End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  “Captain Fritz told me to follow you. I’ll do whatever you do.”

  “In that case,” Leavelle said, “you’ll be on the floor.”

  In the garage, NBC News reporter Tom Pettit was waiting for them: “We are standing in the basement corridor where Lee Oswald will pass through momentarily. Extraordinary security precautions have been taken for the prisoner.” But Pettit was dead wrong. The Dallas police should have transferred Oswald in secrecy. Pettit’s gullible comments echoed the statements that the naive reporters who had covered JFK’s arrival in Dallas had made about security.

  JIM LEAVELLE and his prisoner stepped into the elevator and rode it down to the garage level. The door opened. They walked toward the crowd and the transport car. Oswald spotted the press microphones and spoke: “I’d like to contact a member . . . representative of the American Civil Liberties Union.” These were the last words he would ever speak.

  Television cameras and microphones captured what happened next.

  “Here they come!” a voice from the crowd shouted.

  “Here he comes,” said another voice.

  “Is it OK?” a policeman asked.

  Jim Leavelle got the word. “Okay, come on out, Jim.”

  When Oswald emerged with the trademark smirk on his face, and his body pinned between Leavelle and another detective, excited reporters and photographers pressed forward. Two television cameras recorded the scene. Only one, operated by NBC, was broadcasting live. Ike Pappas, a reporter for WNEW radio, spoke into his microphone:

  “Now the prisoner, wearing a black sweater, is being moved out toward an armored car, being led out by Captain Fritz. There’s the prisoner.” As Oswald walked past him, Pappas asked him a question: “Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  It was 11:21 A.M. A moment after Pappas spoke, the man in the dark suit and hat who had walked down the driveway a few minutes earlier and had melted into the crowd emerged from it and took a lunging step toward Oswald. Leavelle and Oswald did not see him as he rushed them from their left. The detective and his prisoner continued to look straight ahead, oblivious to the danger. No one stood between the president’s assassin and the man in the dark suit. In another moment the man would be close enough to Oswald to touch him. One witness thought that was exactly what was about to happen—an outraged cop or reporter was going to punch Oswald in the face. Another detective, Billy H. Combest, knew better. He recognized the man. It was a local Dallas police buff and hanger-on, Jack Ruby. Combest also saw the gun. “Jack, you son of a bitch,” he yelled, “don’t!”

  Ruby’s right hand gripped a pistol that he pointed at Oswald’s torso. A newspaper photographer, Jack Beers, captured the moment. Oswald had no idea that he was a split second away from being assassinated. Ruby squeezed the trigger and fired one round from his .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver. The bullet struck Oswald. He screamed in pain—a sudden, deep, gutteral, animal-like moan.

  A second photographer, Bob Jackson, snapped his shutter a split second after the bullet’s impact. He captured Oswald’s agonized face and his body writhing in pain. Two days ago, Jackson had missed his chance to photograph the barrel of Oswald’s rifle protruding from the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository. Now he had just taken the most important picture of his life. Moments later, Oswald collapsed.

  Ruby wanted to shoot Oswald again, but before he could get off another shot, policemen tackled him to the ground before he could pull the trigger again.

  Ike Pappas dropped to his knees so he would not be hit by more gunfire, but he kept reporting. He screamed into his microphone: “There’s a shot. Oswald has been shot! Oswald has been shot! A shot rang out. Mass confusion here. All the doors have been locked. A shot rang out as he was being led to the car.”

  Tom Pettit yelled into his microphone too: “He’s been shot! He’s been shot! He’s been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot! There’s a man with a gun. There’s absolute panic, absolute panic here in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. Detectives have their guns drawn. Oswald has been shot. There’s no question about it. Oswald has been shot. Pandemonium has broken loose here in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters.”

  “I hope I killed the son of a bitch,” Jack Ruby said as detectives pried the revolver from his hand.

  A cop who did not know him looked at Ruby and shouted, “Who is this son of a bitch?”

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

  The shooter’s tone was as amiable as if he were handing out complimentary passes to his nightclub, or delivering a bag of fresh corned beef sandwiches to a police station or broadcast studio, two favorite tricks he employed to befriend cops and radio hosts.

  DETECTIVE LEAVELLE was unwounded. His joke to Oswald had come true. Ruby’s aim was good enough to hit his target without shooting the detective. Leavelle reached down and unlocked the handcuffs that bound him to Oswald. Once he had freed himself, he unlocked the second pair around the prisoner’s wrists. Detective Combest bent over Oswald, pulled up the black sweater, and searched for a wound. He found one hole in Lee’s left chest. Although he had been shot just seconds ago, Oswald was already incoherent and appeared to be unconscious.

  Combest spoke to him. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  Oswald’s eyes were open but he did not speak. Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he could not even hear the question. He had screamed in pain when the bullet struck him, and he was moaning now. He did not appear to be alert or lucid.

  Combest asked him again, “Is there anything you want to say right now before it’s too late?” The meaning behind the question was clear. He was asking Oswald to make a dying declaration.

  This might be Oswald’s last chance to claim credit for his infamous crime. To declare that he, Lee Harvey Oswald, lifelong loser and nobody, had finally done something worth remembering. Oswald appeared to shake his head a little from side to side, but it was hard to tell if it was in response to the question.

  At this point, Oswald probably could not speak. If he could, he would have said something. For two days, he had enjoyed matching wits with Captain Fritz during their cat and mouse battle. He had reveled in his spontaneous hallway comments to the press. He had indulged his love of sarcasm and propensity to complain. Indeed, it had been almost impossible to stop Oswald from talking while in police custody.

  He might not want to confess, but it was in Oswald’s character to say something now, if only to tease Leavelle and congratulate him that Ruby had been such a good shot, or to ask who did it, or to complain that his guards had failed to protect him, or to send a final message to Marina. No, if Oswald did not speak now, it must have been because his grievous wound had silenced him.

  Jack Ruby was doing all the talking now: “I hope I killed the son of a bitch,” he boasted. “I’ll save everybody a lot of trouble.” Ruby justified what he had done. “Do you think I’m going to let the man who shot our president get away with it?”

  One of the detectives told him, “Jack, I think you killed him.”

  “Somebody had to do it. You all couldn’t.”

  A cop asked Ruby if he thought he could kill Oswald with one shot.

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

  Police officers carried Oswald away from the excited journalists and the spot he was shot. Ike Pappas described what happened next: “Now the ambulance is being rushed in here . . . screaming red lights, people, policemen . . . they are rushing a mobile stretcher in . . . here is young Oswald now. He is being hustled in, he is lying flat. To me he appears dead. There is a gunshot wound in the lower abdomen. He is white . . . dangling, his head is dangling over the edge of the stretcher.”

  Police officers laid him on a gurney. Then an ambulance rushed him to Parkland Hospital.

  Outside the Dallas County Jail, a crowd of several hundred people had assembled across street. They were waiting for Oswald. This
crowd was bigger than the spontaneous mob that had gathered outside the Texas Theater on Friday afternoon and that was waiting for Oswald when he emerged. Today’s crowd wanted to jeer him, and hoped to get a glimpse of him as he drove past. This was the second time in two days that a crowd had gathered on Houston Street to watch a famous man drive by. The first was on November 22, when President Kennedy’s motorcade had driven down this street on his way to the Texas School Book Depository.

  When Sheriff Bill Decker got word that Oswald had been shot before his motorcade had gotten under way, Decker walked into the street and announced the news. He hoped to disperse the crowd. The president’s assassin was not coming. “Ladies and gentlemen, Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot and is on his way to Parkland Hospital,” Decker told them.

  They could go home now. The people in the crowd cheered and clapped their hands. They were happy that Oswald had gotten a taste of Texas justice.

  LIKE PRESIDENT Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald looked dead on arrival at Parkland Hospital. But unlike the president, who had suffered a catastrophic head wound, Oswald exhibited a tenacity for life.

  The wounded assassin was wheeled inside where some of the same people who treated President Kennedy would now try to save the life of his suspected assassin. It was about 11:30 A.M. The gurney approached trauma room one. No, do not bring Oswald in there, the hospital staff decided. Out of respect for President Kennedy, who had been pronounced dead in this room less than forty-eight hours ago, the staff refused to treat Oswald there. It would be obscene to try to save the assassin’s life on the same table on which the president had died; to employ the same medical instruments to save the man who had stained their hospital gowns with the president’s brains and blood.

  So they rolled Oswald to trauma room two, where doctors had saved the life of Governor John Connally. Some of the same doctors who had treated JFK now worked on his killer. Although Jack Ruby had gotten off only one shot, he had inflicted a devastating wound. It was as bad as if he had shot Oswald three times. Because he shot his victim from at an angle, the bullet passed sideways through Oswald’s entire torso, wreaking havoc with several internal organs.

  Could he live? Would he recover for his trial? And at that trial—when he realized the physical evidence alone would convict him—would he accept his fate, and an almost certain death sentence, and finally mount his soapbox, find his voice, and shout to all the world, “Yes, I, Lee Harvey Oswald did this.” And then tell the world why?

  The doctors wanted him to live. It was their job. Whatever their personal feelings, they would do their utmost to save him. Chief Curry wanted him to live. Only if President Kennedy’s assassin survived his wound could Curry salvage his own reputation, and that of his department. How could more than seventy Dallas policemen in one basement fail to prevent the murder of the most important criminal suspect in the world? If Oswald died, they would be stained forever as the fools who allowed him to be killed right under their very noses.

  Captain Fritz wanted Oswald to live too. A dead suspect was of no use to one of the top interrogators in the history of the Dallas Police Department. Only if Oswald lived was there hope. Perhaps the suspect would confess and explain it all. The press wanted him to live—Oswald was a great story, and worth massive coverage in the weeks ahead. And, despite the howls of delight outside the county jail, most of the American people wanted Oswald to survive this day. True, it was hard not to take some pleasure in the knowledge that John Kennedy’s murderer has suffered a kind of Old Testament or western vigilante justice for his great crime. But the people also wanted answers. Who was he? How did he do it? Why did he do it? If Lee Harvey Oswald died, he would take his secrets to the grave.

  The bullet had damaged several vital organs, and Oswald had suffered a massive loss of blood. Surgeries to multiple organs seemed to offer hope, then failed. He had lost too much blood. The shock was irreversible. Lee Harvey Oswald expired in the same hospital where President Kennedy had died.

  Without regaining consciousness, without speaking any last words, and without confessing his crime, Lee Harvey Oswald died at 2:07 P.M. (EST), just after the memorial service for President Kennedy at the Capitol had begun. Even if he had remained conscious long enough to speak, Oswald was not the sort of man to clear his conscience with a death-bed confession. Or to solve the case for the police. It would have given him pleasure to carry on the game from the grave, where his silence would torment his interrogators, and force them to fit all the puzzle pieces together by themselves.

  NBC Television had broadcast the murder of Oswald on live television to the entire nation. Soon more than 100 million people learned that the assassin’s assassin was a man born Jack Rubenstein, now known as Jack Ruby. He was a middle-aged club owner and low class creature from a world of sleazy nightlife, where men drank stiff drinks and paid women to dance and strip for them onstage. Like Oswald, he was another fringe character, an impulsive, moody, and violent man and, even more than Oswald, given to wild, unstable, emotional and often dangerous mood swings. He beat women, pistol-whipped customers, and called his constant companion—a little dog—his “wife.” Ruby thought he would be a hero.

  It was unwholesome, almost profane, that for the rest of the day, news of Oswald’s shooting competed with coverage of John F. Kennedy’s memorial events.

  At 2:25 P.M., Marina Oswald came to Parkland Hospital to view her husband’s body. She looked at his eyes. They were wet. “Look, Mama,” she said to Lee’s mother, “He cry.”

  The unstable Marguerite began to say crazy things.

  “I think someday you’ll hang your heads in shame,” Marguerite scolded anyone in listening distance. “I happen to know, and know some facts, that maybe my son is the unsung hero of this episode. And I, as his mother, intend to prove this if I can.”

  Then she blabbered that Lee should be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. It was too much for Robert Oswald. He told his delusional mother to shut up.

  On the day he died, Lee Harvey Oswald left behind another victim—the city of Dallas. Within hours of the assassination, Americans began to blame an entire city or state for the murder. Dallas was tarred as the “City of Hate.” People remembered that Texas crowds had once spat at Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson at the Adolphus Hotel. They remembered how in October 1963, hecklers disrupted a speech by Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson.

  Kennedy had been warned not to go to Texas. The political situation there was too volatile, and he was not liked there. He was too liberal for local tastes. One Texas politician had publicly implied it was not safe. Kennedy bristled at the suggestion that any part of the United States was too dangerous for a president to visit. Then there was that menacing WELCOME TO TEXAS newspaper ad and the WANTED FOR TREASON handbills. On November 20, Dallas Chief of Police Jesse Curry had to go on television to beseech the citizenry to treat the president with respect. Rumors spread that in Texas classrooms, schoolchildren cheered when they heard that Kennedy had been shot.

  Whether the rumors were true or not, people wanted to believe them. Other stories claimed that adult Texans, upon hearing the news, had rejoiced in the streets.

  Outside of Texas, politicians, newspaper editors, and others beat the drumbeat of collective guilt. They blamed Dallas right-wing fanaticism for the president’s murder. But Oswald was not a John Bircher or right winger; if anything he was a leftist or, in Jackie Kennedy’s words, “some silly little Communist.” The assassination, they said, was the shame of Dallas. Of course such emotional criticism ignored the fact that most of Dallas had given the Kennedys a friendly reception. No one in that motorcade could have concluded that cheering Dallas crowds “hated” JFK and wanted him to die. The president was thrilled by the warm welcome he had received.

  Two days after the assassination, at the congressional memorial service in Washington, D.C., Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren upset the solemnity of the occasion with a wild and shocking indictment of the climat
e of hate he said had caused the assassination. “We are saddened; we are stunned; we are perplexed. John Fitzgerald Kennedy . . . has been snatched from our midst by the bullet of an assassin. What moved some misguided wretch to do this horrible deed may never be known to us, but we do know that such acts are commonly stimulated by forces of hatred and malevolence, such as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life. What a price we pay for this fanaticism.” The chief justice condemned “the hatred that consumes people, the false accusations that divide us, and the bitterness that begets violence.” Warren blamed the assassination on those “who do not shrink from spreading . . . venom.” Of course Earl Warren meant conservatives and the right wing. But Lee Harvey Oswald was not a right-wing fanatic. He was a leftist who hated the right wing, and who had tried to murder an ultraconservative army general. Everybody knew that Warren was also talking about Dallas, the city that boasted a big billboard that read impeach earl warren.

  But it was the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald while in police custody that really turned the nation against Dallas. The assassination of the president came like a bolt of lightning that struck without warning from bright blue sky. The Oswald killing was different. On a dozen occasions, the police department had displayed their prisoner to the press in crowded, unsecured hallways. A Dallas law enforcement official announced that they had already “solved” the assassination and that the case against Oswald was “cinched.” Death threats against the prisoner came in, but security at the jail remained lax. Nonetheless, detectives transferred Oswald to another location in the middle of a media circus in a poorly secured basement. The whole world saw what happened next.

  Oswald’s murder was the tipping point. How, people wondered, could the city’s police and prosecutors be so inept? How could they subject Oswald to all of those hallway interviews? How could they fail to protect the life of the most hated man in the country?

  America blamed Dallas for ending the play in mid-act. Negligence and incompetence had pushed the assassin offstage before he could perform his starring role—defendant in the trial of the century. The public wanted to hear Oswald’s account of November 22. They hoped he might confess. They wanted to hear from the witnesses and see the evidence presented in a court of law. There would be no third act.