Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  MR. RUBY. . . . I felt very emotional and very carried away for Mrs. Kennedy, that with all the strife she had gone through—I had been following it pretty well—that someone owed it to our beloved President that she shouldn’t be expected to come back to face trial of this heinous crime.

  And I have never had the chance to tell that, to back it up, to prove it.8

  Since he has already spoken of threats to his life and to his brothers and sisters and Warren will not take him back to Washington, he now has to remove all onus from the Mafia. So he brings in the John Birch Society, but vaguely . . . vaguely . . . No one can follow him now.

  MR. RUBY. . . . there is a John Birch Society right now in activity, and Edwin Walker is one of the top men of this organization—take it for what it is worth, Chief Justice Warren.

  Unfortunately for me, for me giving the people the opportunity to get in power, because of the act I committed, has put a lot of people in jeopardy with their lives.

  Don’t register with you, does it?

  CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. No; I don’t understand that.9

  Back goes Ruby to Jackie Kennedy. It may not be very convincing, but at least it is a story that cannot be disproven. What with the way he has learned to talk, back and forth, in and out, about and around, nobody is going to get into his head and refute his tale.

  MR. RUBY. Yes . . . a small comment in the newspaper that . . . Mrs. Kennedy may have to come back for the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  That caused me to go like I did; that caused me to go like I did.

  I don’t know, Chief Justice, but I got so carried away. And I remember prior to that thought, there has never been another thought in my mind; I was never malicious toward this person. No one else requested me to do anything.10

  “No one . . . requested me to do anything.”

  If a copy of this transcript gets out—and there are lawyers and lawyers’ clerks abounding in the halls of Ruby’s paranoia ready to rush to the wrong people with just such a text—he can always point to this line: “No one else requested me to do anything.”

  It is so serious to him, and so godawful. He, Jack Ruby—a good and generous man who fought his way up from the Chicago streets into a decent existence, a semi-decent existence, anyway—is now going to be executed by the government, or else he will be killed by some Mafia minion, some prison guard or convict, in a jail he knows is not safe, because of a crime he did not wish to commit in the first place.

  It is monstrously unfair to Ruby, thinks Ruby, and more unfair to his family. The people outside who will punish him if he rats on them are evil. And evil has no bounds, as Hitler proved. So, if Jack Ruby tries to explain to the Warren Commission that he was only an agent in the death of Oswald, a pawn for the Mafia leaders who passed the order down the line to the man who gave him the order, then there will be Mafia leaders rabid with rage because he tried to rat on them. In retaliation, they will yet kill all the Jews. The safety of the Jews always hangs by a hair, anyway.

  Let us try to assimilate the reasoning. It is not that Ruby is insane. He is, however, all but insane: He has an even larger sense of the importance of his own life than did Oswald. If they kill Ruby, feels Ruby, then all of his immediate family and his larger family, world Jewry, is in peril.

  So he rallies for one more attempt:

  MR. RUBY. . . . it is pretty haphazard to tell you the things I should tell you . . . I am in a tough spot and I do not know what the solution can be to save me . . . I want to say this to you . . . The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment. Consequently, a whole new form of government is going to take over our country, and I know I won’t live to see you another time.

  Do I sound sort of screwy in telling you these things?

  CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN. No; I think that is what you believe, or you wouldn’t tell it under your oath.

  MR. RUBY. But it is a very serious situation. I guess it is too late to stop it, isn’t it?11

  If he cannot save himself, then he cannot save humanity. He is, unknowingly, a spiritual brother to Oswald. The fate of mankind, so each reasoned separately, rested on his shoulders.

  He makes his very last attempt. How many times will he have to spell it out? Can’t they comprehend why he must get to Washington for these lie detector tests?

  MR. RUBY. I have been used for a purpose, and there will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don’t suffer because of what I have done.12

  Yes, if I am killed, my people will be killed.

  MR. RUBY. . . . Because when you leave here, I am finished. My family is finished.

  REPRESENTATIVE FORD. Isn’t it true, Mr. Chief Justice, that the same maximum protection and security Mr. Ruby has been given in the past will be continued?

  MR. RUBY. But now that I have divulged certain information . . . 13

  He has spoken too much on this day, he is trying to tell Gerry Ford. His security will be affected. “I want to take a polygraph test,” he tells them, but “maybe certain people don’t want to know the truth that may come out of me. Is that plausible?”14

  If Ruby is not out of his mind, merely all-but-insane—that is, highly disturbed but sane—then he really does seem to be saying that he acted as a hit man. Yet there is still the odd wait on line in the Western Union office. How to explain that?

  We had better take a look at a few Mafia sentiments concerning Kennedy. Indeed, we are obliged to.

  For months, through all of 1963, there had been low sounds rumbling down from the summits. “Who will remove this stone from my shoe?” asked Carlos Marcello, referring to Jack Kennedy as the stone, and Santos Trafficante had said worse. Jimmy Hoffa was livid on the subject of the Kennedys. Not only was there a host of rumors after November 22 that Trafficante, Marcello, and Hoffa had given the order to kill Jack Kennedy, but indeed the House Select Committee on Assassinations, so far as it came to a conclusion, decided in 1979 that the Mafia probably had done it (although, certainly, no smoking gun was found).

  Recently a book, Mob Lawyer, by Frank Ragano, Trafficante’s legal counselor, was a bit more specific, although no more can be claimed for such a work in relation to the assassination than that it is a teaser; but Ragano does make it clear that Marcello and Trafficante certainly wanted Jimmy Hoffa to believe they were responsible for the act. “You tell him he owes me, and he owes me big,” said Marcello to Ragano,15 passing a message to Hoffa in impeccable Sicilian metaphor that a proper repayment for such a coup might be to receive a loan of $3.5 million from the Teamsters’ pension fund for investment in a lavish French Quarter hotel that Marcello and Trafficante wished to open. Ragano’s disclosure supplies no witness to their conversation but Trafficante (now dead).

  Nonetheless, it stimulates one’s own imagination toward two hypotheses, each of which, for our purposes, can point in the same direction. An hypothesis, no matter how uncomfortable or bizarre on its first presentation, will thrive or wither by its ability to explain the facts available: These two hypotheses are able not only to live but to nourish themselves on the numerous details Gerald Posner gathered from various sources in his long and careful delineation of Jack Ruby’s movements during the three days, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, of Oswald’s incarceration. Indeed, Posner’s chapter on Ruby may be the most careful and well-written section in his book.

  Posner amasses these details to prove that Ruby was not acting under orders but was mentally unbalanced, and he gives us more than thirty pages of text as he follows Ruby’s behavior after the President’s death.

  It will be interesting, however, to use Posner’s carefully collected details to support an opposite point—that Ruby killed Oswald under orders from above.

  Let us take up our two hypotheses. The first, and larger, one is that Marcello and/or Trafficante did give an order sometime in September, October, or November to assassinate Jack Kennedy. Given, however, the solemnity of such a deed and the dangers surroundi
ng such an attempt, the precautions employed to wall themselves off from the act would have been so thoroughgoing that the order had to pass through a number of cut-outs, and each cut-out would only be able to identify the man who had given him his order. Be it said that the executive details of the assassination were left to people at the other end of the line—those who would do the deed. So great was the separation, in fact, that Marcello and/or Trafficante would not know the killer (or killers) or the date or the place. It could happen anywhere—Miami, Texas, Washington, New York—it would not matter. They would not be near any of the immediate details.

  Immediately after the assassination of Kennedy occurred, they assumed—how would they not?—that it was the fulfillment of their order. When they learned, therefore, in the first hour that Oswald was calling himself a patsy, his fate was sealed. A patsy talks—Oswald had to be removed. That he was the nephew of Dutz Murret and so could be connected, no matter how indirectly, to Marcello doubled the need to get rid of him. That he had not been one of their killers and had nothing to do with them might never have occurred to Marcello or Trafficante. They were hardly going to be in conference with their cut-outs. Instead, a quick order was sent out: Put a hit on Oswald. This time they were in a rush, so there were probably not as many cut-outs; and more than one candidate for hit man in Dallas may have been selected, either in the way of locals or out-of-state professionals quickly dispatched there on Friday afternoon. Ruby—so this hypothesis would go—was one of the putative hit men. He was an amateur, a flake, and might be lacking enough dedication to pull off the job. But Ruby did present two positive factors: He was, when all was said, a part of their culture—he would be afraid to talk—and he had the huge and unique advantage of access. For every soldier they made, the Mafia knew the characters and habits of a thousand men. So they also knew that Ruby was on good, friendly terms with at least a hundred Dallas cops. Ergo, Ruby could get to Oswald. He might not be the best man for the job, but he was certainly the one who would have the best chance of doing it in the shortest possible time.

  Word, therefore, was passed to him by somebody he saw on Friday afternoon. It would be rank speculation to fix on Ralph Paul, Ruby’s oldest friend, a man then in his sixties, for Paul was gentle and had no more known relations to the Mafia than that he ran a restaurant in Dallas. Of course, it can be said that big-city restaurant owners are rarely without liaison to the Mob. Ralph Paul was also one of Ruby’s closest friends and was owed tens of thousands of dollars by Ruby—which the Mob would also have known. Ralph Paul could have delivered a message: “Kill Oswald and they will take care of you.”

  If the question was how could Ruby do the deed and get away with it, the answer was that with the right lawyer, Ruby would only receive a few years or, with a defense on grounds of insanity, might get away with no time at all. His financial condition could certainly be alleviated. His deep debts would be rearranged, and the money he owed to the IRS could be paid off. And for motive Ruby was furnished with a beautiful if crazy reason, or came up with the reason himself—which is even more likely—because the reason existed already as a kind of minor motive within him, a small infatuation: He was the kind of exceedingly sentimental man who would indeed have detested the pain it would cause Jackie Kennedy to testify in Dallas. An actor can play a killer, or a lover, or a policeman, or a thief if even 5 percent of such a possibility exists within him. Ruby was an actor manqué: He had the first requirement for good stage performance—his emotions were quickly available, so available indeed that they kept intruding on his syntax, which is why his speeches are sometimes so hard to follow.

  The above is the first hypothesis. The second is simpler. Marcello and Trafficante had made their noises back and forth with Hoffa about getting a hit on the President, but they had issued no orders. They had merely fumed, and been afraid to make such a move. Yet when the President was killed, they had an opportunity to rake in some huge profits with Teamster funds, so they took pains to let Hoffa know that they had been the masterminds behind the deed. Indeed, Ragano hints at this likelihood in Mob Lawyer: “If there was a possibility of making big money, Santo and Carlos were capable of conning Jimmy into believing they had arranged the assassination solely for his benefit.”16 Now Jimmy could show his appreciation by diverting those Teamster pension monies into a loan for their hotel. The problem was Oswald. When he talked, assuming he would, Hoffa would be able to see that Marcello and Trafficante had had nothing to do with the death in Dealey Plaza. So Oswald had to be marked for extinction.

  Hypothesis One and Hypothesis Two may be at great variance, but they come to the same conclusion—given the need to move quickly: Jack Ruby is anointed to be a hit man.

  That he did not see it as an honor is evident in his behavior. The assignment is equal to the total disruption of his life. Ralph Paul, if he was the last cut-out to Ruby, would have issued no personal threats, but then, he would not have had to. To disobey that kind of order would prove considerably more damaging than the cost of doing the deed. Ruby could only guess who might have initiated such a project, but whoever the top man was, he would not be sitting far from the devil’s right hand.

  If we are now in position to see whether the details collected by Posner conflict or agree with the common point of these two hypotheses, the first question to pose is when Ruby might have been given such an order: The earliest time that one can reasonably suggest is when he talked to Ralph Paul, at about 2:45 that Friday afternoon. It was only an hour and a quarter after the announcement of the death, but then, the move from above could have been quick. Marcello and Trafficante may have been renowned not only for their caution but for their speed.

  Posner: The Carousel’s records show a call to the Bullpen [Paul’s] restaurant at 2:42 for less than a minute. When Ruby discovered Paul was not at his restaurant but instead at home, he telephoned him there. The phone record shows he called Paul at 2:43.17

  MR. PAUL. . . . when I got home Jack called me and he said, “Did you hear what happened?” I said, “Yes; I heard it on the air.” He says, “Isn’t that a terrible thing?” I said, “Yes; Jack.” He said, “I made up my mind. I’m going to close it down.” . . .

  MR. HUBERT. Did he discuss with you whether he should close down?

  MR. PAUL. No; he didn’t discuss it. He told me he was going to close down.18

  Unless it was Paul who told him to. Ralph Paul, as the message bearer, could well have said: “Jack, you’ve got to close down for the next couple of days. You are going to need all your free time to find a way to bring this off.”

  Posner presents evidence that would oppose such an assumption. Ruby is very emotional in the office of the Dallas Morning News after he first hears of the attack, and speaks already of how awful it is for Jackie Kennedy and her children. He is crying when he leaves the newspaper office. This, however, is only by Ruby’s own account to the Warren Commission: “I left the building and I went down and got my car, and I couldn’t stop crying . . .”19 But he may have been lying, particularly if he did not start crying until later that day.

  In any event, he visits his sister twice that afternoon, and by then must certainly have been given the word. His sister was ill in bed, having just returned to her home a few days before from an abdominal operation, and he had gone out to shop for her.

  Posner: Ruby was back at Eva’s by 5:30 and stayed for two hours.

  Eva said he returned with “enough groceries for 20 people . . . but he didn’t know what he was doing then.” He told her that he wanted to close the clubs. “And he said, ‘Listen, we are broke anyway, so I will be a broken millionaire. I am going to close for three days.’” In dire financial straits, and barely breaking even with both clubs open seven days a week, his decision to close was an important gesture . . .

  But his sister Eva witnessed the real depth of his anguish, and unwittingly contributed to it. “He was sitting on this chair and crying . . . . He was sick to his stomach . . . and went into the bathroom . .
. He looked terrible.”20

  As she says to the Warren Commission:

  MRS. GRANT. . . . he just wasn’t himself, and truthfully, so help me, [he said] “Somebody tore my heart out,” and he says, “I didn’t even feel so bad when pops died because poppa was an old man.”21

  This, she indicates, is the worst state she has ever seen him in. That he has brought more food than anyone can eat is natural. Food is life, and his life may soon be over. It is all very well to take a shot at Oswald, but what if he, Jack Ruby, is mowed down in the process?

  Once he left his sister’s house, he went over to police headquarters at City Hall, where Oswald was being interrogated. He never had had trouble getting in before, and now, given the exceptional influx of newsmen, there was no difficulty at all. From 6:00 P.M. on, he was there, expecting, but not knowing whether he would have, an opportunity to get near enough to Oswald to do the job.

  Posner: John Rutledge, the night police reporter for the Dallas Morning News, knew Ruby. He saw him step off the elevator, hunched between two out-of-state reporters with press identifications on their coats. “The three of them just walked past policemen, around the corner, past those cameras and lights, and on down the hall,” recalled Rutledge. The next time Rutledge saw him, he was standing outside room 317, where Oswald was being interrogated, and “he was explaining to members of the out-of-state press who everybody was that came in and out of the door . . . . There would be a thousand questions shot at him at once, and Jack would straighten them all out . . . .” Soon several detectives walked by, and one recognized him. “Hey, Jack, what are you doing here?” “I am helping all these fellows,” Ruby said, pointing to the pack of reporters . . .