking for nothing less. So Ruby, in all the lacerated but still functioning wounds of his sensibility, is beginning to recognize that his own agenda is hopeless. If he keeps talking this way and Warren does not listen to him, then the record of this testimony could open him and his family to Mafia reprisal. So he returns—he reverts—to the sound of his own music, his operatic cover story: He invokes the name of Jackie Kennedy.
Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery Page 80