Reclaiming History (46 page)

“I have had it,” she complains loudly. “You’re taking my picture without my consent! Now go find out what accommodations you can make for my daughter-in-law and I so that we can be in Dallas to help my son, and let me know in the morning!”
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Thompson and Grant leave the house, but not the area. They sit in their rented car on the dark street in front of the house. Twirling the keys to the car on his index finger as he watches the house, Thompson says, “This, my friend, is probably going to be the scoop of my career. I will kill the first newsman that approaches that house.” Grant, with slightly different priorities, says, “Let’s go. I want to get this film off to New York.” “We’re not leaving here,” Thompson says, “until those lights go out.”
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9:50 p.m.

After talking with Lieutenant Cunningham for nearly an hour, Robert Oswald gives up any hope of speaking with Captain Fritz. He leaves the ruckus of City Hall and walks back to his car seven blocks away. The reporters don’t have any idea who he is, so his stroll through the cool night air is free of pesky newsmen. Getting in his car, Robert starts driving. He has no particular destination in mind. He only wants to still the turmoil in his mind. If anyone were to ask him what he feels, he would say “unspeakable horror.”

Some people are already speculating that the killing of the president was not the isolated act of one man, but the result of a great conspiracy. Robert wonders if it could be true. Is it possible that Marina could have played a role in some plot? What about the Paines? Whom could Lee have possibly become involved with? As the miles click by, he tries to assemble his thoughts and fears into some coherent order, but to no avail. Robert soon finds himself out on Highway 80, approaching the western outskirts of Fort Worth, and suddenly realizes how far he has already driven. He stops for gas, turns around, and heads back to Dallas.
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10:00 p.m.

No sooner than Fritz and Alexander get back to City Hall from dinner than the telephone rings in the Homicide and Robbery office of Dallas police headquarters and Alexander takes the call. It’s Joe Goulden, a former reporter for the
Dallas Morning News
who is now on the city desk of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

“What’s going on down there? We’re not getting anything straight. It’s all garbled. Is Oswald going to be charged with killing the president?” the reporter asks.

“Yeah, we’re getting ready to file on the Communist son of a bitch,” Alexander tells him. When Goulden asks Alexander why he called Oswald a Communist, Alexander tells him about all the Communist literature and correspondence they found at Oswald’s Beckley address. “We have the killer,” Alexander says, “but we’re not sure what his connections are.”

Goulden wants to know exactly when the charges will be filed against Oswald. “As soon as I can draw up the complaint,” Alexander replies.

Goulden says his editor won’t print the part about Oswald being a Communist for fear of a libel suit. The only way he’d print that is if he could say it was part of the formal charge.

Alexander, who would later allow that “I let my mouth overload my ass,” says sarcastically, “Well, how about if I charge him with being part of an international Communist conspiracy? Could you run with that?”

He knew he couldn’t draw up a complaint like that, but Alexander was itching to show Oswald for what he was, a damn Communist. Goulden was more than eager to oblige.

“You got it!” the reporter says.
⁸⁷⁹

Ever since his meeting with Vince Drain an hour and a half ago, Chief Curry has been getting calls from Washington, insisting that the police send all of the evidence up to the FBI laboratory in Washington, although nobody will tell him exactly who it is that is making the demands, always insinuating it’s someone in high authority. Curry manages to get a moment with Captain Fritz and asks him if they are in a position to release some of the evidence to the FBI for testing.

“I need the evidence here,” Fritz argues. “I’d like to have some of the local gun shops take a look at this rifle and pistol and see if they can identify them. How can I do that if they’re in Washington?”

Curry knows he’s right. This case is not under the jurisdiction of the FBI or the Secret Service. Although Curry wants to go all out and do whatever he can to allow these agencies to observe what is taking place, in the final analysis this crime happened in Dallas and would have to be tried in Dallas and therefore it was their responsibility to gather and present the evidence. If they fail, the blame will fall on him. For the moment, the Dallas police chief is unwilling to give in to the demands from Washington.
⁸⁸⁰

I
n New York City, FBI agents watch employees as they rummage through the files of Crescent Firearms Company. Louis Feldsott, president of the company, has been very cooperative, keeping employees after hours to help investigators track the assassination weapon.
⁸⁸¹
Earlier in the afternoon, Dallas FBI agents had canvassed Dallas gun dealers to determine if any of them had ever sold surplus World War II vintage Mannlicher-Carcanos. They found only one who did—H. L. Green Company on Main Street. Albert C. Yeargan Jr., manager of the sporting goods department at H. L. Green, spent the late afternoon with agents reviewing sales receipts for the past few years to determine if his company had ever handled a Mannlicher-Carcano with serial number C2766. The search proved fruitless; however, their records did identify the importer of these Italian 6.5-millimeter rifles as Crescent Firearms Company of New York.
⁸⁸²

The investigation quickly switched to New York, where for the last several hours Crescent Firearm’s employees have been looking for a record of serial number C2766. Suddenly, they have a break. Their records show that C2766 had been wholesaled to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago.
⁸⁸³

Within the hour, Chicago FBI agents are pounding on the front door of the home of William J. Waldman, vice president of Klein’s. Waldman agrees to accompany agents to the office to start a search, but first he’ll need some help. He calls Mitchell Scibor, general operating manager of Klein’s, and asks him to meet him at the office. As Waldman gets ready, he tells waiting agents that this is not a simple matter.

“Klein’s purchases a lot of sporting goods,” he warns them, “of which guns are but one. It could take hours to go through our purchase records.”
⁸⁸⁴

I
n a small alcove of the autopsy room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the acting chief of radiology, Dr. John Ebersole, clips the last of the X-rays onto a light box. Nothing. No bullet. The president’s entire body has been x-rayed and still the doctors have been unable to determine what happened to the bullet that struck his back.
⁸⁸⁵

“Where did it go?” someone asks.

The doctors have no idea.
⁸⁸⁶
A discussion ensues about what might have happened to it. Someone suggests the possibility that a soft-nosed bullet struck the president and disintegrated. Others contemplate that the bullet could have been “plastic,” and therefore not easily seen by X-rays, or that it was an “Ice” bullet, which had dissolved after contact.
⁸⁸⁷
None of the suggestions made much sense, but then neither did the absence of a bullet. FBI agent Jim Sibert decided to call the FBI laboratory and find out if anyone there knew of a bullet that would almost completely fragmentize. He managed to reach Special Agent Charles L. Killion of the Firearms Section of the lab, who said he’d never heard of such a thing. After Sibert explained the problem, Killion asked if he was aware that a bullet had been found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Sibert hadn’t and is nearly certain that no one else at the morgue has either. Sibert hangs up the phone, returns to the autopsy room, and informs the three pathologists that a bullet had been recovered at Parkland Hospital.
⁸⁸⁸

“That could account for it,” Humes said of the missing bullet. He suggested that in some rather inexplicable fashion the bullet might have been stopped in its path and thereafter worked its way out of the body and onto the stretcher, perhaps during cardiac massage.
⁸⁸⁹

10:15 p.m.

Jack Ruby, by all accounts, was having one of the worst days of his life. “He cried harder when President Kennedy was killed than when Ma and Pa died,” his sister Eva would later tell me.
⁸⁹⁰
But his day had started out with anger, not mourning. He had awakened to find a large advertisement in the
Dallas Morning News
in the form of a letter captioned “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” taken out by one Bernard Weissman in which Kennedy is criticized for aiding and abetting international Communism.
⁸⁹¹
Jack is very patriotic, has been all his life. He loves America and can’t tolerate anyone saying anything negative about our government.
*
He was even known to insist that someone he was attending a sporting event with put out his cigarette during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner.”
⁸⁹²
And Jack was a great admirer of President Kennedy and his wife and family, bringing them up in social conversations and praising them.
⁸⁹³
In fact, when someone at the Carousel Club made a disrespectful remark not too long ago about Kennedy, Jack threw him out of the club.
⁸⁹⁴
†
And Jack had forbidden his comics at the club from saying anything or using any material that reflected adversely against “Negroes, Jews, or the Kennedys.”
⁸⁹⁵
How could this fellow Weissman attack “our beloved President,” Ruby thought.
⁸⁹⁶
Indeed, he thought that John F. Kennedy was possibly the greatest man who ever lived,
⁸⁹⁷
and after the assassination started carrying a small picture of the president on his person, kissing it “like a baby” in front of his sister Eva. “My brother had such a great admiration for this man, it’s unbelievable,” Eva would recall.
⁸⁹⁸

After seeing the Weissman ad, Jack called Eva, he was so upset about it. He told her he had called the
News
and bawled them out. “Where the hell do you get off taking an ad like that? Are you money hungry?” It was a rotten thing for any person to question the way the president was running the country. “If this Weissman is a Jew,” he told her, “they ought to whack the hell out of him.” He figured Weissman might actually be a Commie himself trying to discredit the Jews, and Ruby later clips the Weissman ad from his sister Eva’s copy of the
News
, even though he still has his.
⁸⁹⁹
Jack seems to almost be more upset about the audacity of Weissman dishonoring the president by addressing his letter to “Mr. Kennedy,” rather than “Honorable President” or “Mr. President,” than the letter itself.
⁹⁰⁰

When Ruby heard at the
News
that Kennedy had been shot, he turned an ashen color, very pale, and sat completely dazed, a fixed stare on his face that was remarkable enough for people in the office to notice. He said nothing, very uncommon for Ruby.
⁹⁰¹
He eventually came out of it enough to verbally grieve with those around him on the horror and tragedy of what had happened. Ruby used John Newnam’s phone to call his sister Eva, and she was crying hysterically.
⁹⁰²
Ruby asked Newnam to listen to his sister and held the phone up to his ear. Newnam could hear that Eva sounded very upset.
⁹⁰³
Ruby told Newnam, “John, I will have to leave Dallas. John, I am not opening tonight.”
⁹⁰⁴
He left the building and got in his car, sobbing.
⁹⁰⁵
After returning to the Carousel, he ordered that the club be closed for the night, and his employee Andrew Armstrong made the first phone call, to a stripper, Karen “Little Lynn” Carlin, at 1:45 p.m., to tell her not to come in, but he was unable to reach her.
⁹⁰⁶
Ruby’s coworkers saw that he was taking the president’s death harder than even they, and he called what happened an “outrageous crime that would ruin the city of Dallas.”
⁹⁰⁷

Ruby started making a flurry of phone calls from the club,
⁹⁰⁸
the first at 1:51 p.m. to his friend Ralph Paul at Paul’s Bullpen Drive-In in Arlington, Texas, telling Paul “I can’t believe it,” and urging him to close his drive-in restaurant “in honor of the president,” which Paul told him he couldn’t afford to do.
⁹⁰⁹
He called his sister Eileen, in Chicago, and was crying. “Did you hear the awful news,” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Jack said. “Maybe I will fly up to be with you tonight,” he suggested, but she reminded him that Eva, who had just returned home from the hospital from abdominal surgery, needed him now more than she did. “You better stay there,” she told her brother.
⁹¹⁰

Later in the afternoon he called Billy Joe Willis, the drummer at his club. “How could any man do such a thing?” he asked Willis, crying. He also said to Willis—not trying to connect the two acts—“Remember that man making fun of President Kennedy in the club last night?,” referring to a man in the audience who called Kennedy a bum when Ruby, on stage with his twistboard, said, “Even President Kennedy tells us to get more exercise.” Completely broken up over the president’s death, Ruby said, “This is the most horrible thing that has ever happened,” and hung up. Willis was taking the president’s death hard too, but he told his girlfriend later that he couldn’t understand the extent that Ruby was torn up over it.
⁹¹¹

Before the day was out he also called his brother, Hyman Rubenstein, in Chicago, to lament the president’s death—“Can you imagine, can you imagine?” he asked Hyman.
⁹¹²

Ruby also called Al Gruber, a friend of his from Chicago now living in Los Angeles whom he has known for many years and who had stopped by the Carousel to see Jack just two weeks earlier when he was passing through town. “Did you hear what happened?” he asked Gruber. “You mean the shooting of the president?” “Yes, ain’t that a terrible thing. I’m all upset and my sister is hysterical.” Gruber heard Ruby crying at this point, and Ruby said, “I’m crying and can’t talk to you anymore,” whereupon he hung up the phone.
⁹¹³