Reclaiming History (258 page)

It is not known for sure when Ruby went to the Carousel Club that Thursday afternoon. He thought it was in the early afternoon hours.
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The Carousel utility worker, Larry Crafard, could only say Ruby arrived “sometime between 12:00 and 3:00” and left the club later in the afternoon.
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Chances are he left somewhere between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m. because around that time he tried to make a dinner date with a woman waiting for a bus on Commerce Street (the street the Carousel Club was on) whom he had met two or three months earlier at the club when she showed up there with the doctor she worked for. Ruby’s pitch to her this Thursday afternoon, “With your looks, you should be in show business,” never got him his date, but she did give him her phone number.
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Ruby called Crafard at the club later in the afternoon, telling him he wanted him to bartend that night at the Vegas Club, and about 7:30 p.m. Ruby picked Crafard up at the Carousel and drove him to the Vegas Club.
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Jack was overseeing the Vegas Club as well as the Carousel because his sister Eva was at home and in quite a bit of pain while she was recuperating from surgery (hysterectomy and the removal of a large abdominal tumor) performed earlier that month.
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Ruby returned to the Carousel at around 9:00 p.m. and talked with Lawrence Meyers, a sales manager for a Chicago-based automobile accessory company who had met Ruby several years earlier during one of his trips to Dallas. Meyers and his lady friend from Chicago, Jean Aase, visited with Ruby for a while, and Meyers invited Ruby to join him and his brother and his brother’s wife later that evening for drinks at the Bon Vivant Room, the club at the Cabana Motel where Meyers and Aase were staying.
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Jack said he would try to stop by, and then left shortly after to have dinner with his good friend Ralph Paul at the Egyptian Lounge, arriving around 9:45 or 10:00 p.m. and staying for about forty-five minutes.
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Joe Campisi, owner and operator of the Egyptian Lounge, apparently was not there that night.

Ruby returned to the Carousel after dinner and had a normal evening—interacting with the crowd as emcee, and getting into a verbal argument with a foul-mouthed drunk in the crowd who wanted Ruby, who was giving away prizes, to get off the stage and bring on the girls, Ruby eventually forcing him to leave without incident.
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Another incident happened while Ruby was on the stage giving a brief demonstration of his twistboard to stimulate sales. “Even President Kennedy tells us to get more exercise,” Ruby said, inducing a heckler to shout, “That bum.” Jack responded immediately, “Don’t ever talk that way about the President.”
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Around 11:30 Jack took Lawrence Meyers up on his invitation and joined him and his brother and wife at the Bon Vivant Room at the Cabana Motel. Jack, ever the entrepreneur, tried to interest Lawrence’s brother Eddie, a Pepsi distributor, in the twistboard as a tie-in with the Pepsi operation. Eddie wasn’t interested and Jack left after twenty to thirty minutes to go back to the Carousel.
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Jack got back to the club, closed up around 2:00 a.m.,
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and picked up Crafard at the Vegas Club around 2:30 a.m. They had breakfast next door at the Lucas B & B, after which he dropped Crafard off at the Carousel, where he was staying, around 3:30 or 4:00 a.m.
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Ruby then went directly home.

As indicated, it had been a typical day for Jack—caring about his friends, caring about his club, working on his personal problems, handing out club cards, trying to pick up a woman, socializing with friends, trying to make a buck, schmoozing with customers, ejecting customers—before he went to bed in the early hours of Friday, November 22, 1963.
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D
r. Renatus Hartogs, the New York City psychiatrist who examined Oswald when Oswald was thirteen, and went on to write a book about Oswald and Ruby,
The Two Assassins
, found many similarities between the two. A few he mentioned are that both, at a young age, “were poverty-stricken emotionally as well as sometimes economically…Violence threaded through the life of each…[Psychiatric] help was suggested for each,” Oswald at the Bronx Children’s Court, Ruby at Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research. “Both were truants” in school, “both were educationally deprived. Oswald went only as far as the tenth grade, Ruby…only finished the eighth grade.” Both “were impulsive men driven by their fantasies,” and “Oswald acted as though he believed he had the right and the calling to kill the President of the United States…Ruby appears to have felt he had the right to avenge the murder…Neither could accept the slightest degree of frustration without throwing a temper tantrum,” et cetera.
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Hartogs could have added, among a few other things, that both Ruby and Oswald had uncommonly neurotic mothers whose own families found them impossible to get along with, and who the authorities concluded were incapable of properly rearing their sons. It is interesting to note that, as we saw earlier, the primary influence on Lee Harvey Oswald’s young life was his mother, his father having passed away before his birth. Though Joseph Rubenstein was alive throughout Jack’s youth, most of young Jack’s adolescent years were spent without the presence of his father, and Ruby, like Oswald, was reared during this period by his mother. The similarities in their backgrounds go beyond this. As author David Lubin points out, “Oswald and Ruby were classic losers. Violent, undereducated, raised in broken homes by neurotic, paranoid, and…emotionally unstable mothers, unable to hold a steady job (Oswald) or stay out of debt (Ruby)…[Each was] puffed up with compensatory delusions of self-importance.”
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The two men, of course, differed in many ways, among which was that Oswald was extremely political, unpatriotic, and tended toward intellectualism, Ruby the exact opposite on all three counts. In any event, the rage and psychic chaos in both men, unharnessed by any emotional stability, ultimately exploded in a way that not only was self-destructive but, particularly in the case of Oswald, changed the world.

A
s can be seen from the biography of Jack Ruby, two things are very clear. One, he was not a member of organized crime, and two, even if he had wanted to be, they could never have afforded to let him in. In addition to having a volatile, unstable personality, Jack Ruby was not mentally sound. Indeed, as we learned from his trial, he was suffering from organic brain damage. Even Marina Oswald, whose husband Ruby killed, remarked pitifully that just from seeing “his [Ruby’s] picture in the paper now, it is an abnormal face.”
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Even a prosecution witness at Ruby’s trial, the general manager at the parking lot where Ruby parked his car, said that he “sometimes wondered about Jack’s sanity.”
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And a close friend of Ruby’s testified at the trial he “was sure” Ruby was “suffering from some form of…mental disturbance.”
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The mob might want its members to be vicious killers, but not looney birds.

Ruby’s mental infirmity seemed to deteriorate quickly into a pathological paranoia following his arrest and incarceration for Oswald’s murder. Being “deprived of the Preludin and Benzedrine that he had come to know so well” added to the decline of his mental state.
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The close-to-child-like mentality and paranoia, interspersed with periods of normality and lucidity, led to the following type of words and speech by Ruby in his testimony before the Warren Commission on June 7, 1964, in Dallas. To remind the reader, Ruby has by now been convicted of Oswald’s murder and sentenced to death. The setting is formal, he is on the witness stand, and his questioner is Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Among the hundreds of people who gave testimony before the Commission or its staff, not one sounded even remotely similar to Ruby. Apart from the casualness and adolescent innocence in Ruby’s remarks, in which he converses with Warren as if he is talking to a male buddy of his at his club, Ruby, unlike any other Commission witness, all of whom were only on the stand to answer questions, asked most of the questions and did nearly all the talking. Here are some nonsequential excerpts, a small sampling—some of which, in view of the circumstances, approach skit-like humor—to give you a further sense of the man who conspiracy theorists say was closely associated with the Mafia and killed Oswald for them:

Ruby to Chief Justice Warren: “Is there any way to get me to Washington?”

Warren: “I beg your pardon.”

Ruby, not wanting to tell his “story” in Dallas, repeats himself: “Is there any way of you getting me to Washington?…I would like to…go to Washington and…take all the tests that I have to take.”

Ruby, upon seeing Gerald Ford in the room: “What state are you from, Congressman?”

Ford: “Michigan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.”

Later, Ruby: “Unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me…Unless you get me to Washington immediately, I am afraid after what Mr. Tonahill [Ruby’s lawyer who is with him] has written there, which is unfair to me regarding my testimony here—you want to hear what he wrote?”

Ruby, after reading some words: “It is too bad, Chief Warren, that you didn’t get me to your headquarters six months ago.”

Later, Ruby to Warren: “Is there any way of getting a polygraph here?…I wish the president were right here now. It is a terrible ordeal. I tell you that.”

After Ruby attempted to relate what happened chronologically, Warren says to Ruby: “You have told us most of what happened up to the time of the incident.”

Ruby: “This is still only Friday night, Chief.”