And what of some of the other people drawn, whether or not by their own design, into the assassination of President Kennedy and its aftermath? In the intervening year, the lives of most of them have changed dramatically.
MARINA OSWALD, 23, the assassin's Russian-born wife, was a pitiable creature, beaten and burdened by a psychotic husband who was a flat-out failure in every way. After Oswald was killed, sympathetic people sent Marina some $60,000. She moved into a $15,000, three-bedroom, air-conditioned brick house in a Dallas suburb. She had her teeth fixed, now affects fashionable coiffures and Neiman-Marcus clothes. She bought her own membership in Dallas' Music Box, a private club, and she turns up frequently with dates. Marina tosses down shots of vodka, chases them with 7-Up. She often outdrinks her escorts, despite the fact that when Oswald was alive he forbade her to drink hard liquor. She chain-smokes, though Oswald once slapped her for smoking a cigarette in his presence. So far, she has refused to change her name, although she worries some about the stigma affecting her children, June Lee, 2, and Rachel, 1. She has had mountains of marriage proposals and other bizarre propositions (a man from Kentucky offered her $50,000 if she would let him exhibit Oswald's body in a sideshow, another $100,000 if she would accompany the display). She still broods about last Nov. 22, and she feels particularly bad about Jackie Kennedy's loss. "It's hard enough to lose a bad husband," said Marina. "I wonder how it is to lose a good one." As the assassination anniversary rushed at her last week, Marina Oswald became increasingly tense and morose. At week's end she checked into a hospital. The cause: nervous exhaustion.
JACK RUBY, 53, the strip-joint owner who killed Oswald in the Dallas police station, often kneels in beady-eyed terror on the floor of his jail cell, and babbles that he can hear the screams of U.S. Jews who are being killed or castrated in the streets because of his crime. Such are his demented dreams that previously friendly guards have all but stopped playing dominoes with him, and Ruby spends hours hunched over on his bunk playing solitaire. Ruby has tried three times to kill himself—by battering his head against a wall, ripping up his trousers to make a noose, and poking his finger in an electric light socket. Ruby's onetime pride and joy, the tawdry Carousel Club, has been sold, and Mrs. Grant says the family is nearly broke. Ruby's attorney, Phil Burleson, last week filed a 6,341-page appeal and transcript of Ruby's trial in hopes that the state Court of Criminal Appeals would grant another hearing—possibly in February or March.