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.