Reclaiming History (325 page)

The next day, October 9, the TEC sent Oswald to the Burton-Dixie Corporation for a job as a clerk trainee. Emmett Hobson at Burton-Dixie knows that the company didn’t hire Oswald, but told the FBI he didn’t recall why, and could not recall the background information Oswald had given him. Burton-Dixie was located at 817 Corinth in Dallas, an industrial area near Oak Cliff, which again, unfortunately for the buffs, was nowhere near the motorcade route.
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On October 14, Oswald applied for a job at the Wiener Lumber Company in Dallas. The proprietor, Sam Wiener, was impressed with Oswald as a prospective employee until Oswald was asked to show his Honorable Discharge Card, which Oswald, of course, was unable to do. In the “Remarks” section of Oswald’s application, Wiener typed, “Although this man makes an excellent appearance and seems quite intelligent he seemed unable to understand when I continually and clearly asked him for his honorable discharge card or papers for the latest (just ended) hitch. I believe he does not have [it] and will not get such a card or paper. Do not consider for this reason only.”

The lumber company was at the corner of Inwood Road and Maple Avenue, near Love Field, so was close to the motorcade route, but again, not on it. The closest that the president’s motorcade came to this location was at the intersection of Lemmon Avenue and Inwood Road, a little more than three-quarters of a mile from Wiener Lumber.
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Again, the fact, alone, that Oswald was applying for jobs up through October 14 at locations not on the motorcade route virtually precludes the notion of conspiracy among rational people.

24. In the same vein, although Oswald applied for his job at the Book Depository Building with Roy Truly on October 15, the Depository had two buildings, the one at Houston and Elm that everyone knows about, and another building called the “Warehouse,” located at 1917 Houston, a building that was larger than the one at Houston and Elm but with two fewer stories.
*
The Warehouse was not on the parade route, being about four blocks north of the Book Depository Building. (Indeed, at that time in 1963, Houston Street became unpaved one block north of Elm.) Truly just as well could have assigned Oswald to work in the building at 1917 Houston as at the building at Houston and Elm. “I might have sent Oswald to work in a warehouse two blocks away,” Truly said. “Oswald and another fellow reported for work on the same day [October 15] and I needed one of them for the depository building. I picked Oswald.” Truly said he “hired” the other “boy” for the Warehouse.
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Neither Oswald nor the supposed conspirators behind him could have possibly known or foreseen which building Truly would have assigned Oswald to. And if Truly had sent Oswald to 1917 Houston, Kennedy would not have passed under Oswald’s window and there wouldn’t have been an assassination. What type of massive conspiracy by the CIA, mob, et cetera, to murder Kennedy would be completely dependent on what building Truly assigned the assassin to? I mean, would any group of conspirators choose a location for killing Kennedy that depended on an arbitrary decision such as this one that was wholly beyond its control? Of course, we could make Roy Truly part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, something that would be perfectly all right with the conspiracy theorists.

It should be noted further that, as we saw in this book, there is absolutely no evidence that any group such as the CIA or mob had anything to do with Oswald getting a job at the Book Depository Building, the building that literally enabled Oswald to successfully kill Kennedy.

25. Oswald told Marina he didn’t care for his job at the Book Depository Building, and as late as November 9 (Ruth Paine thinks it may have been November 2),
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just thirteen days before the assassination, he applied for a job, per Marina, at “some photographic” company but did not get it.
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So up to thirteen days before the assassination, or twenty at the most, Oswald sought a job that would have taken him away from his sniper’s nest right above the president’s limousine. Some conspiracy.

26. We know why Oswald shot Kennedy from the Book Depository Building. He worked there. Besides, no better opportunity to kill Kennedy would probably ever come to him. But if a powerful organization like the CIA, KGB, or organized crime, with vast resources at its disposal, decided to kill the president of the United States, obviously it would reconnoiter assassination sites around the country where the president was scheduled to be, searching for the very best one it could find. With this in mind, why in the world would any of these groups have chosen a location for their hit man that had a giant and heavily foliaged oak tree obstructing his view of the president during several of the critical seconds in which he would want to be tracking and shooting the president? And why would they choose to shoot the president at a time when at least 80 percent of his body was concealed and protected by the body of his limousine?

27. If a group like the mob or the CIA was behind Oswald’s assassination of Kennedy, in the period of time leading up to the assassination they (his “handlers,” per conspiracy lore) would obviously have to be in touch with him. But in a telephone conversation, Mrs. Puckett told me that none of the seventeen tenants of the rooming house in 1963 had their own phone. She said they all shared “one communal pay phone on the wall in the hall back near the kitchen, and with all of them having only this one phone, it was in use a lot.”
⁶⁷

Also, Oswald spent every weekend, except one, with his wife and children at the Paine residence in Irving, and missed no days of work at the Book Depository Building. In the evenings we know he went to the nearby washateria on occasion, and went out on the evenings of October 23, a Wednesday, when he attended a speech by General Walker, and October 25, a Friday night when he was in Irving and attended a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union. But other than this, according to Mrs. Puckett’s mother (Mrs. Johnson) and the housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, in the five weeks prior to the assassination Oswald simply never went out. Mrs. Johnson said that except for watching TV with the other renters sometimes (during which, she said, if they talked to him, he wouldn’t answer), “I just really never did see that man leave [his] room…95 percent of the time he would sit in his room.”
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Earlene Roberts said, “He was always home at night—he never went out.”
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And Ruth Paine testified at the trial in London that Oswald was a loner who never had a relationship with anyone other than Marina, and never received or made any calls at her house phone while he was in her home. When I asked her, “So you’re not aware of any contacts he had with anyone?” she answered, “No.”
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So it would seem that the biggest murder plot in American history, with the inevitable follow-up conversations, could only have taken place under the following circumstances: Oswald called his mob or CIA contacts from his job at the Book Depository Building, or they called and asked for him. But Roy Truly, the superintendent at the Book Depository, testified before the Warren Commission that there was only one phone (on the first floor) for the employees to use during their lunch hour “for a minute” and they were “supposed to ask permission to use the phone.” And Truly said, “I never remember ever seeing him [Oswald] on the telephone” during work hours.
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Or on the way home from work Oswald got off the bus to call his co-conspirators from a pay phone. Or they called him at the rooming house (Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper, said that Oswald never received any telephone calls),
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or he called them with a bunch of change from the busy communal pay phone on the wall in the hall back near the kitchen of the rooming house.
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Just how likely is any of this?

Moreover, Arthur Johnson, the landlord at Oswald’s rooming house, told
Dallas Morning News
reporter Hugh Aynesworth on the afternoon of the assassination that Oswald “
always
talked in that foreign language when he talked on the phone.” Whom was he talking to? Roberts, the housekeeper, told Aynesworth that Oswald “dialed that BL number [Irving, Texas, where Marina was living] a lot.”
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As far as receiving phone calls, the landlady, Mrs. Johnson, like Earlene Roberts, said she didn’t recall Oswald ever receiving a call at the rooming house.
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28. Part of a criminal’s invariable preparation for any premeditated crime is to contemplate how to pull it off
without being caught
. Although Oswald may have been disoriented enough not to have considered this part of the venture, we can be more than 100 percent certain that a group like the CIA, mob, or military-industrial complex would have. Since we know this to be true, if a group was behind Oswald’s act, it is absolutely inconceivable that it wouldn’t have done everything possible to avoid having its hit man captured and interrogated by the authorities, which carried the enormous danger of his cracking and implicating the group. No matter how far removed the group personally may have been from his act, he would have to have sufficient knowledge to incriminate whoever approached him to do the job, that person could in turn put the hat on the person or persons above him, and so on up to the architects of the assassination themselves. Since they would know this, at a very minimum they would have tried to provide for Oswald’s escape. But much more probably, a car would have been waiting for him at a prearranged place after he left the Depository Building, not to help him escape, but to drive him to his death.
*
Yet here we have Oswald, right after the assassination, leaving the Depository Building, completely alone and wandering out on the streets, trying to get back to his home by catching a bus, then deciding to get off and find a cab.
This fact alone, and all by itself, tells any sensible person that Oswald acted alone, that there was no conspiracy in the assassination to kill Kennedy.

And as indicated, when Oswald was arrested he only had $13.87 on his person,
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not enough to get him far away from Dallas, which, in the unlikely event the mob or CIA didn’t arrange for his immediate death, they would have wanted him to be.

Even if we make the completely unreasonable assumption that a group behind Oswald’s killing Kennedy would not have made every effort to help Oswald escape or kill him after he left the Book Depository Building to ensure he wasn’t captured and interrogated (i.e., apparently the group wanted him to be grilled for hours on end
before
it killed him), and accept the assumption made by so very many that it decided, instead, to have Ruby silence Oswald for it, let’s see where that takes us. There are two realities to consider. First, by the time Ruby shot Oswald, Oswald had already been interrogated for twelve hours over a three-day period (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) by investigators from the Dallas Police Department, FBI, and Secret Service, as well as by the U.S. Post Office inspector and U.S. marshall in Dallas.
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Second, if it was the group’s plan to get someone to silence Oswald after Oswald killed Kennedy, all rational minds have to agree that the group surely would not have waited until
after
Oswald killed Kennedy before it started looking for someone to silence Oswald. This would all be worked out, of course, well in advance.

In view of these two realities, the evidence that Ruby did not silence Oswald for any group such as the mob is that if he had been chosen to kill Oswald, he would have done so the first opportunity he had, rather than give the authorities two more days to interrogate Oswald, and that was on Friday evening at the Dallas Police Department. That evening, while Oswald was being grilled in the Homicide and Robbery office by Captain Fritz and others, Ruby, we know, was right outside Fritz’s office talking to reporters. At one point, Fritz brought Oswald out of the office and Oswald walked right past Ruby, coming within two to three feet of him.
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And Ruby admitted to the FBI that he had his revolver, the one he used to kill Oswald two days later, in his right front trouser pocket because he had a lot of money from his nightclub on his person.
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Ruby’s own attorney, Tom Howard, said Ruby was armed with his revolver that Friday night.
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*
Presumably at the request of his lawyers, Ruby wrote his version of the events that led up to his shooting of Oswald on 3 × 5 inch cards, and the cards were given to his lawyers. Some were prepared before his trial, others in advance of a motion for a new trial. On one of the cards, he wrote in his handwriting, “Had I wanted to get him [Oswald] I could have reached in and shot [him] when either Fritz [or] Curry brought him out in the hall, when they told the press that they would bring him down in the basement.”
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In addition to the fact that if Ruby killed Oswald for the mob (or any other group) he would have done so on Friday night to prevent further interrogation of Oswald, there is another reason why Ruby would have killed Oswald Friday night. The mob and Ruby would necessarily have to believe that Oswald would be extremely well protected by Dallas law enforcement, so Ruby would have no choice but to kill him the first opportunity he had since he would have had no way of knowing that he would ever have another opportunity to do so.

The fact that Ruby did not kill Oswald on Friday night, when it would have been so easy for him to have done so, is virtually conclusive evidence,
all by itself
, that he didn’t kill Oswald on Sunday for anyone but himself, which in turn is just further evidence that there was nothing inside of Oswald to silence because he too acted alone.

29. One other indication that Oswald’s decision to kill the president was essentially spontaneous (and therefore, devoid of any conspiracy with others) and formed sometime after the route of the president’s motorcade in front of Oswald’s workplace first became public only three days before the assassination, is his lack of planning to ensure his survival. Although Oswald wanted to survive—he tried to escape, and also physically resisted arrest, striking the arresting officer and drawing his revolver before it was wrenched away from him—he apparently never thought out his escape, even to the obvious point of bringing his revolver to work with him so that he would have it to defend and extricate himself from any possible confrontation with the authorities after his attempt on the president’s life the next day. Instead, he admitted during his interrogation by Captain Fritz of the Dallas Police Department that after he left the Book Depository Building following the assassination, he went back to his room at 1026 North Beckley in Dallas and got his revolver.
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