Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Some allegations had the ring of calculated black propaganda. A prominent exile writer, Salvador Díaz-Versón, claimed that while in Mexico City, Oswald had met at restaurant with the Cuban Ambassador and Sylvia Durán, the secretary who dealt with his visa application. His source for this, Díaz said, was a fellow exile journalist living in Mexico, Eduardo Borrell Navarro. Interviewed for the author, Borrell said he, in turn, had gotten his information from anti-Castro Cubans—they had been surveilling their pro-Castro counterparts before the assassination. Borrell spoke of his own long and close relationship with officials at the U.S. Embassy, and said his sources were close to U.S. intelligence.

  Along with all these claims, there was a matter that an Assassinations Committee report characterized as an allegation that “although related to certain facts, cannot be substantiated.” Late on the night of the assassination, according to former U.S. diplomat Clare Booth Luce, the wife of wealthy publisher and editor-in-chief of Time and Life magazines, Henry Luce, she had received a call from a Cuban exile she knew well. Like some other wealthy Americans, Mrs. Luce supported the anti-Castro movement by funding one of the motorboats the exiles used for raids on Castro’s Cuba. The man phoning was one of her protégés, and he had called from New Orleans.

  The purpose of the call was to tell Mrs. Luce that her exile protégé and two comrades had met Oswald during the summer, that he had tried to infiltrate their group, and had offered his services to help kill Castro. The exiles had unmasked him as a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, however, taken pictures of his street actions and taped him talking about Cuba within his “communist cell.” According to Mrs. Luce’s caller, Oswald had made “several” trips to Mexico City and had returned with funds.

  With that, Mrs. Luce said, the voice from New Orleans launched into a familiar litany. Oswald had boasted he was “a crack marksman and could shoot anybody—including the President or the Secretary of the Navy.”11 There was “a Cuban Communist assassination team at large and Oswald was their hired gun.”

  The Committee found that Mrs. Luce’s protégés in 1963 had been in the DRE, the exile group represented in New Orleans by Carlos Bringuier, who had taken part in the street fracas with Oswald over his Fair Play for Cuba leafleting.12 Here again, then, in a call to the wife of a man at the top of Time—that mighty media outlet—was the scenario of a Communist Oswald who supposedly bragged about his marksmanship and spoke of killing the President. Shades of the Silvia Odio incident, and the Mexico City allegations.

  The most revealing detail of the Luce episode, however, was the reference by her caller to Oswald’s travel to Mexico City. Mrs. Luce was sure she had received the call late on the night of the assassination—she recalled the phone ringing while she and her husband were watching the television coverage. Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, however, did not become known to the public until forty-eight hours later. On the night of November 22, the record indicates, Oswald’s visit to Mexico City was known only to Oswald himself, perhaps to his wife, Marina—and to U.S. intelligence.

  If the call to Mrs. Luce was another fable designed to incriminate Castro’s Cuba, ready-made to generate massive publicity,13 it suggests collaboration between the exiles and an element of American intelligence.14 Tracking back, the indications are that an effort to link Oswald firmly to Castro’s Cubans had begun as early as September, in Mexico City.

  * * *

  Oscar Contreras, the then law student who said he was buttonholed in the university cafeteria by an Oswald other than the authentic Oswald, offered food for thought.15 Perhaps he was being over-suspicious, Contreras told the author, but he had never been able to understand how—of all the thousands of students in Mexico City—the man who called himself Oswald picked on three who really did have contacts in the Cuban Embassy. Nothing about the evening, or the moment, had had anything to do with Cuba.

  Contreras recalled, too, how emphatically Cuban officials at the Consulate later warned them off seeing any more of Oswald. They did so, they said, because they thought even then that the young American might well be “some sort of provocateur, sent by the United States to go to Cuba with evil intent.” The Cuban Consul’s colleague, Alfredo Mirabal, recalled that his impression “from the very first moment was that it was in fact a provocation.” Disquieting leads suggest that the Cubans’ suspicion, voiced weeks before the assassination, was not mere paranoia.

  According to Ernesto Rodríguez, who claimed to have been a CIA contract agent in Mexico City in 1963, Oswald had given both the Soviets and the Cubans information about a current CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro—had even talked about it on the telephone.16 He offered to share more information, Rodríguez said, were he granted a Cuban entry visa. The story fed into the theory that Castro may have responded to Oswald’s information by striking first—in Dallas.

  Another account, if true, indicates flatly that a U.S. intelligence officer attempted to concoct information about Oswald in Mexico City. Exile leader Antonio Veciana, who said he saw Oswald in the company of his American contact, “Bishop,” just weeks before the Mexico episode,17 added that—after the assassination—Bishop gave him a new task. “He asked me to get in touch with a cousin of mine who worked in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, Guillermo Ruiz. Bishop asked me to see if Ruiz would, for money, make statements stating that Lee Harvey Oswald had been at the Embassy a few weeks before the assassination. I asked him whether it was true that Oswald had been there, and Bishop replied that it did not matter whether he had or not. What was important was that my cousin, a member of the Cuban diplomatic service, should confirm that he had been.”

  Veciana did have a cousin by marriage named Ruiz, who worked—fronting as a diplomat—for Castro’s intelligence service. According to Veciana, however, he was unable to contact Ruiz as quickly as Bishop had wished. Before he could do it, Bishop told him to “forget the whole thing and not to comment or ask any questions about Lee Harvey Oswald.”18

  Veciana may well have told the truth. A former associate who worked with Veciana when he was chief of sabotage for the People’s Revolutionary Movement in Havana said, “Veciana was the straightest, absolutely trustworthy, most honest person I ever met. I would trust him implicitly.”19 The Assassinations Committee investigator’s report on him stated that “Generally, Veciana’s reputation for honesty and integrity was excellent. He appeared credible to this author in the course of many contacts, and important information he provided checked out.”

  “Bishop,” Veciana said, “did work for an intelligence agency of this country, and I am convinced that it was the CIA… . The impression I have is that the Mexico City episode was a device. By using it, Maurice Bishop wanted to lay the blame for President Kennedy’s death fairly and squarely on Castro and the Cuban government.”

  If that was the ploy, it came close to succeeding. Even today, some still think Castro was behind the Kennedy assassination.20

  In the late 1970s, the author interviewed the son of the late Mario García Kohly Sr., a prominent activist and for a time self-styled president-in-exile of Cuba. An extreme rightist bitterly opposed to President Kennedy’s policy, he had, by 1963, long since broken with the mainstream exile movement. On hearing the news that Kennedy had been killed, Mario Kohly Jr. said, he called his father—after opening a celebratory bottle of champagne.

  “My father,” he told the author, “seemed elated and quite relieved. He seemed more pleased, I would say, than surprised. I am sure he had knowledge of what really happened in Dealey Plaza.” The younger Kohly would not say who he believed killed Kennedy. “Let’s just say,” he responded,” it is very possible the assassination was done by the anti-Castro movement in the hopes of making it look like Castro had done it. If they could blame the assassination of President Kennedy on Fidel Castro and arouse enough indignation among the American people, this would have helped the movement to get the support we needed to regain our country. In o
ther words, they either would have supported a new invasion against Castro or might have invaded Cuba themselves.”

  It never happened, of course. As the months went by, it became apparent that Washington had put aside plans for intervention in Cuba. Even as the exiles’ military plans were consigned to the political trash can, so too was talk of reaching an accommodation with Fidel Castro. Three days after the assassination, when U.S. diplomat William Attwood received formal confirmation that Havana wished to proceed with talks, President Johnson was briefed on the contacts of recent weeks. The new President, preoccupied as he was with the accelerating U.S. involvement in Vietnam, evinced no interest. Word came back,” Attwood recalled, “that this was to be put on ice for the time being, and ‘the time being’ has been ever since.”

  The Kennedy era was over, its promise vanishing into mythology as surely as the flame on the President’s grave flickered in the wind. With Lee Oswald dead, the Warren Commission made little of the inconsistencies of the case—the Silvia Odio incident, the suspect scenario in Mexico City, and the indications that there may have been more than one gunman. Late in the inquiry, faced with the imponderables of the Odio evidence, Chief Counsel Rankin spoke volumes when he said wearily, “At this stage, we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.”

  Behind one of the doors stood the surviving principal in the case, Jack Ruby. That door, too, was better left closed.

  Chapter 23

  The Good Ole Boy

  “The pattern of contacts did show that individuals who had the motive to kill the President also had knowledge of a man who could be used to get access to Oswald in the custody of the Dallas police.”

  —House Select Committee on Assassinations

  Report, 1979

  Seven months after the assassination, in a nondescript room at Dallas County Jail, the Chief Justice of the United States presided over a vital interrogation. Earl Warren, accompanied by then Congressman Gerald Ford and a pack of lawyers, was going through the motions of questioning Jack Ruby.1 The man who had silenced Lee Oswald sat shifting uneasily, chewing his lower lip, sometimes drying up altogether. If he was afraid the Warren Commission would prove hard to handle, Ruby worried unnecessarily. The interrogators listened with equanimity to the well-rehearsed story of why he murdered the accused assassin.

  Ruby testified:

  No one … requested me to do anything. I never spoke to anyone about attempting to do anything… . No underworld person made any effort to contact me. It all happened that Sunday morning… . The last thing I read was that Mrs. Kennedy may have to come back to Dallas for a trial for Lee Harvey Oswald and I don’t know what bug got hold of me… . Suddenly, the feeling, the emotional feeling came within me, that someone owed this debt to our beloved President to save her the ordeal of coming back. I had the gun in my right hip pocket, and impulsively, if that is the correct word here, I saw him [Oswald] and that is all I can say… . I think I used the words, “You killed my President, you rat.”

  Ruby presented himself as the misguided exponent of his own brand of sentimental patriotism, and the Warren Commission saw no need to probe further.

  A month earlier, the two lawyers charged with the Ruby investigation, Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin, had fired off a long memorandum to Chief Counsel Lee Rankin. It laid out, in precise detail, areas they felt had been inadequately investigated, emphasizing that the Commission had yet to disprove that “Ruby killed Oswald at the suggestion of others.” Their recommendations were followed up only in a halfhearted sort of way, for—as Griffin put it—“They were in a different ball game than we were… . They really thought that ours was crazy and that we were incompetent.” Hubert resigned, on the understanding that he would still be present at the forthcoming interview with Ruby. The promise was not kept. Warren, Ford, and Lee Rankin departed for Dallas without informing Hubert. The Commission’s specialists on Ruby, the two men most qualified for the job, were excluded from questioning the man who perhaps held the key to unsolved areas of the assassination.

  The Commissioners who did talk to Ruby found it a tedious chore. Ruby rambled on for hours, often irrelevantly, about his activities before the murder. He prattled about his Jewish origins and how Jews would be killed in vast numbers because of what he had done. He seemed frightened, so much so that Chief Justice Warren apparently dismissed him as a psychiatric case. That was insufficient justification for what happened before the interview ended.

  Ruby had been doodling on a notepad. Then he cried: “Gentlemen, unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me… . I am not a crackpot, I have all my senses—I don’t want to avoid any crime I am guilty of.” Eight times in all, Oswald’s murderer begged the Chief Justice to arrange his transfer to the capital for further questioning and lie-detector tests. Warren told him it could not be done. In the Warren Report, published a few months later, Ruby was characterized as merely “moody and unstable,” one lone nut who had killed another. His background and activities, the Report said, “yielded no evidence that Ruby conspired with anyone in planning or executing the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  Fifteen years later, the House Assassinations Committee replaced the Commission’s certainty with a cobweb of suspicion. Along with its finding that the assassination evidence pointed to conspiracy, the Committee portrayed a Ruby who had, for years, been involved with some of the people most motivated to kill the President. They found that vital matters had been glossed over in the original inquiry and that Ruby probably received “assistance” in gaining access to the police station basement where he shot Oswald.

  The most startling revelations about Oswald’s killer concerned his involvement with organized crime and with Cuba. The Warren inquiry had declared there was “no significant link between Ruby and organized crime,” dismissing what it called “rumors linking Ruby with pro- or anti-Castro activities.” Given the material the Warren staff possessed even then, it is hard to believe the Report’s authors expected to be taken seriously. Ruby’s life story is the dossier of a sort of gangsters’ groupie.

  It began in Chicago. Jacob Rubenstein—Ruby’s name at birth—came into the world in 1911, the fifth of eight children born to Polish immigrant parents, a drunkard father and a slightly crazed mother. All eight offspring ended up in foster homes. Jacob never made it past the eighth grade. By the age of sixteen he was known as Sparky to his pals, a tough, street-smart kid roaming Chicago’s West Side who earned the occasional dollar by running errands—for a boss whose name is synonymous with violent crime, Al Capone.

  The record of Jacob’s early life is one of an apprenticeship in petty crime—ticket scalper, racetrack tip-sheet vendor, dealer in contraband music sheets, and nightclub bouncer. He had some minor brushes with the law and earned a reputation for senseless violence. In 1937, he took a real job of sorts—as what he later liked to call “organizer” for a local branch of the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union. The union leadership had been commandeered by stooges for Chicago’s leading racketeers, and Ruby was a bagman for the new president, John Martin. He once pulled a gun while trying to recruit members in a scrap-paper plant. When Martin shot down his predecessor, Ruby was pulled in for questioning.

  Years later, the Warren Commission would accept his claim to have “left the union when I found out the notorious organization had moved in there.” In fact, Ruby stayed on for some time. The Warren Commission ignored, too, an FBI interview with a Chicago crime figure who said Ruby had been “accepted and to a certain extent his business operations controlled by the syndicate.” After a wartime spell in the U.S. Air Force, Ruby left Chicago for Dallas and the nightclub business.

  By his own account, reportedly, the move was at the direction of his Mob associates. A Dallas businessman who knew Ruby well, Giles Miller, told the author Ruby would “discuss how he was sent down here by ‘them’—he always referred to ‘them’—meaning the syndicate. He alway
s complained that if he had to be exiled, why couldn’t he have been exiled to California or to Florida? Why to this hellhole Dallas?” According to Luis Kutner, a former attorney on the Kefauver Committee—the 1950 Senate probe into organized crime—the staff learned that Ruby was “a syndicate lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for Chicago mobsters.”

  A Mob emissary, Paul Jones, tried in 1946 to bribe the Dallas District Attorney and Sheriff to let the syndicate operate in the city.2 Decades later, when Ruby shot Oswald, former Sheriff Steve Guthrie came forward to say Ruby had been the man named by Jones to run the proposed operation—a gambling joint fronting as a restaurant and nightclub. The Chicago contacts who introduced Jones to Ruby, Paul “Needle Nose” Labriola and Jimmy Weinberg, were close to the man who at the time ran organized crime in Chicago, Sam Giancana. Giancana, as noted earlier, would in the distant future play a prominent role in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro.

  In Dallas, Ruby made a sort of career for himself as the proprietor of shady nightspots known for after-hours drinking and violent brawling. He beat up those who crossed him, but escaped serious trouble by being careful to dispense favors to policemen. Underworld sources said Ruby was “the payoff man for the Dallas Police Department,” a man who “had the fix with the county authorities.” Further afield, Ruby apparently played more dangerous games.

  In 1956, he was named by an FBI informant as the man who “gave the okay to operate” in part of a major drug-smuggling scheme. Enter, soon after, Ruby the gunrunner to Cuba. His Cuba connection would appear to link him to Santo Trafficante, the Mafia chieftain who was reportedly later to prophesy that President Kennedy “was going to be hit.” Ruby’s apparent connections led to the core of the most enduring suspicions as to who really killed Kennedy.