Reclaiming History (72 page)

Tears come to Ruby’s eyes.
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“My sister,” he continues, “who has recently had an operation, has been hysterical. When I saw that Mrs. Kennedy was going to have to appear for a trial, I thought to myself, why should she have to go through this ordeal for this no good son of a bitch. I had read about a letter to little Caroline. I had been to the Western Union office to send a telegram. I guess I had worked myself into a state of insanity to where I had to do it. I was afraid he might not get his just punishment. Sometimes they don’t, you know?”

Jack looks up at Sorrels.

“I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts,” he says.
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Sorrels asks him if he was ever politically active and Ruby tells him that he was a labor organizer years ago. Asked if he ever was convicted of a felony, Ruby says he was not.

“I was arrested and taken before a justice of the peace in 1954,” Ruby says, “but I was released.”

“What for?” Sorrels asks.

“Investigation of violation of state liquor laws,” Ruby replies.

“Why were you carrying a gun today?” Sorrels asks.

“I often have a large amount of money on me from my business,” Ruby tells him.

Now, Sorrels gets to what he really wants to know. “Was anyone involved with you in the shooting of Oswald?”

“No.”

“Did you know Oswald before?”

“No,” Ruby says again, “there is no acquaintance or connection between Oswald and myself.”
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Before it’s all over, Ruby says that he has the highest regard for the Dallas police and that they all know him. After getting the answers to a few more questions about Ruby’s background and family, Sorrels excuses himself and leaves.
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The interview has lasted less than seven minutes, but Sorrels has all the information he needs to get an investigation rolling and needs to find a telephone to call Washington immediately. He retrieves his sidearm, steps into the jail elevator, and is whisked back to the third floor.
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Now, Sergeant Dean turns to face the prisoner.

“Jack, I want to ask you a couple of questions myself,” he says.

Dean has known Ruby since about 1960 when he commanded a downtown patrol and routinely checked out the Carousel Club. He had even gone there three or four times with friends when he was off duty. Occasionally he would run into Ruby on the street, and Jack was always very friendly, inviting him up to the club to see the latest show. However, Dean didn’t want to get cozy with Jack, and kept his contacts on an impersonal basis.
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“How did you get in the basement?” the sergeant asks.

“I walked in the Main Street ramp,” Ruby says calmly, repeating what he’s already told Detective Clardy. “I had just been to the Western Union to mail a money order to Fort Worth. I walked from the Western Union to the ramp and saw [Rio] Sam Pierce drive out of the basement. At the time the car drove out is when I walked in.”
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“How long had you been in the basement before Oswald came out?” Dean asks.

“I just walked in,” Ruby replies. “I just walked to the bottom of the ramp when he came out.”
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11:40 a.m.

In the Dallas FBI office, Agent Jim Hosty heads down the stairs to the eleventh floor, having just finished an interview with Katya Ford, a Russian-born refugee who had befriended Marina Oswald and knew Lee as an abusive husband. Just as Hosty reaches the bottom step, his supervisor, Ken Howe, scrambles toward him, dodging desks and chairs.

“Goddamn it, Jim, they’ve just killed Oswald!” he shouts.

Hosty is stunned. His mouth opens but nothing comes out. Howe pushes him aside and dashes up the stairs. Hosty can’t believe it. The police had been warned of the threats against Oswald. Why had they not taken them seriously?

Hosty’s desk phone rings and he answers. It’s W. P. “Pat” Gannaway, captain of the Dallas police intelligence unit. “What do you guys have on a Jack Rubenstein, alias Jack Ruby?” Gannaway asks. “We’ve arrested him for shooting Oswald.”

“Let me check,” Hosty says. “I’ll get back to you, okay?”

“Sure. As soon as you can,” Gannaway says, and hangs up.

Hosty quickly locates the FBI file on Jack Ruby, which shows that Ruby was classified as a PCI—potential criminal informant. There are four pages in it. The first is a memo from Agent Charles Flynn saying he is opening the file. The second is a “contact” page, showing that Flynn had several contacts with Ruby but no information had been developed. The third page was a memo saying the Ruby file was closed because Agent Flynn had been routinely transferred to another city. The final page was a misfiled item that had nothing to do with Ruby.

Hosty knew Flynn as a young, new agent in the Dallas office who, like most new agents, aggressively sought out new potential informants. It was department policy and an easy way to keep bureau authorities off a new agent’s back. Hosty ran the file over to Ken Howe’s desk.

“Gannaway just called and said they’ve arrested a guy named Jack Ruby for shooting Oswald,” Hosty tells him. “He wants to know what we have on Ruby. Here it is.”

Hosty hands Howe the file. “Ruby was one of our PCIs.”

Howe grabs the folder and scans the contents a moment.

“Don’t call Gannaway back,” Howe orders. “I’ll take care of it.”

Obviously, Howe was worried about how Ruby’s PCI status would be viewed if it were ever made public that the gunman in the Oswald shooting was also one of the FBI’s potential criminal informants. He knew the press would eat it up. The FBI ultimately decides to handle it the easy way. They bury it—for thirteen years.
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11:42 a.m.

On a second-floor operating table at Parkland Hospital, Dr. Malcolm Perry, under the supervision of chief surgeon Tom Shires, quickly lays open Oswald’s abdomen in an operation called a laparotomy. The damage is, much as they suspected, massive. Both of the major vessels leading to and from the heart, the aorta and the inferior vena cava, have been ripped open, with catastrophic loss of blood and circulation. The abdomen is swamped with an excess of three quarts of blood, both liquid and in clots. The whole team—Shires, Perry, McClelland, and Jones—assisted by three anesthesiologists and five nurses, work quickly to remove the blood by suction, lap packs, and their own latex glove–covered hands. Sixteen 500-milliliter bottles of whole blood, along with huge quantities of lactated Ringer’s solution, are given to Oswald as the doctors feverishly work to stop the bleeding points one by one. The bullet has shattered the top of the spleen, damaged the area around the pancreas, and torn off the top of the right kidney and the right lobe of the liver before lodging in the right lateral body wall. Along the way the bullet has also injured the stomach. The doctors first concentrate on the right side, using packing to control the bleeding around the kidney, then turn to focus on the left where the bleeding is massive. A multitude of organs and tissues are dissected free, then clamped, only to reveal more damage. Dr. Perry finds the source of most of the bleeding, a ruptured aorta, and uses his fingers to clamp it while Dr. Shires tries to stop the bleeding from another main artery that has been sheared away. Working at a breakneck pace for the next hour, the surgical team manages to stop all the major bleeding and restore Oswald’s blood pressure to 100 over 85. They begin to think that they may be able to save Oswald after all.
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I
n New York, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite calls a cousin of his in Dallas whom he grew up with and was like a brother to him. The cousin was the vice president of the local branch of the National Distillers. As such, he knew all the bars in Dallas. “Do you know anything about Jack Ruby?” Cronkite asks. “Oh, Jack Ruby, he’s a nut. Why are you calling me [about him]?” It hadn’t been on the air yet but Cronkite said it is believed he’s the person who shot Oswald. “No kidding,” the cousin says. “Tell me more about him,” Cronkite says. “Well, he’s kind of a nut. He’s been around town a long time. He’s owned several bars. He has always been a strange sort of character. I can’t imagine why he’d be shooting Oswald. He didn’t strike me as the kind of patriot who would want to get rid of this assassin.”
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11:45 a.m. (12:45 p.m. EST)

On all three networks, most of America is watching the televised proceedings in Washington, where the weather is crisp and sunny.

Jackie Kennedy, in black, her eyes swollen from hours of crying, holds the hands of her two children as she watches the president’s coffin being carried by military pallbearers from the North Portico of the White House and placed in an artillery caisson, a gun carriage without its gun. Six magnificent white horses (which equestrians always call, no matter how white they may be, “grays”) will pull it up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Immediately behind the caisson is Sardar, a riderless bay gelding given to Mrs. Kennedy by the president of Pakistan, and a ten-car procession—with Mrs. Kennedy and her two children, Robert Kennedy, and Lady Bird Johnson in the first car. An estimated three hundred thousand people line the procession route on Pennsylvania Avenue. Seldom have so many people made so little noise. The crowd’s silence is uncanny—loud to the senses. The sound of muffled drums—sticks beating slowly on slackened drumheads—from the corps of military drummers following the caisson increases the emotion of the moment for the hushed throngs. Many have never heard the oppressive and ominous sound before, but few will ever forget its monotonous expression of unremitting and unrelievable grief.

Upon the arrival of the caisson, the same one that bore Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the Capitol steps, and with the Kennedy entourage now standing nearby, a military officer shouts, “Pre-sent! Arms!” the words echoing across the square. In nearby Union Station Park an artillery battalion commences firing a twenty-one-gun salute, after which the navy band breaks into a dramatically melancholy version of “Hail to the Chief.” As the notes ring out, Jackie Kennedy’s heretofore incredible public poise crumbles, her head bows and beneath the mantilla of black lace, she sobs openly. It is a scene that brings a nation to its knees.

When the last measure has been played, the nine-man casket team from the United States Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard unbuckles the coffin and carries it slowly up the thirty-seven steps of the Capitol, the widow and her two children following behind. Inside the rotunda, they ease the coffin onto the catafalque, the honor guards take their positions, and the circle of mourners closes in around them.

They endure a few brief eulogies, starting at 2:02 p.m. (EST), by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Speaker of the House John McCormack, and Chief Justice Earl Warren. The rotunda, with its vast spaces and hard reflective surfaces, is a very poor sound studio, and Mansfield’s voice is faint, often buried under the barrage of nervous coughing from the onlookers.

“He gave us of a good heart,” Mansfield says, “from which the laughter came…Of a profound wit, from which a great leadership emerged. He gave us of a kindness and a strength fused into a human courage to seek peace without fear.”

Chief Justice Warren speaks of a man who was a “believer in the dignity and equality of all human beings, a fighter for justice and apostle of peace,” and that he had “been snatched from our midst by the bullet of an assassin…The whole world is poorer because of his loss.”

It is not the words, though, but the images that are seared into the collective consciousness—Jackie Kennedy once again poised and collected, little Caroline by her side,
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unable to understand fully what the chief justice is saying.

The president’s brother looks drained, deaf to the words of Speaker McCormack, who says, “Thank God that we were privileged, however briefly, to have had this great man for our president. For he has now taken his place among the great figures of world history.”

President Johnson follows a soldier bearing a wreath of red and white carnations to the catafalque. Johnson pauses in momentary prayer, then retreats to his place. The rotunda falls silent. The ceremony has ended, but no one seems to want to leave. Mrs. Kennedy suddenly realizes that everyone is waiting for her. She turns to Robert Kennedy and whispers, “Can I say good-bye?” He nods once.

“We’re going to say good-bye to daddy,” the First Lady says quietly, turning to her daughter, “and we’re going to kiss him good-bye, and tell daddy how much we love him and how much we’ll always miss him.”

They step forward solemnly toward the casket, Caroline keeping her eyes on her mother to see what to do. Mrs. Kennedy kneels at the coffin, then Caroline, as the whole world watches.

“You know, you just kiss,” whispers Jacqueline.

She leans forward to brush her lips against the flag, and Caroline does the same, her small white-gloved hand slipping beneath to touch the closed casket. The microphones are too distant to capture the whispers, but the image strikes a deep chord in the hearts of the world. A cutaway to the faces of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shows them standing at attention with tears streaming down their faces. It is one of the most moving moments of the entire four days of television broadcasting.

As the family emerges from the rotunda, squinting in the stabbing sunlight, they see the immensity of the crowd that has gathered and is still growing—people as far as the eye can see waiting to walk past the president’s coffin in the rotunda. The streets leading from the Capitol are filled, an ocean of people everywhere, between the congressional office buildings, around the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the Folger Library, from the Botanic Gardens to the Taft tower. The fact that the rotunda would remain open was announced on television, and people are already flowing toward it in a tide that cannot be stemmed. Cars on New York Avenue are bumper to bumper and by dusk will stretch all the way back to Baltimore, thirty miles away.
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12:35 p.m.

FBI agent C. Ray Hall is in Chief Curry’s office when a call comes in from the man in charge of the Dallas FBI office, Gordon Shanklin. Hall walks out and picks up a phone just outside Curry’s office.