Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Detective Billy H. Combest, who is part of the line of officers forming a protective lane on each side of Oswald and his escorts, also recognizes Ruby and shouts, “Jack, you son of a bitch, don’t!”1360

  11:21 a.m.

  BANG! The shot reverberates through the basement garage.* Several police officers jump at the sound. There is a cold moment of silence, a split second, then Oswald lets out a loud cry, “Ohhh!” and grabs his stomach, his face contorting in pain. No one can believe it. The unthinkable has happened.† Tom Pettit, the NBC News correspondent broadcasting television’s first live murder, instantly utters into his NBC microphone what would become the most famous and replayed live words in the entire Kennedy assassination saga: “He’s been shot,” Pettit exclaims. “He’s been shot. Lee Oswald’s been shot,” he repeats in a tone more declaratory than incredulous. “There’s been a shot,” Ike Pappas shouts out almost simultaneously, his astonishment captured on his personal audiotape. “Lee Oswald has been shot.” The police spring into action as Oswald’s knees crumple and he falls to the garage floor.

  Leavelle pushes back on the gunman’s shoulder as Graves grabs the pistol. He can feel the man trying to squeeze the trigger again.

  “Turn it loose! Turn it loose!” Graves yells, wrenching the revolver from the gunman’s hand with a twisting motion.1361 A platoon of detectives pile on the gunman, knocking him to the concrete, his hat tumbling under their feet. “I hope I killed the son of a bitch,” Ruby manages to say while being held down on the floor of the basement.1362

  Chaos breaks out as the crowd of reporters push madly toward the scuffle. NBC’s live national audience hears correspondent Tom Pettit shouting above the din, “There’s absolute panic, absolute panic here in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters…pandemonium has broken loose here!” The appalled anchormen at NBC headquarters in New York cannot contain their shock and outrage. While none of them are sure of what just happened, they know they have witnessed a disaster.1363

  Captain Talbert vaults over the trunk of an unmarked squad car, throwing himself between the reporters and the melee on the floor.

  “Get back! Get back!” and “nobody out,” he shouts, shoving the newsmen back hard against the railing.1364 Several officers draw their pistols and Dick Swain, a burly detective, jumps in with his arms outstretched, fists tight. “I’ll knock you on your ass!” he yells at reporters.1365

  Bob Huffaker, reporting live for CBS through its local channel, KRLD, reports excitedly into his microphone that “police have ringed the inside.” He gets only four words into a sentence, “And no one is…,” when he falters, buckling under the weight of reporters who are moving and pressing in on him. He holds on tight to his mike cord as they step on it, pulling him farther down. Still not uttering another word into his mike, he manages to regain his footing, but only at a low crouch as he thrusts upward as hard as he can, shoving men off his shoulders on the way up through the brawl.1366

  Someone shouts, “Get a doctor!” as Detective Combest helps Jim Leavelle drag Oswald back into the jail office. Oswald is moaning as they take the handcuffs off him, his sweater ripped open by the gun blast.1367

  Police detectives bring the gunman to his feet and rush him back into the jail office. Captain Jones spots some people running up the ramp out to the street. A number of reporters are trying to escape with the news.1368

  “Block the exits! Don’t let anybody out!” Jones yells.1369

  Fellow officers join in.

  “Nobody out! Nobody out!”1370

  An officer at the top of the ramp pulls his gun, “Get back down!” The reporters quickly retreat, a few managing to escape through the corridor near the jail office to the floors above, where they telephone their newspapers.1371

  One of them is Washington Star reporter Jerry O’Leary, who rockets up the public elevator to the third floor in search of a phone. He notices Chief Curry in his office, apparently unaware of what has happened. He pokes his head in.

  “Oswald’s been shot,” O’Leary says.1372

  Curry’s face turns ashen as the phone in the next office begins ringing.

  A police officer comes in and confirms the news.1373

  Secret Service agents Sorrels and Kelley are standing just outside Deputy Chief Batchelor’s office when they hear of the shooting. They both run for the basement.1374

  Captain Talbert pushes his way into the basement jail office and over to the group of detectives who have the gunman on the floor. One of them has his knees on the man as they slap a pair of handcuffs on him. Everyone is talking all at once.

  “Who is this son of a bitch?” Talbert asks.

  “Oh, hell! You guys all know me, I’m Jack Ruby!” the gunman says.

  Indeed, many of them do.

  “He operates the Carousel Club,” an officer chimes in. Talbert, his mind swirling, manages to remember being introduced to Ruby by Lieutenant Pierce a while ago at a restaurant in Dallas.1375

  A few feet away, Detective Combest bends down over Oswald as Leavelle unleashes the two pairs of handcuffs. Combest pulls Oswald’s sweater up and sees a bullet hole in the lower left part of his chest, the flesh around it bruised and purple. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of blood. Combest thinks that maybe the point of entry has been seared by the gun blast, or that perhaps the wound is not too serious. He reaches around Oswald’s right side and feels a lump. The bullet is just below the skin. It has almost passed completely through him. Oswald continues to moan and seems conscious.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” Combest asks him. “Is there anything you want to say right now before it’s too late?”

  Oswald’s eyes are open. He seems to recognize that Combest is speaking to him.

  “Do you have anything you want to tell us now?” Combest asks again.

  Oswald only shakes his head slightly, as if to say, “No.”*

  Combest goes on appealing to him, but Oswald is fading before his eyes. Finally, the detective is no longer sure that Oswald even hears him.1376

  At the booking desk a few feet away, Patrolman Willie Slack, who was telephoning the dispatcher’s office at the time of the shooting to tell them that Oswald was on his way to the county jail, instead tells the dispatch operator, “This is Slack at the jail office. Somebody just shot Oswald. We need a doctor.”1377

  The operator picks up the hotline to O’Neal’s Funeral Home, a direct connection to its ambulance service, and tells the man on the other end that Oswald has been shot, they need an ambulance at City Hall as fast as possible. He tells her that an ambulance is on its way. The operator then immediately informs police dispatcher Clifford E. Hulse.1378

  Dispatcher Hulse recalls that Michael Hardin and Harold Wolfe, another ambulance team from O’Neal’s, have just become available a short distance from downtown. The dispatcher contacts them via radio and orders them to report to the City Hall basement, Code 3. The ambulance driver switches on his red lights and siren and races toward Main Street.1379

  11:22 a.m.

  Frederick A. Bieberdorf, a twenty-five-year-old medical student at Southwestern Medical School and the on-duty first-aid attendant for inmates at the city jail, frantically bangs on the door leading into the basement jail office, but the man standing guard, Detective Wilbur J. Cutchshaw, won’t let him in.

  “I’m a doctor! Someone called me!” Bieberdorf cries.

  Cutchshaw finally opens the door and quickly runs his hands down the young man’s coat. He discovers a stethoscope in his right coat pocket and lets him through.1380

  Bieberdorf dashes around the booking counter, and drops to his knees. Oswald’s pupils are slightly dilated. The young medical student is unable to detect a pulse, heartbeat, or any signs of breathing, although there is so much noise and confusion he’s not sure whether he’d be able to hear one anyway. Bieberdorf reaches around and feels the bullet bulging between the ribs on Oswald’s right side. He starts to massage Oswald’s sternum in an effort to get a heartbe
at.1381

  Assistant Chief Batchelor makes his way over to where officers have Jack Ruby on the floor. Captain Talbert asks Batchelor for permission to put all the media in the assembly room for an immediate search when someone says, “Graves has the gun.”1382

  “Let’s get him onto the elevator and take him to the fifth-floor jail,” Captain Glen King roars. The detectives assist Ruby to his feet and march him past Oswald’s body toward the jail elevator.

  “I hope I killed the son of a bitch,” Ruby hollers out again. “It’ll save everybody a lot of trouble.”1383

  As they crowd him into the elevator for the ride to the fifth floor, Ruby adds, “Do you think I’m going to let the man who shot our president get away with it?”1384

  Captain Talbert grabs a batch of memo pads from the jail office and begins passing them out telling officers to get the names, identification, and location of each person in the basement at the time of the shooting.1385

  Chief Batchelor checks with Lieutenant Wiggins to make sure an ambulance has been called,1386 then orders Captain Talbert to go to Parkland Hospital immediately and secure it for Oswald’s arrival.1387

  Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels enters the jail office and sees Oswald on the floor, being attended to. Sorrels uses the Signal Corps security telephone mounted on the wall to call Secret Service deputy chief Paul Paterni in Washington and tell him of the shooting. Sorrels believes the assailant’s name is “Jack Rubin.”1388 Paterni instructs him to get as much background information on the man as possible and report back immediately. Sorrels hangs up and takes the elevator back to the third floor, believing that “Rubin” has been taken to Captain Fritz’s office.1389

  Outside the basement jail office, the newsmen, desperate for any information at all, begin interviewing each other. Almost none of them actually saw what happened—all eyes were focused only on Oswald. They cluster around Francois Pelou, a French journalist, who excitedly tells them he saw the blue muzzle flash against the background of Oswald’s black sweater. Ike Pappas recalls seeing the flash too.1390

  Immediately after the shot, someone came running from the left of KRLD film cameraman-reporter George Phenix and nearly knocked him down. His eye came away from the eyepiece as his unipod slipped to a lower level, but he just kept shooting, not knowing whether he captured anything on film or not. He later learned he got it all—the shooting and the struggle for Ruby’s gun.1391

  John McCullough of the Philadelphia Bulletin was on the other side of the ramp from the action, but high enough to see Ruby’s sudden lunge toward Oswald. At first he thought it was just a photographer disobeying the instructions not to move toward Oswald when he came out. When Ruby’s right hand came up, he wondered for a fraction of a second whether he was going to shake hands with him. Only at the last instant did he see the gleam of metal in Ruby’s hand and the muzzle flash against Oswald’s sweater.1392

  The millions of viewers who were watching the event on television hardly fared better. Although the tape of the incident is already being rebroadcast over and over, the shooting lasts just a fraction of a second and all anyone can really see is Oswald’s grimace as the shot rings out.1393

  11:23 a.m.

  Up on the fifth floor of the jail, Detectives Archer, McMillon, and Clardy push Ruby against the wall and tell him to “spread-eagle.” With help from the jail officer, they frisk him, tossing the items they find into Ruby’s hat, including a sizable roll of money. They remove the handcuffs and have Ruby strip down to his shorts, searching his clothes completely for weapons. In his underwear, Ruby no longer seems all that threatening.1394

  “Jack, I think you killed him,” Archer says, recalling the look on Oswald’s face as he lay on the jail office floor.1395

  “Somebody had to do it,” Ruby says. “You all couldn’t.”1396

  “Did you think you could kill the man with one shot?” someone says.

  “Well, I intended to shoot him three times,” Ruby replies. “I didn’t think that I could be stopped before I got off three shots.”1397

  “How’d you get into the basement?” Detective Barnard Clardy asks.

  “Rio Pierce drove out in the car,” Ruby says, referring to the Main Street ramp, “and the officer stepped out from the ramp momentarily to talk to Pierce, or said something to him, and I came in behind him right on down the ramp. When I got approximately halfway down the ramp I heard somebody holler, ‘Hey, you,’ but I don’t know whether he was hollering at me or not, but I just ducked my head and kept coming…It was one chance in a million…If I had planned this, I couldn’t have had my timing any better.”1398

  Down in the basement, reporters wander about like sleepwalkers among the noise and chaos, trying to get some information, any information, that might make sense out of the past few minutes.

  “How would it have been possible for him to slip in?” NBC’s Tom Pettit asks Sergeant Dean above the din. Dean, whose job it was to make sure that no one like Ruby could slip in, is wondering the same thing, but he isn’t about to discuss it on television. “Sir, I can’t answer that question.” Although Dean knows Ruby, he refuses to name him.1399

  Pettit manages to corner Captain Fritz next. “Do you have the man who fired the shot?”

  “We have a man, yes,” Fritz replies tersely.1400

  Although the Dallas Police Department has just sustained the greatest blemish on its record ever in not protecting a presidential assassin for his historic trial, and the officers are visibly upset and humiliated, others aren’t upset at all. Outside the entrance to the Dallas county jail on Houston Street, several hundred people had congregated in a roped-off area across the street awaiting Oswald’s expected arrival. When Dallas sheriff Bill Decker walks out into the middle of the street and announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot and is on his way to Parkland Hospital,” very loud cheers and applause immediately erupt from the crowd of smiling faces.1401

  11:25 a.m.

  It doesn’t take long for the ambulance to get to City Hall, arriving just four minutes after the shooting.1402 Newsmen jump out of the way as the ambulance comes down the Main Street ramp into the basement garage, its flashing red lights sweeping over the concrete walls. Police scramble to move the two unmarked sedans still parked at the foot of the ramp.

  Twenty-three-year-old ambulance driver Michael Hardin leaps from the station wagon and scurries toward the back of the wagon. A police officer shoves him back into the crowd of reporters, before realizing that he’s the driver. Hardin and assistant Harold Wolfe flop open the back hatch and roll the stretcher into the jail office. They find Oswald on the floor surrounded by officers. There is little they can do at the scene. It is long before the days of trained paramedics, and attendants Hardin and Wolfe are simply there to get the victim to a hospital as fast as possible, their ambulance being equipped with little more than an oxygen tank and a resuscitator cup. They pick up Oswald’s limp body and put him on the stretcher and within seconds are wheeling him out toward the ambulance, his left arm dragging along the floor.

  Ike Pappas breathlessly describes the scene, his tape recorder capturing the chaos of the moment for posterity.

  “Here is young Oswald now,” Pappas says in a rush of words. “He is being hustled in, he is lying flat, to me he appears dead. There is a gunshot wound in his lower abdomen. He is white.”

  The attendants lift the stretcher and slide it into the back of the station wagon.

  “Pull the truck out! Pull the truck out!” several anxious policemen yell, suddenly realizing that the armored truck is still blocking the Commerce Street exit.

  “Let the driver by,” someone pleads to newsmen crowding around the ambulance. Detectives Graves and Leavelle, along with first-aid attendant Fred Bieberdorf, pack into the back of the wagon alongside the stretcher. The tail gate is slammed shut as an officer hollers again, “Get the truck out of the way!”

  “Oswald—white, lying in the ambulance,” Pappas says into h
is microphone, now nearly shouting over the noise. “His head is back. He is out—unconscious! Dangling—his hand is dangling over the edge of the stretcher.”1403

  The armored truck crawls out onto Commerce Street as the ambulance slips up the ramp, turns left, passes the armored truck, and screams off to Parkland Hospital, sirens wailing.1404 Captain Fritz, along with Detectives Beck, Montgomery, and Brown, follow in Beck’s car.1405 The detectives are all talking about Jack Ruby.

  “Who is Jack Ruby?” Fritz asks.

  “He’s a man that runs the Vegas Club out in Oak Lawn,” Montgomery tells him.

  “Do you know him?” Fritz wants to know.

  “Yes,” Montgomery says, “I used to have a district for about four years out there.”1406

  11:27 a.m.

  At the foot of the ramp, newsmen plead with police officials to allow them to leave the basement so they can file their stories.

  “Who is he?” Pappas asks, as he slips his microphone into the group.

  “Jack Ruby is the name,” a police official replies. “He runs the Carousel Club.”

  “He runs the Carousel Club,” Pappas repeats into his mike.

  The name rings a bell with several of the newsmen gathered there.

  “He handed me a card the other day,” a reporter says.1407 Suddenly, Pappas remembers a curious little man he met Friday night in the third-floor hallway of police headquarters.

  Pappas was standing at a telephone, waiting for District Attorney Henry Wade to join him for an interview he had arranged with WNEW in New York. The line was open and Pappas was frustrated because Wade was tied up on another telephone interview a short distance down the hall. Just then a nattily dressed man in a gray fedora hat, who Pappas first thought was a detective, walked up and asked, “Where are you from?” Pappas told him he was a reporter from New York and was in town to cover the story. The man reached into his pocket and handed him a business card with the words, “Carousel Club, Jack Ruby your host” on it. Pappas asked if he was Jack Ruby and Ruby said, “Yes, come on over to the club if you get a chance and have some drinks. There are girls there.” Pappas slipped the card into his pocket and Ruby disappeared into the crowd. A short time later, Ruby passed him again, Pappas still waiting for Wade. The reporter must have looked cross because Ruby asked, “What’s the matter?” Pappas explained that he was trying to get Wade over to the phone. Ruby asked, “Do you want me to get him?” Pappas said, “Sure,” grateful for any kind of help. He watched as Ruby pushed through the crowd, said something to Wade, who was on another phone, pointed over at Pappas, and disappeared again into the crowd. Whatever he said worked, because a short time later, Wade finished his call and came over to be interviewed by Pappas.1408