Parkland (Movie Tie-In Edition)

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “Mr. Wade, was he under any kind of federal surveillance because of his background prior to today, today’s events?”

  Wade, no doubt thinking of Jack Revill’s memo, prefers not to open that can of worms. “None that I know of. We didn’t have any knowledge—We didn’t have any information on him. When I say we, being the Dallas police or the Dallas sheriff’s office.”1016

  Several questions return to the issue of whether this was an organized plot or just one man out to get the president.

  “We don’t know that answer,” Wade replies. “He’s the only one we have.”

  “Are you willing to say whether you think this man was inspired as a Communist or whether he is simply a nut or a middleman?”

  “I’ll put it this way,” Wade says. “I don’t think he’s a nut.”1017

  1:20 a.m.

  After Wade’s press conference, he continues to be interviewed by individual reporters outside the basement assembly room, and Jack Ruby persists in his pursuit of Joe Long, who mysteriously remains elusive to Ruby. But Jack finally manages to get the control room number of the station from two reporters, Jerry Cunkle and Sam Pease, who worked for rival KBOX. Calling the control room, he’s shuttled to Glenn Duncan in the newsroom, whom he tells, “I have sandwiches for you. I want to get over there,” and then adds, “By the way, I see Henry Wade talking on the phone to someone. Do you want me to get him over here?”

  “Yes, do that.”

  “Just a second, he’s talking to someone from New York. I’ll get him.”

  He goes over, collars the district attorney, and brings him back to the phone, not even telling him what station it is.

  The newsman at KLIF is elated over scoring the brief interview, and tells Ruby he can “only leave the door open for five minutes.”

  On the way out, Ruby spots Russ Knight of KLIF with a tape recorder. Glenn Duncan rushed him over from the station a few blocks away to get another interview with the district attorney—they didn’t get the first one on the phone on tape, and Duncan wants something for the morning news. Ruby, only too happy to oblige, takes Knight to Wade.

  “Ask him if Oswald is insane,” Ruby suggests to Knight.

  “Okay,” Knight says. “That’s a point well taken.”

  Ruby introduces them.

  “Oh,” Wade says, recognizing Knight’s name, “you’re the Weird Beard!”

  Knight cringes a little—his on-the-air persona is great for the kids who have made him the top-rated DJ in Dallas, but it sounds just a mite foolish here.

  Wade obliges Knight with an interview and tells Knight that Oswald is not insane. His brutal act was entirely premeditated. While Knight is interviewing Wade, Ruby leaves for the station three blocks away. But arranging the interview with Henry Wade for Russ Knight delayed Ruby beyond the five-minute window he’d been offered, and he finds the door to the KLIF studios locked when he gets there, so he waits, with Sheba, for Knight to get back.1018

  1:30 a.m.

  Wade and Judge Johnston finally escape the persistent journalists and make their way back to the third-floor homicide office. On the way, the district attorney tells Johnston that they should arraign Oswald on the Kennedy killing immediately. When the pair get to Captain Fritz’s office, they confer with Chief Curry, Captain Fritz, and Assistant DA Maurice Harrell.1019 It may be approaching the middle of the night but with all the activity one would never know it. Curry agrees that Oswald should be arraigned on the murder charge regarding the president’s death soon. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that a prisoner must be arraigned and informed of the charges against him as soon as possible. Curry doesn’t want anyone saying that they haven’t followed the law.

  Curry picks up the phone and calls the jail supervisor, Sergeant Warren.

  “Bring Oswald back down to the fourth-floor ID bureau,” he says. “We’ll meet you there.”1020

  Oswald has been asleep,* though not for very long, when Sergeant Warren awakens him.

  “What’s going on?” Oswald says angrily, half asleep.

  “I’ve got my orders from the chief,” the jail supervisor says. “He says to bring you down to ID again.”

  The man who would arguably become the most famous murderer in history, as well as the most consequential one, doesn’t bother to protest. He swings his legs to the floor and holds his wrists out in front of him as the cuffs are snapped in place. Sergeant Warren and jailer Tommy Todd escort him toward the stairway.1021

  1:35 a.m.

  Oswald and his escorts emerge from the stairwell and enter the Identification bureau inside the fourth-floor jail office. A half-dozen police officials are standing behind the counter when Oswald arrives. He purses his lips and surveys the familiar faces.

  Judge David Johnston stands squarely behind the counter, with complaint number F-154, the Kennedy murder charge, in his hand. The men grouped around him are some of the top brass of Dallas law enforcement: Captain Fritz, Chief Curry, Assistant Deputy Chief M. W. Stevenson, District Attorney Henry Wade, and Assistant District Attorney Maurice Harrell. A few Identification Bureau officers who happen to be on duty, including crime-lab lieutenant Carl Day, hover nearby.1022

  “Well, I guess this is the trial,” Oswald sneers sarcastically.

  “No sir,” Judge Johnston replies, “I have to arraign you on another offense.”

  For the second time this night, Johnston advises Oswald of his constitutional right to remain silent and warns him that any statement he makes may be used in evidence against him. Then, Johnston reads the complaint to Oswald, that “Lee Harvey Oswald, hereinafter styled Defendant, heretofore on or about the twenty-second day of November, 1963, in the County of Dallas and State of Texas, did then and there unlawfully, voluntarily, and with malice aforethought kill John F. Kennedy by shooting him with a gun against the peace and dignity of the State.”1023

  “Oh, that’s the deal, is it,” Oswald says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”1024

  Johnston ignores the comment and advises Oswald of his right to an attorney.

  “I want Mr. John Abt of New York,” Oswald demands, spelling the name out. “A-B-T.”

  “You’ll be given the opportunity to contact any attorney you wish,” Judge Johnston answers calmly. “Bond is denied on this capital offense. I hereby remand you to the custody of the sheriff of Dallas County, Texas.”1025

  In ten minutes it is over. Lee Harvey Oswald has been formally arraigned on the charge of assassinating the president of the United States. Chief Curry, who has seen little of Oswald in the course of the evening, is not impressed by his truculence and arrogance. Curry nods to the jailers, who spin and take the prisoner back upstairs to his fifth-floor cell.1026

  1:50 a.m.

  Most of Dallas is asleep when Ruby finally enters the KLIF building after Russ Knight gets back from City Hall and opens the door. Several of the guys on duty are glad to see Jack’s big paper sack full of corned beef sandwiches and soft drinks. “I figured you guys would be hungry,” Jack tells them, “and I brought these up for you.” Knight and DJ Danny McCurdy were intrigued by Doctor Black’s celery tonic in its peculiarly shaped bottle and expensive-looking gold foil, which neither of them had ever seen before. Whoever heard of a soft drink with celery in it? Jack explains that it’s something you normally get only in New York and is especially pleased when McCurdy thinks it’s the best soft drink he’s ever had.

  Five minutes later Jack has worked his way into the control room, where he chats with McCurdy between announcements while Duncan and Knight get the two o’clock news ready.

  Jack appreciates the way the station has switched from Top Forty to album music—easy listening, McCurdy calls it. Ruby is pale and keeps looking at the floor. McCurdy is feeling awfully low himself and thinks little of it.

  “I’m closing my club down this weekend,” Jack tells him morosely. “I’d rather lose twelve or fifteen hundred this weekend than not be able to live with myself later on.” He gives M
cCurdy a card for the Carousel Club. McCurdy already has one Ruby gave him some time back, one with a picture of one of the strippers on it.

  Ike Pappas comes in with a lot of tapes he wants to relay back to WNEW in New York, and the KLIF guys are happy to let him use their facilities. Pappas also gets one of the corned beef sandwiches, but is so busy with his work he never sees Ruby.

  Though Duncan is getting ready to go with his two o’clock news bulletin, he chats a little with Ruby, who seems somewhat excited and happy that the case against Oswald is going well. He seems to get a real charge out of being close to the police and the news developments. Duncan is intrigued by Ruby’s description of Oswald—that he looks a little like the movie star Paul Newman.

  Ruby stays right there in the newsroom for the bulletin, and after Duncan leads to Knight, the latter says, “I have just returned from a trip to the Dallas County Courthouse [actually City Hall] and, on a tip from Jack Ruby, local night club owner…”

  Jack is tickled pink at the mention of his name on the air. After Ruby chats with the guys for a quarter of an hour or so, Knight walks Ruby down to his car, parked right in front of the door, the little dachshund, Sheba, patiently awaiting his return. Ruby wants him to urge Gordon McClendon to devote one of his on-the-air editorials to the assassination and the turgid, right-wing political atmosphere in Dallas that he feels led to it. He’s a great admirer of McClendon, a Kennedy supporter who ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Senate and the only radio broadcaster in Dallas to do editorials, and outspoken ones at that. Ruby fishes a one-page flyer from the mess in his car and hands it to the disk jockey. “You look like a square guy, why don’t you look this over and read it?”

  Ruby’s story about the flyer is complicated to Knight, but it has something to do with right-wing radicalism in Dallas, though Ruby doesn’t use those exact words.

  Ruby had gotten the flyer when he was selling a contrivance called a twistboard out at the Texas Products Show at the Exhibit Hall off the Stemmons Freeway a couple of weeks ago. Ruby’s friend Ed Pullman, a furniture designer, had a booth there, and Ruby took some of his girls out there every night during the week the show was on to demonstrate and sell the device. One of them got her picture into the Dallas Times Herald. Ruby had stopped by the booth of H. L. Hunt, the right-wing Dallas oil tycoon, which was giving away free bags of groceries, and in his Ruby found the flyer, a script called “Heroism” for Hunt’s radio show, Life Line. He was outraged by the script and steamed back to Pullman’s booth on the mezzanine, George Senator in tow.

  “I’m going to send this stuff to Kennedy,” Jack raged breathlessly. “I want to send this stuff to Kennedy. Nobody has the right to talk like this about our government.”

  Pullman was philosophical. “Well, you just learned about it now, but Life Line has been out for some time, and that’s what he does and that’s how he gets his materials around.”

  “I’m going to do something about this, I’m going to see that this is taken up in Washington,” Ruby insists. He even mentions the FBI. Pullman recalls to Ruby that Hunt had not been allowed to have a display at some New York fair because of that type of literature. “I’m sure that Kennedy knows all about this, and Washington knows about this.”

  “Maybe they don’t. I’m going to send it in.”

  “Well, you do what you want,” Pullman said.

  It’s all a bit of a mystery to Knight, but he takes the broadsheet from Ruby and goes home.

  It’s hard to figure out why Ruby had gotten so exercised about the flyer out at the fair. The flyer was all pretty harmless stuff, although it did contain this language:

  Personal heroism is a vital part of the American character and the American dream…Nearly all nations, when they do fail, have forgotten what heroism is.

  And,

  A nation and a people which truly value their heroes have no use for a paternal government which always claims to know best. Such a nation cannot be coaxed or conned out of their fundamental liberties.

  It’s bylined “Gene Scudder from Washington.” At the bottom of the back of the sheet is a list of two-dozen stations in the Dallas–Fort Worth area which carry the program, and a short list of “some of the other three hundred Life Line stations,” almost all in the South.1027

  Robert Donovan, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, finally gets back to his Dallas hotel after an incredibly hectic day that went by without his eating since breakfast the previous morning in Fort Worth. He and some of his colleagues, equally famished and exhausted, were able to send out for food. They give the old black waiter, dressed in a young bellboy’s outfit, some extra money to also get them “a jug” of liquor, telling him they had worked for hours, were frazzled, and needed it. But you couldn’t buy liquor over the counter in Dallas, it being a “closed” city, and the waiter wasn’t about to find some other way, illicit, to get the hooch. “No,” he says evenly, “you couldn’t do that because that would be breaking the law.” He then adds in a voice that Donovan knows he will remember to his dying day, “There’ve been enough laws broken in Dallas today.”1028

  2:00 a.m.

  Eventually, in the early hours of Saturday morning, Dallas police headquarters begins to quiet down for the night. Captain Fritz sends his troops home, with instructions to be back by ten, but remains in his office conferring with Wade, Judge Johnston, and some of the other officers on the case until around 3:45 a.m., when they all go home. Deputy Chief Stevenson remains in his office on the third floor, where, with a couple of detectives, he continues to work, available for anything that might need to be investigated during the night. He doesn’t get home until around 12:30 Saturday afternoon.1029

  2:30 a.m. (3:30 a.m. EST)

  At Bethesda Naval Hospital, the morticians are winding up the embalming and casketing of the president’s body.1030

  2:45 a.m.

  After leaving KLIF, Jack Ruby decides to drive over to the Times Herald building. He rarely goes there to place his weekend ad, because once he gets the ad into the Morning News, which comes out first, he just calls the afternoon newspaper to have the ad “transpired,” as he puts it, into the Times Herald, but he promised one of the boys over there on the night shift one of his twistboards. He had put off going there for some time, but since he hadn’t called in his ad today, he feels this might be a good time to take out an ad in the Herald that his clubs will be closed Saturday and Sunday nights.

  As he drives past a parking garage at the corner of Jackson and Field, he hears a horn honk and sees a police officer he knows, Harry Olsen, sitting in a car. He’s sitting there with one of Jack’s girls, Kathy Kay. The thing with Kathy is supposed to be a secret, but Jack knows all about it. Kathy’s real name—most of the strippers use stage names—is Kay Coleman.

  Harry’s divorce came through last month, and Kay has been divorced for a time, but it would be difficult for a police officer to marry a woman who is working as a stripper. Kay is from England and, young as she is—just twenty-seven—has two little girls, ages seven and nine. Jack likes Kay a lot, and he has stopped over at her place with a few other people for a late-night breakfast a couple of times—it’s only four or five blocks from his apartment out in Oak Cliff, on the same street, Ewing.

  Jack climbs into the car with Harry and Kay. They had driven over to Dealey Plaza earlier, just to see where the president was shot, stopped in at the Sip and Nip on Commerce Street for a couple of drinks, and then went to see their friend Johnny Johnson, who works at the garage. They are drinking beer, ruminating on the day’s sad events, and glad to see Jack. They think he’s a great guy for closing his clubs. They are all upset about the assassination and find it hard to talk about much else. Harry’s leg is in a cast so he has been on light duty for a while. He was off that day and spent most of it moonlighting, guarding the estate of an elderly lady out in Oak Cliff near Kay’s place.

  Earlier Kay had called Andy Armstrong at the Carousel from her house to find out whether th
e club would be open that night.

  “What’s Jack doing?” she asked.

  “Oh, he is all upset and he is crying,” Andy told her, adding, “We are closed tonight.”

  Harry and Kay have known Jack for a couple of years and can see that he’s really upset. Harry used to work the downtown area and made routine checks of the Carousel. He’s seen Jack so mad that he would shake, usually at his employees, but sometimes at customers too. Jack can fly off the handle about almost anything. Harry would take him aside and get him to calm down, and Jack, with his respect for police officers, listened to Harry.

  Jack tells them he saw Oswald down at the police station, calls him an “SOB,” and says, “It’s too bad that a peon could do something like that,” referring to the killing of Kennedy and Tippit. Kay thinks Jack is wild-eyed, with a sort of starey look. He is awfully tired, sits back, and stares off into space. He doesn’t cry or anything, but he just keeps saying over and over how terrible it is. He also keeps mentioning Jackie Kennedy and her children, whose plight especially touches him. Harry thinks they should cut Oswald into ribbons inch by inch, and Jack recalls all the citizens who went out that morning with banners and posters stirring up hate against the president. “I just wonder how they feel about that now.” The three commiserate about the death of Kennedy for over an hour.1031

  2:56 a.m. (3:56 a.m. EST)

  At Bethesda Naval Hospital, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman telephones the seventeenth-floor suite where the Kennedy family and friends have been waiting for almost nine hours.

  “We’re ready,” he tells them.

  Secret Service agents escort the Kennedy entourage—Mrs. Kennedy, Robert and Ted Kennedy and Robert’s wife, Ethel, the president’s sisters, Dave Powers, Kenneth O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Robert McNamara, and others—down to a small room near the rear loading dock.1032