Oswald's Tale (93 page)

He is still looking and he is still weeping. Ruby must have wept and/or had tears in his eyes ten to twenty times from Friday to Sunday. But, we can remind ourselves once more, he is crying for himself. His life is slipping away from him. Nevertheless, to maintain some finer sense of himself, he is also weeping for Jack, Jackie, and the children.

Soon enough, he begins to prowl again:

Posner:
. . . Later in the afternoon [TV reporters in their van] saw him on their monitors wandering the third floor of police headquarters and approaching Wade in an office, from which regular reporters were barred.
³³

Indeed, he is hyperactive:

Posner:
Thayer Waldo, a reporter with the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
watched Ruby giving out Carousel cards to reporters between 4:00 and 5:00
P.M.
He was aggressive in getting the reporters’ attention, pulling the sleeves of some and slapping others on the back or arms. When he got to Waldo, Ruby said, “ . . . Here’s my card with both my clubs on it. Everybody around here knows me . . . . As soon as you get a chance, I want all of you boys to come over to my place . . . and have a drink on me . . .”
³⁴

Half of the time he is even behaving as he would if his life were to go on just as it used to. He seems to have forgotten that he has closed the Carousel. He is living in two states of being. He is in his own skin and he is also playing the lead in a film full of significance and future heartbreak.

That Saturday night, with Oswald locked in his jail cell on an inaccessible floor, begins another long dark journey. Ruby has failed to produce, and it is a reasonable assumption that
they
will soon be letting him know about it.

Posner:
By 9:30 Ruby had returned to his apartment. There, he received a call from one of his strippers, Karen Bennett Carlin, whose stage name was Little Lynn. She had driven into Dallas from Fort Worth with her husband and wondered if the Carousel was going to open over the weekend, because she needed money. “He got very angry and was very short with me,” Carlin recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t you have any respect for the President? Don’t you know the President is dead? . . . I don’t know when I will open. I don’t know if I will ever open back up.’”
³⁵

How can he? If he does not kill Oswald, the Mob, after breaking his nose, his chin, and his kneecaps, will proceed to take his clubs away. But if he succeeds, the government will take the Carousel. At ten o’clock, he telephones his sister Eva to complain about how depressed he is.

An hour goes by, and then he calls Ralph Paul. No answer.

Posner:
Ruby telephoned [Paul’s] restaurant again at 11:18 and discovered Paul had gone home. He then telephoned Paul three times at home, at 11:19 for three minutes, at 11:36 for two minutes, and at 11:47 for one minute. Paul said he did not feel well, and told Ruby “I was sick and I was going to bed and not to call me.”
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That night, the Dallas jail received anonymous phone threats on Oswald’s life. On later reflection, Captain Fritz thought the calls might have come from Ruby. Perhaps they did. Ruby would have been looking for excuses—I had it all set up for Sunday, but they moved Oswald on Saturday night.

Now, he calls an old friend, Lawrence Meyers, who is in Dallas for a couple of days:

MR. MEYERS.
. . . he was obviously very upset . . . he seemed far more incoherent than I have ever listened to him. The guy sounded absolutely like he had flipped his lid, I guess . . .

I said, Jack, where are you . . . He said come have a drink with me or a cup of coffee with me . . . I said, Jack, that is silly. I am undressed. I have bathed. I am in bed. I want to go to sleep but,

I said, if you want a cup of coffee you come on over here and come on up to my room . . . He said, no, no, he had things to do. He couldn’t come over . . . This went on for a little while and the last thing I said, Jack, why don’t you go ahead and get a good night’s sleep and forget this thing. And you call me about 6 o’clock tomorrow night . . . and we will have dinner together and he said okay . . .

MR. GRIFFIN.
. . . the FBI has quoted you as saying that one of the things that Ruby told you in the conversation was, “I have got to do something about this.” Do you remember that?

MR. MEYERS.
Definitely.
³⁷

We can interpret that remark in two ways: I, on my own, have to do something about this; or, I have been told to do something about this.

He slept in one or another fashion that night and awoke in a terrible mood:

MR. SENATOR.
. . . He made himself a couple of scrambled eggs and coffee for himself, and he still had this look which didn’t look good . . . how can I express it? The look in his eyes? . . .

MR. HUBERT.
The way he talked or what he said?

MR. SENATOR.
The way he talked. He was even mumbling, which I didn’t understand. And right after breakfast he got dressed. Then after he got dressed he was pacing the floor from the living room to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the living room, and his lips were going. What he was jabbering I didn’t know. But he was really pacing.
³⁸

In the telephone conversation the night before, Meyers, referring to Jackie Kennedy, had said: “Life goes on. She will make a life for herself . . .”
³⁹

It was the worst thing Meyers could have said. By now, Jack Ruby and Jackie Kennedy are one—two suffering souls who have merged. Ruby does not want to make a new life for himself—he wants his old one back.

It is so painful. Ruby cannot ask directly for sympathy, but his self-love is pouring out of him. He is bleeding for Jackie Kennedy as if she is that beautiful element in his soul that no one else knows about, and soon it will all be lost.

He is distraught in still another fashion. When he woke up on Sunday morning, he must have been living with what he had learned the night before—Oswald was scheduled to be transferred at 10:00
A.M.
If he wasn’t at City Hall for the transfer, he might never have as good an opportunity at the County Jail.

Ruby, however, had decided not to be present. During the night, he had made up his mind. He would take whatever consequences would come from the Mob. Fuck them. He would not be their hit man.

Events, however, intervened.

Posner:
At 10:19, while still lounging in the apartment in his underwear, he received a telephone call from his dancer Karen Carlin . . . “I have called, Jack, to try to get some money, because the rent is due and I need some money for groceries and you told me to call.” Ruby asked how much she needed, and she said $25. He offered to go downtown and send it to her by Western Union, but told her it would “take a little while to get dressed . . .”
⁴⁰

Then he went out. It was a little before 11:00
A.M.,
and on his way he drove past Dealey Plaza and began to cry once more.

Of course, if you have been debating with yourself for close to forty-eight hours whether you are or are not going to pull a trigger, and either way death or utter ruin stands before you, you might cry too at every reminder of where you are. Which is that you didn’t take your last opportunity at 10:00
A.M.

Oswald, however, has not yet been transferred. Fritz has decided to let the press have one more look at him. A photo opportunity!

Meantime, Ruby is at the Western Union office sending $25 to his stripper. If his life is going to be smashed, he can at least do one last good deed.

Posner:
. . . he patiently waited in line while another customer completed her business . . . When he got to the counter, the cost for sending the moneygram totaled $26.87. He handed over $30 and waited for his change while the clerk finished filling out the forms . . . Ruby’s receipt was stamped 11:17. When he left Western Union, he was less than two hundred steps from the entrance to police headquarters.
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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?”
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