A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (56 page)

At about eleven a.m. Specter and Warren stood at the sixth-floor window. “Warren assumed a silent and thoughtful pose at the window, which I knew was my cue to start,” Specter remembered. “For about eight minutes, the chief justice didn’t say a word as I summarized” the single-bullet theory. As he spoke, “Warren stood with his arms folded across his chest and studied Dealey Plaza,” Specter recalled. “Except for the cheering crowds and the presidential motorcade, our view of Dealey Plaza, Elm Street and the Triple Underpass matched what Oswald had seen as he crouched at that window six and a half months before.”

Specter opened the presentation by reminding Warren of “the incontrovertible physical evidence” of Oswald’s guilt, including the discovery of his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle on the sixth floor—only inches from where Warren was standing at that moment—and the ballistics evidence that proved that the bullet found at Parkland Hospital had been fired from the same rifle. Oswald’s fingerprints were on the rifle, and the spent cartridges found on the sixth floor matched the rifle and the fired bullets.

He reminded the chief justice of the findings in the autopsy report and how navy pathologists demonstrated that a bullet had entered the base of Kennedy’s neck from behind and exited out his throat, nicking the knot of his tie. Specter then used his finger, pointing out the window, to show the bullet’s trajectory in the instant after it struck the president’s neck. He explained how the on-site tests done two weeks earlier showed that the bullet would then have entered Connally’s back, exiting his chest before passing through his wrist and settling in his thigh. Warren had already seen the Zapruder film several times, so Specter did not need to remind the chief justice what happened next, when a second bullet struck the president in the back of the head.

“When I finished my discourse, the Chief Justice remained silent,” Specter recalled. “He turned on his heel and stepped away, still saying nothing.” Specter was annoyed that Warren could not be bothered to say anything, if only to compliment him on the quality of the presentation. But Warren’s silence, Specter decided, probably signaled that he had accepted, in full, the single-bullet theory.

*

From the book depository, the group was taken across the street to the Dallas county jail, where they would use the sheriff’s kitchen to take Ruby’s testimony. Ford remembered the room as relatively small, about ten feet by eighteen feet, and “very austere.” A table, about three feet by eight feet, had been placed in the middle of the room, with chairs around it for Ruby and his questioners.

Specter remembered that Warren had specifically requested a small room for Ruby’s testimony, to limit the number of people who could witness the event. “A swarm of Washington and Texas bigwigs had descended” on Dallas in hopes of being part of this moment of history, Specter said. But not all could get in. There was so little space that Warren could see he would have to leave a member of his own delegation out of the room. “As the Chief Justice studied the roster, he found only one person he could exclude—me,” Specter said. “So I sat in the sheriff’s office watching the Philadelphia–San Francisco baseball game on national television. At the time, I didn’t mind too much. In retrospect, I should have.”
*

At about eleven forty-five a.m., Ruby was brought in by sheriff’s deputies. He was wearing a white prison-issue jumper. His feet were covered in thong sandals, which were given to prisoners on suicide watch in place of shoes with laces. Ford remembered that Ruby took a seat and fumbled with a small piece of paper tissue and a rubber band. He was “clean-shaven, balding, hawk-nosed, big hands and feet for a small, slight person,” Ford said. One of Ruby’s trial lawyers, Joe Tonahill, joined them. At first, Ruby appeared “surprisingly rational and quite composed—certainly far different acting than psychiatric reports I had read before the trip,” Ford said. But Ruby was also inscrutable. He had a “habit to look right at you for a period” before looking away, so it was “hard to know what he is thinking.”

Even before Ruby was sworn in by Warren, he had an urgent question for the chief justice: “Without a lie detector on my testimony, my verbal statements to you, how do you know if I am telling the truth?”

“Don’t worry about that, Jack,” Tonahill said.

Warren stepped in: “You wanted to ask something, did you, Mr. Ruby?”

Ruby: “I would like to be able to get a lie detector test, or truth serum, on what motivated me to do what I did.… Now, Mr. Warren, I don’t know if you have any confidence in the lie-detector test and the truth serum, and so on.”

Warren would later admit that he did not think fast enough, and he found himself agreeing to Ruby’s request. “If you and your counsel want any kind of test, I will arrange it for you. I would be glad to do that, if you want it.”

Ruby was pleased. “I do want it.”

Warren: “We will be glad to do it.”

That settled, Ruby wanted to be certain he would have time, on this visit, to tell his full story.

“Are you limited for time?” he asked.

Warren: “No, we have all the time you want.”

The testimony had only begun, but Ruby already wanted to know: “Am I boring you?”

Warren: “Go ahead, all right, Mr. Ruby, tell us your story.”

Ruby’s account of the two days that began November 22, with news of Kennedy’s murder, and ended November 24, with Ruby gunning down Oswald in police headquarters, would be long and convoluted. He said he heard about the shooting in Dealey Plaza seconds after it occurred; he had been a few blocks away at the
Dallas Morning News
, placing weekend advertisements for the Carousel Club. He was shattered by the news of Kennedy’s death, he said. “I became very emotional.… I couldn’t stop crying.” He immediately decided to close his club for the weekend.

That night, he took advantage of his friendship with Dallas police officers to slip into police headquarters to watch the news conference in which Oswald was paraded in front of reporters. Ruby told strangers in the pressroom that night that he was an Israeli journalist; if anyone had challenged his presence, he could always drop in a few words of the Yiddish he had learned in childhood.

At that point, his testimony quickly became so disjointed that it was almost impossible for Warren to follow. Ruby threw out names—of friends, of family members, of strippers, and of other employees at the Carousel Club—and places and dates that meant nothing to the chief justice and the others. In moments of coherence, however, he consistently denied that he had been part of any conspiracy to silence Oswald. He insisted that he had not known Oswald and that he had no thought of killing him until he read a newspaper article that Sunday morning that suggested Mrs. Kennedy might have to return to Dallas to testify. “I felt very emotional and carried away for Mrs. Kennedy, with all that the strife she had gone through,” Ruby said. “Someone owed it to our beloved president that she shouldn’t be expected to come back to face this heinous trial.”

Killing Oswald was an impulsive act, he said. He was aware of the many rumors that some of his organized-crime contacts might have put him up to it, but he said that “no one else requested me to do anything.… I never spoke to anyone about attempting to do anything. No subversive organization gave me any idea. No underworld person made any effort to contact me.”

Ford recalled that Ruby’s testimony went reasonably well for about forty-five minutes, until Ruby and his lawyer began arguing for reasons that were not clear and the court reporter stopped recording the session. The scene then became “terribly tense,” Ford said. It was “touch and go” whether Ruby would be able to continue. Warren, he said, “tried to be reassuring and was very patient in his cajoling” of Ruby.

Down the hall, Elmer Moore, a Secret Service agent assigned to the trip to protect the chief justice, found Specter in the sheriff’s office watching the baseball game. He announced that Specter was needed, as quickly as possible, in the kitchen. “They want you,” he said. “Ruby wants a Jew in the room.” Specter knew enough about Ruby to know how he valued his Jewish heritage and how he had become fixated on the idea that Jews were being massacred because of him.

Specter followed Moore down the hall. As he entered the kitchen, Specter could see that Ruby was studying him. “Looking straight at me, he silently mouthed the words, ‘Are you a Yid?’”

Specter said nothing. Again, Ruby mouthed the words: “Are you a Yid?” And then a third time.

Specter said he tried to remain stone-faced, not even to nod his head. He wanted none of this taken down by the court reporter. “I didn’t flinch or respond in any way.”

At just that moment, Specter recalled, the court reporter ran out of paper, and Ruby jumped up and pulled the chief justice into a corner, motioning for Specter to join them. Joe Ball, the other commission staff lawyer, stood up and tried to enter the conversation.

“Are you Jewish?” Ruby asked.

“No,” Ball replied.

“Well, go away,” Ruby told him.

Ruby then turned to Warren. “Chief, you’ve got to get me to Washington. They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso.”

“I can’t do that,” the chief justice said.

Ruby urged Warren to talk to Abe Fortas, the well-known Washington lawyer who was close to President Johnson and would soon be named to the Supreme Court—and who was Jewish. “Get to Fortas,” Ruby said. “He’ll get it worked out.”

Ford could see that Ruby relaxed at the acknowledgment—it was not clear by whom—that Specter was indeed Jewish. “This seemed to give him confidence to continue testifying.”

When the stenographer was ready to resume, Ruby, Warren, and Specter returned to their seats. Ruby noticed his lawyer, Tonahill, pass a note to Ford. Ruby insisted that he be allowed to read it, and the conversation stopped while the note was handed to Ruby, who was farsighted and struggled to make out the words on the page. The chief justice handed Ruby his glasses.

“You see,” Tonahill had written. “I told you he was crazy.”

Ruby put the note aside, seemingly untroubled by his lawyer’s insult, and turned back to the chief justice. He wanted Warren to confirm again that he would allow him to take a polygraph test or be injected with truth serum—“Pentothal,” he said, referring to Sodium Pentothal, the depressant sometimes referred to as a “truth serum.” He asked again to be taken to Washington.

“Do I sound dramatic? Off the beam?”

Warren tried to keep him calm: “No, you are speaking very, very rationally.”

“I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here,” Ruby said, using words that would sound ominous when read by conspiracy theorists in years to come.

This was the first time that Specter, who had missed the start of Ruby’s testimony, had heard about his request for a polygraph—and about Warren’s agreement to give him one. Specter said he understood instantly that the chief justice had made a terrible mistake. He knew Warren, like most serious-minded law-enforcement veterans, gave little credence to polygraphs; the chief justice, in fact, had already vetoed the idea of giving one to Marina Oswald. Yet he had just promised one—on the record—to Oswald’s seemingly delusional killer.

Ruby tried to step up the pressure on Warren, claiming that his life was in danger if he remained in Dallas. He was convinced that “other people”—he suggested members of the right-wing John Birch Society—were trying to tie him to a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And because he was Jewish, Jews everywhere were being murdered in retaliation for the president’s assassination. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” he said. “I am used as a scapegoat. I am as good as guilty as the accused assassin of President Kennedy. How can you remedy that, Mr. Warren?” If he could get to Washington and testify, Ruby said, “maybe my people won’t be tortured and mutilated.”

Specter could see how flustered Warren was. The chief justice told Ruby: “You may be sure that the president and his whole commission will do anything that is necessary to see that your people are not tortured.”

After more than three hours of this, Warren decided to stop the testimony, insisting he was doing it for Ruby’s own good. “I think we have tired Mr. Ruby,” the chief justice said. “We appreciate your patience and your willingness to testify in this manner for us.”

Ruby: “All I want to do is tell the truth, and the only way you can know it is by the polygraph.”

Warren: “That we will do for you.”

*

Still hoping to get out of Dallas by day’s end, the chief justice left for a late lunch at the Dallas apartment of Robert Storey, a former president of the American Bar Association. The end of the lunch produced what was, for Specter, another astonishing display of the chief justice’s awkwardness when called on to make quick decisions. After leaving Storey’s apartment, Warren noticed a group of reporters and photographers at the end of the hall eager to hear his thoughts about his day in Dallas. “Instead of turning left and facing the pack,” Specter remembered, “the Chief Justice ran down a corridor to the right and down a flight of stairs to avoid talking to them.” It would have been easy enough for Warren to smile and offer a polite “no comment” to the reporters. Instead, he had created a baffling scene in which the chief justice of the United States could be seen fleeing, almost in panic, from a group of reporters who wanted to ask him a few simple questions.

On the plane home that night, Warren told Specter how unhappy he was that he had promised a polygraph test to Ruby. “I don’t believe in polygraphs,” he said. “I don’t believe in Big Brother.”

Specter told Warren that he had no choice but to go through with the test, unless Ruby changed his mind about wanting one. “Mr. Chief Justice, you promised him a polygraph,” Specter said. It “would look awful if the commission reneged on an on-the-record promise.” If Ruby was denied a polygraph now, “at best, it would look as though the commission was not exhausting every lead.” At worst, it would look like a cover-up designed to prevent Ruby from exposing a conspiracy. Warren might not believe in polygraph tests, but opinion polls suggested that the American public did. “Mr. Chief Justice,” Specter said, “you can’t turn him down.”