Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  Were others involved in the assassination? The House Assassinations Committee believed that a tape recording of a police motorcycle radio transmission contained the faint sounds of four shots and that one of them came from the grassy knoll. It concluded that another gunman in that area had fired a shot that missed the motorcade completely. But in 1982 a new panel of acoustical experts reexamined the tape for the National Research Council and unanimously concluded that the sounds on the tape had been recorded about one minute after the shooting and that there was thus no evidence for a second gunman. And that is where the matter stands as of now. In any event, the bulk of the evidence about Oswald clearly suggests that if there had been a conspiracy, Oswald would not have been a patsy, but the ringleader. If he had any accomplices, which seems doubtful, I would nominate the two unknown men who helped him try to gull Sylvia Odio.

  As the Assassinations Committee said, a conspiracy involving Oswald and someone else, “possibly a person akin to Oswald in temperament and ideology, would not have been fundamentally different from an assassination by Oswald alone.” In a footnote it added, “If the conspiracy was, in fact, limited to Oswald, the second gunman, and perhaps one or two others, the committee believes it was possible they shared Oswald’s left-wing political disposition. A consistent pattern in Oswald’s life was a propensity for actions with political overtones. It is quite likely that an assassination conspiracy limited to Oswald and a few associates was in keeping with that pattern.” Conspirators are usually allies, not political enemies.

  But there’s no compelling reason to believe anyone else was involved. The police-tape theory overshadowed the other work done by the Committee that strengthened the case for Oswald’s guilt. Having examined the Warren Commission’s evidence, as well as new evidence it developed on its own, the Committee reached the following conclusions. President Kennedy was struck by two rifle shots fired from the sixth-floor window on the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository. All the wounds inflicted on President Kennedy and Governor Connally were caused by two bullets fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository, and this rifle belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was present on the sixth floor shortly before the assassination. A paper bag suitable for containing a rifle found in the sniper’s nest bore a fingerprint and palmprint of Oswald’s. Oswald had no alibi for the time of the assassination. Oswald shot and killed Patrolman J.D. Tippit. The evidence “strongly suggested that Oswald attempted to murder General Walker and that he possessed a capacity for violence.” Considering this and other evidence against him, the Committee concluded that Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. As Anthony Summers said, “If Oswald really was just a fall guy, he had been bewilderingly well framed.”

  Much of the controversy about Dallas derives from the Warren Commission’s analysis of an 8-millimeter film of the motorcade taken by spectator Abraham Zapruder, who was standing west of the Depository near the spot where Kennedy was killed. His movie, often blurry, tracked the president’s limousine at 18.3 frames per second as it turned onto Elm Street in front of the Depository and came toward Zapruder’s position, 200 feet away. At frame 210 the president disappeared from Zapruder’s view as the car passed behind a road sign. When he reappeared at frame 225, he had obviously been wounded, his fists clenched in front of his throat, elbows extended. Roughly a second and a half later Connally reacted dramatically to being hit.

  The Commission’s test of Oswald’s rifle found that 2.3 seconds were required between shots if the telescopic sight was used. This finding resulted in an apparent dilemma: either Connally and Kennedy were wounded by the same bullet and Connally’s visible reaction was delayed—or there were two gunmen. Eventually the Commission concluded that one shot missed; another hit Kennedy in the upper back and exited his throat to wound Connally in the upper torso, wrist, and thigh; a third struck Kennedy’s head between Zapruder frames 312 and 313. A whole bullet recovered from a stretcher at Parkland Hospital was said to have transited both men; it was soon called “the magic bullet” by critics who insisted that it could not have caused so much damage and remain virtually intact. But neutron activation tests have now linked this missile rather firmly with fragments removed from Governor Connally’s wrist, thus supporting the one-bullet hypothesis.

  One shot had clearly been fired before the limousine reached the road sign. Connally has said that when he heard a rifle report shortly after the car turned onto Elm Street, he immediately shouted “No, no, no” while attempting to look at Kennedy behind him. The Assassinations Committee located the start of the movement he described at frames 162–167, that is, eight seconds before the fatal shot. Mrs. Kennedy recalled that she had been looking left at the crowd when she heard Connally cry out, and that she too turned toward the president. Up until frame 183, she is facing the crowd; by frame 193, she has swung completely around to stare at her husband. Her position is unmistakable. If the first shot occurred at frame 161, Oswald had eight seconds to aim and fire two more. The Committee found that it was possible to fire the Mannlicher-Carcano twice within 1.66 seconds, using the open iron sights.

  All the hard evidence points to a sixth-floor assassin and points away from a gunman firing from any other location. Minutes before the assassination, several spectators saw a young male fitting Oswald’s description in the sixth-floor window. Another witness, who saw him aim his last shot, ultimately identified the man as Oswald. Three others looked up in time to see the rifle being withdrawn from the window. No one saw a sniper or a weapon at any other location. A large bullet fragment recovered from the car has been connected by neutron activation analysis to Kennedy’s head wound and, like the stretcher bullet, by ballistics tests to Oswald’s rifle. No fragments of a third bullet were indicated. In the autopsy X rays of Kennedy’s skull, the dispersal of metal fragments extends from back to front. The trajectory of all wounds ranged downward from back to front. Thus, there is no evidence whatsoever of a bullet striking either man from any other weapon or any other direction. A bullet from the grassy knoll that hit Kennedy and disappeared without a trace (along with the gunman) would indeed have been a “magic bullet.”

  Why, then, did many witnesses believe that shots came from the grassy knoll? Some of these people made the same mistake David S. Lifton made: they saw Kennedy fall backward and assumed he had been shot from the front. For instance, a witness quoted by the Dallas Times Herald said he thought “the shots came from in front of or beside” the president because Kennedy “did not slump forward as he would have after being shot from the rear.” William Newman, standing in front of the knoll, believed that the shot hit Kennedy “in the side of the head,” adding that Kennedy’s head was pushed back and to the left.

  Probably the strongest evidence the proponents of a Mafia or anti-Castro conspiracy have ever found is Oswald’s alleged association with David Ferrie in New Orleans during the summer of 1963. Ferrie was a strange character who was violently anti-Kennedy and anti-Communist. After a disease caused the loss of his body hair, he began wearing a reddish mohair wig and fake eyebrows. He was also a homosexual and had been fired from his job as an Eastern Airlines pilot after he was charged with extortion and with molesting young males. In 1963 he worked as a private investigator, both for the lawyer of Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans Mafia boss, and for Guy Banister, another militant anti-Communist who ran a detective agency. Both Banister and Ferrie had connections with anti-Castro groups. On November 22, Ferrie was in a New Orleans courtroom with Marcello and his lawyer.

  The office of Banister’s detective agency was in a building near the coffee company where Oswald worked until mid-July. The building had two entrances, and the address of the one around the corner from Banister’s office was 544 Camp Street. Anyone who has read a conspiracy book should be familiar with that address, because it was stamped on some of Oswald’s “Hands Off Cuba” leaflets.

  So, the plot thickens. The conspiracists believe that Oswald’s pro-Castro
activities in New Orleans were a scam being run by the anti-Castroites Ferrie and Banister in order to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This is highly unlikely. Even if we knew nothing about Oswald, the fact that his first pro-Castro demonstration occurred before he got to New Orleans would seem to rule that out. Although the owner of the Camp Street building denied that he ever rented space to the president’s accused assassin, Oswald may have used an alias or an intermediary. (In a letter to Vincent Lee, he claimed that he had rented an office somewhere but was evicted on a pretext three days later.) However, I suspect that Oswald may have had some contact with Ferrie and perhaps with Banister as well, but I believe it had nothing to do with the events in Dallas—which, at that point, no one could have foreseen.

  Oswald may have approached Ferrie or Banister, as he approached Carlos Bringuier, with a plausible cover story and with an eye to pursuing his own ends. It’s possible that, after he lost his job at Reily’s, he went to see Banister; working for a detective agency might have appealed to him.

  The best evidence that Oswald knew Ferrie, and possibly Banister, comes from the testimony of several credible witnesses who told the Assassinations Committee that they saw Oswald in Clinton, Louisiana, during late August or early September with a man who looked like Ferrie and another man whom they identified as Clay Shaw, the businessman involved in the Garrison investigation. The second man was almost certainly not Shaw—but Shaw looked very much like Guy Banister. According to these witnesses, Oswald was first seen in nearby Jackson, where he asked a barber how he could get a job as an electrician at the local mental hospital. (Oswald had no training as an electrician.) The barber referred him to a state representative, who advised him to register as a voter to establish residency. Two secretaries said that Oswald applied for work at the hospital, and afterward he was seen standing in line at the Clinton voter registrar’s office while Ferrie and the other man, presumably Banister, waited outside in a Cadillac. As it happened, blacks in the parish were conducting a voter registration drive that month, and there was a long wait. The registrar, Henry Palmer, testified that when it came his turn Oswald handed him a U.S. Navy ID card with his name and a New Orleans address on it, and Palmer told him he hadn’t been in the area long enough to register.

  Summers believes that Ferrie and Banister may have brought Oswald to Clinton as part of a U.S. intelligence scheme to discredit the civil rights movement. Just how Oswald could have discredited the movement by standing quietly in line isn’t clear. The chronology suggests that the right question is not why this man identified as Oswald was at the registrar’s office, but why he wanted to get a job at the East Louisiana State Hospital. It’s conceivable that he wanted to get inside the hospital as an employee to photograph someone’s psychiatric records for the detectives Banister and Ferrie. This interpretation is, of course, highly speculative, but if this was indeed Oswald, it might explain why Ferrie always denied knowing him in 1963, if in fact he did.

  On the other hand, the proposition that Oswald was in Clinton rests entirely on the testimony of these witnesses who didn’t come forward until 1967, during the Garrison investigation. If some of them misidentified Banister as Clay Shaw, they may have been mistaken about Oswald as well.

  How can we be certain, even so, that Oswald wasn’t working for American intelligence or a similar group all along? I return to the principle that, in order to be plausible, a theory must fit the available evidence into a reasonable chronology of events. As we have seen, Oswald was capable of playing a double role for his own purposes and of risking his life for his beliefs. This inner-directedness gives us no reason to think that he would have staked his life for the beliefs of anyone else. To argue, as some critics have, that Oswald was merely posing as a leftist from the time he was 16 until, literally, the day he died, one must unravel the story of his life presented in this book and attempt to reweave it into an entirely new pattern. I can’t say that it is impossible to do so, but thus far it hasn’t been done.

  No event aroused more skepticism about the lone assassin theory than Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald. Immediately after his arrest, Ruby said that he shot Oswald because he had been upset by the assassination and wanted to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of returning to Dallas to testify at Oswald’s trial (as news reports had indicated that she would have to do). Ruby added, “I also want the world to know that Jews do have guts.”1

  To many, Ruby’s professed grief looked suspicious. At the apartment of his sister, Eva Grant, a few hours after Kennedy’s death, he telephoned numerous acquaintances to bemoan the assassination. He tried to eat supper but threw up in the bathroom. As he was leaving, Eva thought he looked “broken.” He told her, “I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma or Pa died.” Several other people who talked with Ruby that day or the next remembered that he expressed concern for the president’s wife and children, saying in one instance, “those poor people, those poor people.” These sentiments may seem excessive, or phony, but they were not unusual.

  Before the end of November the National Opinion Research Center completed a poll on the public’s reactions to the assassination. In 1964 the Center reported:

  The majority of all respondents could not recall any other time in their lives when they had the same sort of feelings.… Of those who could think of such an occasion (47%) the majority referred to the death of a parent, close friend, or other relative.…

  The first reactions of nine out of ten Americans were sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy and the children and deep sorrow that “a strong young man had been killed at the height of his powers.”

  During the four days following the event, 68 percent of those interviewed were “very nervous and tense,” 57 percent felt “dazed and numb,” 43 percent “didn’t feel like eating,” 22 percent had upset stomachs. Many felt a need to talk to someone they knew, and the nation’s telephone lines were clogged with calls. One person in nine hoped that Oswald would be “shot down or lynched.”

  This intense outpouring of emotion had little to do with politics. Clearly some psychological nerve had been touched. Perhaps these people had unconsciously identified with John Kennedy—at any rate, his death was a sharp reminder of personal mortality. Whatever the underlying cause, Ruby’s reaction was within the mainstream.

  But more important for our purposes is Ruby’s remark that he wanted to prove “that Jews do have guts.” This is the kind of statement that appears nonsensical at a distance but has a surprising relevance on closer inspection. It turns out that Ruby himself was a conspiracy theorist and that his crime, like Oswald’s, was the result of a deadly interplay between his past and the accidental circumstances of the moment.

  Born in Chicago in 1911 as Jacob Rubenstein, Ruby was the fifth child of an alcoholic father and a mentally ill, delusional mother. As a young boy, he was said to be “quick tempered” and “egocentric.” Growing up in a ghetto surrounded by other ethnic groups, Ruby became a street fighter who reacted to anti-Semitic slurs with his fists. Before World War II, Ruby and his neighborhood friends disrupted several pro-Nazi rallies of the German-American Bund, “cracking a few heads” in the process. Although he took no other interest in politics, Ruby was described by an acquaintance as a “cuckoo nut” on the subject of patriotism; he cried openly on learning of President Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

  In 1947 Ruby moved to Dallas to help his divorced sister, Eva, manage a nightclub. Over the next decade Ruby got into numerous fistfights with his employees and unruly patrons. According to Buddy Turman, a prizefighter friend, he “picked his shots”: his victims were often drunk, female, or otherwise unable to defend themselves. By the fall of 1963 Ruby was running two striptease joints and having financial problems. He was also taking Preludin diet pills, commonly known as “uppers.”

  On the morning of November 22 Jack Ruby noticed the black-bordered “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” page in the Dallas Morning News. He telephoned Eva to call her attention to it—he was annoyed that a message
attacking the president bore a Jewish name, Bernard Weissman, as chairman of the sponsoring committee. At about 11 o’clock Ruby made his customary visit to the Morning News building to place weekend ads for his nightclubs. After he completed his business, a newspaper employee, John Newnam, saw him sitting at a desk leafing through the day’s paper, “killing time, as he always did.” Ruby made a comment criticizing the “lousy taste” of the anti-Kennedy advertisement. “Who is this Weissman?” he wanted to know. Privately he suspected that someone had used a false name “to make the Jews look bad.” (Actually, Weissman was a young conservative who had recently moved to Dallas.)

  Five minutes later, another employee ran into the office and said, “Kennedy’s been shot.” Newnam saw Ruby respond with a look of “stunned disbelief.” Soon telephone calls came in from people canceling weekend advertising—a development that Ruby interpreted as a protest against the “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” page. A few minutes later he used an office phone to call Eva again—and put the receiver to Newnam’s ear so that he could hear her anguished reaction to the shooting. Ruby later explained that he wanted Newnam to know that he and his sister were “emotionally disturbed [by the assassination] the same way as other people.” It had never occurred to Newnam that they weren’t, but Ruby was clearly worried that Weissman’s untimely criticism of the president might provoke a backlash against other Jews.

  Later that afternoon, Ruby checked the Dallas phone book: Weissman’s name wasn’t in it. Driving across town on November 23, Ruby noticed a billboard saying “Impeach Earl Warren” that listed a post office box number similar to the one given in the right-wing advertisement. Ruby wasn’t sure who Earl Warren was, but he suspected a plot involving “the John Birch Society or the Communist Party or maybe a combination of both.” After reaching his apartment, Ruby called Larry Crafard, an employee of his who had a Polaroid camera, picked Crafard up, and drove back to the sign and took pictures of it. Ruby’s roommate, George Senator, went along. Ruby acted as though he had uncovered something important. Next the trio went to the Dallas Post Office, where Ruby tried unsuccessfully to find out who had rented the box indicated on the billboard. The men went to a nearby coffee shop, where Senator noticed that Ruby’s voice sounded “different” and that “he had sort of a stare look in his eye.”