by Gus Russo
One of those present for the interrogation was Frank Ellsworth, a local agent from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). He recalls that Oswald, with a “smug look on his face,” was “surrounded by 14 agents and officers and he didn’t even seem disturbed. He had the ‘cat-that-ate-the-canary’ look on his face the whole time.”47 Police Officer Elmo Cunningham found Oswald “a very arrogant young man.”48 Cunningham’s impressions were shared by everyone else present. Ellsworth confirms that Oswald denied everything and “kept trying to change the subject.” Ellsworth remembers Oswald as looking “self-satisfied.”
When Oswald did speak, he rarely even flirted with the truth. “I couldn’t get a direct answer from him about the gun. I tried twice and gave up,” Ellsworth remembers. Oswald’s constant and characteristic lying seems to have unnerved a number of those present. He lied, for example, about owning a rifle and pistol, about his “Hidell” alias, about the backyard photos showing him with his weapons, even about where he lived. His manner while delivering these falsehoods was consistently calm—with one glaring exception. Jim Hosty, who was also present, explained:
Now I kind of stuck my neck out. I figured with the President being killed, I’d better go ahead and press the issue on this, and I said, ‘Have you ever been to Mexico?’ And Oswald said, ‘Yes, I’ve been to Tijuana when I was in the Marine Corps.’ And I said, ‘Have you been to Mexico City?’ And at that he blew up and he said, ‘How did you know? I—I—I didn’t—I’ve never been there.’ He started to admit it and then, quickly changed, and said, ‘No, I’ve never been there. How’d you know about that?’And it was obvious that I had startled him. It was the only time he ever became unglued.49
Hosty recalls the suspect’s other admission. When Hosty asked Oswald how he had received the bruises to his face, Oswald replied, “I resisted arrest and I had it coming.” This was a far cry from his earlier protestations of total compliance in the Texas Theater.
Meanwhile, the case against Oswald was mounting exponentially, with or without his cooperation. At lineups, he was identified as the Tippit murderer. His rifle as well as dozens of his fingerprints were found in the sniper’s nest, precisely where witnesses in the plaza below had seen someone who looked just like Oswald shoot. One of the chief “indicators” to the professionals was the fact that Oswald alone had fled the Depository, gone home, gotten a pistol, and killed a cop. Flight from a crime puts up red flags for any investigator.
While the interrogation dance with Oswald proceeded, other members of the Dallas police force collected evidence in other parts of the city. Investigators learned that Oswald had stored his meager possessions in the garage at Ruth Paine’s home. The materials they confiscated gave an early indication of Oswald’s links to pro-Castro groups. Listed among the pamphlets the police collected were the following titles:
“The Crime Against Cuba”
“Fidel Castro Denounces Bureaucracy and Sectarianism”
“The Socialist Workers Party”
“The Coming American Revolution”
“Cuban Counter Revolutionaries to the U.S.” by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC)
A list of Communist and Russian publications
“The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought” by Fidel Castro
An FPCC catalogue
“The Road to Socialism”
“Speech at the U.N.” by Fidel Castro
At 7 p.m. on Friday, November 22nd, roughly five hours after being taken into custody, Oswald was charged in the Tippit slaying. Six and one-half hours later, at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, he was charged with the President’s assassination. By now, the police had collected the damning pro-Castro material from the Paine garage, and been advised both of the Cuban Embassy aspects of Oswald’s background, and his defection to the Soviet Union.50 Assistant D.A. Alexander leaked the fact that he intended to formally charge Oswald with committing the assassination “in the furtherance of a communist conspiracy.”
When the press reported this, Alexander was telephoned by a very irate D.A. Henry Wade. Jim Hosty remembers, “When President Johnson found out about this [Alexander’s “conspiracy” charge], he had somebody from the White House—it was either Clark Clifford or Cliff Carter—call down to the District Attorney Henry Wade and demand that he immediately remove that from the complaint.”51 “What the hell are you trying to do, start World War III?” Wade screamed at Alexander. The offending language was quickly removed.52
New Orleans
By Saturday morning, November 23, U.S. investigators had obtained copies of the fliers Oswald had stamped with the address 544 Camp Street. Early that day, Secret Service agents visited the building and were told that Oswald was not a tenant, but that the building had been a headquarters for an anti-Castro exile group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, run for a time by Sergio Arcacha Smith.53 However, neither the Secret Service nor the later investigators were informed that the CRC and Arcacha were linked directly to the Kennedy brothers’ White House. Neither were they told about OPLAN 380-63, the full-scale assault against Cuba that the brothers had planned for the coming weeks. And neither did they know that New Orleans was acting as one of many staging points, helping to supply the Cuban exile camps in Nicaragua and other Central American countries.
Two days later, the FBI made a cursory phone call to Guy Banister, whose New Orleans office was around the corner from the CRC, and also in the Newman Building. Because the Bureau had an ongoing relationship with Banister, the agents were well aware that the straight-laced former Special Agent in Charge was no presidential murderer. Thus, during their five-minute chat, Oswald’s name was never brought up. Banister was merely asked if he had any knowledge of young men associated with the 544 Camp Street address. He replied that he had a passing acquaintance with Arcacha years ago, who once was in the company of a young man—who could have been any of a number of CRC volunteers like Layton Martens.54
Years later, this brief interview would be seized upon by conspiracy theorists as evidence that the FBI was in on Kennedy’s murder, and had helped cover up Banister’s role as an accomplice. These theorists had no inkling of the sensitive nature of Banister’s ongoing Bureau contacts. He was, in fact, a small cog in J. Edgar Hoover’s dirt-gathering machine, supplying the director with the goods on local pols. And Hoover wasn’t about to expose that.
Washington
Much to Robert Kennedy’s dislike, he and Jackie had to wait until almost 4 a.m. Saturday, November 23rd, to accompany Jack’s body from Bethesda Naval Hospital to the White House. Later that morning, the Attorney General tried to get some sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House. He was heard sobbing and crying out, “Why, God, why?”55
On Saturday morning, the family viewed the open casket of President Kennedy in the East Room of the White House. A major debate was then raging over whether the general public should also be allowed to view the open casket of the deceased President. Jackie was adamantly against it from the start. When pressed that the public would want to see a head of state, Jackie replied, “I don’t care. It’s the most awful, morbid thing; they have to remember Jack alive.”56
After polling those who observed the body, Bobby came to agree with Jackie that the public viewing should be of a closed coffin. Besides, Bobby had said, “It doesn’t look like him.” The face was described as “waxen” and “rubbery.” Later, Jackie would confide, “It wasn’t Jack. It was like something you would see at Madame Tussaud’s.”57
Saturday night, after midnight, Bobby and Jackie returned to the open coffin to place personal mementos inside. Jackie had already placed her ring on her husband’s finger. Now, she added three letters, a pair of Jack’s cufflinks, and a piece of scrimshaw, which JFK had collected as a hobby. She then removed a lock of his hair. In his brother’s coffin, Bobby placed his PT 109 tie clip, an engraved rosary,58 and a lock of his own hair.59
The Death of Lee Harvey Oswald
Oswald’s d
etention at the city jail was supposed to be temporary. In Dallas, the city jail is considered merely a holding facility, where prisoners typically are booked, held for three or four days, then transferred to the more secure county jail, located a few blocks away and, coincidentally, overlooking Dealey Plaza..
The members of the Dallas Police force seem to have been unanimous that Oswald should be moved secretly in the middle of the night. However, the decision of when to move him was neither Fritz’s nor Curry’s to make.
Detective Paul Bentley recently recalled, “Curry wanted to move Oswald at 2 a.m. [Sunday], but Elgin Crull [the city manager] overruled him.” Crull had promised the press that they could see Oswald one more time, in part to prove that the police had not roughed him up after his arrest.60 (FBI agent Jim Hosty adds that, three years later, Crull was quietly fired as a result of this decision. According to Hosty, when Hoover learned of Crull’s decision, the FBI Director pressured Chief Curry into dismissing him.)
That Sunday, the new plan was to move Oswald at 10 a.m., but before that was to happen, several unexpected delays occurred. The suspect, still on the third floor of headquarters, expressed a desire to go back to his cell to select a different sweater to wear to his new jail location. (In what would turn out to be a fitting decision, he chose a black one.) After a last minute unscheduled interrogation, Oswald began his journey at about 11:18 a.m.
As Oswald was finally led into the third floor elevator, he was flanked on his right by Detective Jim Leavelle, to whom he was handcuffed, and on his left by L. C. Graves. Leavelle remembers talking with the prisoner:
I said, more in jest, “Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are,” and he kind of laughed and said, “Oh, you’re being melodramatic—nobody’s gonna shoot at me.” I said, “Well, in case they do, you know what to do, don’t you?” And he said, “Well, Captain Fritz told me to follow you out—I’ll do whatever you do.” I said, “In that case, you’ll be on the floor very quickly.”61
According to Leavelle, when the trio exited the basement doors to the garage, they encountered a blinding bank of press floodlights. When his eyes finally adjusted, one of the first things Leavelle discerned was a local nightclub owner, well-known as a police hanger-on. Leavelle recalled, “I couldn’t see anything. . . I was momentarily blinded by those lights. . . As I walked through the double doors, I saw Ruby in the crowd out of the corner of my eye. . . I could see the gun in his right hand down at his side.”
Jack Ruby, who had arrived at Oswald’s transfer only seconds before, screamed: “You killed my President, you son of a bitch!” He got off only one shot, but it was one in a million.62 Army wound expert Dr. John Lattimer put it this way:
It’s pretty hard to imagine a bullet doing more damage than that. 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.63
Leavelle recalls, “Oswald just groaned when he was shot—that’s the only sound he made.” Within seconds, he slipped into unconsciousness. Riding with him in the ambulance, Leavelle observed, “He groaned and stretched a little bit, and then just went completely limp, and actually that’s when I think he expired, because I never saw him make another move at all.”
As the police dragged Jack Ruby away to a holding cell, he kept yelling, “I hope I killed the son of a bitch! I hope I killed the son of a bitch!” Hyped-up, Ruby bragged to the cops about how he had just saved them a lot of trouble, avenged his beloved dead President, and honored his Jewish heritage (his birth name was Rubinstein) all in one stroke. He was, at least momentarily, very proud. Later that day, having had time to reflect, Ruby told Jim Leavelle, “All I wanted to do was be a hero, but it looks like I just fucked things up good.”64
An example of the kind of confusion and paranoia rampant that weekend is the way the Ruby news was received at the White House. Kennedy’s deputy press secretary, Malcolm Kilduff, recently recalled, “There was a White House employee named Jack Rublee. The staff initially thought he had killed Oswald in a state of hysteria.”65
Numerous interviews with those who had contact with Ruby on that weekend in November, combined with the author’s discovery of Ruby’s diary (kept in jail), make the motivation of Oswald’s killer clear. Ruby, apparently a manic-depressive, revered, among other things, the city of Dallas, the Dallas Police, President Kennedy, and his Jewish heritage. When Ruby learned that the infamous black-bordered anti-Kennedy newspaper ad appearing in the Dallas papers was paid for, in part, by a Jew (Bernard Weissman), he feared the worst. As Ruby anticipated, Dallas was now awash with rumors that Kennedy’s death resulted from a Jewish conspiracy.
It was all too much for a man who, according to his friends and employees, had been crying like a baby all weekend. With many in Dallas, and indeed the nation, whispering that Oswald should be killed, Ruby knew what he had to do. (For more on Ruby, see Appendix C: “Who was Jack Ruby?”)
Inn of the Six Flags
Before the events of that Sunday morning, Marina Oswald had already assured herself of Lee’s guilt. In 1964, Marina would spend six months with writer Priscilla McMillan (Marina and Lee), giving the author her story, including her impressions of this day:
Marina was now certain that Lee was guilty. She saw his guilt in his eyes. Moreover, she knew that had he been innocent he would have been screaming to high heaven for his “rights,” claiming he had been mistreated and demanding to see officials at the very highest levels, just as he had always done before. For her, the fact that he was so compliant, that he told her he was being treated “all right,” was a sign that he was guilty.
Marina’s biographer summarized her feelings:
Was he sorry for what he had done? Marina’s impressions were mixed. . . She thought that he was glad he had succeeded, and yet at the same time sorry. . . In spite of his obvious satisfaction, it seemed to her that he was also carrying a burden of regret heavier than he, or anyone, could bear. He was on the edge of tears all the time they were together and was barely holding them back. . . He had looked at her altogether uncharacteristically, with supplication in his eyes. . . He knew this was the end.66
This was Marina’s state of mind on Sunday morning when she heard the news that Lee had just been shot. Secret Service agents Mike Howard and Charles Kunkle were assigned to locate Oswald’s surviving family (mother, brother Robert, Marina and the two babies) and transport them to sequestered protection at the Inn of the Six Flags motel, halfway between Fort Worth and Dallas. Priscilla McMillan later wrote that:
Word had come from the Attorney General, Robot Kennedy, and the new President, Lyndon Johnson, that the Secret Service was to protect the Oswald family. Within an hour the inn was an armed camp, with men patrolling outside armed with carbines. “All we need is to have one more of you killed,” one agent said, “and we’re in real trouble.”67
Agent Mike Howard remembered a call from Johnson himself, ordering, “Nobody talks to those people, not even Washington. Nothing is to happen to that family.”68 At one point, Howard instructed one of the local police guards to remain outside the motel as a “final line of resistance.” Howard handed the cop a submachine gun and ordered him, “If anyone comes up that walk, you take care of ‘em one way or the other.”69
The protective entourage remained at the inn for five days, during which Mike Howard developed a friendship with Lee’s brother Robert, as well as with Marina, whom Howard assured wasn’t headed to a U.S. prison camp. (Howard remains friendly with Marina to this day.)
The assassin’s mother, Marguerite, was another matter altogether. Howard remembers her as being “nutty as a fruitcake.” Marguerite grew “angrier and more abusive by the hour,” at one point demanding to know why her son—who had served in the Marines, after all—would not be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with Kennedy.
During the
five days of sequestration, Howard would interrogate the Oswalds. The recorded conversations, by his estimate, comprised over 1,000 feet of recording tape. In one of their conversations, Howard asked Marina about a piece of evidence he had recovered among Lee’s possessions the day after the assassination. It was a little blue memo book which belonged to Lee. Howard read Oswald’s scribblings in the book and hoped Marina could shed light on them. According to Howard, Oswald noted his intention to kill General Edwin Walker, Governor John Connally (a former Secretary of the Navy), and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. In a notation referring to FBI agent Hosty, Oswald had written, “I will kill this son of a bitch.” Up until this time, the Walker shooting had remained an open case, with no suspects. Marina now closed the case, admitting to Howard that Lee told her of his murder attempt the previous spring.
In a few days, the FBI took over the interrogation of the Oswald family. Howard reluctantly surrendered the blue memo book to the FBI. He didn’t tell them that he had read its entire contents into his tape recorder, although he also had to hand those recordings over. Howard suspected that the tape, including Oswald’s assassination threat, would vanish and, in fact, neither ever surfaced.
Years after the assassination, Howard was assigned to Lyndon Johnson’s security detail, and brought up the topic with LBJ. At the time, Johnson appeared stunned that a page was missing from Oswald’s recovered memo book. When he heard the page’s contents, he told Howard, “That wasn’t in there.”
“It was when we saw it,” Howard said. “It’s on the tape.” According to the Houston Post, “The pair speculated that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover could have had those pages removed. Or that maybe they had disappeared somehow between the FBI and the [Warren] Commission.”70
In 1993, Frontline investigator Scott Malone, unaware of the Howard story, was given access to Oswald’s addressbook at the National Archives. Malone recalls that the book was “blue-black,” consistent with Howard’s description. At that viewing, Malone became the first person to discover that one page of the notebook had been removed by a precise “razor-cut.”71