Suddenly one reporter in the pack shouts out:
“Do you have any connection yet between this and the firing of Major General Walker?”
The beleaguered police chief seems to pause for a fraction of a second and then replies in a slow, deliberate voice:
“I do not know.”
Bernard Weissman had begun the day feeling proud about the full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News signed in his name. Now he is in his car, along with his friend Bill Burley. They are driving across town to meet Larrie Schmidt for beers at the DuCharme Club. As the first reports of the shooting come over the car radio, Weissman is stunned.
“I hope he is not a member of Walker’s group,” he says. “I hope he’s not one of Walker’s boys.”
In Louisiana, General Walker is aboard a commercial flight from New Orleans to Shreveport when the pilot announces the news of the Kennedy assassination over the intercom. Walker immediately begins gathering the names and addresses of the other passengers: He knows he will need to use them as witnesses, to prove that he was not in Dallas on November 22.
When the plane lands, a delegation from the local White Citizens Council is on hand to greet him. Walker is asked whether or not he should cancel this evening’s speech, in light of the day’s events.
“Hell, no!” he barks.
Across the nation, the first few moments of shock are giving way to outrage.
In Washington, John Kennedy’s senior aide Timothy J. Reardon shouts out: “I’d like to take a fucking bomb and blow the fucking state of Texas off the fucking map!”2
Telegrams are being wired straight to the Dallas office of Mayor Earle Cabell:
Three years ago you assaulted Senator Johnson. Last month, you spit on and broke a sign over the head of Governor Stevenson. And today, you’ve killed our president… What kind of people are you?… You can take your stinking city and your stinking state and secede from the union…
As with your ridiculous and nauseating auto slogan stickers we see—“Made in Texas by Texans”—I suppose a similar one can be adopted pertaining to the assassination…
Dallas, the city that spawns the lunatic fringe of the far right. Dallas, the City of Hate.3
Marina Oswald is at the house of her friend Ruth Paine, watching TV news updates about the shooting. She can understand only a little of what she’s hearing, but Paine is translating for her. When the announcer says that the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository, the thought immediately enters Marina’s mind: Could my husband have done such a thing? Yes, she decides, he could have.
She rushes out to the Paines’ garage, where Oswald kept his rifle wrapped inside a blanket. A quick glance tells her that the blanket appears to still hold the weapon. She breathes a sigh of relief and returns to the house. Only later will she realize that the rifle was, in fact, gone.
Aboard Air Force One, still parked on the tarmac at Love Field while awaiting the delivery of Kennedy’s body, Lyndon B. Johnson is being sworn in as the nation’s thirty-sixth president. As Johnson recites the presidential oath, the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy is standing at his side, her husband’s blood and brains sprayed across her pink Chanel suit. She has made no attempt to clean up.
Speaking quietly, she says, “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”4
Lee Harvey Oswald, after fleeing the School Book Depository, has shot and killed a Dallas policeman. Now he’s run inside a movie theater, trying to hide. Dallas cops quickly swarm the place. As an officer moves to arrest him, Oswald stands up and begins to raise his hands. “Well, it’s all over now,” he says dejectedly. Suddenly he punches the cop in the face and they tumble to the floor. It takes four cops to finally subdue Oswald, who is desperately trying to reach for the pistol tucked into his waistband.5
Jack Ruby doesn’t strike people who know him as a particularly politically minded person, but he’s always expressed an admiration for President Kennedy. He mentioned JFK on stage at the Carousel Club, and he long made it a policy to ban his comedians from making any jokes about Negroes, Jews, or the Kennedys.
A couple of weeks earlier, he’d stopped by a business convention in Dallas where copies of anti-Kennedy Life Line scripts were being given away. Ruby picked some up and was instantly incensed. “I’m going to send this stuff to Kennedy,” he threatened.6 He stuffed the scripts into his suit jacket pocket.
As Kennedy arrived in Dallas, Ruby was among the thousands of local readers angered by Bernard Weissman’s full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News. Ruby, sensitive to his own ethnicity in Dallas, wondered how another Jew could do such a thing.
“If this Weissman is a Jew,” he told his sister, “they ought to whack the hell out of him.”7
By lunchtime, he is at the offices of the Dallas Morning News, placing a new ad for his strip club and complaining to employees about their paper’s anti-Kennedy screed. Then the reports come in about the shooting at Dealey Plaza. As people rush by him, some screaming, some crying, Ruby suddenly turns uncharacteristically silent. Finally, he speaks to the adman.
“I am not opening up tonight,” he says.8
Ruby cancels his advertisement, aims for his club on Commerce Street, and tells the employees he is closing the doors for a few days. He begins calling one person after another, sobbing about Kennedy. On the line to a sister in Chicago, he keeps repeating: “Oh, my God. What a black mark for Dallas.”9
By nighttime, he is headed to the special services at Temple Shearith Israel in Dallas. The presiding rabbi, Hillel Silverman, has known Ruby for a decade, not as a regular attendee, but as someone who occasionally comes to worship. As Ruby enters the temple and Silverman greets him, Ruby is crying and shaking, seemingly on the verge of emotional collapse. After Ruby leaves the synagogue, he slides his .38 Colt Cobra into the front pocket of his pants.
He drives around town, checking on his competition and angrily noting that places like Club Bali Hai are staying open. How can they disrespect the dead president? He scans the radio for the latest news. Announcers are saying that Lee Harvey Oswald from Dallas, from the same neighborhood as Ruby, will be charged with being part of an international communist conspiracy to murder the president.
Ruby thinks about the hardworking Dallas police—many of whom he considers friends. On an impulse, he decides to order ten sandwiches from Phil’s Deli to take to the cops. Even though the cops tell him they don’t need the sandwiches, by 11 p.m. he is inside Dallas police headquarters. Throngs of reporters are gathered in a corridor while Oswald is interrogated behind a closed door. Newsmen and photographers are frantic to see the suspect, the communist who killed the president. Ruby quickly makes himself at home, handing out free passes to the Carousel Club and helpfully telling out-of-town reporters how to spell the names of various police officers.
One of the cops notices Ruby and calls out, asking what he’s doing.
“I am helping all these fellows,” Ruby says, gesturing grandly toward the reporters.10
After midnight, Oswald finally appears. He has been grilled by detectives for hours. Now reporters are shouting questions at him as he is escorted down the hallway. Oswald passes within two or three feet of Ruby, who still has his pistol in his front pocket. Ruby feels right at home in the Dallas police station. He is, he thinks to himself, “being carried away by the excitement of history.”11
Saturday, November 23
Rumors are circulating that in some Dallas schools, the children broke into cheers and applause when they first heard the news of Kennedy’s shooting.
In Dealey’s Dallas Morning News, the editorial writers express sorrow for the president’s death, and then add: “It cannot be charged with fairness that an entire city is in national disgrace…” 12
The competing newspaper, the Times Herald, is flatly apologetic: “First there had to be the seeds of hate—and we must pray that Dallas can never supply the atmosphere for tragedy to grow again.”13
And at the morning services, at 9
a.m. at Temple Shearith Israel, there is Ruby again. Still despondent, still emotional. Rabbi Silverman is surprised to see Ruby come back. It is out of character. Silverman thinks that Ruby is not very deep, and certainly not an intellectual or political. That he wouldn’t know the difference between a communist and a totalitarian.14
Ruby listens to Silverman’s eulogy. He hears Silverman talk about Kennedy being ambushed in Dallas, shot in the back by an enemy: “Here is a man that fought in all battles, but he didn’t have a chance to fight here, he was shot from the rear.”
Ruby leaves the temple thinking about what he has heard from the rabbi, about the city of Dallas, about the mad jumble of events: “I have been around people that are so smug and hard.”15
Everyone Ruby talks to that day has the same impression: He seems extraordinarily emotional. He gets choked up when he mentions Jackie Kennedy and thinks of the children growing up without a father. As evening descends, Ruby drives over to Dealey Plaza, where he views the clusters of memorial wreaths left overnight. He also decides to take a picture of a billboard downtown that reads IMPEACH EARL WARREN—it reminds him of the anti-Kennedy ad he saw in the Dallas Morning News.
Rhett James was at the Trade Mart when word began spreading that Kennedy had been shot. To him it was like a mental pandemonium—not a physical one, but a mental one. As if the room and everyone in it had surrendered to something. He knew he would have to prepare sermons, eulogies, emergency services at New Hope. And he would talk about the basic things, the elemental things—about hope, about clinging to faith.
James and Lyndon Johnson had been trading letters for the last few months. Johnson and his aides seemed to rely on James’s field reports about the increasingly important black voters in Texas, on how they were feeling about Texas Governor John Connally and his stances on civil rights. And LBJ and his team wondered, internally, where James was headed—what exactly he had in mind as he tried to form a new, black-based political organization in Texas.
Now LBJ is president—and James decides to send him a letter trying to provide some balm:
Dear Mr. President:
… As we have talked in your office many times, I have been working and giving my service to your cause and the cause of our nation… Dallas is hanging its head in sorrow, more so because this shame to our nation happened in our city… As you have stated, this act was caused by conditions which could have occurred in any city. Yet, Dallas is the city it occurred… Today, things have changed, and I and thousands of Texans still feel that we are fortunate that you were the man to take over the position of President…
Mr. President, I will continue to pray for you and work for your cause and I want you to know that I am convinced that you represent the Joshua of the hour…16
In the hours after the assassination, reporters began calling Congressman Bruce Alger, demanding some reaction. Alger, uncharacteristically, refused comment.
Political observers felt Alger was someone Dallas needed to distance itself from. Some brooding, hidden wings of the Dallas Citizens Council probably remained deeply wary of Alger anyway. No doubt some thought he might be, as a public figure, a fiscal liability—annoying the Kennedy administration so much that it was denying Dallas the highly coveted, multimillion-dollar federal project that would turn a cheap real estate investment into a gusher of profit for the local millionaires. They loved Alger when he attacked Kennedy’s politics, but loathed him when he couldn’t figure out a way to convince Kennedy to green-light the lucrative federal project.
On the evening of the assassination, Alger decided to issue a statement:
“No words can express our deep sorrow in this tragic hour. God alone can sustain us in our loss.”17
Now, on the morning following the president’s death, Alger is sending three telegrams—to John Connally’s wife, to Lyndon Johnson, and to Jacqueline Kennedy. The one to Mrs. Kennedy says: “We beseech God to give us strength to preserve our country, to which your husband was so dedicated.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy shooting, thousands of people—including FBI agents—were very anxiously trying to find out where General Walker was and what he was doing. Finally, Walker decides to release a written statement. Walter Cronkite stops dramatically to read it on the air as part of CBS’s continuing coverage:
“From Dallas Texas: The first comment from former Major General Edwin Walker, who is one of the more vocal right wing leaders in the United States. And he said: ‘The death of Mr. Kennedy is not as surprising as it is tragic. The tragic events of yesterday demonstrate the internal threat that can never be underestimated.’ ”
Sunday, November 24
The major networks, magazines, and newspapers all have reporters combing Dallas, and many of them are rushing to prepare pieces to prosecute the city.
The Reverend W. A. Criswell of the mighty First Baptist Church knows the reporters are out and about. He awoke early in the morning, as is his custom. He has already spent hours laboring over the final lines for the day’s sermons.
He has long planned his pre-Thanksgiving sermon to be about the Pilgrim fathers, about how they had brought hope and freedom to a savage world. With the president having been shot eight blocks away, he knows that he will have to offer something different today. He decides to title the new sermon: “The Red Terror.”
Five blocks to the east of the church, embattled Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry has a building crammed full of reporters and photographers amid tight security. Earlier, the police let the media know that Oswald would be transferred from the city jail to the county jail at 10 a.m. The suspect has been relentlessly interrogated for two days now, and this will be another opportunity for newsmen to get a good look at him. The reporters and photographers wait noisily, impatiently, as the clock ticks past ten with no sign of the suspect. Word passes that Oswald is being interrogated one last time upstairs before leaving the building.
At 10:19 a.m., Jack Ruby receives a call at his apartment from a Fort Worth dancer named Little Lynn. She is worried about lost income with the Carousel Club temporarily shutting down, and she is begging for a salary advance. Ruby listens and tells her he will take care of it, that he will go to the Western Union office in downtown Dallas and wire her enough money to tide her over.
Ruby picks out a neat suit, tie, cuff links, and pinkie ring. He sobs quietly as he thinks about the “Letter to Caroline” in that morning’s Dallas Times Herald. In it, a young girl offers to share her own daddy with Kennedy’s now fatherless daughter. Ruby has been telling people that he can’t bear the thought that Jacqueline Kennedy would ever have to return to Dallas to confront in court the man who shot her husband.
Ruby smooths down his oiled hair and grabs his fedora. He brings his small dog, Sheba, and places her in the car. He drives downtown, passing through Dealey Plaza, where fresh wreaths have been laid overnight. He parks across from Western Union. It is 11:05. He leaves Sheba in the car.
The police headquarters is just a block away, and he can see that a crowd is still gathered, even though Oswald should have been transferred an hour ago. Inside Western Union, a line has formed. Ruby waits patiently. Finally, it is his turn, and he signs the paperwork to send the money to Little Lynn. His receipt is stamped with the exact time: 11:17.
Those few blocks to the west, the Reverend W. A. Criswell is in the pulpit, railing against communism, against Lenin, against the revolutionaries who have brought death to Dallas.
The hundreds of congregants huddle and stare at him, listening carefully to their pastor’s first sermon in the wake of the murder of President John F. Kennedy, the man who Criswell once said was surely under the sway of the papal empire:
“The assassination that so darkly and tragically was enacted upon the streets of our queenly city of Dallas was perpetrated by a man who was schooled in Communist ideology… we have seen on the streets of our city, a typical product of Communist ideology: vengeance, blood, terror.”
Finishing up at We
stern Union, Ruby walks down Main Street and to the Dallas police building. His dog is still in his car. Ruby has visited this building many times. He nimbly avoids the large crowd gathered out front and walks down a ramp into the basement. The policeman guarding the area doesn’t even notice him. It is 11:21.
Upstairs, Oswald is finally entering the elevator for the prisoner transfer to the basement. He delayed things even more by asking for a different sweater before being taken downstairs.
As the elevator descends, Oswald is closely handcuffed to Detective Jim Leavelle. Looking over at the prisoner, Leavelle jokes, “Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are.”
Finally, Oswald appears in front of the jockeying reporters and photographers. Flashbulbs are popping and reporters shout questions at him. He appears to be smirking. With everyone turning toward Oswald, Ruby finishes his short walk by joining the throng of newsmen. He has phenmetrazine, a stimulant, in his bloodstream. He’s long practiced the art of getting to the front of a crowd.
Just as Criswell is finishing his First Baptist sermon about the Red Terror creeping into Dallas, the slightly balding Ruby is reaching inside his pocket for his black .38 Colt Cobra revolver.
Suddenly there is a flash of movement as Ruby darts forward and cries out: “You son of a bitch!” The explosion of the gunshot rings off the basement walls. Millions of Americans are witnessing the first-ever live murder broadcast on television.
Ruby is quickly gang-tackled and brought under control. Amid all the shouting and pushing, he looks around, seemingly confused.
“You all know me,” he says. “I’m Jack Ruby!”
Later, in custody on the fifth floor, Ruby stares at the somber officers and agents looming over him. He has been stripped, searched, and relieved of H. L. Hunt’s anti-Kennedy Life Line scripts found in his jacket. Left in his undershorts, Ruby is befuddled. He expected to be greeted as a great hero for killing the communist assassin.
Dallas 1963 Page 33
