A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (43 page)

Dean had told a number of seemingly contradictory stories about what happened in the basement and what he heard Ruby say immediately after his arrest. By the time Dean testified as a star prosecution witness in Ruby’s murder trial in March, however, he had settled on his account, one that would help put Ruby on death row.

According to Dean’s testimony, Ruby claimed in his initial police interrogation, minutes after shooting Oswald, that he had slipped into the basement by walking down a ramp off Main Street, past an unsuspecting police guard. During the same interrogation, Dean said, Ruby made a statement that the murder was premeditated. Specifically, Dean said, Ruby blurted out that he had originally thought of killing Oswald two days earlier, when he attended the Friday night news conference at police headquarters. Prosecutors cited Dean’s testimony in convincing a jury that Oswald’s murder was two days in the planning—not the result of temporary insanity, as defense lawyers claimed—and that Ruby should die in the electric chair.

Griffin was not the only person in Dallas who believed Dean was lying. Ruby’s defense lawyers said they were convinced of it, especially since no one else could back up the policeman’s testimony. Griffin thought Dean was motivated to lie both to cover up his own “dereliction of duty” and to try to grab publicity for himself. Dean had proved himself remarkably publicity hungry. On the day of Oswald’s murder—without permission from his superiors—he had granted several interviews about what he had seen in the basement and what he knew of Ruby. Also without permission, he drove across town that afternoon to Parkland Hospital, where he managed to attach himself to Oswald’s family, even joining Oswald’s widow and mother in viewing the corpse.

Griffin thought it was possible that Dean had actually seen Ruby walk down the ramp and had done nothing to stop him. The police officer had been friendly with Ruby for years and was an occasional patron at the Carousel Club; Dean might have assumed that Ruby simply wanted the thrill of being a witness to a moment of history when Oswald appeared in front of the cameras again. Griffin could understand why Dean would lie if he had let Ruby into the basement; he would want to save his job. “If somebody in the police department had either let him come in or was aware that he would come in, that guy is out of a job, and the Police Department is totally discredited,” Griffin said later.

As for Dean’s claim that Ruby had acknowledged that the murder was premeditated, Griffin believed it was probably motivated by the policeman’s desire to help local prosecutors win an all-important conviction. That lie, Griffin said, would have been even more “reprehensible” since it was the reason Ruby faced execution.

*

When Griffin took Dean’s testimony in Dallas in late March, he wanted to confront him with what he thought were his lies. At the end of about two hours of questioning, he announced to Dean that he would like to continue the conversation “off the record” with the court reporter out of the room. The unsuspecting Dean agreed.

“I told Dean that he was not telling the truth,” Griffin recalled. “I told him the two particular points in his testimony that I believed to be untrustworthy: that Ruby told him on November 24 that he had entered the basement through the Main Street Ramp and that he thought of killing Oswald on the night of Nov. 22.”

Dean said he was shocked at the accusation of perjury. “I can’t imagine what you’re getting at,” he said. “I quoted Ruby just about verbatim.… These were the facts and I couldn’t change them.”

Griffin tried to ease the blow, he said. “I took considerable pains to explain to Dean that I felt that I understood why he was coloring his testimony and that I believed him to be a basically honest and truthful person. I don’t recall ever using the word perjury.… I most certainly did not tell him that he was going to be prosecuted for anything.” He advised Dean to consider hiring a lawyer if he needed to make a “substantial amendment” to his testimony.

Dean insisted again he was telling the truth, and Griffin went back on the record without getting the confession he had hoped for. He tried to end Dean’s testimony on a friendly note. The court reporter returned to the room and Griffin, speaking for the record, said: “I appreciate very much the assistance that Sergeant Dean has given us here this evening, and I hope, and I am sure, that if anything further comes to light which he thinks would be of value to the commission, that he will come forward with it voluntarily.”

The confrontation with Dean quickly “blew up in my face,” Griffin acknowledged later. The police sergeant walked out of the witness room and contacted Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, the prosecutor who had won Ruby’s conviction. Dean warned that the Warren Commission seemed to be out to undermine his testimony and therefore reverse the conviction. Wade immediately contacted Rankin in Washington to protest.

Dean said later he understood that Wade also telephoned President Johnson, an old Texas friend of the district attorney’s, to complain about the commission’s tactics, and specifically about Griffin. The story leaked to the Dallas newspapers, which reported that Griffin was being “recalled” to Washington.

Griffin might have predicted what would happen next, given his belief that the Ruby investigation had always been treated as a stepchild of the commission’s work. When he learned of the flap in Dallas, Chief Justice Warren sided with Sergeant Dean, not with Griffin. Whatever Warren’s view of Dean’s truthfulness, he did not want the commission caught up in a nasty public fight with officials in Dallas. In early June, Dean was invited to Washington to testify, and he received an apology directly from the chief justice. “No member of our staff has a right to tell any witness that he is lying or that he is testifying falsely,” Warren said. “That is not his business.”

*

The confrontation over Dean came at an already difficult moment for Griffin and Hubert, who were beginning to wonder if they could ever finish their part of the investigation. From the evidence they had gathered, it was impossible to rule out the possibility that—somehow, someway—Ruby had in fact been part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy or Oswald, or both. Ruby had undeniable, if indirect, ties to mobsters who might have had reason to want to see the president dead because of the Justice Department’s war on organized crime. “There were lots and lots of associations that he had with underworld types,” Griffin said. And there was a Cuba connection. Over the years, Ruby had wanted to be part of those seemingly shady business deals in Cuba that might have put him in touch with Cubans—both supporters and opponents of Fidel Castro—who might be implicated in the president’s assassination.

By late winter, Warren had abandoned any hope of meeting his original deadline of June 1 to finish the investigation. The commission’s lawyers were then facing a new deadline of June 15 to prepare drafts of their contributions to the final report. But for Griffin and Hubert, that deadline was still wildly optimistic. In March, they sent a memo to Rankin to remind him how much of their basic detective work was not finished. There had still been no effort to check out all of the names, telephone numbers, and addresses found in Ruby’s belongings, nor had anyone conducted a thorough analysis of the records of phone calls that Ruby and some of his associates had made in the days before Oswald’s murder.

Immediately after a staff meeting on Friday, April 3, the two lawyers met with Rankin and asked for help. They estimated they would need three extra investigators, working with them for at least a month, to get their work done. The response they got was, in their view, insulting. Rankin told them that Warren’s bodyguard might be able to help them; no one else was available.

The next day, Griffin and Hubert mounted something close to an insurrection. They sent a memo to Rankin and Willens, recommending that the commission leave questions about Ruby and about Oswald’s murder out of the commission’s final report entirely. “We do not think the Ruby aspects of the case should be included,” they wrote. “There is no possibility that this work can be properly done so as to be useful in the final report.”

They said the commission could offer the public a sensible explanation for why questions about Ruby were not addressed, given his continuing appeal of his murder conviction. “If Ruby’s conviction is reopened and our report is in any way hostile to Ruby, the commission could be justly criticized for issuing a report which impaired his right to a fair trial,” the two lawyers wrote. Including material about Ruby in the report could create a serious conflict of interest for the chief justice. “Is it proper,” they asked, “for a commission of the high rank and prestige of this commission to comment extensively about a person whose case is on appeal and will surely get to the United States Supreme Court?”

Willens’s response was blunt. He told them to finish the job as best they could and not to expect more help. It was not up to them to decide what information got into the commission’s report. “We should proceed as though we were definitely going to publish something on this subject,” he wrote.

Griffin and Hubert stepped up their protest, this time with an eleven-page memo to Rankin that listed all of their unanswered questions about Ruby. They cited the many gaps in the commission’s evidence about Ruby’s activities in the months before Kennedy’s assassination. They also outlined an explosive theory about ties between Ruby and Oswald: “We believe that the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. We suggest that these matters cannot be left ‘hanging in the air.’ They must either be explored further or a firm decision must be made not to do so, supported by stated reasons for the decision.”

The memo essentially called the bluff of their superiors, and it produced what Willens later called “substantial discussion” about what could be done to satisfy Griffin and Hubert. In a memo dated June 1, Willens told Griffin to “submit to me in writing in the next few business days every investigative request” that “was necessary to complete the investigation.” That same day, Hubert announced to Rankin that he would leave the investigation by the end of the week. Bitter over how the commission had ignored his work, Hubert had been planning for weeks to scale back his work on the commission and return to New Orleans. Now, he wanted to leave entirely. He told Rankin he needed two days “to clean out my desk and also to vacate my apartment.” He said he would be available to return to Washington on weekends, if needed, for special projects and that he would travel to Dallas if the commission finally took Ruby’s testimony.

That, it was decided, would not be necessary. Days later, when the commission finally scheduled a trip to Texas to question Ruby, Hubert and Griffin were not invited, and Arlen Specter went in their place. Their colleagues felt badly for Hubert and Griffin. According to David Belin, they were “brilliant lawyers who were crushed that they were not allowed to be present at the interrogation of the man they had been investigating for so many months.” Later, however, Griffin insisted he understood and accepted the decision to exclude him. After his confrontation with Sergeant Dean, “I had become an embarrassment,” he said. His reappearance in Dallas might stir up local officials in protest.

*

The man who was at the center of so much turmoil inside the Warren Commission, Jack Ruby, had spent most of the winter and spring in a jail cell in Dallas—occasionally trying to hurt, if not kill, himself.

As defense lawyers prepared to appeal his conviction for Oswald’s murder, Ruby was being held at the Dallas county jail. On April 26, just after midnight, he tricked guards into getting him a glass of water so he could try again to injure himself. When the guards stepped away, Ruby charged into the concrete wall of his cell, headfirst. He was found, bleeding and unconscious, and taken to a hospital for X-rays, which revealed no serious injury. In searching his cell, guards discovered that he had begun removing the lining from his prison clothes, apparently to make a noose.

The next afternoon, Ruby had a visitor—Dr. Louis West, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center, who had been hired as a consultant by lawyers handling Ruby’s appeal. West met with Ruby in a private interview room and found him “pale, tremulous, agitated and depressed.” He could see the large cut on Ruby’s head. Why had he tried to hurt himself? the doctor asked.

Ruby said he felt guilty. “The Jews of America are being slaughtered,” he replied. “Twenty-five million people.” They were being killed in retaliation for “all the trouble” he had created by murdering Oswald. Ruby said his own brother, Earl, was among the victims of this genocide—“tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated and burned in the street outside the jail.” Ruby said he could “still hear the screams” of the dying Jews. “The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington, to permit the police to carry out the mass murders without federal troops being called out or involved,” he told West. He was responsible for “a great people with a history of 4,000 years to be wiped out.”

When West tried to assure him he was wrong, Ruby “became more suspicious of my sincerity and once or twice seemed about to attack me,” the psychiatrist said.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know about it—everybody must know about it,” Ruby snapped. He had smashed his head against the wall “to put an end to it.”

In his report to defense lawyers, West said that Ruby referred frequently to Oswald, describing him as “the deceased” or “that person.”

The next day, West went to see Ruby again, and he seemed in better condition. Still, as West watched, Ruby experienced hallucinations that caused him to “quickly rise, move to a corner of the room and stand with head cocked, eyes wide and darting about.” At another moment, Ruby “crawled under the table to listen” to the voices he was hearing. “The hallucinations were of human groans and cries, sometimes of children or a child,” West wrote. Ruby believed they were coming from “Jews under torture.”

West said he was convinced this was not play-acting. “Ruby is technically insane at this time,” he concluded. Ruby was “obviously psychotic—he is completely preoccupied with the delusions of persecution of the Jews on his account. He feels hopeless, worthless and guilty because he is to blame for the mass-murders of his own people.” Ruby did not belong in jail, West said. “This individual should be in a psychiatric hospital for observation, study and treatment.”