A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  Ruby’s account of the two days that began November 22, with news of Kennedy’s murder, and ended November 24, with Ruby gunning down Oswald in police headquarters, would be long and convoluted. He said he heard about the shooting in Dealey Plaza seconds after it occurred; he had been a few blocks away at the Dallas Morning News, placing weekend advertisements for the Carousel Club. He was shattered by the news of Kennedy’s death, he said. “I became very emotional.… I couldn’t stop crying.” He immediately decided to close his club for the weekend.

  That night, he took advantage of his friendship with Dallas police officers to slip into police headquarters to watch the news conference in which Oswald was paraded in front of reporters. Ruby told strangers in the pressroom that night that he was an Israeli journalist; if anyone had challenged his presence, he could always drop in a few words of the Yiddish he had learned in childhood.

  At that point, his testimony quickly became so disjointed that it was almost impossible for Warren to follow. Ruby threw out names—of friends, of family members, of strippers, and of other employees at the Carousel Club—and places and dates that meant nothing to the chief justice and the others. In moments of coherence, however, he consistently denied that he had been part of any conspiracy to silence Oswald. He insisted that he had not known Oswald and that he had no thought of killing him until he read a newspaper article that Sunday morning that suggested Mrs. Kennedy might have to return to Dallas to testify. “I felt very emotional and carried away for Mrs. Kennedy, with all that the strife she had gone through,” Ruby said. “Someone owed it to our beloved president that she shouldn’t be expected to come back to face this heinous trial.”

  Killing Oswald was an impulsive act, he said. He was aware of the many rumors that some of his organized-crime contacts might have put him up to it, but he said that “no one else 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.”

  Ford recalled that Ruby’s testimony went reasonably well for about forty-five minutes, until Ruby and his lawyer began arguing for reasons that were not clear and the court reporter stopped recording the session. The scene then became “terribly tense,” Ford said. It was “touch and go” whether Ruby would be able to continue. Warren, he said, “tried to be reassuring and was very patient in his cajoling” of Ruby.

  Down the hall, Elmer Moore, a Secret Service agent assigned to the trip to protect the chief justice, found Specter in the sheriff’s office watching the baseball game. He announced that Specter was needed, as quickly as possible, in the kitchen. “They want you,” he said. “Ruby wants a Jew in the room.” Specter knew enough about Ruby to know how he valued his Jewish heritage and how he had become fixated on the idea that Jews were being massacred because of him.

  Specter followed Moore down the hall. As he entered the kitchen, Specter could see that Ruby was studying him. “Looking straight at me, he silently mouthed the words, ‘Are you a Yid?’”

  Specter said nothing. Again, Ruby mouthed the words: “Are you a Yid?” And then a third time.

  Specter said he tried to remain stone-faced, not even to nod his head. He wanted none of this taken down by the court reporter. “I didn’t flinch or respond in any way.”

  At just that moment, Specter recalled, the court reporter ran out of paper, and Ruby jumped up and pulled the chief justice into a corner, motioning for Specter to join them. Joe Ball, the other commission staff lawyer, stood up and tried to enter the conversation.

  “Are you Jewish?” Ruby asked.

  “No,” Ball replied.

  “Well, go away,” Ruby told him.

  Ruby then turned to Warren. “Chief, you’ve got to get me to Washington. They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso.”

  “I can’t do that,” the chief justice said.

  Ruby urged Warren to talk to Abe Fortas, the well-known Washington lawyer who was close to President Johnson and would soon be named to the Supreme Court—and who was Jewish. “Get to Fortas,” Ruby said. “He’ll get it worked out.”

  Ford could see that Ruby relaxed at the acknowledgment—it was not clear by whom—that Specter was indeed Jewish. “This seemed to give him confidence to continue testifying.”

  When the stenographer was ready to resume, Ruby, Warren, and Specter returned to their seats. Ruby noticed his lawyer, Tonahill, pass a note to Ford. Ruby insisted that he be allowed to read it, and the conversation stopped while the note was handed to Ruby, who was farsighted and struggled to make out the words on the page. The chief justice handed Ruby his glasses.

  “You see,” Tonahill had written. “I told you he was crazy.”

  Ruby put the note aside, seemingly untroubled by his lawyer’s insult, and turned back to the chief justice. He wanted Warren to confirm again that he would allow him to take a polygraph test or be injected with truth serum—“Pentothal,” he said, referring to Sodium Pentothal, the depressant sometimes referred to as a “truth serum.” He asked again to be taken to Washington.

  “Do I sound dramatic? Off the beam?”

  Warren tried to keep him calm: “No, you are speaking very, very rationally.”

  “I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here,” Ruby said, using words that would sound ominous when read by conspiracy theorists in years to come.

  This was the first time that Specter, who had missed the start of Ruby’s testimony, had heard about his request for a polygraph—and about Warren’s agreement to give him one. Specter said he understood instantly that the chief justice had made a terrible mistake. He knew Warren, like most serious-minded law-enforcement veterans, gave little credence to polygraphs; the chief justice, in fact, had already vetoed the idea of giving one to Marina Oswald. Yet he had just promised one—on the record—to Oswald’s seemingly delusional killer.

  Ruby tried to step up the pressure on Warren, claiming that his life was in danger if he remained in Dallas. He was convinced that “other people”—he suggested members of the right-wing John Birch Society—were trying to tie him to a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And because he was Jewish, Jews everywhere were being murdered in retaliation for the president’s assassination. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” he said. “I am used as a scapegoat. I am as good as guilty as the accused assassin of President Kennedy. How can you remedy that, Mr. Warren?” If he could get to Washington and testify, Ruby said, “maybe my people won’t be tortured and mutilated.”

  Specter could see how flustered Warren was. The chief justice told Ruby: “You may be sure that the president and his whole commission will do anything that is necessary to see that your people are not tortured.”

  After more than three hours of this, Warren decided to stop the testimony, insisting he was doing it for Ruby’s own good. “I think we have tired Mr. Ruby,” the chief justice said. “We appreciate your patience and your willingness to testify in this manner for us.”

  Ruby: “All I want to do is tell the truth, and the only way you can know it is by the polygraph.”

  Warren: “That we will do for you.”

  * * *

  Still hoping to get out of Dallas by day’s end, the chief justice left for a late lunch at the Dallas apartment of Robert Storey, a former president of the American Bar Association. The end of the lunch produced what was, for Specter, another astonishing display of the chief justice’s awkwardness when called on to make quick decisions. After leaving Storey’s apartment, Warren noticed a group of reporters and photographers at the end of the hall eager to hear his thoughts about his day in Dallas. “Instead of turning left and facing the pack,” Specter remembered, “the Chief Justice ran down a corridor to the right and down a flight of stairs to avoid talking to them.” It would have been easy enough for Warren to smile and offer a polite “no comment” to the reporters. Instead, he had created a baffling scene in which the chi
ef justice of the United States could be seen fleeing, almost in panic, from a group of reporters who wanted to ask him a few simple questions.

  On the plane home that night, Warren told Specter how unhappy he was that he had promised a polygraph test to Ruby. “I don’t believe in polygraphs,” he said. “I don’t believe in Big Brother.”

  Specter told Warren that he had no choice but to go through with the test, unless Ruby changed his mind about wanting one. “Mr. Chief Justice, you promised him a polygraph,” Specter said. It “would look awful if the commission reneged on an on-the-record promise.” If Ruby was denied a polygraph now, “at best, it would look as though the commission was not exhausting every lead.” At worst, it would look like a cover-up designed to prevent Ruby from exposing a conspiracy. Warren might not believe in polygraph tests, but opinion polls suggested that the American public did. “Mr. Chief Justice,” Specter said, “you can’t turn him down.”

  41

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 1964

  Secret Service director James Rowley had reason to fear for his job when he testified before the Warren Commission; certainly he had cause to fear that his ninety-nine-year-old agency might not survive the commission’s investigation. The Bronx-born, fifty-six-year-old Rowley was the first director of the Secret Service to have a president assassinated on his watch, and he would face the toughest questioning of any senior government official who came before the commission. Other law-enforcement agencies—the FBI, in particular—might have intentionally tried to hide information from the investigation. In the case of the Secret Service, however, the cover-up seemed indisputable. Warren had evidence of what he considered outrageous misconduct—the decision by several Secret Service agents in the president’s motorcade in Dallas to go out drinking the night before the assassination—and of how Rowley had tried to hide the details of the episode from the public. Some of the chief justice’s anger may have been stoked by his friendship with Drew Pearson, who had broken the story about the agents’ drinking on the radio program that he used to promote his newspaper column. Whatever the reasons for his outrage, Warren walked into the commission’s hearing room on the day of Rowley’s testimony with the attitude of a prosecutor.

  Shortly after nine a.m. on June 18, Rowley was sworn in, and he was immediately hit with questions about the drinking incident. It was Rankin’s first substantive question, in fact: “Did you learn in connection with the trip when the assassination occurred that certain of the Secret Service agents had been in the Press Club and what is called the Cellar, in Fort Worth, the night before?”

  Rowley: “Well, that came to my attention through a broadcast that Mr. Pearson made—that agents were inebriated the night before.” He said he immediately dispatched a Secret Service inspector to Texas to investigate.

  Rankin: “What did you learn?”

  Rowley admitted that much of what Pearson had reported was true, although Rowley said he did not believe that any agent was drunk, as Pearson had claimed. The internal investigation showed that a total of nine agents had been out drinking; three had each downed a scotch, while “the others had two or three beers” each. The next day, at least four of those agents were assigned to the motorcade, including Clint Hill, the agent who appeared to have saved Jacqueline Kennedy’s life.

  Rankin asked: “Did you learn whether or not there were any violations of the regulations of the Secret Service by these men?” It was a question to which Rankin—and Warren—already knew the answer.

  Rowley: “Yes, there was a violation.”

  To make the commission’s point as clearly as possible, Rankin then asked Rowley to cite the specific regulation in the Secret Service manual that barred drinking on duty, and then to read it out loud. Rowley was handed a copy of the employee manual; he turned to the first chapter of Section 10: “Employees are strictly enjoined to refrain from the use of intoxicating liquor during the hours they are officially employed at their post of duty or when they may reasonably expect that they may be called upon to perform an official duty.”

  The rules were stricter for agents assigned to the president’s personal detail. Rowley was asked to read those out, as well: “The use of intoxicating liquor of any kind, including beer and wine, by members of the White House detail and special agents cooperating with them, or by special agents on similar assignments while they are in a travel status, is prohibited.” It was a firing offense, Rowley admitted, reading out the rest of the regulation: “Violation or slight disregard of the above paragraphs or the excessive or improper use of intoxicating liquor at any time will be cause for removal.”

  Rankin asked the next question with what was, for him, uncharacteristic aggressiveness: How could Rowley be sure that his agents might not have saved the president’s life? “How can you tell that the fact that they were out as they were the night before … had nothing to do with the assassination?” Rankin asked. “Have you done anything to discipline these men for violations of the regulations of the Secret Service?”

  Rowley defended himself and the agents. He said he believed that the agents in the motorcade had performed in “an exemplary manner,” whatever the aftereffects of the alcohol. “I did consider what type of punishment would be provided,” he said. “Then I also considered the fact that these men in no way had—their conduct had no bearing on the assassination.” To punish them might lead the public to believe “they were responsible for the assassination of the president. I didn’t think this was fair, and that they did not deserve that.… I did not think in the light of history that they should be stigmatized with something like that, or their families or children.”

  Warren was having none of it: “Don’t you think that if a man went to bed reasonably early, and hadn’t been drinking the night before, he would be more alert than if they stayed up until 3, 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, going to beatnik joints and doing some drinking along the way?” Warren was using Pearson’s description of the Cellar, an all-night club, as a “beatnik joint.”

  As the president’s motorcade traveled through Dallas, Secret Service agents were supposed to be scanning the crowd and the buildings along the route for threats, Warren noted. The commission had heard testimony from witnesses who said they saw a rifle barrel pointing out of the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository before the shots rang out, yet the Secret Service agents missed it entirely. “Some people saw a rifle up in that building,” the chief justice said. “Wouldn’t a Secret Service man in this motorcade, who is supposed to observe such things, be more likely to observe something of that kind if he was free from any of the results of liquor or lack of sleep than he would otherwise? Don’t you think that they would have been much more alert, sharper?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rowley conceded. “But I don’t believe they could have prevented the assassination.”

  Warren was not done. The misconduct went beyond the agents, he suggested; it went to Rowley’s own performance, since the Secret Service director was apparently willing to ignore misconduct by his own employees. “It seems to me that they were all given a complete bill of health,” Warren said. “I just wonder if that is quite consistent with the facts that the commission should have.”

  Rowley: “As I said earlier, we don’t condone their actions, nor do we try to belittle the violation. But in the circumstances, I took the decision that I thought right.… I don’t think that these people should be blamed for the tragedy.”

  Weeks later, Warren was dismayed when he read draft chapters of the commission’s final report dealing with the Secret Service and its performance in Dallas. The drafts, written by Sam Stern, Warren’s former clerk at the court, did not include any direct criticism of the agents who had gone out drinking. Nor did Stern offer any harsh criticism in the draft chapter of the failure of FBI agent James Hosty to alert the Secret Service to Oswald’s presence in Dallas. After months of turning himself into the commission’s in
-house expert on the Secret Service, Stern still could not muster any outrage over the drinking incident, and he continued to be impressed that so many Secret Service agents and their supervisors seemed genuinely to grieve over what happened in Dallas, and to accept some responsibility for the assassination. It came as an awkward surprise for Stern to discover how differently the chief justice felt. Warren ordered Stern’s drafts rewritten to make direct attacks on the Secret Service agents and on Hosty. “We would have looked silly if we hadn’t mentioned the Secret Service agents going out the night before the assassination,” Warren said later. “We would have looked bad if we failed to point out that the FBI had had reason to look up Oswald before the event, knowing all that it did.”

  * * *

  Much as Warren wanted to be tough on the Secret Service, Gerald Ford wanted to be tough on the State Department. The department was a traditional foe for Ford and other conservative Republicans in Congress who saw it as a bastion of liberal Ivy Leaguers all too eager to reach accommodation with nations behind the Iron Curtain. Many department officials were still traumatized over the attacks that had been made on their loyalty by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

  Ford told aides he believed there was evidence of incompetence, if not worse, at the department in its dealings with Oswald over the years, beginning with its decision in 1962 to allow him to return home from Russia. Why should Oswald have been allowed to reclaim his full rights as a citizen after he announced to American diplomats in Moscow, shortly after he arrived there in 1959, that he wanted to renounce his citizenship? The department had not only allowed Oswald to return to the United States, bringing with him a new Russian wife; it had provided him with a loan of about $400 to cover his travel costs. Ford was also outraged, he said, over the public statements issued by the State Department in Washington, within hours of Kennedy’s murder, that there was no evidence of a foreign conspiracy in the assassination—a judgment made before any real investigation had begun.