Skeptics will always wonder whether Jack Ruby’s televised murder of Presidential Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was the meticulously designed act of a conspiratorial network or — as the Warren Commission concluded — simply another irrational element in a tragic tangle of non sequiturs surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy.
Shortly before he died at 55 last week in Dallas of a pulmonary embolism, Ruby tried to dispel any doubt about his role. In a surreptitious hospital-room recording describing the events that put him in the basement of the Dallas Police and Courts Building on the morning of Nov. 24, 1963, Ruby recalled: “The ironic part of this is I had made an illegal turn behind a bus to the parking lot. 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 30 seconds one way or the other.”
Inadmissible Evidence. His statement had the ring of truth to it. However, there is an even more compelling argument against his being the appointed executioner for any planned operation. Anyone with even a cursory insight into Jack Ruby’s character could not help realizing that he was a violently unpredictable man. As the Warren Commission noted, “Ruby was regarded by most persons who knew him as moody and unstable—hardly one to have encouraged the confidence of persons involved in a sensitive conspiracy.”
Ruby himself said that the moment of the killing was a “blur,” and he gave a madman’s mixture of reasons for the murder: because of his grief at the loss of the President (“I loved that man”), because he did not want Jackie Kennedy to be forced to return to Dallas for Oswald’s trial, because he had read a “heartbreaking letter” to Caroline Kennedy in a newspaper that morning. At one point he blurted to cops and federal agents after his arrest: “I guess I just had to show the world a Jew has guts.”
That remark was ruled inadmissible evidence in his murder trial. For that matter, a great deal of the murky world of Jack Ruby was obscured in hearsay and uncertainty. The Warren Commission unleashed an army of investigators to dredge up the facts about Ruby (né Jacob Rubenstein, alias J. Leon Rubenstein), the seedy Dallas strip-joint owner who yearned to be a mensch, a pillar of the community, but always remained a smalltime schwanz. Commission sleuths assembled a voluminous dossier that told everything—and nothing—about him. They could detail his gross income and net profits for February 1958, but they could not discover his exact birth date and wound up listing eight in the year 1911. They learned that his boyhood nickname was “Sparky,” then gave three different reasons for the origin of the name.
Sadistic Brawler. The mottled, volatile life of Jack Ruby began in the slums of Chicago. His father was usually drunk and out of a job; his mother was obsessed by the delusion that she had a fishbone lodged in her throat. They separated when Ruby was ten, and he lived in foster homes for a number of years. A dropout at 16, Ruby gained a reputation as a savage alley fighter who would start punching at the slightest hint of antiSemitism. He scratched out a living scalping tickets, peddling horse-race tip sheets, vending pennants at sports events, selling newspaper subscriptions door to door. He helped organize a Chicago junkyard workers’ union in 1937, was drafted during World War II, served his entire hitch Stateside as an airplane mechanic, was honorably discharged in 1946.
Soon after that, he headed for Dallas to join his sister, Mrs. Eva Grant, in the operation of a couple of bump-and-grind dives there. The Carousel Club, a tarnished-tinsel walk-up joint, became his empire. He was a sadistic, heavy-fisted brawler who insisted on acting as his own bouncer. Occasionally he would set up an irksome drunk for a beating by shoving him into a stripper’s dressing room, accusing him of pawing the girl, then slugging his helpless victim senseless. Sometimes he would punch a stripper who irked him. He was arrested eight times—but never convicted—on charges ranging from carrying a concealed weapon to serving liquor illegally. He was a fawning sycophant with cops, setting them up with free booze and dates with his girls, trundling predawn sandwiches and coffee into headquarters for men on the midnight shift.
Though he was paunchy and pasty-faced, he fancied himself a Dallas Adonis. At times he was blackly depressed because his hair was falling out, but he carefully plastered it back in long, thick strips to cover his scalp. Occasionally he would strip off his shirt, suck in his stomach and flex his muscles before his strippers. He never married, but he had a liaison with a blonde divorcee for eleven years. His passion for dogs approached dementia. He once turned up at a Dallas rabbi’s house with half a dozen mutts at his heels, sobbing that one was “my wife” and the others were “my children.”
His moods were a frightening study in emotional extremes. Not long after he was jailed, his eyes filled with tears when someone mentioned George Senator, his Dallas roommate. Gently Ruby said to his attorney, “Tell George I’d really like to see him.” When Senator showed up the next day, Ruby glanced at him and exploded: “You sonofabitch! You’re wearing my best suit! That’s the suit I was gonna wear at my goddam trial!”
Kafkaesque Fate. Ruby’s murder trial, like his life, was a sordid circus. His principal attorney, flashy Melvin Belli, tried to convince the jury that Ruby was insane. But Belli’s florid oratory and arrogant yelpings at the all-too-obvious ineptitude of Judge Joe B. Brown were not enough. The verdict was guilty; the sentence, death in the electric chair. The conviction was appealed by some of the 18 lawyers that Ruby had in the three years following his crime, and last October the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overthrew the finding on the grounds that Judge Brown had 1) allowed inadmissible evidence, and 2) he should have granted Ruby a change of venue. In a sense, the Kafkaesque fate that Ruby suffered after that first trial was worse than death.
For 32 months he was locked in a windowless cell on the Dallas County Jail’s Corridor 6-M. A “suicide watch” jailer looked in on him round the clock; a single naked light bulb glared endlessly over his cot. He could not tell night from day. He devoured all the newspapers he could get, eagerly sifting every line of print to find his name. He did crossword puzzles and browsed through dozens of books (Perry Mason mysteries, sexy novels, the Warren Report, an abstruse volume of erotica titled Virginity—Pre-Nuptial Rites and Rituals). He played gin rummy indefatigably with his jailers, who claimed he cheated. He did situps, pushups, and stood on his head for exercise. He seemed out of his mind much of the time.
During the early months, he rammed his head against the plaster cell wall. 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. Often he would slip his visitors bits of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them in an oddly womanish hand, whispering desperately: “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.” Usually, the numbers were those of his sister Eva and his brother Earl.
The Legacy. When he became ill, Ruby screamed that his jailers were piping mustard gas into his cell. Later, when doctors discovered that he was suffering from adenocarcinoma—a cancer that had spread swiftly through most of the cavities, ducts and glands of his body—Ruby accused them of injecting him with the disease. Almost from the moment of his arrival at the hospital on Dec. 9, Ruby’s case was considered hopeless—and he knew it. Yet he seemed calmer and more lucid at the brink of death than he had for months—possibly because he had a window to see outdoors and was allowed to sleep in the dark.
When he died last week in Parkland Hospital—where both Kennedy and Oswald died—Ruby was a pathetically shrunken caricature of the swaggering bully boy who had worshiped the “beautiful people” and spent his life wishing he were one of them. The lights that used to shine on the posters of his strippers—Little Lynn, Tammi, Penny Dollar—are still outside the Carousel Club, but they burned out long ago, and Ruby’s cherished nightspot is out of business; the space has been rented by the Dallas Police Athletic League as a gymnasium for underprivileged kids.
Ruby’s deathbed recording had brought him some $2,000 from Capitol Records—just enough to pay for his bronze casket, the $77 shipping charge for sending the body back to Chicago, and a burial service at a cemetery plot next to the graves of his parents. The only real legacy left by the would-be big shot from Big D was one of confusion, futility and frustration—a legacy that would nonetheless impress his name on history.
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