Reclaiming History (326 page)

30. If Oswald had conspired with others to murder Kennedy, why would he not have explored the possibility with the authorities of saving his own life by implicating them? This would be particularly true if, as the conspiracy theorists allege, he was “set up” by co-conspirators to take the blame, that he was “the designated fall guy.” In fact, they cite his statement in custody that he was just a “patsy” as support for this proposition. But if, indeed, Oswald’s co-conspirators set him up, he’d have all the more reason to implicate them, having no reason at that point to feel any loyalty toward those who had betrayed him. Yet Oswald, throughout his twelve hours of interrogation, never suggested in any way that he was part of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Because Oswald knew that there was so much evidence against him, including his ownership of the murder weapon, and that a sentence of death was going to be automatic, to save his life he most likely would have implicated others if there were any to implicate (an extremely common occurrence in criminal cases, i.e., “turning state’s evidence”), yet he said nothing. This fact is circumstantial evidence that there simply were no co-conspirators for him to implicate.
*

And what about Ruby? As we have seen, it is scripture among conspiracy theorists that “Jack Ruby silenced Oswald for the mob.” But they don’t ask themselves, “Who was supposed to silence Jack Ruby?” Ruby, we know, lived more than three long years (1,154 days) after killing Oswald before passing away on January 3, 1967, and never once suggested that he killed Oswald for someone else. But if mobsters were behind Ruby’s act, they could never know if Ruby would talk someday. Yet there is no evidence that the mob or anyone else tried to silence Ruby. We’ve observed that the emotionally erratic and unreliable Oswald would have been one of the last people in the world the mob (or any other group of alleged conspirators) would have relied on to carry out its biggest murder ever. But Ruby was equally unreliable. Why would the mob choose someone to silence Oswald who was a notorious blabbermouth, had a volcanic temper, and was so emotionally unstable? The notion that the mob (or anyone else) got the goofy Oswald, of all people, to kill Kennedy and then got the even goofier Jack Ruby, of all people, to silence Oswald is downright laughable. I told the jury in London that the mob could just as well have “gone down to Disneyland and gotten Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to do their bidding for them.”
⁸³

Several years after I made that remark in London, I read
The Last Mafioso
, Ovid Demaris’s biography of Los Angeles mob boss Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratiano, the highest-ranking mafioso ever to “turn” on the mob, his testimony for the federal government in the early 1980s sending many of them to prison for life. Fratiano was particularly close to fellow mafioso Johnny Roselli, and Fratiano quotes Roselli as telling him one day while they were driving through the Santa Monica mountains shortly after Roselli’s testimony before the HSCA in Washington, D.C., in 1976, “[They’re] all hot, you know, about who killed Kennedy. Sometimes I’d like to tell them the mob did it, just to see the expression on their stupid faces. You know, we’re supposed to be idiots, right? We hire a psycho like Oswald to kill the President and then we get a blabbermouth, two-bit punk like Ruby to shut him up. We wouldn’t trust those jerks to hit a fucking dog.”
⁸⁴
I don’t know if Roselli told Fratiano this, or Fratiano, for some reason, made it up, but either way, it clearly reflects a mafioso’s view of the preposterous theory that organized crime, even if it made the even more preposterous decision to murder the president of the United States, would hire Oswald and Ruby to do its bidding for them.

31. I spoke earlier of the virtual impossibility of all the people involved in any conspiracy to kill the president keeping it a secret for even a few days, much less over forty years. But there’s a perhaps even more difficult, and related, reality that the original conspirators would have to overcome. Let’s assume, for example, that the CIA was behind the assassination.
After
the assassination, how could the CIA have gotten the FBI, Secret Service, Dallas Police Department, the autopsy doctors, indeed, the Warren Commission itself, to go along with the horrendous crime the agency had committed and do the great number of things the conspiracy theorists say these various groups and people did to cover up the CIA’s complicity in Kennedy’s murder? Wouldn’t that be an impossible task?
*
The only way (there is no other way) that agencies and people like the FBI, autopsy doctors, et cetera, would all agree to cover up the murder of the president of the United States for the CIA (or mob, FBI, military-industrial complex, etc.) would be if they themselves were part of the original conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And again, no rational person can possibly believe that these groups and people all got together to murder the president. The bottom line is that conspiracy musings of the conspiracy theorists are outrageously hallucinatory and bear no relation to reality.

32. Even though there’s not a lick of evidence that the CIA, mob, FBI, or any other group conspired with Oswald to kill Kennedy, if the conspiracy theorists could at least show that he had an association or connection with any of these groups, they would then have something to talk about. But here, other than explainable contacts (e.g., the FBI interviewing Oswald when he returned to the United States from Russia, and his very limited attempt to infiltrate anti-Castro Cuban exiles), after the most extensive investigation of a single individual ever conducted, no one has ever come up with any evidence of an association, relationship, or contact that Oswald had with any of these groups. The reason there’s no evidence is that no such evidence exists. As I have said before in this book, it’s all just sublime silliness.

Since we know that Oswald killed Kennedy, and since there is no evidence that Oswald had any relationship with groups like organized crime, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, or any other group, this fact alone removes these groups from any suspicion of being complicit in the assassination
.

A
fter over forty years of the most prodigiously intensive investigation and examination of a murder case in world history, certain powerful facts exist which cannot be challenged: Not one weapon other than Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle has ever been found and linked in any way to the assassination. Not one bullet other than the three fired from Oswald’s rifle has ever been found and linked to the assassination. No person other than Oswald has ever been connected by evidence, in any way, to the assassination. No evidence has ever surfaced linking Oswald to any of the major groups suggested by conspiracy theorists of being behind the assassination. And no evidence has ever been found showing that any person or group framed Oswald for the murder they committed. One would think that faced with these stubborn and immutable realities, the critics of the Warren Commission, unable to pay the piper, would finally fold their tent and go home. But instead, undaunted and unfazed, they continue to disgorge even more of what we have had from them for over forty years—wild speculation, theorizing, and shameless dissembling about the facts of the case.

The purpose of this book has been twofold. One, to educate everyday Americans that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone, paying for his own bullets. And two, to expose, as never before, the conspiracy theorists and the abject worthlessness of all their allegations. I believe this book has achieved both of these goals.

On November 26, 1963, a Dallas County grand jury indicted Jack Ruby (“Jack Rubenstein, alias Jack Ruby”) for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Trial judge Joe B. Brown would be presiding over the case. The affable, bespectacled, fifty-six-year-old was known for running a very loose courtroom and for having modest legal talent—so modest, in fact, that his friend, Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, urged him not to handle the case, telling Brown, “This case is too big for you.”
¹
Brown, who didn’t make it through high school and graduated from a small Dallas law school that went out of business after a few years, was taken by celebrity and was greatly impressed by the size and composition of the media covering the trial. “Just think,” he told his bailiff, “we’ve got newsmen from all over the world here, and Pulitzer Prize winners and famous columnists and TV commentators right here in my courtroom.”
²

Wade’s office was seeking the death penalty against Ruby, the electric chair at Huntsville state prison, and Wade himself, whose cornball manner concealed a good legal mind, would prosecute the case, make the important decisions, and be the nominal head of the prosecution team,
*
although the actual lead trial prosecutor would be Wade’s assistant, William Alexander, who conducted “the bulk of the prosecution’s” case.
³
†
Having anticipated prosecuting and devouring Oswald, until Ruby stopped that dream, Alexander had joked to reporters that “you can’t have rabbit stew without a rabbit.”
⁴

Ruby’s first lawyer was Tom Howard, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Dallas. Howard, though never having handled a big publicity case before, and operating without a secretary or law library out of a small storefront office across the street from the Dallas Police Department, had a reasonably successful record as a criminal defense attorney.
*

Howard had successfully represented Jack a couple of years back on a liquor license dispute over a half bottle of beer found on a table at the Carousel after hours. He had gotten that charge dismissed. It wasn’t going to be as easy getting this one tossed out, but Howard’s plan was to try to convince the jury to convict Ruby of “murder without malice” on the rationale that the killing was in the heat of passion with adequate provocation (Oswald had killed Kennedy), thus negating malice and shielding Ruby from a possible death sentence.

To elaborate, there were two types of murder in Texas that Ruby could be found guilty of: murder with malice aforethought and murder without malice aforethought. As in all states, the word
aforethought
is a useless appendage since it does not mean what it sounds like, premeditation. In most states, there is first-degree and second-degree murder, first degree requiring a showing of premeditation and deliberation along with malice. Texas, to this day, has no degrees of murder, and premeditation and deliberation are not elements of murder that have to be proved. So unlike in most states, the Dallas prosecutors did not have to show that Ruby premeditated and deliberated his killing of Oswald. All they had to prove is that he killed with malice. In Texas, “malice” in a murder case is proved when it can be shown that the killer intended to kill, where there was no legal justification or excuse for his act, and where he was not “under the immediate influence of a
sudden passion
arising from an adequate cause, by which is meant such cause as would commonly produce a degree of anger, rage, resentment or terror in a person of ordinary temper, sufficient to render the mind incapable of cool reflection.” If it is shown that he
was
under such influence, the crime is murder
without
malice. (In most states, it would be voluntary manslaughter.) Even though the prosecution had no legal burden in the Ruby case to show premeditation, premeditation was very relevant since the presence or absence of premeditation could help to prove or disprove malice. If, for instance, Ruby had premeditated the killing of Oswald, it was not the result of a “sudden passion.”

Murder with malice in Texas carries a punishment of death or imprisonment for more than two years (in Texas, the “more than two years” is usually life). Murder without malice is punishable by a maximum of five years’ imprisonment. That’s what Howard was shooting for.

To make the jury more comfortable returning a verdict of murder without malice, although Howard had no intention of ultimately trying to convince the jury that Ruby was insane (he didn’t believe he was), he did intend to show, through a psychiatrist or two, as well as Ruby’s friends and associates, that Jack, shall we say, was not quite right, that he was emotionally unstable, something that no one who knew Ruby could possibly quarrel with. As a device to get Ruby’s mental infirmity into the official record, on December 2 Howard requested a pretrial competency (sanity to stand trial) hearing.

Howard believed that such a simple approach coupled with an expressed plea by Ruby for mercy from the witness stand, as well as the unstated sense of many to “pin a medal on Jack” for killing Oswald, might result in a favorable verdict and light sentence, as opposed to the death penalty. There was some logic behind this thinking. After all, newspaper polls in Dallas taken after Ruby killed Oswald showed, remarkably, that nearly half of the people questioned felt that Ruby should receive no punishment at all.
⁵
It’s an old joke about Texas murder trials that the first matter to be settled is whether the varmint who got himself killed damn well deserved what he got. Legend has it that the first question sheriffs investigating a homicide in rural Texas ask is, “Did he
need
killing?” Indeed, Ruby received hundreds of supportive letters and telegrams (and very few critical of him) from people not just in Texas but all over the world. A sampling from some of the telegrams: “Congratulations. You have done what every loyal American citizen would like to have done. God bless you.” “Heartiest congratulations, but [Oswald] died too fast.” “Thank you for doing what every freedom-loving citizen of the world wanted to do.” “Congratulations. May God bless you.” “Thank you. May the Lord and Texas justice have mercy on you. May you live to be a thousand.” “Our family cannot find in our hearts to censure you. We send you our love and support.” “Had I the guts I’d have done it.
*
Thanks for trying to vindicate Dallas.” “To a job well done. You are a great man, Jack Ruby.” “Congratulations, you deserve a medal, all the world is in back of you.” “Thank you sir. God bless you.” “I kiss your feet.”
⁶
In other words, Howard’s reasoning apparently went, how bad could the jury consider Ruby’s act to be when he had simply done to Oswald what a great number of other Americans wanted to do and which the state of Texas would have eventually done anyway? Indeed, even the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas acknowledged to an interviewer that she had shouted, “Good! Give it to him again!” when she saw Ruby shoot Oswald on her television screen.
⁷

So Howard wasn’t overly worried about the case, even if Jack was hardly the ideal defendant—a Jewish striptease joint operator in a very conservative, overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Protestant city who had also made the Dallas police, and Dallas, a city noted for its civic pride, look bad. But again, Jack shot down the most loathed man in America, and that had to count for something in court, Howard reasoned.

This strategy changed when Ruby’s family, not feeling Howard had enough stature and legal talent for a case this big, brought famed San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli into the case on December 10, 1963.
†
Though he was often described as “flamboyant,”
‡
there was considerable substance behind the sheen. Known as the “king of torts” (torts are civil not criminal wrongs), Belli
*
had actually sown new ground in the area of tort law with his skill at using “demonstrative evidence” (evidence that addresses the physical senses of the jury, such as a model of a human skeleton, scale mock-ups of an accident scene, greatly enlarged photographs, live experiments, and so on)
†
as a plaintiff’s lawyer in personal injury cases, and for the record-breaking monetary awards juries were returning for his clients. The problem is that he was primarily a civil not a criminal lawyer, although he had tried, and continued to try after the Ruby case, a criminal case now and then that caught his fancy. Belli, then, was a legal heavyweight, but not in criminal law, and he demonstrated this in several ways, which are chronicled in the major books on the trial. As the trial judge, Joe Brown, would later write, “Belli undoubtedly was, as the newspapers called him, the king of torts, but at trying a criminal case in Texas, he wasn’t even royalty.”
⁸
Lead Ruby prosecutor Bill Alexander, who had an acerbic relationship with Belli during the trial, acknowledged to me that “Belli was probably a better lawyer in his field than we were in ours, but he was in the wrong ballpark.”
⁹

Wanting a Texas lawyer at his side, Belli brought in Joe Tonahill, a colorful and towering trial lawyer from Jasper in East Texas whose homespun style had proved effective with country juries, along with a Los Angeles associate of Belli’s, Sam Brody. Phil Burleson, a young Dallas lawyer with appellate experience, was hired to primarily handle legal briefs and research. Howard was consigned to the bleachers, looking on, and shortly thereafter resigned from the defense team.

Surprisingly, for a lawyer of Belli’s intelligence and experience, he did nothing to endear himself to the Dallas citizenry, a microcosm of which he would eventually have to rely on for a fair trial for his client. Noted for his flashy but expensive sartorial splendor, he declined to change his attire one lick, including his customary vested suits with silk linings, his rich pastel shirts and ties, and a gold watch chain, items just not seen among Dallas men with their off-the-rack attire. Indeed, his fur-collared Chesterfield overcoat and red velvet briefcase may have been unique among lawyers anywhere in the Panhandle State. And his pronouncements to the local and national media, who followed him like faithful puppies wherever he took himself in Dallas, including restaurants, was confrontational. “He repeatedly criticized the state of Texas. He lectured about Dallas’ need to make Ruby a sacrificial goat…‘The people of Dallas,’ he told the press, ‘perhaps unconsciously have to have a sacrifice in order to cleanse themselves.’”
¹⁰
But if Belli intended to put the city of Dallas itself on trial, he had to expect its citizens not to like this, with whatever way that feeling played out.

One might think that Belli would at least have tried to get Dallas’s legal community on his side, but he alienated it too when he arrived in Dallas by characterizing members of the district attorney’s staff as “yokels.”
¹¹
If someone wanted to hide anything from Alexander and Wade, he joked, put it in a law book and they’d never find it.
¹²

At a change-of-venue hearing on February 10–13, 1964, during which Belli presented forty-one witnesses in support of his motion to move the trial out of Dallas because Ruby could not get “a fair trial” there, he argued that because many blamed the city for the assassination taking place there, and for negligently allowing the shooting of Oswald to occur, Dallas itself was on trial, and in effect, the jury might have to convict Ruby to acquit the city. There can be little question that Belli’s concern was not a frivolous one. There was a collective sense of guilt among the citizenry, mostly about Kennedy being killed there, that continued for years thereafter. Just a day after the assassination, remarks like this were being made by Dallas citizens: “Dallas can’t hold its head up this morning.” “I think Dallas died right with [the president]. We’re the ones that are going to suffer. History will never erase it.” A cabby, when learning that his passengers were from New York, said, “New York? Are you here to take pictures of our black-eye?” Ruby himself told his sister, Eileen Kaminsky, on the afternoon of the assassination, “What a black mark for Dallas.”

The feeling was so prevalent that Dallas’s mayor, Earle Cabell, felt moved to say in defense, “There are maniacs all over the world, and in every city of the world. This was a maniac. It could have happened in Podunk as well as Dallas.”
¹³
But apart from Oswald’s action severely damaging Dallas, Cabell testified for the defense at the venue hearing that Ruby couldn’t get a fair trial in Dallas because what Ruby did had further hurt the city very badly. Ruby’s lawyer Joe Tonahill said that prior to Cabell’s statement on the witness stand, Ruby was upbeat about his chances, but what Cabell said affected Ruby deeply. “Why, I love this city, Joe,” he said to Tonahill. Cabell told the Warren Commission that he had known Ruby “for several years.” Jack had a habit of taking people up to Cabell at public functions and introducing them to him as “my friend, the Mayor.” Now, for the first time, Jack was hearing from his “friend,” the head of the city, the essentially official word that he was no hero, but someone who had disgraced Dallas, and Tonahill said Cabell’s words hit Ruby “like a ton of bricks.”
¹⁴

In the venue hearing, the prosecution never called one opposing witness to the stand, instead filing with the court thirty-eight affidavits from Dallas citizens swearing under oath that Ruby could get a fair trial in the city. On February 14, Judge Brown did not grant the defense motion, but he did not deny it either, postponing his decision until a jury was selected, at which time he’d decide whether
that
jury could give Ruby a fair trial.
¹⁵

Under Belli’s direction, the defense team decided to come up with an “imaginative” defense. Almost out of hand, Belli rejected Howard’s “murder without malice” strategy and decided on a scientific and sophisticated medical defense of temporary insanity, with psychiatric experts testifying for the defense. In other words, he didn’t want to settle for anything less than an acquittal, a verdict of not guilty based on Ruby’s insanity at the time of the shooting. Ruby entered a plea of “not guilty” to the murder indictment against him, not “not guilty by reason of insanity,”
¹⁶
for the simple reason that there was no such plea in Texas, as there is in most states, and there still isn’t to this very day. However, even in Texas the defense can put on an affirmative insanity defense to the charges against the accused, and the Texas Penal Code provides that “no act done in a state of insanity can be punished as an offense.” The question would not be whether Ruby unlawfully killed Oswald—there were eighty million eyewitnesses
*
to affirm that proposition—but what was on Ruby’s mind, if anything, at the time he did so. Bob Huffaker, who covered the Ruby trial for Dallas’s CBS affiliate, KRLD, wrote that Ruby “had failed to envision actually being charged with murder for what he had conceived as an act of patriotism. Ruby had fancied himself a hero, and he was deflated when the King of Torts hired specialists to sully his righteousness with hints of mental problems.”
¹⁷