The Kennedy Half-Century (42 page)

For some Americans who lived at the time, Ruby was a folk hero who had avenged the murder of their president and spared the country a lengthy, expensive trial. When he was diagnosed with cancer in 1966, Ruby received a flood of sympathy cards and letters from admirers. Most expressed gratitude for Oswald’s murder. Ruby may not have been able to appreciate them at the time—nor to give any deathbed confessions—because his mind and body were rapidly deteriorating. Ruby began to experience paranoid delusions. “He raved again and again that Jews were being tortured and killed because Gentiles wanted revenge for his crime. He shouted that he could hear screams from the jail cellar, machine guns in the street.” He also gave visitors pieces of paper with phone numbers on them, explaining, “These people have been murdered. They’re all out to get the Jews, and these people won’t answer the phone because they’re dead.”

At saner moments, Ruby seemed determined to dispel rumors that he had been part of a conspiracy. “The ironic part of this is, I had made an illegal turn behind a bus to the parking lot” near the jail, he said from his hospital
bed. “Had I gone the way I was supposed to go—straight down Main Street—I would’ve never met this fate, because the difference in meeting this fate was thirty seconds one way or the other.” Earl Ruby told the press that his brother wanted to take another lie detector test (he had already taken two) “so that people will be convinced that there was no plan on his part, or conspiracy of any kind.” A month before he died, Ruby said, “There is nothing to hide. There was no one else.”
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The best evidence that Ruby’s encounter with destiny may have been accidental is derived from his actions on the day of the Oswald shooting. Ruby was in downtown Dallas Sunday morning, November 24, in order to send money to one of his strippers who had requested urgent help. We know Ruby was in the Western Union office, not far from the Dallas jail, at 11:17 A.M., since his money order was stamped at that exact time—and all Western Union clocks were carefully synchronized each morning. Oswald had been scheduled to be transferred from the city jail to the Dallas County jail sometime after ten A.M., and if Oswald had been moved shortly after ten, he and Ruby would have never crossed paths.
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Instead, at the last minute, a postal inspector had a few questions for Oswald, and Oswald himself unexpectedly requested a change of clothing upstairs in the interrogation room, which delayed his transfer—just enough time to permit Ruby to make the journey to the police basement entrance, gain admission to the media spectacle (apparently from either a friendly or an inattentive policeman), and find a suitable perch for close observation. If Ruby had been under orders to kill Oswald, he would never have cut the timing so close, and he would not have run a trivial errand in advance. Nor would he have brought his dog, Sheba—his companion animals were like children to him—and left her locked up in his car while he undertook a high-profile shooting that meant he would certainly be arrested and might even be killed via police counterfire. Finally, murdering Oswald would not have protected the plotters of November 22. Ruby would know who put him up to his part in the cover-up, and would talk sooner or later. Wouldn’t Ruby have had to be eliminated eventually, too—and then the person who killed Ruby, and on and on? Ironically, the episode most Americans cite as having convinced them of a JFK assassination conspiracy may be the easiest to debunk, simply by following the details of Ruby’s day and the illogic of this particular alleged “silencing.”

An alternate explanation that places Ruby inside a mob conspiracy to kill JFK is offered by HSCA counsel Robert Blakey: “Did [Ruby] get [Oswald] that day [November 24] serendipitously? Or did he get him that day with a connection with some of the crooked cops in the Dallas police? And they were crooked. And they were connected to the organized crime in town—not the whole police department, but substantial numbers of them. I don’t know how
[Ruby] got in [to the police basement] for sure. There’s some suspicion that he was let in. Even if he got in serendipitously, he still got in. He was stalking [Oswald]. If he hadn’t got him today, he’d have got him tomorrow.”
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Adding some credence to this view are Ruby’s actions on Friday evening, November 22. Ruby got all the way to the door of Captain Fritz’s office, where Oswald was being interrogated, and actually opened it several inches before he was stopped by two policemen.
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Was Friday’s bold move Ruby’s first attempt to get Oswald? Blakey’s argument about Ruby is plausible, but on balance, it is less convincing than the coincidental theory.

Whatever his motivations, Jack Ruby was no hero. He robbed America of a fuller explanation of the Kennedy assassination. In time, it is highly probable Lee Oswald would have provided a great deal of information, either about his own objectives or the existence of a wider conspiracy. The year 1963 preceded significant Supreme Court decisions that enhanced the constitutional guarantees possessed by accused criminals, and police departments were often not terribly fussy about the rights of those in custody. When I asked Bill Alexander, one of Oswald’s ranking interrogators for the short time he was in the Dallas jail, what would have happened if Oswald had lived, he reminded me that they were gathering incriminating evidence from many sources and Oswald’s own writings. They had already surprised Oswald with what they knew about him (his rifle purchase, the staged photograph with the gun, and other details). By Monday, Alexander felt, they would have had enough hard proof to make him crack. And if he didn’t, would the police have gotten a bit rough with Oswald behind closed doors? “Oh, surely not!” quipped Alexander in mock horror. “We would have [just] made him understand we [meant business].”
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10
Examining the Physical Evidence: Old and New Controversies

Hard proof is often lacking to support plausible conjecture, semireliable hearsay, and logical guesswork. Unfortunately, contrary to what the experts say on TV crime shows, the same is true for some of the physical evidence. Where you stand on that evidence depends on where you sat on November 22, 1963, or shortly thereafter. Take the medical findings and judgments of those who saw President Kennedy right after his fatal shooting.

President Kennedy arrived at Parkland Hospital within a few minutes of the shooting, at around 12:35 P.M. Hospital staff gave him the designation “No. 24740, Kennedy, John F.”
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When Dr. Charles Carrico received Kennedy in Trauma Room One, he knew the situation was extremely grim, and noted JFK’s color as blue-white or ashen, an indication of poor blood circulation. Dr. Carrico also noticed that the president was having trouble breathing and “had no palpable pulse.” In addition, Kennedy’s eyes were wide open and unresponsive to light. As Dr. Carrico was making these observations, Trauma Room One began to fill with medical personnel. With the assistance of other doctors and a senior nurse, Dr. Carrico opened the president’s shirt and put an ear to Kennedy’s chest. Carrico detected a faint heartbeat, so the assembled physicians began working to restore the president’s breathing.
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While inserting a breathing tube down the president’s throat, Carrico noticed a small wound in the front of his neck. He described it as “rather round” without “jagged edges or stellate [starlike] lacerations.” Carrico made these observations as he was connecting the breathing tube to a respirator machine.
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At this point, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry and other doctors arrived, and Perry assumed control over the effort to resuscitate the president.
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Perry noted a wound “in the lower part of the neck below the Adams apple,” which he described as “a small, roughly circular wound of perhaps 5mm in diameter from which blood was exuding slowly.”
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Since it seemed obvious that the president was losing oxygen through this hole, Perry decided to perform a
tracheotomy. Using a scalpel, he made a “transverse incision right through the wound in the neck.” Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the teaching faculty at Parkland, assisted with this procedure. Perry also asked another doctor to insert a tube in the president’s chest in order to drain excess blood and air.
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Dr. Kemp Clark, Parkland’s chief neurosurgeon, inspected the president’s massive head injury. Clark could see “a large, gaping wound in the right rear part of the head, with substantial damage and exposure of brain tissue, and a considerable loss of blood.” Although he “did not see any other hole or wound on the president’s head,” Clark later admitted that the massive amount of blood and thick hair could have concealed the full extent of the president’s injuries. Finally unable to detect any pulse, the physician began performing external cardiac massage.
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Dr. Marion T. Jenkins, one of Parkland’s anesthesiologists, later said that at this point, after “Dr. Clark had begun closed chest cardiac massage,” he became “aware of the magnitude of the wound, because, with each compression of the chest, there was a great rush of blood from the skull wound. Part of the brain was herniated [i.e., the brain projected through the blasted-out cranial cavity]; I really think part of the cerebellum, as I recognized it, was herniated from the wound; there was part of the brain tissue, broken fragments of the brain tissue on the drapes of the cart on which the president lay.”
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As the physicians worked desperately to save the president’s life, Mrs. Kennedy forced her way into the operating room cupping a sizable piece of her husband’s brain that she had retrieved from the trunk of the limousine—an action captured in famous photos and the Zapruder film of the awful instants after the shots were fired.
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Jenkins described the horrific scene: “Jacqueline Kennedy was circling the room, walking behind my back. The Secret Service could not keep her out of the room. She looked shell-shocked. As she circled and circled, I noticed that her hands were cupped in front of her, as if she were cradling something. As she passed by, she nudged me with an elbow and handed me what she had been nursing in her hands—a large chunk of her husband’s brain tissues. I quickly handed it to a nurse.”
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But it was much too late for miracles. The president had been brain-dead from the moment his skull exploded under fire at 12:30 P.M. The time of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s death was somewhat arbitrarily fixed by the doctors as being 1:00 P.M. CST. Dr. Clark signed the death certificate, citing a gunshot wound to the head as the cause of death.
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Years later, one of the attending doctors told an interviewer that “as soon as we realized we had nothing medical [left] to do, we all backed off from the man with a reverence that one has for one’s president. And we did not continue to be doctors from that point on. We became citizens again, and there
were probably more tears shed in that room than in the surrounding hundred miles.” Most of the doctors quietly left the room, with a couple staying behind to remove tubing and medical equipment from the president’s body.
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Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff had accompanied Kennedy to Dallas in lieu of Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who was on a mission abroad with cabinet members. It was left to Kilduff to make the official announcement of the president’s death to journalists gathered in the hospital. “His eyes red-rimmed, his voice barely controlled, [Kilduff] said: ‘President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one P.M. central standard time here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain.’ ”
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When Kilduff had finished speaking, Drs. Perry and Clark gave an impromptu press conference. Perry told reporters that he had located “an entrance wound in the front of the throat” that had likely been caused by a bullet moving toward the president.
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Months later, he would describe this wound to the Warren Commission as “roughly circular.” When asked whether it was an exit or entry wound, Perry told the commission that “it could have been either.”
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By contrast, in his 1992 book,
JFK: Conspiracy of Silence
, Dr. Charles Crenshaw claimed that he had “identified a small opening about the diameter of a pencil” in the middle of the president’s throat, and he remained convinced that it was “an entry bullet hole. There was no doubt in my mind about that wound. I had seen dozens of them in the emergency room.”
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If Crenshaw is correct, this bullet could not possibly have caused Governor Connally’s wounds, since it was coming from Kennedy’s front and not his back.
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Other doctors who certifiably were in Trauma Room One insist that Dr. Crenshaw did not treat President Kennedy or was in no position to observe anything significant.
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Perry also told the press on November 22 that he could not identify the entry point for the bullet that had shattered the president’s skull. This statement was corroborated by Dr. Clark, who said that “the head wound could have been either the exit wound from the neck or it could have been a tangential wound, as it was simply a large, gaping loss of tissue.”
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Given the nature of the resuscitation efforts and the confusion of the day, none of the physicians in Trauma Room One could have conducted a thorough examination of the president’s head wound. Yet a physician who spent considerable time in the room holding the president’s shattered head and looking directly at the cranial wound for many minutes was Dr. Robert McClelland. One of the few surviving occupants of Trauma Room One on November 22, he told me that not only was “a third to a half of the president’s brain” shot away, but while the other doctors were working feverishly to revive Kennedy, “the right half of [Kennedy’s] cerebellum fell out of the hole in his skull cavity.”
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