by Garry Wills
I called Harold to see if he wanted an article of this sort. He did. When I turned in the article, it had just reached the point where Ruby was shooting Oswald. Harold told me to do another article to get Ruby through his arrest and trial. For this second article, I interviewed the prosecutors and defense attorneys in Dallas. Then, back in Baltimore, I read the trial transcript and all the volumes of the Warren Commission testimony on Kennedy’s assassination. When Tom Wolfe assembled an anthology of articles for his book The New Journalism, he wanted to include my account of the Ruby trial. But he showed me his introduction, where he said that, for the New Journalist, it was “all-important to be there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expression, the details of the environment.”1 I pointed out that I was not at Ruby’s trial. He thought from the vividness of my account that I must have been. When he learned I was not, he included instead my account of Memphis after the shooting of Dr. King, where I had been present.
Bill Alexander, the bright and sadistic prosecutor of Ruby, took great delight in tormenting Ruby’s main defense lawyer, Melvin Belli, the so-called King of Torts, whose San Francisco office pioneered medical-claims cases. Belli was so used to handling medical testimony that he began to think of himself as a doctor. For his Dallas case he claimed that the flickering lights in the garage where Oswald was shot had triggered an epileptic fit in Ruby. He went through great rolls of encephalograms with the jury. Alexander asked Belli’s expert witness on radiology if all things do not give off radiation. The man said yes. Even the railing around the jury? Yes. Even the wall of the courtroom? Yes. Alexander was delighted to hear from the police guard that when the jury went into its deliberation room that day, some of its members rushed over to the wall and put their ears to it, trying to hear the radiation.
Alexander knew how to get Belli’s goat. He called the girdled man “Mr. Belly.” When Belli complained to the judge that the prosecutor was mocking him, Alexander sardonically pronounced his name Mr. Bell-EYE. The short Belli wore shoes with uplift heels, which Alexander, talking with reporters, referred to as “fruit boots.” Joe Tonahill, the Texas attorney Belli recruited as his local colleague for the trial, told me that “Mel was at his wit’s end over Bill’s treatment of him.” Tonahill was a study in himself. He had a wheezy Christmas cold and cough when I interviewed him in a coffee shop. Since he had brought no handkerchief with him, he first blew his nose on the paper napkins at the table, then on the doilies placed under our coffee cups, then on the little paper envelopes holding sugar for the coffee, leaving a soggy pile of these materials on the floor beside his chair.
When the Ruby articles appeared, an editor at New American Library asked me to expand them into a book. But others were not pleased with them. I was threatened with three lawsuits. The first one was silly. I had quoted Ruby’s cleaning lady in a way that suggested he was not planning any great act on the fatal day. A Dallas lawyer, perhaps wanting to discredit exculpatory evidence on Ruby’s part, asked the cleaning lady if she had given me an interview. When she said no, he wrote Esquire to say he was suing me on her behalf. Actually, I had taken her words from the Warren Commission volumes. She had not only said exactly what I quoted, but had said it under oath when testifying before the commission.
The second suit was pursued further, into the deposition-taking stage, and it was filed by Mel Belli, who claimed that I had defamed him. Everything I had said about him I had on tape, was in the trial record, or was from the Warren testimony. Esquire’s lawyer asked if I had further derogatory material that I had not used, to prove that I was not just throwing any old charges at him. I said yes. I had got from another of Belli’s lawyers a letter written to the Texas bar by Ruby’s sister, who was supposed to be Belli’s employer. She complained that he would never report to her, or even see her. He was always too busy. Finally, she went to Belli’s hotel during an afternoon break in the trial, knocked on his door, and was admitted on the assumption that she was picking up the room service trays. She found Belli in a circle of reporters, including the famous Dorothy Kilgallen. He was stripped to his jockey shorts, and was taking butter patties from the room service, putting them on a bread knife, and flipping them up to stick on the ceiling. The lawyer said Belli would never go to trial, where that letter could be introduced.
The third suit came from another lawyer, Mark Lane, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that Ruby was part of a plot to cover up the assassination of President Kennedy by removing any possibility that Oswald could talk of it. One of Lane’s arguments was based on the testimony of a woman to the Warren Commission. Though her testimony was included in the voluminous record, it was not even referred to in the report written as a summary of the commission’s findings. For Lane, that was a proof that the Warren Commission was also party to a cover-up.
The name of this woman was given by Lane as Nancy Perrin Rich. Her testimony was of a type familiar in the long line of witnesses before the Warren Commission. In her thirties, she had been everywhere and known everyone. She once worked for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. She had been an FBI informer. She was married to a man who had run guns into Spain for Francisco Franco. She had worked as a bartender in Jack Ruby’s club but left when he roughed her up; when she tried to file charges against him, the police protected him.
She next saw Ruby at a meeting with a military officer where her husband was asked to run guns into Cuba as he had into Spain. Ruby showed up at this meeting, glared at her, and went into an inner room. At another meeting with the same people Ruby also appeared—but so did the son of organized crime lord Vito Genovese. She recognized him from a picture, not of him but of his father. This was a little hard even for Lane to swallow, so he fudged her testimony, saying simply, “A person was present whom Mrs. Rich thought she recognized as someone associated with syndicated crime.”2 This testimony convinced Lane that Ruby was connected with military, pro-Castro, and mob plots. He attacked the Warren Commission for not following up on the testimony, talking to all the people Mrs. Rich identified (though she had often forgotten their names). And he was suing me for defamation, since I had ridiculed his charges.
Because I had read all the Warren volumes, I knew not only that the Rich testimony was internally inconsistent but that it did not match similar stories told by two other witnesses. Lane should have cited these as corroborating the Rich story, since—despite differences—much of what was alleged in the other two places resembles what Rich was saying. There was a good reason Lane had to neglect those two tales after rebuking the Warren people for neglecting Rich’s evidence. The reason is that the two other witnesses were Nancy Perrin Rich under two different names. Ovid, with his tracking skills, found Rich’s husband, and I asked him if he had talked with Lane. He said yes. Did Lane know about the other two times she testified before the commission? Yes. Why did she tell three different stories under three different names? Because she was mentally disturbed. She was under treatment when I called the husband. Lane knew all these things and did his own cover-up in order to accuse others of cover-up. I told all this to Esquire’s lawyer, and asked why Lane would bring a suit when he knew all these things about the Rich story, and that they would come out at trial. The lawyer said it was a nuisance threat, meant to intimidate me and make me stop talking about him.
The Lane case brings out a problem with all the conspiratorialists who fish around in the many volumes compiled by the Warren Commission, finding “evidence” that the commission did not use in the report. The commission was open to anyone who felt he or she could contribute to its knowledge. It suppressed nobody’s testimony. But it did not knock down each false allegation. It did not, for instance, embarrass the poor disturbed woman Lane exploited by showing that she babbled three different accounts, all equally and wildly implausible. There were many nuts, fanatics, and obsessed people who volunteered to speak to the commission. I know this because I was acquainted with one of the fanatics, Revilo Oliver.
Ol
iver was a very learned classicist at the University of Illinois, whom I met on Bill Buckley’s yacht before Buckley stopped using him as a book reviewer because of his growing anti-Semitism. After that, Oliver helped found the John Birch Society and wrote ever more extreme stuff. He not only thought fluoride in the drinking water was a Communist effort to poison Americans—he foiled the plot by keeping a water cooler in his front room full of unfluoridated water, to drink himself and to serve to his guests. Oliver told the Warren Commission that the International Communist Conspiracy had trained Oswald in Russia and dispatched him to kill Kennedy, “who was doing so much for it,” because “the job was not being done on schedule.”
He rejected the idea that Communists had killed Kennedy “because he was planning to turn American.” On the contrary, he said, he saw no evidence that Kennedy planned to “turn American.” Instead, the assassination of Kennedy was meant to trigger the backlash killing of true patriots all across the land. That plan failed only because the Dallas police captured Oswald. Then the Communists had to send Ruby to kill Oswald before he could reveal the plan.
Eventually, Oliver became too crazy even for the Birch Society, and he was forced out, making his few followers call him a martyr, “the man who knew too much.” The Warren Commission did not publicly refute Oliver any more than it did Rich. It did not want to spend decades chasing down the phantoms of fanatics. But that left it vulnerable to men like Lane who could use the fanatics to create their own phantoms.
NOTES
1 Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, The New Journalism (Harper & Row, 1973), p. 21.
2 Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murder of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), p. 295.
4
Turbulent Times
After earlier urban riots—Watts, Detroit, Newark—there was great fear that the cities could succumb to a general conflagration in 1968. Political and police leaders went into a flurry of preparations for trouble, buying armored vehicles and testing new technologies for crowd control. The Pentagon did studies on better ways to back up National Guard units, as it had (belatedly) in the Detroit riot. The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) studied the range of nonlethal weapons that could be used on citizens (exotic things like “liquid banana peel”). The FBI issued a manual, Prevention and Control of Mobs and Riots. The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice made riots a new focus. Antiwar demonstrations were increasing and authorities were scurrying about to cope with the threat.
In this climate, Esquire’s editor, Harold Hayes, sent me to nine cities to talk with mayors and police officials on what preparations they were making for control of the threat. I flew over Watts in a police helicopter. I toured Chicago in police cars. I talked with the police chief in Detroit, Ray Girardin, who said the riot there would not have been so bad if Governor George Romney had not wanted to promote his presidential race by refusing federal troops for too long. I talked to Frank Rizzo, the tough police commissioner in Philadelphia, who had heavily armed teams cruising around the clock for quick response to trouble. Rizzo had new weaponry, including a Stoner gun that could shoot snipers not just at a window or on a rooftop but by firing through a brick wall at them. In Detroit, a police official took me to a range to fire a Stoner gun and showed me a block of clay that had been hit. I could put my fist through the hole—imagine what that would do to a human chest.
A Pentagon adviser told me that the IDA report was bumbling. If I wanted to learn about nonlethal weapons I should go to the young genius who had invented Mace, Alan Litman. I went to Litman’s home for an afternoon and evening, eating dinner with him and his wife. Litman was an experimental designer fascinated by the principles of structure. He had patents for a whole range of new products, not just for Mace. As a college student, he had done experiments on the intelligence of sea life, and he still had, in basement tanks, the crocodile (smart and tamable) and alligator (dumb and dangerous) he used in the experiments. He liked the design principles evolution had given them. Of his crocodile, whom he called Ernst, he said, while tickling the sack under his jaw:He’s a masterpiece of design. See this ridge? It curls the water off around his eyes so he can get up speed without blinding himself. And this bunch of muscles here protects the hinges of his jaw. His teeth are all askew, you notice—he drops and replaces them constantly. He has an inner thin lid under his heavy eyelid—it slides sideways, he can see through it, and it corrects for underwater refraction of light so he can strike accurately underwater. Ernst is a great fisherman.
To demonstrate the inadequacies of the IDA report on nonlethal weapons, he took me out on his porch and fired some of them. Tear gas drifted back on its user unless he was half blinded with a mask. He smeared a little pepper spray on my cheek. In twelve minutes it had begun to sting. Twenty minutes later it had left a red irritation. “It’s a great deterrent for a man attacking you, if you can manage to run away from him for twelve minutes.” Why does pepper spray work on dogs?
It gets into the nostrils and mouth, and on the tongue, and has a good chance of getting in his eyes. But with a human, the nostrils and mouth are dry and not so accessible. To be effective on a human, you have to score a direct hit in the eyes—which are easily shielded or simply closed. For some reason, the Institute of Defense Analysis has shown an entirely disproportionate interest in pepper.
I asked how he had invented Mace. After a friend of his wife was mugged, he experimented with the deterrents available to his wife. They were either ineffective or dangerous (not really nonlethal). He needed something that could be directed in an aim-focused stream that would disable without permanent harm. He found the right combination of chemicals, and he and his wife took out the patent. Some civil rights groups claimed the effectiveness of Mace showed it had lasting harmful effects. To disprove this, the chief of the Cook County police in Illinois, Joe Woods (brother to Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s secretary who handled his tapes), had himself shot with Mace on TV.
Litman said one need not go that far to do an experiment on oneself. He squirted some Mace into the bathtub and told me to duck my face down for a moment near the wet spot—even in that mild dose, it made me feel like my face was on fire. Mace was not for sale at the time except to police and military units, but Litman gave me several bottles—and for years my wife kept one by her bed when I was traveling out of town. Litman stopped giving interviews about his invention as it caused more controversy, so law review treatments of its toxicity had to cite Litman from my Esquire article as the main source on its safety.
In Chicago, I was driven around for two days by Hutch and Duke—James Hutchinson and Leonard Hunter—two deputy sheriffs hired by Joe Woods to be his Youth Council. They were black policemen in their twenties, Vietnam veterans, who spouted statistics like sociologists and analyzed the various communities, black and white, they drove me through. They were black militants, but they controlled the young men like themselves by saying, “Don’t be stupid.” Their heroes were men like Stokely Carmichael. “He never lied to us.” They had no respect for most of the Chicago police, but they liked Woods, who never condescended to them. They had more intelligent things to say about riots and riot control than I had heard from most policemen or politicians.
After I had completed my tour of nine cities, I went to the Pentagon to interview the provost marshal general, Carl Turner, the commander of military police, on his preparations for urban disorder. Turner was in charge of troops at the March on the Pentagon, which had not been handled well (I was there to see that). But he admitted no error, nor any uncertainty in his role of “making doctrine” (as he put it) on riot control. When I asked to interview him, as the man responsible for riot response, he refused, saying the press had no right to know what the military was planning: “I have too often been the screwee from the press.” When I went above him and got a Pentagon official to say he mu
st respond to legitimate questions, he received me with great and surly hostility.
I asked permission to tape our interview and he refused. I said that it was a protection for him, against misquotation. He answered, “If the newsmen are going to misquote me, then I say to hell with them.” He brought with him two public relations people from the Pentagon, who throughout the interview regularly reduced his answers to euphemism or placation, to his obvious disgust. When he got to “making doctrine” over riots, he told me that the first priority, when trouble impends, is for the police to take all the guns from gun shops. When I ran this idea by various police chiefs, they snorted with derision. Apart from the legal problem of seizing property in this way, the diversion of manpower to the task would take officers away from dealing with crowds, just when they are most overstretched.
