MR. REVILL: We interviewed everyone that had been assigned to the basement. We interviewed members of the news media in an effort to determine if there was complicity between Ruby and any member of the police department or anyone else for that matter, and we were unsuccessful in that endeavor.44
When Oswald was being moved into the basement to be loaded into the van, Ruby was standing directly behind Harrison and lunged past him to shoot and kill Oswald as he was walked into the throng of reporters and officers.
The Warren Commission would later ask Dallas police inspectors to examine their own force in regard to a possible collusion between the department and Ruby. The idea that the Commission would expect a potentially corrupt police force to investigate itself was ridiculous, but useful. It would follow the same protocol of self-examination with the CIA, the Secret Service, and the FBI.
“It would be have been like asking the Chicago White Sox baseball team of 1919 to examine charges that some of its players had conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series,”45 wrote Seth Kantor.
Both Harrison and Miller were uncooperative when questioned by Warren Commission assistant counsel Burt Griffin.
MR. MILLER: I still don’t understand the reason of it. Are you going to use this thing to try to prosecute me?
MR. GRIFFIN: No
MR. MILLER: What are you going to use it for?
MR. GRIFFIN: We have no authority to prosecute anyone except for perjury before the Commission. Now, we—our instructions are—let me get a copy of the resolutions. Let me suggest that we handle it this way. I have got a copy here of the resolutions, Executive Order signed by President Johnson, and the joint resolutions of Congress. The rules of the Commission and a memorandum dated March 20, 1964, from Mr. Rankin, who is the general counsel of the Commission authorizing Mr. Hubert and me to administer your oath and take your deposition. Now, I think that what I prefer to do here so that you can be sure what you want to do, and I don’t want to put you under any pressure. Now, I would like to give you this and have you try to find another room out here and look at this, and read it over, and think about this and ponder it as long as you want, and I want to give you assurance that I am going to call another—I am going to call officer Montgomery in here and proceed with him. I am not going to tell him that I have not completed your deposition or anything like that. I want to be sure that, as far as anybody is concerned whatsoever, what has transpired here is completely routine so that any decision you make, I can give you as much assurance as possible——
MR. MILLER: All I wanted to know is the purpose of the thing.46
The morning that Harrison was to take a lie-detector test concerning the Oswald slaying, a rumor floated in police ranks that he was heavily sedated on tranquilizers to prevent an accurate test reading; the results would be inconclusive.47
Ruby was held in the Dallas county jail after he had killed Oswald, but pleaded with the Warren Commission and Earl Warren in particular on multiple occasions, to be moved to a place where he felt safe enough to tell the true story.
“Is there any way of you getting me to Washington?” Ruby asked on one occasion.
“I don’t think so,” replied Warren.
“It is very important,” said Ruby.48
The members of the Warren Commission certainly had the authority to move Ruby whenever and wherever they wanted, particularly if they thought that Ruby was in danger and that his testimony was altered due to threats of harm. They had Ruby right where they wanted him.
“I may not live tomorrow to give any further testimony … and 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,”49 Ruby asserted. He then intimated to Warren that his family was in danger.
Ruby, rotting in jail, once believed himself to be a networked friend of the Mob and the Dallas Police Department. But after he had killed Oswald, Ruby himself assumed the role of patsy. A short time after his death, the Dallas Times-Herald reported that Ruby had admitted in a note smuggled out of prison that he was “part of a terrible political frameup.”50
In the years following Ruby’s slaying of Oswald, only one reporter, Dorothy Kilgallen, was granted a private interview with him. Kilgallen had voiced strong speculations about the Kennedy assassination, especially concerning the connections of Oswald and his killer.
“It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect,” Kilgallen wrote in February 1964. “Lee Harvey Oswald has passed on not only to his shuddery reward, but to the mysterious realm of ‘classified’ persons whose whole story is known only to a few government agents … Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, while the defense tries to rescue his alleged killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway?”51
Kilgallen had more pieces of the assassination puzzle, including that Texas oil barons—Lyndon Johnson moneyman H. L. Hunt in particular and Carlos Marcello—were involved in the plot. Following her interview with Jack Ruby, Kilgallen announced to friends that the information she was privy to in the Ruby interview was game-changing, and that she was “about to blow the JFK case sky high.” The new information was to be released in a book Kilgallen was writing titled Murder One, which she hoped would finally reveal elements of the conspiracy and coverup integral to the assassination.
The book, however, would never be released. Kilgallen would be found dead in her New York City apartment on November 8, 1965, the result of an accidental overdose in the early hours of the day. The cause of death was a potent mix of alcohol and barbiturates, but, as so many who died in connection to the assassination, Kilgallen’s abrupt passing was suspicious. The death was made to look natural, but clues that she had been murdered and her body had been moved postmortem were abundant. Her body was found in a bed that she never slept in, positioned next to her was a book that she had already read, and the room was cooled by an air conditioner that she never used in the evening hours.52 Kilgallen’s final clothing choices were also bizarre: The reporter was outfitted as if she were ready for a night on the town.
“She was dressed very peculiarly, like I’ve never seen here before,” a friend who had discovered her body said. “She always [was] in pajamas and old socks, and her make up [would be] off, and her hair [would be] off.”53
Gone were the revelatory notes that Kilgallen had taken from her interview with Ruby, never to be found. It could only be speculated as to what they revealed, but perhaps some of the public statements to reporters that Ruby made following his incarceration could shed some light on what they contained.
“I wish that our beloved President Lyndon Johnson would have delved deeper into the situation, hear me, not to accept just circumstantial facts about my guilt or innocence and would have questioned to find out the truth about me before he relinquished certain powers to these certain people,” Ruby told the Warren Commission. “I have been used for a purpose,”54 he added.
It was not be the last time that Ruby would bring up President Johnson.
“Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface,” Ruby told reporters. “The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives. The people that have had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world.”
“Now these people are in very high positions, Jack?” a reporter asked.
“Yes,” replied Ruby.
Ruby later added context to his statement.
“I want to correct what I said before about the vice president,” Ruby said.
“The vice president?” a reporter inquired.
“When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he were vice president, there would have never been an assassination of our beloved Presid
ent Kennedy,” Ruby answered.
“Would you explain again?” the reporter asked.
“Well, the answer is the man in office now,” Ruby coldly replied.55
NOTES
1. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg. 96.
2. Warren Commission Testimony of James J. Rowley.
3. Brussel, “The Last Words of Lee Harvey Oswald,” www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/LHO.html.
4. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg. 98.
5. Ibid, pg. 96.
6. Warren Commission Testimony of August Mike Eberhardt.
7. Ibid.
8. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg. 89.
9. Ibid.
10. HSCA Final Report, pg. 170.
11. Ibid pg. 170.
12. North, Act of Treason, pg. 345.
13. Ibid, 361.
14. Nelson, LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, pg. 364.
15. Kantor, Pgs. 390–391.
16. Ibid, og. 391.
17. Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, pg. 1117.
18. Ibid.
19. Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, pg. 6.
20. Ibid, pg. 13.
21. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa, pg. 152.
22. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg. 199.
23. HSCA Final Report, pg. 171.
24. Davis, Mafia Kingfish, pg. 157.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid, pg. 449.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Deitche, The Silent Don, pg. 157.
30. Ibid, pg. 160.
31. Ibid.
32. Deitche, The Silent Don, pg. 156.
33. Ibid, pg. 102.
34. Giancana, Double Cross, pg. 388.
35. Testimony of Santos Trafficante.
36. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg. 62.
37. Davis, Mafia Kingfish, pg. 156.
38. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg. 139.
39. Warren Commission Testimony of Jack Ruby.
40. Davis, Mafia Kingfish, pg. 232.
41. Warren Commission Testimony of L.D. Miller.
42. Warren Commission Testimony of W.J. Harrison.
43. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg 126.
44. HSCA Testimony of Jack Revill.
45. Ibid, pg. 118.
46. Warren Commission Testimony of L.D. Miller.
47. Kantor, The Ruby CoverUp, pg. 127.
48. Ibid, pg. 29.
49. Ibid, pg. 27.
50. The News and Courier, September 27, 1978.
51. Belzer, Hit List, pg. 79.
52. Ibid, pgs. 82–83.
53. Ibid, pg. 88.
54. Warren Commission Testimony of Jack Ruby.
55. www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnpQBa1Euc&feature=related.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
POPPY
No one acted more curiously than future President George H. W. Bush on the day President Kennedy was shot. For over twenty years, Bush claimed he couldn’t remember where he was on that day. In fact, he went out of his way to create an alibi and dissemble about where he really was on November 21 and 22, 1963.
I have a unique experience with George H. W. Bush: I helped bar his assent to the presidency in 1980. It would be a major mistake to assume Bush’s unfailingly polite, friendly, affable, and sometimes goofy style as benign. Don’t fall for the vapidity and obfuscation. Underneath it lie consuming political ambition, steely determination, boundless energy, and remarkable physical discipline for relentless travel to pursue his political goals. Barbara Bush brings a vindictive streak; she remembers everyone who was not for her husband. Despite his “nice guy” image, George Bush is high-handed, secretive, and fueled by an incredible sense of entitlement.
He is also disciplined and extremely well organized. He was a model candidate, traveling relentlessly, shaking hands, writing notes, and building his friends list. He was always collecting: people, addresses, supporters, and money. Only Richard Nixon was a more indefatigable campaigner.
I met George Bush when I was Young Republican National Chairman and he addressed the group’s national leadership conference. He was cordial. I heard later that that my introduction of him as “George Herbert Walker Bush” was taken as a slight as if I was mocking his four-part patrician moniker. I wasn’t.
I grew up in Connecticut’s Fairfield County when the Bushes still lived in Greenwich. I saw Senator Prescott Bush speak to the 1966 Republican state convention. I rooted for George Bush in his 1970 campaign for the US Senate. Then, I had only three posters in my room: Jim Buckley (New York) for Senate, John Lupton (Connecticut) for Senate, and George Bush “He Can Do More for Texas.” I also knew the seeds of a family feud with Lowell Weicker, which would play out in the 1980s.
Bush was not a conservative, but, as Nixon, he knew when he had to sound like one. He always accommodated the “kooks” as Harris County GOP chair and even worked with them. He treated every one with bonhomie. He knew the buzz words and dutifully repeated them: UN, Gun Owners, Civil Rights. Post election in 1988, he famously swept a copy of Bill Buckley’s National Review off a coffee table in his Kennebunkport, Maine home and said “well we don’t need this shit anymore.”
I had the chance to observe George Bush up-close when I worked against him in the Northeast during the 1980 Presidential campaign. The states that I handled for Ronald Reagan had GOP establishments still dominated by the Eastern moderates and were thought to be Bush strongholds. In fact, Bush’s campaign manager James A. Baker would later tell me that I was “a pain in the Bushes’ ass.”
Baker admitted that Bush was counting on delegate votes in New York and New Jersey, where Reagan swamped him, seizing all the delegates. In Bush’s native Connecticut, Reagan victories in three congressional districts forced Bush to split the thirty-five delegates down the middle.
“Barbara hates your ass,” Lee Atwater told me. He was Bush’s campaign manager, later Republican National Chairman and my friend of twenty years.
When I saw presidential candidate George W. Bush, whose campaign for governor I had financially supported at a fundraising reception in New Jersey, he told me “My father always said you stole those New Jersey delegates from him.”
Secretary to the Eisenhower cabinet and New Jersey Republican National committeeman Bernard “Bern” Shanley, who ran for the Senate in New Jersey, told me “the Bushes hate you.” As a soldier in the service of Ronald Reagan, I still wear their scorn proudly.
Bush’s 1980 campaign was hampered when it hired his longtime mistress, Jennifer Fitzgerald, as his scheduler. Fitzgerald hoarded information; power struggles plagued the campaign. Barbara Bush once famously exploded at Fitzgerald in the back of a limousine when she touched Bush’s knee. Senior campaign aides plotted to remove Fitzgerald, and eventually Bush’s savvy campaign chief James A. Baker, III gave Bush a “her or me” ultimatum. Fitzgerald would leave the campaign, only to be hired later to handle the vice president’s schedule (she was kept in the vice president’s ceremonial Capitol Hill office rather than the White House). Fitzgerald let it be know that she had a trove of love letters from the vice president and wouldn’t be going anywhere.1
George Bush was checking into political obscurity when he was defeated for president in 1980 after losing two US Senate races. Only his elevation to the vice presidency by Ronald Reagan gave him a chance to become president. His unwillingness to defend Reaganomics, which had given the nation its largest economic boom in history, was a stunning display of disloyalty to the “Gipper.”
Perhaps it was because George H. W. Bush has no fixed ideology that he was underrated within his own party. Nixon and Kissinger considered Bush a lightweight; in his book Being Poppy, Richard Ben Cramer would say that Nixon believed Bush “lacked the killer instinct.” In the House, Bush was so active for birth control that his colleagues would nickname him “Rubbers.” In his 1970 Senate race, he said “I realize this is a politically sensitive area. But I believe in a woman’s right to chose. It should be an individual matter. I th
ink, ultimately, it will be a constitutional question. I don’t favor a federal abortion law as such.” He would switch to oppose abortion to run for vice president with Reagan. Deriding Reagan’s tax cuts as “voodoo economics,” Bush himself ran on a no-new-taxes pledge in 1988—a pledge he would promptly break.
George H.W. Bush is the son of US Senator Prescott S. Bush. As with his son, Prescott graduated from Yale where he had been a member of the secret Skull and Bones society. He was an investment banking partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, a golfing partner of Eisenhower, and a pillar of the Eastern Establishment.
A tall imposing man and heavy drinker, Prescott was a man whose wrath you didn’t want. He narrowly lost the US Senate seat in 1950 when it was revealed in the heavily Catholic state of Connecticut that he and his wife has contributed to Planned Parenthood. In 1952, Prescott would win a special election to fill the seat of Senator Brien McMahon, who died unexpectedly. He was friendly with John Foster and Allen Dulles, Wall Street lawyers who represented Brown Brothers.
In 1952, George Bush served as Co-Chair of Citizens for Eisenhower–Nixon in Midland County, Texas, where he had relocated to work for Dresser Industries and later founded the Zapata Petroleum Company and Zapata Offshore. In his masterful book, Family of Secrets, author and reporter Russ Baker established that both Dresser and Zapata had been used as covers for CIA business.
According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Zapata Petroleum began in 1953 through Bush’s joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business, but who continued to work for the CIA under commercial cover.2
George Bush, known to his Ivy League friends as “Poppy,” may have been associated with the CIA as early as 1953. Fabian Escalante, the chief of a Cuban counterintelligence unit during the late 1950s and early 1960s, describes a plan called “Operation 40” was put into effect by the National Security Council and presided over by Vice President Richard Nixon. Escalante said that Nixon, as operation director or “case officer,” had assembled an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation. Operation 40, a group of CIA assassins, was subsequently brought into the Bay of Pigs invasion. Interestingly, CIA official Fletcher Prouty delivered three Navy ships to agents in Guatemala to be used in the invasion. Prouty claims that he delivered the ships to a CIA agent named George Bush. Agent Bush named the ships Barbara J, Houston, and Zapata.3
The Man Who Killed Kennedy Page 29