Regardless of who did it and why the main suspect for the assassination of Pres. Kennedy is Lee Harvey “I’m a Patsy” Oswald.
And Jack Ruby Shot him.
The events of the assassination of Pres. Kennedy and the assassination of Oswald are witnessed, with gaped mouth shock and disbelief by a nation grieving the loss of its young leader.
On November 22, 1963, at 12:40 p.m. CST — just 10 minutes after President Kennedy was shot — CBS broadcasts the first nationwide TV news bulletin on the shooting.
After that, all three television networks — CBS, NBC, and ABC — interrupt their regular programming to cover the assassination for four straight days.
The JFK assassination is the longest uninterrupted news event on television until the coverage of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Throughout the world, reports on these events are disseminated in massive detail.
Theories mount regarding the assassination. In many instances, the intense public demand for facts is met by partial and frequently conflicting reports from Dallas and elsewhere.
Downtown Dallas turns into a ghost town, everything has been canceled by nighttime including school and all other functions. All US Military bases are on high alert status.
After Oswald’s arrest, his denial of all guilt focus public attention both on the extent of the evidence against him and the possibility of a conspiracy, domestic or foreign.
Because the killing Oswald destroys the chance to hear any testimony which might shed some more light on the relationship he had with the Marines, the Soviets, allegedly the mafia, and Jack Ruby- floodgates of speculation open about the assassination of President Kennedy.
Furthermore, questions begin to arise about Ruby.
Who is he? Why’d he do it?
Is Oswald’s murder a “hit” to silence him?
How does Ruby get into the Dallas Police Department basement with a gun?
Does he have help?
Is Ruby tied to organized crime, and if so do these connections tie into the murder of President Kennedy?
The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
Is it because, as Ruby originally states, he wants to spare the widow of President Kennedy the agony of testifying against
the man accused of killing her husband?
Or is Ruby part of a bigger conspiracy?
Why does the Warren Commission wait until July of 1964 to talk to Ruby, months after his Texas murder trial is over?
Going backwards now, let’s unpack the case.
Kennedy and Texas
Texas Tensions Run Deep
The Mink Coat Mob
In November 1960, FOUR DAYS before the general election, vice presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson comes to Dallas on Republican Tag Day.
The downtown lunch crowd is being canvassed by 300 women in red, white, and blue. They are Dallas congressman Bruce Alger’s, women passing out literature for the Nixon-Lodge campaign.
It was chilly, and some of them wore their minks.
As Johnson enters Dallas, a policeman pulls over his Lincoln to warn him of a “little disturbance” awaiting him at the Baker Hotel, where the Johnsons traditionally stay.
In front of the hotel on Commerce Street is filling up with tag girls, who have now transformed themselves into an eager mob, complete with placards- Alger had stored in the Baker overnight.
“Think once and scratch Lyndon twice,” said one sign. Also: “LBJ traitor, Judas Johnson,” and “Let’s ground Lady Bird.”
Most of them carrying Nixon-Lodge and “Tower for Senate” signs (one of the peculiarities of that election being that Johnson is entered in both races, thanks to a special dispensation from the Texas Legislature).
It is another gauntlet. There is shoving, jockeying, and elbows are flying.
Some people are pulling off their Nixon buttons and using the pins to stab at the handful of pro-LBJ supporters.
Reporters and photographers push in to get a better view. The local NBC-TV affiliate, tipped off to Alger’s protest, has already set up a camera to capture the melee.
Several women spot the Johnsons arriving and rush to surround their car. As Lady Bird is stepping out, one of the pickets impulsively snatches Mrs. Johnson’s gloves from her hands and throws them in the gutter.
Lady Bird goes white. It is still a time when incivility is rare in politics when public figures felt safe in crowds.
No one, perhaps not even the tag girls themselves, are prepared to understand the ferocity and anger of these apparently well-cared-for women.
Johnson rushes Lady Bird into the lobby of the Baker, which is packed with jeering tag girls. When the elevator doors open, LBJ whirls to face the mob. He raises his hand and, almost oddly, it goes quiet.
He says: “I recognize that many of you are Republicans, and you have every right to be.”
From the crowd, a mocking voice emerges: “Louder!”
Johnson looks at the picket signs, the flushed faces: “I have many friends who are sincere and committed Republicans.”
The boos erupt again, echoing across the marble floors of the old hotel: “Socialist! Pinko!”
Finally, Johnson and his wife retreat into the open elevator. Johnson stares back at the women and summons his most commanding voice: “You ought to be glad you live in a country where you have the legal right to boo and hiss at a man who is running for the vice presidency of the United States.”
For a second, the mob seems stilled. Then someone in the back screams out: “Louder and funnier, Lyndon!”
Cheers and laughter bounce around the hotel lobby, as the elevator doors close. In the hotel suite, the frazzled Johnsons try to assess what the hell just happened to them in downtown Dallas.
Two women from the Kennedy-Johnson campaign are clutching their faces, pressing their hands to their broken noses. Other people are limping, being helped outside to hospitals.
Off to the side, Stanley Marcus watches in horror. He is devastated. He feels like every shout of traitor or Judas is aimed at him as well.
Marcus always had a vision for Dallas-a place of taste, culture, and refinement in the heart of Texas.
A place where reason, art, and insight were the outgrowths of so much money pooling in one place on the planet would be a sort of beau ideal, a place where people relish and celebrate and share the finest things humankind can create.
What is more surprising is the sign carriers and catcallers are well-groomed women from the finest homes in the city.
Right now he knows what is happening: Longtime customers are spotting him and they are already deciding to close their charge accounts at his store.
Yet, as the Johnsons wade into Commerce Street, the women begin to curse and to spit.
(Later, some members of the “Mink Coat Mob,” as they came to be known, claimed that they were not spitting, exactly, they were frothing.)
Perhaps the gallant veneer Marcus has cultivated so assiduously for Dallas is dissolving right before his eyes, right here on Commerce Street.
In the background are the second-floor dives where $2 would earn you admission to one of nightclub owner Jack Ruby’s “exotic dance” joints.
The Other Dallas
The sign actually reads, “Honest Joe, Loan Ranger”.
As the story goes, a skeptical lady weighing the integrity of the place when a regular customer, Little Jimmy, chimed in, “Don’t worry, lady. This is Honest Joe”.
Eventually attracting customers like Sammy Davis, Jr. and other Hollywood actors, the Dallas Mayor, and many Dallas locals.
Even Jack Ruby buys items for his Carousel Club here, including tables which are eventually repossessed since Jack apparently has no intention of ever paying for them.
Though, he usually carries a big roll of money and a gun as he churns through the streets of downtown Dallas, with the energy of a steam engine.
The Carousel was a dingy, cramped walkup in the 1300 block of Commerce, right next to Abe Weinstein’s Colony Club and close to the hotels, restaurants, and nightspots that made downtown Dallas lively and respectably sinister in those times of official innocence.
According to Gary Cartwright of Texas Monthly, “Jack Ruby had come a long way from the ghettos of Chicago, or so he liked to think. “
Any girl caught hooking in his joint would get manhandled and fired on the spot, but Ruby leaned on his girls to provide sexual pleasures for “favored” clients.
You can see more flesh in a high school biology class now than you could at any of the joints on The Strip in 1963, but that wasn’t the point.
Jack Ruby ran what he considered a “decent” place, a “high-class” place, a place that Dallas could view with pride.
“Punks” and “characters” who wandered in by mistake were as likely as not to leave with an impression of Jack Ruby’s fist where their nose used to be.
He never misses a chance to gain customers.
A shameless self-promoter- you can always spot him at boxing matches, waiting right before the main event, when they turn the lights up to hand out free passes to the Carousel.
Always, glad-handing, talking quickly and compulsively about his clubs as a “f–ing classy joint”.
Ruby’s like that, and though notoriously violent – he can be embarrassingly sentimental. There was once a policeman who had wife and kid involved in a car accident, Ruby took over a sack of groceries.
Ruby and has been known as Sparky since he was a kid. He’s small, but has thick shoulders and arms. Plus, he is fast.
He has an expression dating from his street-fighting days in Chicago: “Take the play away.”
It means he likes to strike first.
Cops and newspapermen, that’s who Ruby wanted in his place. Dallas cops drank there regularly, and none of them ever paid for a drink. Cops- so he can get in good with them in exchange for them being lax on enforcement as his place.
Newspaper men for the publicity.
[One officer even called Ruby by name as the nightclub owner stepped forward to pull the trigger when he shot Oswald]
On the same block as the Dallas Police Department is the Statler Hilton.
Joe Cavagnaro is the sales manager of the Statler Hilton, a neat, manicured, gregarious man who exudes the personality of downtown Dallas, but is in need of a friend when he arrives in 1955.
Cavagnaro is eating at the Lucas B&B Restaurant next to the Vegas Club Ruby owns. Suddenly, Ruby saunters in, says hello, and picks up the check. They become best friends.
1963 The New Election
By the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his political advisers are preparing for the next presidential campaign.
Although he has not formally announced his candidacy, it is clear President Kennedy is going to run and he seems confident about his chances for re-election.
On November 02, 1963 (just twenty days before JFK’s assassination in Dallas), a plot to kill JFK in Chicago is thwarted when an FBI informant tips off the FBI about the impending assassination.
Then, on November 12, he holds the first important political planning session for the upcoming election year.
At the meeting, JFK stresses the importance of winning Florida and Texas and talks about his plans to visit both states in the next two weeks.
Texas’ 24 electoral votes become a weight-bearing beam that holds up the Kennedy electoral strategy.
President Kennedy is aware of a feud among party leaders in Texas that could jeopardize his chances of carrying the state in 1964, and one of his aims for the trip is to bring Democrats together.
AP Photo/Carl E. Linde
He also knows a relatively small, vocal group of extremists is contributing to the political tensions in Texas, and will likely make its presence felt—particularly in Dallas, where US Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson has been physically attacked a month earlier after making a speech there.
Zealots from the National Indignation Committee picket a UN Day speech by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson; and call him Addle-Eye while booing.
As he makes his way to the limousine there is much shoving and shouting. At one point a placard comes down squarely on Stevenson’s head.
He reels back, startled but unhurt. Several protesters also spait on his face. He is asked if some picketers should be arrested.
“I don’t want to send them to jail,” he replies. “I want to send them to school.”
When a hundred civic leaders wire strong and sincere apologies to the ambassador, General Edwin Walker, who has been cashiered by the Pentagon for force-feeding his troops right-wing propaganda, flies the American flag upside down in front of his military-gray mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, Texas.
President Kennedy reads about the confrontation and tells Stevenson, he did great. At first, Stevenson jokes about the incident before turning serious.
“But, you know, there is something ugly and frightening about the atmosphere”
H. L. Hunt’s chief of security is a former FBI agent, and he enjoys excellent contacts within the Dallas Police Department.
He knows that the Dallas police have been monitoring some of the city’s “extremist” groups.
Before it’s even filed he knows what’s going into an internal police report on security for Kennedy’s visit.
“Don’t let the President come down here. I’m worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.”
The police have been doing their street-level reconnaissance, trying to figure out if any Dallas locals are preparing for violence.
The bomb threat against Martin Luther King Jr., the swastikas on Neiman Marcus windows, the cross burning on the Holocaust survivor’s lawn, the Adlai Stevenson riot—they have all added up to a growing folder of information at police headquarters on extremist activists in the city.
The police report is nearly ready, but before it is issued Hunt’s security head sends a memo to Hunt with the details: There are “unconfirmed reports of possible violence during the parade.”
He believes that Hunt will be anxious to avoid any incidents in Dallas—if only because people in Dallas, around the nation, will likely try to blame Hunt for inciting it.
He’s been blamed for plenty already: funding Senator Joseph McCarthy, spending millions on his right-wing radio programs, spending more money on distributing the anti-Kennedy screeds, and even donating cash to General Walker.
Nonetheless, JFK seems to relish the prospect of leaving Washington, getting out among the people, and into the political fray.
At the same time, Jack Ruby is having one of his customary feuds with an employee of his Carousel Club, but this one is serious.
His star attraction Jada claims she fears for her life and places Ruby under a peace bond for throwing her down the stairs.
Prior to this, In March 1963, during an argument about wages, Ruby threatened to throw a cigarette girl down the stairs of the Carousel.
Now, newspaper ads for the Carousel Club during the week of November 22 feature Bill Demar, a comic ventriloquist—hardly Ruby’s style, but the best he can do.
And someone took a pot shot at General Walker in his own home, people said it was Oswald.
In 1963 Warren Commission, also finds Oswald had tried to shoot and kill Walker.
Walker suffered minor injuries from bullet fragments.
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas.
12:29 p.m.
Crowds of excited people lined the streets and waved to the Kennedys. The car turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza.
As it was passing the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire suddenly reverberated in the plaza.
Bullets struck the president’s neck and head and he slumped over toward Mrs. Kennedy. The governor was shot in his back.
The car sped off to Parkland Memorial Hospital just a few minutes away. But little could be done for the President.
12:57 p.m.:
Father Oscar Huber arrives at the hospital. Kennedy aide Ken O’Donnell tells secret service agent Clint Hill to order a casket from somewhere nearby.
The president is already technically dead, but Jackie is worried about him receiving his Catholic last rites before he has died.
Just after Huber performs them, Dr. Kemp Clark pronounces Kennedy dead.
Admiral Dr. George Burkley then officially pronounces Kennedy dead.
Though seriously wounded, Governor Connally will recover and seems aware there will be conspiracy theories.
Texas Governor Connally Interview
According to the Warren Commission, Ruby is in the 2nd-floor advertising offices of the Dallas Morning News, five blocks away from the Texas School Book Depository, placing weekly advertisements for his nightclubs when he learns of the assassination around 12:45 p.m.
Ruby then makes phone calls to his assistant at the Carousel Club and to his sister.
The Commission stated that an employee of the Dallas Morning News estimated that Ruby left the newspaper’s offices at 1:30 p.m., but indicate other testimony suggests he may have left earlier.
John Newman, an employee at the newspaper’s advertisement department, testifies Ruby became upset over a right-wing anti-Kennedy ad published in the Morning News, that was signed by “The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman”.
Ruby, who was sensitive to antisemitism, was distressed that an ad attacking the President was signed by a person with a “Jewish name”.
Early next morning, Ruby, while driving, noticed a political billboard featuring the text “IMPEACH EARL WARREN” in block letters.
Ruby’s sister Eva testified that Ruby had told her he believed that the anti-Kennedy ad and the anti-Warren sign were connected, and were a plot by a “gentile” to blame the assassination on the Jews.
Ruby arrives back at the Carousel Club shortly before 1:45 p.m. to notify employees that the club will be closed that evening.
Cavagnaro and Ruby have coffee at the Statler a few hours after the Kennedy assassination. Ruby was extremely upset and blames the Morning News.
He says “it will be a cold day in hell, before he will place another ad with the News,” Jack feels he is a true patriot and a Democrat.
He thinks Kennedy has done a lot for the minorities. “Just from a business standpoint, something like that could kill a city”, he says.
The Rosetta Stone
David Belin, Assistant Counsel to the Warren Commission and one of the chief defenders of the Warren Report, asserts “the Rosetta Stone to the solution of President Kennedy’s murder is the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit. . . . Once it is admitted that Oswald killed Patrolman J. D. Tippit, there can be no doubt that the overall evidence shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of John F. Kennedy.”
Only thing is… he never admitted it and the evidence doesn’t link the crimes.
About 45 minutes after JFK is shot in Dealey Plaza, Dallas Police Officer JD Tippit is murdered in cold blood -publicly- approximately four miles away from downtown Dallas.
It is the crime Oswald was actually initially arrested and charged for when they brought him down to the Dallas Police Department.
The policemen who seize Oswald at the Texas Theatre arrive with him at the police department building at about 2 p.m. and bring him immediately to the 3d floor offices of the homicide and robbery bureau to await the arrival of Captain Fritz from the Texas School Book Depository.
After about 15 or 20 minutes Oswald is ushered into the office of Captain Fritz for the first of several interrogation sessions.
At 4:05 p.m. he is taken to the basement assembly room for his first lineup.
While waiting outside the lineup room, Oswald is searched, and five cartridges and other items were removed from his pockets.
After the lineup, at about 4:20 pm, Oswald is returned to Captain Fritz’ office for further questioning.
Two hours later, at 6:20 p.m., Oswald is taken downstairs for a second lineup and is returned to Captain Fritz’ office within 15 minutes for additional interrogation.
Shortly after 7 p.m., Captain Fritz signs a complaint charging Oswald with the murder of Patrolman Tippit.
Oswald is formally arraigned, i.e., advised of the charges, at 7:10 p.m., before Justice of the Peace David L. Johnston, who came to Captain Fritz’ office for the occasion.
After a third lineup at about 7:40 p.m., Oswald is returned to Fritz’ office.
About an hour later, after further questioning, Oswald’s fingerprints and palmprints are taken and a paraffin test administered in Fritz’ office, after which the questioning resumes.
At 11:26 p.m. Fritz signs the complaint charging Oswald with the murder of President Kennedy.
Shortly after midnight, detectives take Oswald to the basement assembly room for an appearance of several minutes before members of the press.
Bizarrely , Jack Ruby has been trailing Oswald at every Press conference.
Ruby is seen in the halls of the Dallas Police Headquarters on several occasions after Oswald’s arrest on November 22, 1963.
As he trails Oswald, he never forgets to shove a promotion card like the one above into every hand he meets.
Newsreel footage from WFAA-TV (Dallas) and NBC shows that Ruby impersonating a newspaper reporter during a press conference at Dallas Police Headquarters that night.
One month after his arrest for killing Oswald, Ruby tells the FBI that he had his loaded snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38 revolver in his right pocket during the press conference.
District Attorney Henry Wade briefs reporters at the press conference telling them that Lee Oswald was a member of the anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee.
Ruby is one of several people there who speak up to correct Wade, saying, “Henry, that’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee”, a pro-Castro organization.
That night, as Air Force One brings John Kennedy’s body home to Washington, President Johnson is afraid that Oswald’s apparent communist connections could spark an international crisis.
About 12:20 a.m. Oswald is delivered to the jailer who places him in a maximum-security cell on the fifth floor.
His cell is the center one in a block of three cells that are separated from the remainder of the jail area. The cells on either side of Oswald were empty and a guard is nearby whenever Oswald was present.
Shortly after 1:30 a.m. Oswald is brought to the identification bureau on the fourth floor and arraigned before Justice of the Peace Johnston, this time for the murder of President Kennedy.
November 23, 1963
Questioning resumes in Fritz’s office on Saturday morning at about 10:25 a.m., and the session lasts nearly an hour and 10 minutes.
Oswald is returns to his cell for an hour, and at 12:35 p.m. he is brought back to Fritz’ office for an additional half-hour of questioning.
From 1:10 to 1:30 p.m., Oswald’s wife and mother visit him in the fourth-floor visiting area at 1:40 p.m.
He attempts to call an attorney in New York. 18, then appears in another lineup at, 2:15 p.m.
At 2:45 p.m., with Oswald’s consent, a member of the identification bureau obtains fingernail scrapings and specimens of hair from him.
He returns to the fourth floor at 3:30 p.m. for a 10-minute visit with his brother, Robert.
Between 4 and 4:30 p.m., 5:30 p.m. Oswald makes two telephone calls to Mrs. Ruth Paine at her home in Irving;
The president of the Dallas Bar Association, H Louis Nichols with visits Oswald for about 5 minutes.
Oswald is interrogated once again in Captain Fritz’ office and then returns to his cell.
Oswald is determined to have been less than cooperative.
According to Captain Fritz:
November 24th: 12:20 p.m. CST
You know I didn’t have trouble with him. If we would just talk to him quietly like we are talking right now, we talked all right until I asked him a question that meant something, every time I asked him a question that meant something, that would produce evidence he immediately told me he wouldn’t tell me about it and he seemed to anticipate what I was going to ask.
Oswald is signed out of jail at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, November 24, and taken to Captain Fritz’ office for a final round of questioning.
Dallas police attempt to transfer Oswald to the more secure county jail, via the basement garage of the Dallas police headquarters. The transfer party leaves Fritz’s office at about 11:15 a.m.
Ruby drives to downtown with his pet dachshund Sheba (whom he jokingly refers to as his “wife”) to send an emergency money order at the Western Union on Main Street to one of his employee, Little Lynn.
The timestamp of completion for the cash transaction on the money order is 11:17 a.m.
Ruby then walks half a block to Dallas Police Headquarters, where he makes his way into the basement via the Main Street ramp or a stairway accessible from an alleyway next to the Dallas Municipal Building.
Although more than a hundred policemen and newsmen are present in the basement of police headquarters during the 10 minutes before Oswald’s shooting, none can be found who definitely observed Jack Ruby’s entry into the basement.
Frustration toward the Dallas Police Department (DPD) was not isolated to this incident — allowing a gunman into police headquarters to kill the most important suspect in American history.
From DPD’s reliance on federal resources to its loose-lipped approach to public relations -the murder of Oswald was just the latest screwup.
The shotgun squad could not protect Kennedy (the “Feds” thought it would look bad for a President to be herded down an American street under cover of bared guns).
Bill Decker had to wait on the sidelines to keep up appearances.
Harried Jesse Curry had to expose his prisoner to prove he was not mistreating him.
Then on the afternoon of Nov. 24, 1963, after President John F. Kennedy had been dead for two days, an exasperated J. Edgar Hoover receives word that his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been murdered while in police custody.
He knows who to blame, too: Dallas police Chief Jesse Curry and homicide Capt. Will Fritz.
He said so in a memo written just 45 minutes after doctors declared Oswald dead at Parkland Hospital.
“Last night we received a call from our Dallas office from a man talking in a calm voice and saying he was a member of a committee organized to kill Oswald.
We at once notified the Chief of Police and he assured us Oswald would be given sufficient protection.
This morning we called the Chief of Police again warning of this possibility of some effort against Oswald and he again assured us adequate protection would be given. However, this was not done.
The truth is, Dallas Police receives dozens of death threats against Oswald.
It is why Dallas Homicide Detective Jim Leavelle decides to carry two handguns instead of his usual one- in case there was a shootout.
Leavelle’s memory of their back and forth, “I put the handcuffs on him and in the process of doing that, I more in jest kind of said, ‘Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are,’ meaning, of course, that they’d hit him and not me. And he kind of laughed and he said, ‘Oh, you’re being melodramatic,’ or something to that effect.
‘Nobody’s going to shoot at me.’” Oswald died shortly after that conversation.
As a further precaution, he handcuffs Oswald’s wrists together, he then handcuffs his left wrist to Oswald’s right.
At 11:21 am
DPD’s Homeside Detective James Leavelle leads out Oswald.
Before being placed in a waiting police vehicle, Jack Ruby, is heard yelling, “Oswald, Oswald!
As local and national news stations broadcast the murder from start to finish. The footage is of a hurried chaotic motion of violence, in another moment of mouth-gaping shock.
Ruby emerges from the crowd and fatally shoots him at point-blank range from a concealed .38 revolver -an already traumatized nation looks on.
Ruby shouts! “You all know me. I’m Jack Ruby!”.
Police pile on him.
Oswald makes a cry of anguish and his manacled hands clutches at his abdomen as he writhes with pain, and he slumps to the concrete, where he moans several times.
Police Detective Billy Combest suddenly recognizes Ruby and exclaims: “Jack, you son of a bitch!”
The bullet enters Oswald’s left side in the front part of the abdomen and causing damage to his spleen, stomach, aorta, vena cava, kidney, liver, diaphragm, and eleventh rib before coming to rest on his right side.
Leavelle he did not say anything to Oswald when he as shot.
“Oswald went completely blank.
Instantly.
He was out by the time he hit the floor,”
“I didn’t have time to do anything, I had him by the belt as well. I turned to him and instead of pulling him behind me, I turned his body. Instead of that bullet hitting him dead center, it hit about 4 inches to the left of the navel.”
Dallas Homicide Detective Jim Levealle ,
Leavelle rides in the ambulance with Oswald to Parkland Hospital – the same place Kennedy had been taken two days earlier.
The crowd outside the headquarters burst into applause when they heard that Oswald had been shot.
Oswald is transported to Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
A pacemaker is inserted into Oswald and a heartbeat is detected.
Before being declared dead at 1:07 p.m., Oswald is placed in a room a few doors down from Texas Governor, John Connally, who is still recovering from being shot during the President Kennedy assassination.
Jack Ruby is immediately arrested. Newsmen scramble to relate what just happened.
The thing is: In regards to Lee Harvey Oswald, at the time a ton of people in Dallas say something to the effect of, ‘I’d like to kill that SOB.”
But Ruby does it; that is the difference.
Jack Ruby Arrest
In the City Hall elevator just after his arrest, Ruby tells his captors: “Somebody had to do it, you guys couldn’t.”
“Somebody had to kill him,” he repeatss to his friend Joe Campisi, who is among the first to visit him in jail.
And shortly after the killing, he tells Treasury agent Forrest Sorrels, the man in charge of security at the parade, that he did it for Jackie’s sake and to prove that “a Jew has guts.”
(A few days later, he tells newsman Tony Zoppi on the telephone that he meant to prove “a Jew has balls.”)
Late on Sunday afternoon, Ruby is fingerprinted—by Ed Carlson, one of the officers he rescued in a South Ervay Street brawl.
Jack chats pleasantly with Ed, and asked after Blankenship, the other officer he helped out in that fight.
When his sister Eva comes to see him, he tells her, “I have friends here, so don’t worry about me.”
They all know him. “I got lots of friends here, so don’t make a scene and get hysterical.” He is Jack Ruby.
Andrew Armstrong, a bartender at The Carousel, calls him regularly at the jail to report on the club’s affairs and get instructions about running it.
“He talks as if it will be no time before he is back running things.”
Most of the things Ruby says will be argued to be Res Gestae.
Res Gestae
So he gives a number of contradictory explanations for his act,
“That rat killed my President!”, “You guys [the Dallas police] couldn’t do it!” , which may be no more or less accurate to him than, “I did it to prove Jews have guts!”
or “I did it for Mrs. Kennedy,”
or “I only wanted to be a hero” — all of which (and more) he reportedly said soon after the shooting, and all of which, to some extent, are determined to may well be true.
Since it was completely an impulsive act (as he consistently claims and as both documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony supports), all of his later explanations are, to some extent, after-the-fact rationalizations.