JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (109 page)

In November 1963, Gordon McLendon was a less visible supporter of the CIA, but his Liberty Radio Network with its Dallas station was known for promoting a hard-line anti-communism. McLendon told the HSCA he “could not recall” if he had consciously provided a cover job for a particular CIA agent employed at one of his stations. He would, he added, have been happy to have his company serve as a CIA cover.
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He denied any knowledge of a plot to kill JFK. He also disclaimed being a friend of Jack Ruby, saying he was only “a close acquaintance” of the man whose first cry for help after murdering Oswald had been to Gordon McLendon.
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Most crucial to understanding Ruby’s killing of Oswald is Ruby’s involvement in the killing of Kennedy. Thanks to Julia Ann Mercer’s unflinching testimony, which the government covered up, we know that Ruby delivered a man with a rifle to the grassy knoll an hour and a half before the assassination. As we have seen, Jim Garrison interviewed Mercer, who showed him how the government revised her testimony and forged her signature. Garrison then made the connection between Ruby’s role in the killing of Kennedy and his subsequent killing of Oswald:

“When you understand that that part of the Mafia which was the ally in the late Fifties, early Sixties, of the CIA is working with the agency like it used to before, as Ruby was doing, actually the evidence is overwhelming that he was working for the intelligence community. Not as agent No. 352 with a gold badge, but as a member of the Mafia, part of which had become subservient to the CIA.

“That was Ruby’s involvement from the beginning. That’s why he was actively engaged in the assassination. He delivered one of the riflemen to the grassy knoll, as one witness observed; although the government, the FBI, changed her testimony, I subsequently got the true testimony from her . . . Apparently, that’s one of the ways they persuaded Ruby it was the better part of valor for him to be the one to remove Oswald. Because a few days earlier, he had delivered a gunman to the grassy knoll. It wasn’t a case of saying, ‘Say, Jack, would you mind doing this little project for us?’ By the time Sunday after the assassination rolled around, they were in a position to say, ‘Jack, do you realize what you did the other day?’ That’s why he was crying the next few days. He wasn’t crying about the president. He was crying because he knew what he had to do.”
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Jack Ruby knew what he had to do to Oswald because he was already a key player in the assassination plot. He had carried out the dangerously visible task of delivering a gunman to the grassy knoll. Ruby was ideal for such a role because he was tied in with the CIA’s anti-Castro Mafia underlings, making him and the Mob the perfect backup scapegoats behind Oswald, the Soviet Union, and Cuba—an alternative scapegoat role Ruby and the Mob have continued to play to the present. The CIA could hold Ruby in reserve for the murder of Oswald, in case Oswald was not killed by the Dallas police in the Texas Theater, as turned out to be the case. When Oswald survived his arrest and was taken to jail instead of to the morgue, Ruby acted as if he knew what he had to do next.

Jack Ruby was everywhere on the weekend of the assassination. After Ruby-aided gunmen shot President Kennedy, Ruby showed an ability not only to keep pace with the post-assassination drama but also to anticipate its unfolding events. Although the Warren Commission did its best to obscure the fact, Ruby was always on top of the breaking news, appearing on the spot of an event just after or even before it happened.

At about 1:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, Seth Kantor, a White House correspondent who was a passenger in the motorcade, saw Jack Ruby in Parkland Hospital. Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff had just told Kantor and other reporters to follow him to the site of what would turn out to be the press conference announcing the president’s death. As Kantor was hurrying up a hospital stairway, he felt a tug on his coat. He turned around. It was Jack Ruby.

As a reporter in Dallas until 1962, Seth Kantor was well acquainted with Ruby, who had tried to enlist him in doing feature stories on Ruby’s interests. On the hospital stairs, Ruby called Kantor by his first name and shook his hand. Kantor has described his impression of Ruby at that moment:

“He looked miserable. Grim. Pale. There were tears brimming in his eyes. He commented on the obvious—how terrible the moment was—and did I have any word on the President’s condition? There was nothing I knew to tell him and I only wanted to get away. Kilduff was disappearing up the steps. Certainly there was nothing unusual about seeing Jack Ruby there. He regularly turned up at spectacles in Dallas. In a subdued voice he asked me if I thought it was a good idea for him to close his places for three nights because of the tragedy. Instead of shrugging, I told him I thought it was a good idea and then took off on the run, up the steps.”
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When Jack Ruby denied he had been at Parkland Hospital the afternoon of the assassination, the Warren Commission accepted his version of events over that of Seth Kantor.
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It was a remarkable act of trust in Ruby. The Commission was supporting the claim of Oswald’s killer over against the word of a trained journalist who already knew Ruby, who had a vivid encounter with him at Parkland, and who then reported it in an article he wrote two days later right after seeing Ruby shoot Oswald.
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The disparity between the trustworthiness of the two men was so great, and the Commission’s decision so arbitrary, that its acceptance of Ruby’s word over Kantor’s in itself destroyed the credibility of the
Warren Report
for early critics.
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A pioneer among the critics, Sylvia Meagher, asked, “Why was it so urgent to repress reports that Ruby was at Parkland Hospital shortly after the assassination?”
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She answered that a clue may have been the title of the
Warren Report
’s chapter that included Kantor’s testimony: “Possible Conspiracy Involving Jack Ruby.”
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Jack Ruby’s appearance at Parkland Hospital was a beginning sign of his knowledge of the plot. Once we know that Ruby delivered a gunman to the grassy knoll an hour and a half before the shooting began, we can see how he knew enough to be only half a step behind Seth Kantor going up the Parkland Hospital stairway. Jack Ruby was wired to the assassination plot. Ruby knew where to be because he knew the assassination scenario before the actors took the stage.

As Johnny-on-the-spot as Ruby was in following Kantor up the Parkland stairs, his presence there could still be attributed to the quick movements of an experienced news hound. However, Ruby had to know the assassination plot’s script to show up where he did twenty minutes later—at the Texas Theater to watch the police close in on Oswald.

George J. Applin, Jr., was an off-duty crane operator attending the movie at the Texas Theater the afternoon of November 22, 1963. When the lights came on and police officers started coming down the aisle, the first carrying a shotgun, Applin got up from his seat.
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He retreated to the rear of the theater, while the officers prepared to move in on Oswald. While standing in the rear, Applin warned a man sitting in a back-row seat—whom he later identified as Ruby—that it would be smart to move.

In an interview with investigative reporter Earl Golz, Applin described his encounter with Ruby:

“Ruby was sitting down, just watching them. And when Oswald pulled the gun and snapped it at his [a policeman’s] head and missed and the darn thing wouldn’t fire, that’s when I tapped him [Ruby] on the shoulder and told him he had better move because those guns were waving around.

“He just turned around and looked at me. Then he turned around and started watching them.”
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When Applin was questioned by Dallas police later that day, he did not mention the man in the back row. He could not have identified him in any case, because he did not know Ruby by sight. Two days later, thanks to the television news, he knew that the man in the back row of the Texas Theater on Friday afternoon was the same man who shot Oswald to death on Sunday morning, Jack Ruby.
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He also realized it could be dangerous to divulge that truth.

In his Warren Commission testimony four months later, Applin did bring up his encounter with the man in the back row, but denied any later recognition of him. In response to the question, “Ever seen the man since?,” he said, “No, sir; didn’t.”
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In a 1979 interview, George Applin finally identified Jack Ruby as the man he had seen at Oswald’s arrest. He said fear had kept him from making his knowledge public:

“I’m a pretty nervous guy anyway, because I’ll tell you what: After I saw that magazine where all those people they said were kind of connected with some of this had come up dead, it just kind of made me keep a low profile.”
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After Oswald was jailed on Friday afternoon, Ruby managed to gain increasing access to Dallas Police Department headquarters and to Oswald himself. Media and police witnesses saw Ruby early Friday evening on the third floor of police headquarters. He was near Captain Will Fritz’s office, where Oswald was being questioned.
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As witnessed by a reporter, Ruby then went so far as to attempt to enter Fritz’s office while Oswald was inside: “[Ruby] put his hand on the knob, turned it, opened the door and started in, probably not more than a step or a step and a half before the officers reacted and pulled him back.”
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At about 11:30 p.m. Friday, Ruby reentered police headquarters. He attended the televised midnight press conference on the third floor at which District Attorney Henry Wade presented the prisoner Oswald to the media and the world. This strange event was in effect a dry run of Oswald’s murder on Sunday morning. About five minutes before Oswald was brought in, UPI photographer Pete Fisher noticed Jack Ruby standing near the room’s entrance. In an FBI interview, Fisher described the preview he was given then of Oswald’s murder on Sunday:

“The Dallas Police brought Oswald through this entrance and Oswald passed not more than three feet from Ruby as he was led up on the stage. Fisher pointed out that if Ruby had wanted to shoot Oswald at that time he could easily have done it because of the fact that he was so close to Oswald.”
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Ruby also had the means to shoot Oswald. At the time he “was carrying a loaded, snub-nosed revolver in his right-hand pocket,” as he would admit to the FBI a month later.
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Why he passed up that chance to kill Oswald is unclear, although we will be given clues to the reason from his behavior early Sunday morning.

Ruby missed his moment of opportunity Friday night, but he would be given an even better one Sunday.

While the police were exposing their prisoner to a waiting assassin, the prisoner was pondering his plight. He was seeking a way out of it.

We have seen mounting evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald, an admirer of President Kennedy, was an FBI informant trying to stop the CIA plot to kill the president. In late July, in the notes he wrote for his speech to the Jesuits, Oswald warned of a coup d’état against the U.S. government. He attributed that threat especially to the Marine Corps—in a way, however, that pointed more specifically at the CIA, into whose ranks he had passed from the Marine Corps.

In August, according to New Orleans FBI employee William Walter and other witnesses, Oswald was acting as an FBI informant.
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While Oswald was in jail in New Orleans for the ruckus caused by his pro-Castro leafleting, he met for an hour and a half with FBI agent John Quigley.
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Given his Kennedy sympathies, his warning against a coup, and his recent recruitment (with deeper designs) into the plot to kill the president, it is reasonable to suppose Oswald at this point in his FBI contacts was trying to save Kennedy’s life—and in the process, risking his own.

He apparently kept on trying. The Chicago plot to kill Kennedy on November 2 was, as we saw, disrupted by Chicago Police lieutenant Berkeley Moyland and by an otherwise unidentified FBI informant named “Lee.” Lee Harvey Oswald, the most likely candidate to have been the FBI informant “Lee,” had strong similarities to the intended Chicago scapegoat, Thomas Arthur Vallee. Government sources characterized both men unsympathetically as psychopathic loners with extremist political views—in effect, perfect patsies. Both were Marine veterans. Both had served at U-2 bases in Japan under the Joint Technical Advisory Group (JTAG), the CIA’s cover name for its U-2 spy plane surveillance as well as “other covert operations in Asia.”
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Both of their U-2 bases were prime recruitment stations for the CIA. Both men had recent intelligence connections with anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

Yet Oswald’s and Vallee’s most striking parallel came from their places of employment in November 1963. After they had relocated in the late summer and fall—Vallee to Chicago, Oswald back to Dallas—each potential scapegoat fortuitously found work in a building overlooking the street of an upcoming presidential motorcade near a dogleg turn. There each could be identified as a lone assassin, while covert snipers killed the president. Who had the power to place Oswald and Vallee in the same position of suspicion for the motorcades scheduled to pass beneath their workplace windows?