by H. N. Lloyd
4.00 p.m. Captain William Fritz’s heart was in his mouth as he received a personal telephone call from President Johnson, the content of the conversation was not what Captain Fritz had been expecting. President Johnson allegedly ordered Fritz to prematurely end his investigation into President Kennedy’s murder, ‘You have your man’, President Johnson allegedly told Fritz, before abruptly hanging up the telephone. Minutes after the telephone call from President Johnson, Captain Fritz called a press conference with the waiting reporters who still filled the corridors of the Police Headquarters. Fritz told the waiting pressmen, radio microphones and news cameras, ‘What I can tell you is that this case is cinched. This man (Lee Harvey Oswald) killed the President. There’s no question in my mind about it. I don’t want to get into the basis. I don’t want to get into the evidence. I just want to tell you that we are convinced beyond any doubt that he did the killing’.
By 9:00 p.m. the majority of the Kennedy family had gathered in the east room of the Whitehouse. Present was the international movie star and famed member of the ‘Rat Pack’; Peter Lawford, who was married to President Kennedy’s sister, Patricia. Later that weekend; Lawford would reveal to his Rat Pack drinking buddies how Robert Kennedy, through tears, had told the collected members of the Kennedy clan that it was his belief that President Kennedy had been murdered as part of an international conspiracy, which had grown from secret anti-Castro operations the government had been carrying out. Robert Kennedy stated that there was nothing he could do to get justice for his brother, the enemy was too powerful, and the Kennedy’s no longer had control of the incumbent administration. Justice and the truth would be buried along with his brother.
At 1.15 a.m. on Sunday the 23rd of November 1963, J. Edgar Hoover telephoned Captain Will Fritz in Dallas. Since Oswald had now been charged with both the murders of J. D. Tippit and President Kennedy, Hoover ordered Captain Fritz to hurry the transfer of Oswald from the city to the county jail. Shortly after terminating the phone call with Captain Fritz, a member of Fritz’s team contacted Parkland Memorial Hospital and ordered them to be on standby for an emergency. Several of the police in Dallas had already raised their concerns with Captain Fritz about the lack of security surrounding Oswald, and had discussed the possibility of how easy it would be for an assassin to kill him. At 2.15 a.m. several anonymous phone calls were placed to the Dallas Police Headquarters, the Dallas FBI Field Office, and the local Sheriff’s Office, the anonymous caller warned that Oswald would be murdered during his transfer from the city to the county jail later that day. The calls were all later traced to the home of Jack Ruby. Despite the numerous warnings and direct death threats; neither Captain Fritz nor Chief of Police Curry did anything to improve security surrounding Oswald.
Despite the lateness of the hour; President Johnson was awake and shaping his lasting legacy; his latest action was to undo one of the single most important pieces of legislation President Kennedy had ever signed. President Johnson put his signature to National Security Action Memorandum #273, with one stroke of his pen President Johnson cancelled President Kennedy’s commitment to pull out of Vietnam, and instead committed America to twelve long years of war, a war that would cost the lives of thee million people all told, both soldiers and civilians. Johnson did this terrible action with a smile on his face; and whooping triumphantly he gave the order to a disbelieving and incredulous John McNamara to, ‘Win the war!’
10:01 a.m. J. Edgar Hoover had to give President Johnson a damning report, it was his opinion and the opinion of his experts that it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who had been photographed at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, or Oswald’s voice recorded on the telephoned conversations allegedly intercepted going into the embassy. President Johnson informed Hoover that his report left him ‘confused’, the CIA was telling him for certain it was Oswald in both sets of evidence. Hoover made the situation clearer; if it was not Oswald in the photographs and on the tapes; then it meant that someone was deliberately impersonating Oswald in order to make his activities in the months leading up to the assassination look suspicious, clear evidence of a wider conspiracy. Hoover asked President Johnson not to tell anyone of the news he had imparted; only a few select people in the FBI knew the truth of the matter. Hoover left the phone call with salient words of warning, ‘The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction’.
11.00 a.m. Jack Ruby pulled up outside of the Dallas Police Headquarters, leaving his beloved dog, Sheba, in the unlocked car; he made his way into the basement car-park of the Police Headquarters. Once in the basement he joined the throng of fifty reporters who were waiting to document Oswald’s transfer to the Federal Prison. Many of the reporters had seen Ruby a lot over the past few days, and assumed he was from one of the local newspapers; his presence there that morning did not therefore draw any suspicions from them.
11.19 a.m. Tom Howard, a local attorney who was regularly used by Jack Ruby and other Dallas Mafiosi, entered the upper levels of Dallas City Hall; and made his way to the jail house. He stood for a few moments and watched as Lee Harvey Oswald was placed into the elevator that would take him down to the basement car-park. Detective H. L. McGee recognised Howard, and walked over to him, he asked if there was anything he could do for Howard. Howard shook his head and replied, ‘That’s all I wanted to see’, before he promptly left the building again.
11.20 a.m. NBC’s news cameras rolled as Lee Harvey Oswald entered the basement car-park of the Dallas Police Headquarters; he was flanked by Detective Leavelle on his right, Detective Graves on his left, Captain Fritz and Lieutenant Swain walked in front of him, he was then followed by Detective Montgomery. After Oswald had taken only a few short paces, Jack Ruby lunged out of the throng of reporters and shoved a .38 Colt Cobra into Oswald’s stomach. Pulling the trigger; Oswald fell to the ground with a pained grunt; Ruby lunged forward again as if to take a headshot; but was wrestled back by the now panicked police officers. Lee Harvey Oswald had become the first ever person to be murdered live on television. Oswald was dragged back into the corridor from whence he had come. With no signs of life; two of the police officers began to desperately give him artificial respiration. Unbeknown to the two officers, two of the major arteries leading to Oswald’s heart had been severed by the bullet, so the chest compressions carried out by them to help save Oswald’s life, actually hastened his demise.
11.25 a.m. Jack Ruby had been manhandled up to the cells on the fifth floor. There was no need for the police to ask him who he was or search for any identification, thirty-six of the police officers in the basement that morning, and four of Oswald’s five escorting officers, knew Jack Ruby personally, counted him among their friends even, he had brought them coffee and sandwiches most days, entertained them for free at his club most nights. Emptying out his pockets they discovered that they were empty apart from a wad of banknotes totalling $2000. He asked for a cigarette, and sat sweating profusely, shaking like a leaf, smoking heavily upon the cigarette as if gripped by a great fear.
In the Whitehouse the television had been switched on in the Oval Office; so that President Johnson could watch the coverage of President Kennedy’s funeral preparations. President Johnson recalled later that when he saw Ruby shoot Oswald out of the corner of his eye; he believed for a moment that someone had re-tuned the television to a gangster movie. Then to his horror he realised what had happened. Johnson immediately stormed out of the oval office in a fit of rage, and thundered his way into the Blue Room, where Robert Kennedy sat working. President Johnson turned on the television and Robert Kennedy watched in stunned silence as the aftermath of the murder of the man accused of assassinating his brother played out. ‘You’ve got to do something...We’ve got to get involved. It’s giving the United States a bad name around the world!’ President Johnson raged to the numb Robert Kennedy, before thundering out of the room again; slamming the door behind him. Johnson then sat brooding impotently in the oval office, his aides and advisors too scared to approach him
until his mountainous anger had passed.
Within minutes of the shooting Lee Harvey Oswald was in an ambulance being taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital. All the way there the paramedics fought to save Oswald, continuing the disastrous artificial respiration started by the cops. Once they had arrived at the hospital, Detective Jim Leavelle, who had travelled with Oswald in the ambulance, ordered the doctors to dig the bullet out of Oswald’s abdomen and give it to him as evidence. This they duly did, and Leavelle had a nurse scratch her initials onto the bullet to help verify the chain of custody. Meanwhile Oswald was rushed into surgery; where it was discovered that Ruby’s bullet had ripped through Oswald’s spleen, pancreas, liver, and the right kidney. The damage to his internal organs was devastating. President Johnson consumed by his furious mood telephoned Parkland Memorial Hospital. He got the doctor who was performing the life and death surgery on Oswald on the telephone; and press-ganged him into allowing an FBI officer into the operating room. President Johnson demanded that the doctors elicit a ‘deathbed confession’ from Oswald.
At the same time that President Johnson was haranguing the bemused and stressed surgeon, the news cameras in Washington captured Jackie Kennedy dressed in her mourning attire, with her children, on the north portico of the Whitehouse. They watched as President Kennedy departed the Whitehouse for the last time in the funeral cortege that would lead the former President’s body on a slow and steady progression to the rotunda on Capitol Hill.
At 2.07 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald died on the operating table at Parkland Memorial Hospital, much to President Johnson’s chagrin; Oswald never did make a deathbed confession.
Shortly after 2.15 p.m. Jack Ruby was informed of Lee Harvey Oswald’s death. It was stated that Ruby’s demeanour changed instantly, turning from a sweating nervous wreck, a shell of a man who looked like he might be on the verge of a fatal heart-attack, to his usual confident smiling swaggering self. One of the detectives offered Ruby another cigarette, and Ruby informed the officer that he didn’t smoke. Suddenly Ruby began talking freely to the cops, telling them that he had entered the basement car-park via the ramp that gave cars access to the street. The two cops who had been on duty guarding this ramp denied having seen Ruby or having granted him access to the basement. When asked why he had murdered Oswald, Ruby replied simply, ‘I did it for you, because you guys couldn’t’. At 3:00 p.m. Jack Ruby was taken from his cell to the Homicide Bureau; where Captain Will Fritz and FBI agent C. Ray Hall interviewed him more formally. The interview was not properly recorded; and as a result two different minutes of the interview were drawn up, one by the Dallas police and one by the FBI. The Dallas police’s minutes stated that Oswald was talkative; and discussed in great detail just how he had gained entry to the basement car-park via the street level ramp. The FBI reported that Ruby did not disclose any information whatsoever; and went ‘no comment’ throughout the interview.
4:00 p.m. J. Edgar Hoover telephoned the Whitehouse and discussed Oswald’s assassination with President Johnson. Hoover was concerned about how Oswald’s death would be perceived by the public, ‘The thing I am most concerned about...is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin’. After the telephone conversation Hoover drafted a memo in which he bitterly noted, ‘There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead’. Independently of this conversation between President Johnson and Hoover, the Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas deBellville Katzenbach, was filled with worry over the death of Oswald, and how no hope of a trial to finally put pay to any nagging doubts about Oswald and his guilt would play with the public, so after some thought he wrote to President Johnson suggesting a Presidential Commission, ‘of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the evidence and to announce its conclusions...The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he had no confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial...Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off...Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat-too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc)...We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort’. At first President Johnson was weary of becoming involved in a formal and politicised murder investigation, a process for which there was no legal precedent. President Johnson telephoned Katzenbach and torpedoed his suggestion, stating that the matter should be left to the everyday legal processes, a police investigation, an FBI report submitted to the Attorney General, and a normal Court of Inquiry in Texas. This quickly changed when President Johnson heard one simple comment on the news that sent his blood boiling again. ABC’s Howard K. Smith stated, ‘We don’t know if Oswald really committed the crime, and perhaps we will never know’. This infuriated the easily riled President, and so he decided there and then that, ‘some kind of report and process must take place that will convince the American public that Oswald was the actual assassin’. So with the ink barely dry on the Katzenbach memo, and Howard K. Smith’s words ringing in President Johnson’s ears, the Warren Commission was rather impetuously conceived.
Monday the 25th of November 1963. At 11.00 a.m. Jack Ruby was given his second formal interview, this time specifically by the FBI; and for the purposes of them to conduct a polygraph (lie detector) test. For the first time; in this interview Ruby set out his formal defence, that the murder was a spare of the moment thing, motivated by his desire to spare Jackie Kennedy the heartache of having to return to Dallas for an inevitable and protracted trial. The results of the polygraph test were heavily criticised, standard procedures were ignored which made falsehoods harder to determine, and the machines sensitivity was reduced to its lowest possible setting, meaning it could not pick up on the little tell tale fluctuations in blood-pressure, perspiration and heart-rate that the device was dependent upon working off. Despite this the machine did detect a clear lie from Ruby; a whopper of a lie, when asked if he had been part of a wider conspiracy to murder President Kennedy, and Ruby answered no, the machine went wild.
Tuesday the 26th of November 1963, Jack Ruby was formally charged with the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Despite the fact that he had murdered Oswald in a room full of cops, on live television, and subsequently failed a lie detector test, it had taken the police longer to charge Ruby with the murder of Oswald; than it did for the police to charge Lee Harvey Oswald for the murders of Tippit and the President, on evidence that even the director of the FBI felt wasn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.
On Friday the 29th of November 1963, exactly one week after the assassination of President Kennedy, and with the alleged assassin’s assassin behind bars charged with murder, President Lyndon B. Johnson officially signed Executive Order No. 11103, formally creating a Commission with a purview to evaluate all of the evidence, facts and circumstances around the deaths of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Commensurate With The Dignity of Their Lives: The Investigations
The Federal Bureau of Investigation Report
The seeds that led to such wide ranging conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy; were planted during the initial FBI investigation into the President’s murder. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was aware of the damage such rumours and conspiracies could have to a nation’s morale, he wanted to show the world that after such devastating events that it was business as usual for America. The last thing anyone needed were doubts hanging in the air that could be formulated into political accusations and a possible excuse for war. On Sunday the 24th of November 1963, Hoover informed his agents that he wanted, ‘something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald was the real assassin’. Embarrassingly the FBI already had quite the thick dossier on Oswald; thanks to his defection shenanigans, and his high profile public support for Cuban President Fidel Castro, so the job was a lot easier than it might have first appeared; the FBI report gave a precise of Oswald’s life and
the events running up to the assassination, and also dealt with the fatal events of Friday the 22nd of November 1963 themselves.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born on Wednesday the 18th of October 1939, his father Robert Edward Lee Oswald had died of a heart attack two months before Oswald was born. Oswald spent the first five years of his life in New Orleans; with his mother Frances and his brother, Robert, before Frances moved the family to Dallas, Texas, in 1944. Oswald was a precocious child, hitting an above average IQ of 103. Like many children with a high IQ, Oswald was withdrawn, finding it difficult to make friends, and also prone to mood swings and outbursts of anger if he didn’t get his own way. This was a trait he carried throughout his life. In 1952 his temper got the better of him; and he ended up striking his mother and threatening his auntie with a pocket knife. This little outburst of temper prematurely ended a potential family move to New York, where the Oswald’s had planned to live with their Uncle John Pic and his wife. After his little performance; Oswald was assessed by a psychiatrist, who stated that Oswald lived in a vivid fantasy life where he was obsessed with the ideas of omnipotence and power. Oswald reported to Dr. Renatus Hartogs that he fantasised that he was all powerful, that he disliked everyone, and sometimes fantasised about killing people. All in all Dr. Hartogs diagnosed Oswald as having ‘traits of a greatly disturbed person’, he was suffering the impact of emotional isolation and a lack of affection, the product of ‘a rejection from a self-involved and conflicted mother’, which had led to him being severely detached and having a personality disturbance with schizoid features and passive aggressive tendencies. A judge questioned whether Frances Oswald might have been indulging Oswald too much; to make up for her being emotionally distant, exacerbating Oswald’s feelings of self-importance and over inflating his already deluded ego. For a few weeks the question of whether Oswald should be taken off Frances for his own good hung in the air like a heavy stench. As soon as Frances Oswald heard this disturbing rumour she hightailed it back to New Orleans before the judge could make an official decision. After that close call Frances just kept moving, by the age of seventeen Oswald had lived at twenty-two different addresses and attended twelve different schools. This is behaviour which today any teacher is on the lookout for, as it can be a clear indicator of some physical or emotional abuse going on within the family. Unable to find stability; Oswald also found it difficult to knuckle down and apply himself; no wonder then that he tried to find an identity that would make him standout. At the age of fifteen Oswald declared himself a Marxist, in a capitalist country in the middle of a Cold War with a communist regime; this obvious cry for attention probably marked Oswald out as being worst than a devil worshipper. His school friends stated that Oswald was a deeply bitter child who often commented that it was unfair that his father had died before he was born, and that he had been given a ‘raw deal out of life’.