Reclaiming History Page 36
Goulden wants to know exactly when the charges will be filed against Oswald. “As soon as I can draw up the complaint,” Alexander replies.
Goulden says his editor won’t print the part about Oswald being a Communist for fear of a libel suit. The only way he’d print that is if he could say it was part of the formal charge.
Alexander, who would later allow that “I let my mouth overload my ass,” says sarcastically, “Well, how about if I charge him with being part of an international Communist conspiracy? Could you run with that?”
He knew he couldn’t draw up a complaint like that, but Alexander was itching to show Oswald for what he was, a damn Communist. Goulden was more than eager to oblige.
“You got it!” the reporter says.879
Ever since his meeting with Vince Drain an hour and a half ago, Chief Curry has been getting calls from Washington, insisting that the police send all of the evidence up to the FBI laboratory in Washington, although nobody will tell him exactly who it is that is making the demands, always insinuating it’s someone in high authority. Curry manages to get a moment with Captain Fritz and asks him if they are in a position to release some of the evidence to the FBI for testing.
“I need the evidence here,” Fritz argues. “I’d like to have some of the local gun shops take a look at this rifle and pistol and see if they can identify them. How can I do that if they’re in Washington?”
Curry knows he’s right. This case is not under the jurisdiction of the FBI or the Secret Service. Although Curry wants to go all out and do whatever he can to allow these agencies to observe what is taking place, in the final analysis this crime happened in Dallas and would have to be tried in Dallas and therefore it was their responsibility to gather and present the evidence. If they fail, the blame will fall on him. For the moment, the Dallas police chief is unwilling to give in to the demands from Washington.880
In New York City, FBI agents watch employees as they rummage through the files of Crescent Firearms Company. Louis Feldsott, president of the company, has been very cooperative, keeping employees after hours to help investigators track the assassination weapon.881 Earlier in the afternoon, Dallas FBI agents had canvassed Dallas gun dealers to determine if any of them had ever sold surplus World War II vintage Mannlicher-Carcanos. They found only one who did—H. L. Green Company on Main Street. Albert C. Yeargan Jr., manager of the sporting goods department at H. L. Green, spent the late afternoon with agents reviewing sales receipts for the past few years to determine if his company had ever handled a Mannlicher-Carcano with serial number C2766. The search proved fruitless; however, their records did identify the importer of these Italian 6.5-millimeter rifles as Crescent Firearms Company of New York.882
The investigation quickly switched to New York, where for the last several hours Crescent Firearm’s employees have been looking for a record of serial number C2766. Suddenly, they have a break. Their records show that C2766 had been wholesaled to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago.883
Within the hour, Chicago FBI agents are pounding on the front door of the home of William J. Waldman, vice president of Klein’s. Waldman agrees to accompany agents to the office to start a search, but first he’ll need some help. He calls Mitchell Scibor, general operating manager of Klein’s, and asks him to meet him at the office. As Waldman gets ready, he tells waiting agents that this is not a simple matter.
“Klein’s purchases a lot of sporting goods,” he warns them, “of which guns are but one. It could take hours to go through our purchase records.”884
In a small alcove of the autopsy room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the acting chief of radiology, Dr. John Ebersole, clips the last of the X-rays onto a light box. Nothing. No bullet. The president’s entire body has been x-rayed and still the doctors have been unable to determine what happened to the bullet that struck his back.885
“Where did it go?” someone asks.
The doctors have no idea.886 A discussion ensues about what might have happened to it. Someone suggests the possibility that a soft-nosed bullet struck the president and disintegrated. Others contemplate that the bullet could have been “plastic,” and therefore not easily seen by X-rays, or that it was an “Ice” bullet, which had dissolved after contact.887 None of the suggestions made much sense, but then neither did the absence of a bullet. FBI agent Jim Sibert decided to call the FBI laboratory and find out if anyone there knew of a bullet that would almost completely fragmentize. He managed to reach Special Agent Charles L. Killion of the Firearms Section of the lab, who said he’d never heard of such a thing. After Sibert explained the problem, Killion asked if he was aware that a bullet had been found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Sibert hadn’t and is nearly certain that no one else at the morgue has either. Sibert hangs up the phone, returns to the autopsy room, and informs the three pathologists that a bullet had been recovered at Parkland Hospital.888
“That could account for it,” Humes said of the missing bullet. He suggested that in some rather inexplicable fashion the bullet might have been stopped in its path and thereafter worked its way out of the body and onto the stretcher, perhaps during cardiac massage.889
10:15 p.m.
Jack Ruby, by all accounts, was having one of the worst days of his life. “He cried harder when President Kennedy was killed than when Ma and Pa died,” his sister Eva would later tell me.890 But his day had started out with anger, not mourning. He had awakened to find a large advertisement in the Dallas Morning News in the form of a letter captioned “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” taken out by one Bernard Weissman in which Kennedy is criticized for aiding and abetting international Communism.891 Jack is very patriotic, has been all his life. He loves America and can’t tolerate anyone saying anything negative about our government.* He was even known to insist that someone he was attending a sporting event with put out his cigarette during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner.”892 And Jack was a great admirer of President Kennedy and his wife and family, bringing them up in social conversations and praising them.893 In fact, when someone at the Carousel Club made a disrespectful remark not too long ago about Kennedy, Jack threw him out of the club.894† And Jack had forbidden his comics at the club from saying anything or using any material that reflected adversely against “Negroes, Jews, or the Kennedys.”895 How could this fellow Weissman attack “our beloved President,” Ruby thought.896 Indeed, he thought that John F. Kennedy was possibly the greatest man who ever lived,897 and after the assassination started carrying a small picture of the president on his person, kissing it “like a baby” in front of his sister Eva. “My brother had such a great admiration for this man, it’s unbelievable,” Eva would recall.898
After seeing the Weissman ad, Jack called Eva, he was so upset about it. He told her he had called the News and bawled them out. “Where the hell do you get off taking an ad like that? Are you money hungry?” It was a rotten thing for any person to question the way the president was running the country. “If this Weissman is a Jew,” he told her, “they ought to whack the hell out of him.” He figured Weissman might actually be a Commie himself trying to discredit the Jews, and Ruby later clips the Weissman ad from his sister Eva’s copy of the News, even though he still has his.899 Jack seems to almost be more upset about the audacity of Weissman dishonoring the president by addressing his letter to “Mr. Kennedy,” rather than “Honorable President” or “Mr. President,” than the letter itself.900
When Ruby heard at the News that Kennedy had been shot, he turned an ashen color, very pale, and sat completely dazed, a fixed stare on his face that was remarkable enough for people in the office to notice. He said nothing, very uncommon for Ruby.901 He eventually came out of it enough to verbally grieve with those around him on the horror and tragedy of what had happened. Ruby used John Newnam’s phone to call his sister Eva, and she was crying hysterically.902 Ruby asked Newnam to listen to his sister and held the phone up to his ear. Newnam could hear that Eva sounded very upset.903 Ruby told Newnam, “John
, I will have to leave Dallas. John, I am not opening tonight.”904 He left the building and got in his car, sobbing.905 After returning to the Carousel, he ordered that the club be closed for the night, and his employee Andrew Armstrong made the first phone call, to a stripper, Karen “Little Lynn” Carlin, at 1:45 p.m., to tell her not to come in, but he was unable to reach her.906 Ruby’s coworkers saw that he was taking the president’s death harder than even they, and he called what happened an “outrageous crime that would ruin the city of Dallas.”907
Ruby started making a flurry of phone calls from the club,908 the first at 1:51 p.m. to his friend Ralph Paul at Paul’s Bullpen Drive-In in Arlington, Texas, telling Paul “I can’t believe it,” and urging him to close his drive-in restaurant “in honor of the president,” which Paul told him he couldn’t afford to do.909 He called his sister Eileen, in Chicago, and was crying. “Did you hear the awful news,” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Jack said. “Maybe I will fly up to be with you tonight,” he suggested, but she reminded him that Eva, who had just returned home from the hospital from abdominal surgery, needed him now more than she did. “You better stay there,” she told her brother.910
Later in the afternoon he called Billy Joe Willis, the drummer at his club. “How could any man do such a thing?” he asked Willis, crying. He also said to Willis—not trying to connect the two acts—“Remember that man making fun of President Kennedy in the club last night?,” referring to a man in the audience who called Kennedy a bum when Ruby, on stage with his twistboard, said, “Even President Kennedy tells us to get more exercise.” Completely broken up over the president’s death, Ruby said, “This is the most horrible thing that has ever happened,” and hung up. Willis was taking the president’s death hard too, but he told his girlfriend later that he couldn’t understand the extent that Ruby was torn up over it.911
Before the day was out he also called his brother, Hyman Rubenstein, in Chicago, to lament the president’s death—“Can you imagine, can you imagine?” he asked Hyman.912
Ruby also called Al Gruber, a friend of his from Chicago now living in Los Angeles whom he has known for many years and who had stopped by the Carousel to see Jack just two weeks earlier when he was passing through town. “Did you hear what happened?” he asked Gruber. “You mean the shooting of the president?” “Yes, ain’t that a terrible thing. I’m all upset and my sister is hysterical.” Gruber heard Ruby crying at this point, and Ruby said, “I’m crying and can’t talk to you anymore,” whereupon he hung up the phone.913
When Ruby heard of Officer Tippit’s murder, his grief was intensified, believing it’s the Officer Tippit he knows, though he will later learn it’s a different Tippit. Ruby knew Dallas police detective Gayle M. Tippit, who worked in the Special Services Bureau, and who on numerous occasions had stopped by the Vegas and Carousel clubs on official business.914 After leaving the Carousel Club in midafternoon, Ruby goes to his sister Eva’s apartment to lament and cry over the president’s death, and talks about sending flowers to the place right off Elm Street near the spot where the president was shot. It was the first of three visits to her apartment that day, and he called her eight times on the phone.915
Though his financial condition was such that he could ill afford to do it, he made the decision at Eva’s place to close his two clubs for not just one but three days, the first time the Carousel had ever been dark.* Ruby had first told Don Safran, the entertainment columnist for the city’s evening paper, the Dallas Times Herald, that his club would be closed that evening as well as the entire weekend. He then tried to cancel his ads at the Dallas Morning News for the weekend, and when he was told that his space had already been reserved for him, he told the paper to just say in the ads that his Vegas and Carousel clubs would be closed for the weekend.916 Eva had asked Jack to bring some food over when he came, but he brought enough “to feed twelve people,” Eva explaining that Jack was so out of it “he didn’t know what he was doing then.” She said her brother was so upset over what happened that he only took one “spoonful or forkful,” then started making more phone calls. At one point, he was sick in the stomach enough to go into the bathroom, but he did not vomit. “Someone tore my heart out,” he told Eva, who herself was experiencing great grief, literally screaming over the telephone to a friend earlier that “the president is dead.” Jack told Eva, “I didn’t even feel so bad when Pops died because Papa was an old man. He was close to ninety.” Eva looked at her brother sitting in front of her and got the sense that he felt life wasn’t worth it anymore, “like he thought they were out to get the world, and this was part of it.” “This man,” Jack said to Eva about Kennedy and his efforts with his brother Bobby toward integration in the South, was “greater than Lincoln.” When Jack left her apartment in the early evening “he looked pretty bad, a broken man.”917
At the Shearith Israel Synagogue, where he went to pray for the fallen president, arriving near the end of a two-hour service that had started at 8:00 p.m., the day’s events preyed on his mind. When a friend, Leona Lane, remarked to him after the services “how terrible” the assassination of President Kennedy had been, Ruby said, “It is worse than that.”918 The rabbi, Hillel Silverman, noticed that Ruby appeared to be “in shock” and in a daze, though Ruby didn’t mention the assassination to him, merely thanking him for visiting Eva at the hospital a few days earlier.919 When he left the synagogue for the parking lot, he got his pistol, a .38 caliber Colt Cobra, out of the trunk and slipped it into his right front trouser pocket. It’s a lightweight revolver with a two-inch barrel, and a shroud over the hammer makes it easy to carry in his pocket without snagging the cloth.920 He wouldn’t take it into the synagogue, but he usually carries the pistol when he has a lot of cash on him from the Carousel, which he does tonight.921
Now, around 10:15 in the evening, he’s worried about the other Dallas clubs and whether they are properly respecting the death of the president, so he makes a point of driving by the Bali-Hai Restaurant, and notes grimly that it is open. He drives past the Gay Nineties too. It is closed.
As he goes on down Preston Road, he listens to the car radio, hungry for any new information about the assassination. He hears that the police are working overtime, and is overcome by a feeling of respect and admiration for them. He has always felt close to the police department—he doesn’t even know why—and believes Dallas has the greatest police force in the world. He has many friends on the force and often visits the police at the station, encouraging them to come to his clubs when they are off duty. Jack gives them the cut rate on drinks he normally reserves for newsmen, hotel receptionists, bellboys, and others who might help to generate business.922 And if all an officer wanted was a snack, “Jack kept coffee and sandwiches in the back for the police.”923
On an impulse he stops at Phil’s Delicatessen on Oak Lawn Avenue and tells the counterman, John Frickstad, to cut him ten corned beef sandwiches with mustard. And ten soft drinks—eight black cherries and two celery tonics. He chats a bit with the owner, Phil Miller.
He goes to the phone, calls police headquarters, and gets Detective Sims, a fifteen-year acquaintance.
“I hear you guys are still working,” he says. “I want to bring you some sandwiches.”
“Jack, we wound up our work already. We finished what we were doing. I’ll tell the boys about your thoughtfulness. Thank you.”924
Those sandwiches are already being made, and it’s a shame to let them go to waste. Ruby remembers Gordon McLendon, and how good McLendon has always been to him, giving him a lot of free plugs for his clubs on his Dallas radio station. McLendon owns many radio stations, including KLIF in Dallas, the one Ruby had been listening to in the car. One of the disk jockeys, Joe Long, is down at the police station, phoning information to the station as it comes in, and others are working late too—the guy on the air and the engineers at the station. He tries calling KLIF, but because it’s after six no one answers. He knows there is a hotline right
into the control room, but he doesn’t know the number.
He calls out to Frickstad, “These sandwiches are going to KLIF, and I want you to make them real good.”
There’s another disk jockey he knows at KLIF, Russ Knight, big with the kids in the late-afternoon hot spot, but he can’t get his home number from information. He tries Gordon McLendon, who lives out near the synagogue and whose number he does know. A little girl answers. Maybe her name is Christine, Jack thinks.
“Anyone home?”
“No.”
“Is your daddy or mommy home? I would like to get the number of the station, so I can get in the building at this time.” The little girl leaves the phone and comes back with a number in the Riverside exchange.
Jack dials the Riverside number but it has been disconnected. He calls Eva, tells her he’s at Phil’s getting sandwiches and is going to the station, and if she needs him, she can reach him there, though he still doesn’t have the station’s number. The sandwich bill only comes to $9.50 plus tax—Frickstad made only eight sandwiches instead of the ten Jack ordered. Frickstad helps Jack with the sandwiches out to his car and receives Jack’s customary tip, a free pass to the Carousel or Vegas, for his pains.925
It’s four or five miles from Phil’s to downtown, and Ruby still doesn’t know how he’s going to get into KLIF to bring the sandwiches to the gang on duty. He drives up McKinney Avenue to check on some more clubs, and finds more open. Jack simply can’t understand how they would remain open at such a tragic time. Jack proceeds to the KLIF station, near City Hall. He knew the front door would be locked, of course, but he hopes his knocking is loud enough for them to hear him, but because of the long distance between the bottom of the flight of stairs and the studio, no one does, so he proceeds to City Hall to look for KLIF reporter Joe Long to get the control-room phone number.926