Reclaiming History (246 page)

But Lifton, although he presents in a footnote the statement of an employee at O’Neal’s Funeral Home that the president’s body was not in a body bag, elects to go with O’Connor’s version that it was. Translation: If we’re to believe Lifton (and O’Connor), the conspirators, who performed the most improbable and sophisticated body-snatching caper in history, and along the way performed other magical feats (per Lifton, the successful alterations of the president’s wounds) that even Houdini wouldn’t have aspired to, somehow neglected to do the simplest, most obvious thing imaginable: put the president’s body back into his original wrapping
and
casket. Determined to draw attention to themselves and to what they had done, or because these brilliant plotters suddenly became totally mindless, they apparently went out of their way not only to find a completely different casket to put the president’s body back in, but to put it in a body bag instead of keeping the body wrapped in the sheets it was in when they took it away.

One of the most widely accepted conspiracy theories is that organized crime had Kennedy murdered and then got Ruby to silence their assassin, Oswald. Contrary to what may seem logical, I am starting here with an emphasis on Ruby, not organized crime, because after reading the “Organized Crime” section, which follows, it will be very clear to the reader that the Mafia had nothing to do with Kennedy’s murder, and it would be terribly anticlimactic and superfluous for the reader then to go on to a whole chapter on Jack Ruby, his alleged association with the Mafia, and why it’s obvious he didn’t kill Oswald for them.

But before discussing the allegation that organized crime got Ruby to kill Oswald, I must present the simple facts surrounding Ruby’s murder of Oswald, which by themselves preclude the notion of organized crime, or anyone else, being behind Ruby’s act. In fact, the issue of time alone precludes conspiracy. The time it would have taken Oswald, in armed custody, to exit the basement door at the Dallas City Hall garage and walk the ten steps or so to the unmarked police vehicle waiting to transport him to the Dallas sheriff’s office couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty seconds, if that, since the police car was close to the door Oswald exited.
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He had only taken a few steps toward the car when he was shot.
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Several fortuitous things happened, or did
not
happen—
none of which the conspirators would have had any control over
—which enabled Ruby to be in the basement at the precise moment he was, and gave him the opportunity to shoot and kill Oswald. If any one of these things had happened otherwise, Ruby would not have been in the basement at the right moment, proving that the shooting could not have been a planned event:

1. When Ruby went to the Western Union office, there was only one customer ahead of him.
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If there had been two customers in front of him, or even if the lone customer had had a transaction that took the clerk just a minute or two longer to complete, or if the clerk, for whatever reason, took longer than he should have, or if he was interrupted by a telephone call, Ruby would not have been able to shoot Oswald. We know that the twenty-five-dollar money order Ruby sent that morning, and the receipt for it, were both stamped 11:17 a.m. and that Ruby shot Oswald four minutes later at 11:21 a.m., the O’Neal Funeral Home logging the call it received for an ambulance at 11:21 a.m.
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*

When Doyle Lane, the Western Union clerk, was asked at Ruby’s trial, “Did you talk to [Ruby] very much, chat with him?” he answered “Only briefly.”

“How did he appear to you?”

“Calm.”

“Did he leave then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which way did he go?”

“Out the door and to the left.”

“Was he in a hurry?”

“No, sir.”

“Just casually moving along?”

“That’s right.”

If Ruby had to be at a designated spot two or so minutes later to kill Oswald, how is it possible he would not have been in a hurry?
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We also know that the distance from the doorway of the Western Union office to where Ruby shot Oswald was 454½ feet, and that walking at a regular pace—which Ruby was doing, per Lane, at the time he left the Western Union office—it took approximately one minute and thirty-five seconds (one minute and thirteen seconds to walk the surface street, twenty-two seconds to walk down the ramp) to walk the distance.
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How long was Ruby in the basement before Oswald appeared and Ruby shot him? Although it is not completely in sync with the above times, we know it was less than a minute, probably in the vicinity of thirty seconds. Local television station KRLD was videotaping everything that was taking place in the basement area and furnished its tape to the Dallas Police Department. Dallas investigating officers Lieutenant C. C. Wallace and Lieutenant P. G. McCaghren, in a report to Chief Jesse Curry, said that they “timed the video tape from the time Lieutenant R. S. Pierce’s car left the basement and started out Main Street [the time Ruby entered and started to walk down the Main Street ramp] until the time the shot was fired. The time recorded on the video machine and checked twice was fifty-six (56) seconds.”
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Indeed, an NBC newsman testified before the Warren Commission that he saw Ruby coming down the Main Street ramp into the police basement “not more than fifteen to thirty seconds” before he shot Oswald.
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Ruby himself says he saw Oswald emerge from the jail office “just as I got to the bottom of the [Main Street] ramp.”
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If Ruby was a hit man for the mob, how is it, then, that they would cut it that close? Wouldn’t this, by definition, have required Captain Will Fritz and one or more of his men to conspire with the mob to kill Oswald? How else could the mob be assured that the Dallas police wouldn’t get Oswald into a car a minute or so earlier? But no sensible person could possibly believe that Captain Fritz conspired with the mob to kill Oswald.

If Ruby was a hit man for organized crime, how is it that for at least five minutes or so before he shot Oswald, he wasn’t lying in wait for Oswald to appear in the basement garage of City Hall, but instead was approximately
one and a half football fields
away waiting for the person in front of him to complete his transaction so Ruby could wire his money to Karen Bennett Carlin? Only a silly person (i.e., only an avid conspiracy theorist) could possibly believe the hit man theory. No one said it better than author Norman Mailer. If Ruby killed Oswald for the mob, he asks, “Why was Ruby standing [in] line [at the] Western Union waiting his turn to send $25 to a stripper while time kept floating away and Oswald might be moved at any moment?…How many confederates—and most of them had to be police—would be necessary to coordinate such a move? No one who is the key figure in a careful schedule that will reach its climax just as the target is being transferred is going to be found dawdling [down] the street at a Western Union office with only a few minutes to go. It would take hours for a stage director to begin to choreograph such a scene for an opera.”
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In simple language, if Ruby had
planned
ahead to kill Oswald in the basement, it is absolutely inconceivable that he would not have been in the basement far in advance of when Oswald was supposed to be brought down. He
never
would have taken a chance on possibly missing Oswald, since he would know it would most likely be the last chance he would ever have to silence him. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about this.

Moreover, the possibility that one or more members of the Dallas Police Department conspired with Ruby and signaled him (how? there were no cell phones in those days) or told him exactly when Oswald was going to be brought down has no merit. Not only is there no evidence to support this rank speculation, but as Dallas police captain Orville A. Jones put it, “If there was some type of conspiracy, [Ruby]…would have had to have known what time the man was coming down, which we didn’t know, Fritz didn’t know, nor did any of the policemen. The only reference to it was made by Curry when he told the press that if they’d get there by 10:00…it would be early enough. He didn’t know exactly what time it was going to be. So if there was a signal or something, somebody had to have some rather Divine Knowledge of what was going to happen.”
¹¹

2. Forrest Sorrels, the special agent in charge of the Dallas Secret Service office, testified before the Warren Commission that when the interrogation session of Oswald wound up after 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, November 24, Oswald was told he was going to be moved to the county jail, and “he requested that he be permitted to get a shirt out of…the clothes that had been brought in, that belonged to him, because the shirt he was wearing at the time he had been apprehended was taken, apparently for laboratory examination. And so Captain Fritz sent out and got his clothes and, as I recall it, he selected a dark colored kind of sweater type shirt…and then he was taken out.”
¹²
Obviously, if Oswald hadn’t made the request he did, necessitating a delay of at least one to two minutes, he probably would have left the basement in the police car by the time Ruby arrived.
So unless Oswald was a party to the conspiracy to murder himself
, it would appear from this fact alone that Ruby’s killing of Oswald at 11:21 a.m. was not a planned event.

3. Going back even further, how did it happen that Dallas U.S. postal inspector Harry D. Holmes attended the interrogation session of Oswald on Sunday morning, the day Oswald was shot? It was completely fortuitous. In his testimony before the Warren Commission, Holmes said, “I had been in and out of Captain Fritz’ office on numerous occasions during this two and a half day period [of interrogation of Oswald]. On this morning I had no appointment. I actually started to church with my wife. I got to church and I said, ‘You get out, I am going down and see if I can do something for Captain Fritz. I imagine he is as sleepy as I am.’ So I drove directly on down to the police station and walked in, and as I did, Captain Fritz motioned to me and said, ‘We’re getting ready to have a last interrogation with Oswald before we transfer him to the county jail. Would you like to join us?’ I said, ‘I would.’”
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What’s the relevance of Holmes’s attending this Sunday-morning session? It’s so enormous that by itself it disposes of the hit man theory. As opposed to the previous interrogation sessions, Holmes participated heavily in this one (it is the only one he submitted a memorandum on), thus helping appreciably to lengthen the session beyond the time it had been scheduled to end. Captain Fritz testified that the Sunday-morning interrogation session had been scheduled to end “by ten o’clock,” but “we went…an hour overtime with the interrogation.”
¹⁴
Therefore, Oswald’s transfer from the Dallas Police Department to the sheriff’s office, which had been scheduled for 10:00 a.m., was delayed over an hour.
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Following is a four-paragraph excerpt from a “Memorandum of Interview” prepared by Holmes and signed on December 17, 1963, summarizing the portion of the Sunday-morning session he participated in. As can be seen from this excerpt, the interrogation of Oswald by Holmes of Oswald’s post office boxes in Dallas and New Orleans was extensive and time-consuming. The memorandum was based on notes Holmes took during the interview as well as his memory.

P.O. Boxes–He [Oswald] was the three boxes he had rented, and in each instance his answers were quick, direct and accurate as reflected on the box rental applications. He stated without prompting that he had rented Box 2915 at the Main Post Office [in Dallas] for several months prior to his going to New Orleans, that this box was rented in his own name, Lee H. Oswald, and that he had taken out two keys to the box, and that when he had closed the box, he directed that his mail be forwarded to him at his street address in New Orleans.

He stated that no one received mail in this box other than himself, nor did he receive any mail under any other name than his own true name; that no one had access to the box other than himself nor did he permit anyone else to use this box. He stated it was possible that on rare occasions he may have handed one of the keys to his wife to go get his mail but certainly nobody else. He denied emphatically that he ever ordered a rifle under his name or any other name, nor permitted anyone else to order a rifle to be received in this box. Further, he denied he had ever ordered any rifle by mail order or bought any money order for the purpose of paying for such a rifle. In fact, he claimed he owned no rifle and had not practiced or shot a rifle, other than possibly a .22 small barrel rifle, since his days with the Marine Corp. He stated that “How could I afford to order a rifle on my salary of $1.25 an hour when I can’t hardly feed myself on what I make.”

When asked if he had a post office box in New Orleans, he stated that he did, for the reason that he subscribed to several publications, at least two of which were published in Russia, one being the hometown paper published in Minsk where he met and married his wife, and that he moved around so much that it was more practical to simply rent post office boxes and have his mail forwarded from one box to the next rather than going through the process of furnishing changes of address to the publishers. When asked if he permitted anyone other than himself to get mail in Box 30061 at New Orleans, he stated that he did not. It will be recalled that on this box rental application he showed that both Marina Oswald and A. J. Hidell were listed under the caption “Persons entitled to receive mail through box.” After denying that anyone else was permitted to get mail in the box, he was reminded that this application showed the name Marina Oswald as being entitled to receive mail in the box and he replied “well, so what, she was my wife and I see nothing wrong with that, and it could very well be that I did place her name on the application.” He was then reminded that the application also showed the name of A. J. Hidell was also entitled to receive mail in the box, at which he simply shrugged his shoulders and stated “I don’t recall anything about that.”

He stated that when he came to Dallas and after he had gone to work for the Texas School Book Depository, he had rented a box at the nearby Terminal Annex Postal Station, this being Box 6225, and that this box was also rented in his name, Lee H. Oswald. He stated he had only checked out one key for this box, which information was found to be accurate, and this key was found on his person at the time of his arrest. He professed not to recall the fact that he showed on the box rental application under the name of corporation, “Fair Play For Cuba Committee” and “American Civil Liberties Union.” When asked why he showed these organizations on the application, he simply shrugged and said that he didn’t recall showing them. When asked if he paid the box rental fee or did the organizations pay it, he stated that he paid it. In answer to another question, he also stated that no one had any knowledge that he had this box other than himself.
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