Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  And about two hundred and fifty steps from dubious immortality.

  MR. RUBY. [I] walked the distance from the Western Union to the ramp. I didn’t sneak in. I didn’t linger in there.

  I didn’t crouch or hide behind anyone, unless the television camera can make it seem that way . . . 42

  Posner: On the third floor of the headquarters, police had informed Oswald shortly after 11:00 A.M. that they would immediately take him downstairs . . . He asked if he could change his clothes. Captain Fritz sent for some sweaters . . . If Oswald had not decided at the last moment to get a sweater, he would have left the jail almost five minutes earlier, while Ruby was still inside the Western Union office.43

  MR. RUBY. . . . I did not mingle with the crowd. There was no one near me when I walked down that ramp . . . 44

  It is worth hearing the account of a plainclothesman named Archer, a detective on the Dallas force:

  MR. ARCHER. . . . I could see the detectives on each side of Oswald leading him towards the ramp . . . I did have some bright lights shining into my eyes, and [it was hard] for me to recognize someone on the opposite side of the ramp [but] I caught a figure of a man . . . . I had been watching Oswald and the detectives . . . and my first thought was, as I started moving—well, my first thought was that somebody jumped out of the crowd, maybe to take a sock at him. Someone got emotionally upset and jumped out to take a sock at him, [but] as I moved forward, I saw the man reach Oswald, raise up, and then the shot was fired.45

  MR. RUBY. . . . I realize it is a terrible thing I have done, and it was a stupid thing, but I just was carried away emotionally. Do you follow that?

  CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. Yes; I do indeed, every word.

  MR. 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.46

  The irony is that he was indeed impulsive. He has meditated upon the act since Friday; he has had his opportunities and not taken them. Now that he has lost his opportunity, or so he sees it, he has gravitated back to the police station. It has been the center of his activities for the last two days, after all. Yet, to his surprise, here and now is Oswald! It was as if God had put the man there. God was now giving the message: Jack Ruby was supposed to do it after all. So he fulfilled his contract. Let us say that he fulfilled two contracts. He did his job for the Mob, but since he had been talking about it so much that he had come to believe it, he did it as well for Jack, Jackie, the children, and the Jewish people. He fused himself into his all but unbelievable cover story and did it for Jackie Kennedy, after all.

  To the Warren Commission, he describes his feelings with considerable style. Nothing is more difficult than to combine elegance with piety, but Jack has had seven months in jail to prepare this speech for Earl Warren:

  . . . I wanted to show my love for our faith, being of the Jewish faith, and I never used the term and I don’t want to go into that—suddenly the feeling, the emotional feeling came within me that someone owed this debt to our beloved President to save her the ordeal of coming back. I don’t know why that came through my mind.47

  He had been less sanctimonious, however, right after his gun was seized on that terminal Sunday:

  MR. ARCHER. . . . we took him on into the jail office and I assisted in keeping his left arm behind him and someone got his right. I couldn’t say who it was that had his other arm. Laid him down on the floor, his head and face were away from me at that particular time. But that is when I said, “Who is he?” [He answered] “You all know me. I’m Jack Ruby.” . . . And he said at that particular point, “I hope I killed the son of a bitch.” . . . I said to Ruby at that time, “Jack, I think you killed him,” and he just looked at me right straight in the eye and said, “Well, I intended to shoot him three times.”48

  Posner: When they got to the third floor, Ruby, who was excited from the shooting, talked to anybody who came by. “If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” he bragged. “It was one chance in a million . . . . I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts.” . . . 49

  For forty and more hours before that, awake and asleep, he must have been castigating himself: You Jew, you do not have the guts to be a hit man—only Italians are that good. So he wanted to give the Mafia a real signature, his own—three shots—wanted to show the world that a Mob-style execution was not out of reach for him, a Jew.

  The Parkland surgeons were not able to save Oswald:

  Posner: “It’s pretty hard to imagine one bullet doing more damage than that,” says Dr. John Lattimer. “It perforated the chest cavity, went through the diaphragm, spleen, and stomach. It cut off the main intestinal artery, and the aorta, and the body’s main vein, as well as breaking up the right kidney. That wound was definitely fatal.”50

  Jack Ruby would wear brass knuckles when he got into a fight in his nightclub. He would brag to his handyman, Larry Crafard, that he had been with every girl in his club, and yet . . . and yet . . . As with Oswald, there is always more to Ruby.

  MRS. CARLIN. . . . He was always asking the question, “Do you think I am a queer? Do you think I look like a queer? Or have you ever known a queer to look like me?” Everytime I saw him he would ask it.

  MR. JACKSON. Do you mean he would bring up the subject himself?

  MRS. CARLIN. Yes; he would say, “Do you think I look like one or act like one?”51

  A man of many sides—he loved his animals:

  Posner: His favorite dog, Sheba, was left in the car. “People that didn’t know Jack will never understand this,” Bill Alexander told the author, “but Ruby would never have taken that dog with him and left it in the car if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail. He would have made sure that dog was at home with Senator and was well taken care of.”52

  Yes, Posner must be absolutely right that Ruby was not planning to kill Oswald on Sunday at 11:21 A.M. But that does not take care of why Ruby finally—for reasons considerably closer to his heart than the pain and turmoil awaiting Jacqueline Kennedy—did the deed and threw the cloak of a thousand putative conspiracies over the mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald, his life and his death.

  PART VIII

  OSWALD’S GHOST

  1

  The Punishment of Hosty and the Death of the Handler

  De Mohrenschildt has figured prominently in our account; FBI Special Agent Hosty has been a passing figure. Yet, of all the men in security and intelligence whose careers would be blighted in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, no others stand out so prominently, and so a quiver of insight may be obtained by learning what happened to them.

  The memorandum to which Priscilla Johnson McMillan will soon make reference is the “two- to four-page document” mentioned earlier that was dictated by Hosty at Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin’s suggestion after Oswald’s angry encounter with Hosty in Captain Fritz’s office.

  McMillan: Between two and four hours after Oswald’s [demise] on November 24, Shanklin summoned Hosty. Hosty recalls that Shanklin was standing in front of his desk and . . . took out both the memorandum and Oswald’s note. “Oswald is dead now,” he said. “There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this.” Hosty started to tear up the documents in Shanklin’s presence. “No,” Shanklin shouted. “Get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.” Hosty then took the note and memorandum out of Shanklin’s office, tore them up, and flushed them down a toilet at the FBI. A few days later, Shanklin asked Hosty whether he had destroyed Oswald’s note and the memorandum and Hosty assured him that he had.1

  The HSCA reported that Shanklin, in 1963, denied he had any knowledge of the note. In fact until 1975, the Dallas FBI office kept secret the destruction of the note.2

  McMillan: Hosty’s . . . answers on an internal FBI questionnaire were subsequently falsified either by Shanklin or by someone in FBI headquarters in Washington to admit “poor investigativ
e work” in the Oswald case. Hosty received letters of censure from J. Edgar Hoover, was placed on probation . . . and demoted to Kansas City. Years later, a promotion that was recommended for him was blocked by Clyde Tolson, chief deputy of J. Edgar Hoover. Except for Shanklin and two others, every FBI agent who had anything to do with the Oswald case in 1962 or 1963 was censured, transferred, demoted, or barred from promotion, while Shanklin received several letters of commendation from Hoover.3

  It is very hard to believe that the note was as simple and direct in its contents as Hosty says it was. The irony, of course, is that Hosty was part of the legitimate FBI, as opposed to COINTELPRO, and so may have had almost as little to do with Oswald as he claims; but Hoover could not have known that to a certainty, since the working boundaries between daily FBI work and COINTELPRO adventures were not going to be defined with high clarity in inter-office memos—and besides, the evidence had been destroyed. That made Hosty a part of the detritus that J. Edgar Hoover had to hide under bureaucratic sanctity. So Hosty was chosen as Hoover’s patsy.

  More is available when we look at the Baron. Recounting how he heard the news in Haiti that someone had killed Kennedy, he is pleased with his own acumen:

  MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Now I do not consider myself . . . a genius. But the very first thought after we heard . . . [the news from] an employee of the American Embassy in Port au Prince, and he mentioned that the name of the presumable assassin is something Lee, Lee, Lee—and I said, “Could it be Lee Oswald?”

  And he said, “I guess that is the name.”

  MR. JENNER. That occurred to you?

  MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. That occurred to me.

  MR. JENNER. As soon as you heard the name Lee?

  MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. As soon as I heard the name Lee. Now, why it occurred to me—because he was a crazy lunatic.4

  The Haitian government must have gone through quite a few changes of mind over the next weeks concerning its relation to De Mohrenschildt. We obtain more than a clue in George’s manuscript I’m a Patsy.

  . . . We learned that a letter was sent by someone influential in Washington to the officials of the Haitian government to drop me from the payroll and to exile me as fast as possible. Fortunately I had good friends and the latter did not happen. And later, little by little, we were ostracized by the United States Ambassador Timmons, then by the American businessmen and government employees with whom we had been on very good terms, and, finally, came the news of the investigation of all our friends and even acquaintances in the United States.

  . . . At last, after a good long time, we were officially invited to come to Washington and help the Warren Commission in their investigation. Although we could contribute very little, we still accepted to go to Washington to testify. Although our depositions were supposed to remain confidential, all three hundred pages of irrelevant conversation were printed and promiscuously distributed.5

  Toward the end of his manuscript, he gives a more candid explanation of the process:

  As the atmosphere of Port-au-Prince became oppressive . . . we were considering abandoning my survey . . . and returning to the States. But President Duvalier found himself a solution to this situation. He asked Dr. Herve Boyer, Minister of Finance, Secretary of Treasury, and a good friend of mine who had helped me get the survey contract, to invite me to his office and to have a chat with me. [Boyer] said decisively: “You are in the hot water. Everyone is talking about you and your wife. Do not abandon your survey but go back to the States and clear your name somehow. If you cannot, come back, wind up your work and leave the country.”

  It so happened that on the same day our Embassy received a letter, addressed to me and my wife, from Mr. J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel of the Warren Commission. Mr. Rankin invited us to come to Washington, D.C., if we wished, and to testify . . . Of course, we were most anxious to cooperate as much as we could to solve this crime. But Jeanne refused to travel without our two dogs—Manchester terriers—and, after the exchange of wires, Mr. Rankin accepted this additional “dog expense.” . . .

  I was the first to testify. The man who took my deposition was Albert Jenner, a lawyer from Chicago, who much later became well known in connection with the Watergate case . . . I have to admit that either he was much cleverer than I or that I was impressed by the whole setting and situation as it unfolded in Washington at the time. Anyway, Jenner played with me as if I were a baby.6

  In fact, it was a trial of nerves. He had to protect the CIA and he had to protect himself, and as we can recall, his modus operandi was to remind the Agency that he could certainly pull them in with him if they should be so rash as to disown him completely and thereby destroy his shaky purchase on a sinecure in Haiti.

  At the conclusion of his stay in Washington, De Mohrenschildt may have looked to better his situation at a small dinner party:

  Very tired by our testimonies, we were invited after our ordeal to the luxurious house of Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother and her stepfather, Mr. Hugh Auchincloss. This luxurious house was located in Georgetown and Auchincloss’ money originated out of some association of Hugh’s family with John D. Rockefeller, Sr., of the oil fame . . . 7

  Almost in passing, De Mohrenschildt mentions that Allen Dulles was also there. Is it fair to suspect that Dulles asked the Auchinclosses to arrange the dinner? Dulles, having been all but forcibly retired from the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, would still have been in contact with many a CIA loop; Dulles was bound to have questions concerning Agency connections with De Mohrenschildt. Even an active director of the CIA will have a good deal of sensitive information concealed from him, and in this situation, relegated to the sidelines for more than two years, Dulles must have had his own share of concern about how closely CIA was involved, since it was on his watch, after all, that the Agency had tried to kill Castro.

  Of course, if he and George had any private conversation that night, there would be no record of it. De Mohrenschildt contents himself with remarking that Allen Dulles “asked me a few questions about Lee.”

  One of them was, I remember, did Lee have a reason of hating President Kennedy? However, when I answered that he was rather an admirer of the dead President, everyone took my answer with a grain of salt. Again, the overwhelming opinion was that Lee was the sole assassin.8

  De Mohrenschildt is, as ever, ready to divert us from the point:

  I was still thinking of poor Lee, comparing his life with the life of these multi-millionaires. I tried to reason—to no avail. It seemed to me that I was facing a conspiracy, a conspiracy of stubbornness and silence. Finally, both Jeanne and Janet (Mrs. Auchincloss) got very emotional, embraced each other, and cried together, one over the loss of her son-in-law, the other over the loss of a great president she admired so much.

  “Janet,” I said before leaving, “you were Jack Kennedy’s mother-in-law, and I am a complete stranger. I would spend my own money and lots of my time to find out who were the real assassins and the conspirators. Don’t you want any further investigation? You have infinite resources.”

  “Jack is dead and nothing will bring him back,” replied she decisively.9

  As usual, there is no emotional sequence to De Mohrenschildt’s account. One thing happens, and then another, and each little matter seems to have very little to do with the next. The best way to forestall the development of a scenario is to keep your events episodic:

  But we were still in the Auchincloss’ luxurious mansion, about ready to leave. “Incidentally,” said Mrs. Auchincloss coldly, “my daughter Jacqueline never wants to see you again because you were close to her husband’s assassin.”

  “It’s her privilege,” I answered.

  Hugh, who was a very silent man, asked me suddenly: “And how is Marina fixed financially?”

  “I do not know. I just read that she received quite a lot of money from the charitable American people—maybe eighty thousand dollars.”

  “That won’t last her long,” he said thoughtfully and, almost w
ithout transition, pointed to an extraordinary chess set: “This is early Persian valued at sixty thousand dollars.”

  We said goodbyes amicably to the Auchinclosses and drove off back to our hotel. “That son of a gun Hugh has an income running into millions,” I told Jeanne thoughtfully.

  “Such figures are beyond my comprehension,” she said sadly.10

  For his testimony before the Warren Commission, De Mohrenschildt was reimbursed with job security. Or, to be precise, he was and he was not. Forces were in play with counterforce.

  Fortunately, the Haitian Ambassador in Washington was reassured by the Warren Commission that we were decent people. The Ambassador transmitted this message to President Duvalier and we could return safely to Haiti. But my contract became hopelessly harmed by the intervening publicity and by the peculiar attitude taken by the American Embassy toward us. And President Duvalier, the astute Papa Doc, knew through his informants, that our Embassy would not protect my rights any more. And the old fox was absolutely right; the payments for my survey began drying up and in later years I never received any cooperation from anyone in our Embassy or in the State Department in trying to recover the large balance of my contract still due to me.11

  Still, he was able to hang on in Haiti until 1966, after which he and Jeanne came back to Dallas.