Victor Robertson, a WFAA Radio reporter, also knew Ruby. He saw him approach the door to the office where Oswald was being interrogated and start to open it. “He had the door open a few inches,” recalled Robertson, “and began to step into the room, and the two officers stopped him . . . . One of them said, ‘You can’t go in there, Jack.’”
Ruby probably left police headquarters shortly after 8:30 . . . 22
He had failed in his first attempt. Now he made a quick trip to his apartment, where he found George Senator, his roommate, at home. Senator later stated in an affidavit that it happened to be the “first time I ever saw tears in his eyes.”23 Then Ruby went on to his synagogue. No surprise if he was ready to pray.
Posner: He cried openly at the synagogue. “They didn’t believe a guy like Jack would ever cry,” said his brother Hyman. “Jack never cried in his life. He is not that kind of a guy . . .”24
Yes, he will tell people, he simply cannot bear the thought of that beautiful woman, the former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, being obliged to return to Dallas and testify. You pay your money and you take your choice, but as a betting proposition—with all due respect to Jacqueline Kennedy—it must be 18 to 5 that Ruby is thinking of himself. And if it were anyone but Jacqueline Kennedy, the odds might be 99 to 1 that he is brooding about no one but himself. All he has is his life, and it is being taken away from him. A precious gem, a ruby, is about to be thrown into the crapper.
After the synagogue, he went right back to police headquarters.
Posner: When he arrived at the third floor of the station, he encountered a uniformed officer who did not recognize him. Ruby saw several detectives he knew, shouted to them, and they helped him get inside. Once there, he said he was “carried away with the excitement of history.” Detective A. M. Eberhardt, who knew Ruby and had been at his club, was in the burglary-and-theft section when Jack “stuck his head in our door and hollered at us . . . . He came in and said hello to me, shook hands with me. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was a translator for the newspapers . . . . He said, ‘I am here as a reporter’ and he took the notebook and hit it.”25
He has taken cognizance of the situation. He has not been a vendor in ball parks and burlesque houses and a street hustler for too little: He is laying the groundwork to become indispensable to any number of reporters. He never knows when the right door will open and the opportunity will be there. This is the field of operations, and he may have a chance to try again before midnight.
Posner: In less than half an hour, Oswald was brought out of room 317 on the way to the basement assembly room for the midnight press conference. Ruby recalled that as Oswald walked past, “I was standing about two or three feet away.”26
The challenge has to be equivalent to jumping for the first time into a quarry pool from a height of forty or fifty feet. And Ruby cannot take the step. All he has to do is pull out his gun and finish Oswald off, but he cannot make the move. It is, after all, a vertiginous leap.
He is sick at his own cowardice, even as all of us are when we fail to take that daring little jump which some higher instinct, or a bully, or a parent, or a brother, is commanding us to take.
Posner: In his first statement to the FBI, Ruby admitted he had his .38 caliber revolver with him on Friday night (Commission Document 1252.9). Later, when he realized that carrying his pistol might be construed as evidence of premeditation, he said he did not have his gun on Friday. However, a photo of the rear of Ruby, taken in the third-floor corridor that night, shows a lump under the right rear of his jacket. If he was a mob-hired killer with a contract on Oswald, he would have shot him at the first opportunity. Certainly, any contract to kill Oswald would not have been one Ruby could fulfill at his leisure. Yet when he had the perfect opportunity, with Oswald only a couple of feet away, Ruby did not shoot him.27
Posner may lack empathy here. Just because you are told to kill Oswald doesn’t mean you can do it. Indeed, Ruby may still be looking for some way to perform the act and yet get out scot-free. That is a fantasy, but then, he is not a professional killer. What he cannot stomach is that there seems no way he will be able to follow orders without paying a prohibitive price.
In the meantime, to cut the losses to his ego, he continues networking.
MR. PAPPAS. It was at this point that I ran into Ruby—the first time that I recall. He came up to me as I was waiting for Wade and he said . . . “Are you a reporter?” I said, “Yes.” . . . And he reached into his pocket, and he pulled out a card. It said the Carousel Club on it. And I was amazed. I didn’t know who he was or what he was. My immediate impression of him was that he was a detective. He was well dressed, nattily dressed, I imagine. [A little later] he said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “I am trying to get Henry Wade over to the telephone.” He said, “Do you want me to get him?” . . . I said, “Yes, I would like to have him over here.” And he went around the desk, over to Henry Wade on the telephone . . . 28
Ruby is investing more and more of himself in a role that enables him to hang around the third floor, waiting to pick up a better opportunity. It helps that he loves the role. As long as he can live within it, he can, like an actor, feel vital and alive; he can keep the dread of his real mission apart from himself.
Once he leaves police headquarters, however, he has to pass through a Walpurgisnacht. He wanders back and forth to newspaper offices and takes sandwiches to the people working at KLIF. In between, he spends an hour in a car talking to a couple, Kathy Kay, a former stripper at the Carousel, and Harry Olsen,29 a policeman, and all three are talking in Olsen’s car about how terrible it must be for Jackie Kennedy. The stripper begins to weep and the men join her with a few tears. In the moil and meld of such mutual compassion for Jackie Kennedy, all three feel respect for each other, deep respect, and each expresses it so.
After more wandering through the Dallas night, Ruby goes back to his apartment and wakes up George Senator.
MR. SENATOR. Yes; it was different. It was different; the way he looked at you . . .
MR. HUBERT. Had you seen him in that condition before?
MR. SENATOR. . . . I have seen him hollering, things like I told you in the past, but this here, he had sort of a stare look in his eye . . .
MR. GRIFFIN. I didn’t catch that. What kind of a look?
MR. SENATOR. A stare look; I don’t know . . . I don’t know how to put it into words.
MR. HUBERT. But it was different from anything you had ever seen on Jack Ruby before?
MR. SENATOR. Yes.
MR. HUBERT. And it was noticeably so?
MR. SENATOR. Oh yes.30
Ruby then calls up his handyman, Larry Crafard, at the Carousel, wakes him up, and drives the youth and George Senator out to a billboard in Dallas that says: IMPEACH EARL WARREN. Ruby had been very upset earlier that day when he saw an ad, taken out by a man named Bernard Weissman, in the Dallas Morning News alluding to Jack Kennedy as a Communist supporter. He is now convinced that the John Birch Society invented the name Weissman in order to blame the Jews.
Now he, Jack Ruby, will soon be one of the Jews being blamed for the death of Kennedy, even if he will only be blamed in the secondary sense that they have selected him to be the one to kill Oswald. So Jack Ruby, a Jew, will pay the second heaviest price. He is a scapegoat, just like the Jews in the Holocaust, and just like all Jews who will soon be blamed for the Weissman ad.
In his distraught state, he takes photographs of the billboard—IMPEACH EARL WARREN—as if this is not only evidential material of some sort but may even prove sacramental for someone in his position. If he is acting a little loopy, well, very few hit men out on a mission are reputed to comport themselves as one hundred percent sane.
It is daybreak on Saturday before he drops Larry Crafard off at the Carousel and the handyman promptly goes back to sleep on the sofa in Ruby’s office.
Crafard has his revenge, however, by telephoning Ruby at eight-thirty in the morning. There is no f
ood for the dogs at the Carousel, he tells his boss. Ruby flies into a rage for having had his sleep disturbed and proceeds to chew Crafard out as he never has before. Indeed, his language is so personal that Crafard packs his stuff and takes off. He is angry enough or uneasy enough to hitchhike back home to Michigan.
Somewhat later that morning, we learn from Posner,
Ruby turned on the television and saw a memorial service broadcast from New York. “I watched Rabbi Seligman,” he recalled. “He eulogized that here is a man [JFK] that fought in every battle, went to every country, and had to come back to his own country to be shot in the back. That created a tremendous emotional feeling for me, the way he said that.”31
Doubtless, Ruby is trying to find impressive reasons for his intended act. He is too big a man to do such a job just because the Mob has ordered it; no, he is potentially an honorable Jewish patriot who wishes to redress a wrong in the universe. We have to recognize that Ruby, now that he has been given his assignment, does not have to justify it with Mob motivations or by Mob professionalism—“I’m there to do the hit, that’s it”—no, Ruby, being an amateur, would look to ennoble his task.
In any case, he seems to move without large purpose until mid-afternoon, when he goes to Dealey Plaza. As he sees the multitude of wreaths laid out for Jack Kennedy in the plaza, he weeps in his car, or so he testifies.
Posner: When he left Dealey Plaza, it appears Ruby once more went to the third floor of the police headquarters, expecting an Oswald transfer that never took place. He later denied being there Saturday because, again, he probably feared it might be interpreted as evidence of premeditation. The Warren Commission said it “reached no firm conclusion as to whether or not Ruby visited the Dallas Police Department on Saturday.” Yet credible eyewitness testimony shows he was there.32
He is still looking and he is still weeping. Ruby must have wept and/or had tears in his eyes ten to twenty times from Friday to Sunday. But, we can remind ourselves once more, he is crying for himself. His life is slipping away from him. Nevertheless, to maintain some finer sense of himself, he is also weeping for Jack, Jackie, and the children.
Soon enough, he begins to prowl again:
Posner: . . . Later in the afternoon [TV reporters in their van] saw him on their monitors wandering the third floor of police headquarters and approaching Wade in an office, from which regular reporters were barred.33
Indeed, he is hyperactive:
Posner: Thayer Waldo, a reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, watched Ruby giving out Carousel cards to reporters between 4:00 and 5:00 P.M. He was aggressive in getting the reporters’ attention, pulling the sleeves of some and slapping others on the back or arms. When he got to Waldo, Ruby said, “ . . . Here’s my card with both my clubs on it. Everybody around here knows me . . . . As soon as you get a chance, I want all of you boys to come over to my place . . . and have a drink on me . . .”34
Half of the time he is even behaving as he would if his life were to go on just as it used to. He seems to have forgotten that he has closed the Carousel. He is living in two states of being. He is in his own skin and he is also playing the lead in a film full of significance and future heartbreak.
That Saturday night, with Oswald locked in his jail cell on an inaccessible floor, begins another long dark journey. Ruby has failed to produce, and it is a reasonable assumption that they will soon be letting him know about it.
Posner: By 9:30 Ruby had returned to his apartment. There, he received a call from one of his strippers, Karen Bennett Carlin, whose stage name was Little Lynn. She had driven into Dallas from Fort Worth with her husband and wondered if the Carousel was going to open over the weekend, because she needed money. “He got very angry and was very short with me,” Carlin recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t you have any respect for the President? Don’t you know the President is dead? . . . I don’t know when I will open. I don’t know if I will ever open back up.’”35
How can he? If he does not kill Oswald, the Mob, after breaking his nose, his chin, and his kneecaps, will proceed to take his clubs away. But if he succeeds, the government will take the Carousel. At ten o’clock, he telephones his sister Eva to complain about how depressed he is.
An hour goes by, and then he calls Ralph Paul. No answer.
Posner: Ruby telephoned [Paul’s] restaurant again at 11:18 and discovered Paul had gone home. He then telephoned Paul three times at home, at 11:19 for three minutes, at 11:36 for two minutes, and at 11:47 for one minute. Paul said he did not feel well, and told Ruby “I was sick and I was going to bed and not to call me.”36
That night, the Dallas jail received anonymous phone threats on Oswald’s life. On later reflection, Captain Fritz thought the calls might have come from Ruby. Perhaps they did. Ruby would have been looking for excuses—I had it all set up for Sunday, but they moved Oswald on Saturday night.
Now, he calls an old friend, Lawrence Meyers, who is in Dallas for a couple of days:
MR. MEYERS. . . . he was obviously very upset . . . he seemed far more incoherent than I have ever listened to him. The guy sounded absolutely like he had flipped his lid, I guess . . .
I said, Jack, where are you . . . He said come have a drink with me or a cup of coffee with me . . . I said, Jack, that is silly. I am undressed. I have bathed. I am in bed. I want to go to sleep but,
I said, if you want a cup of coffee you come on over here and come on up to my room . . . He said, no, no, he had things to do. He couldn’t come over . . . This went on for a little while and the last thing I said, Jack, why don’t you go ahead and get a good night’s sleep and forget this thing. And you call me about 6 o’clock tomorrow night . . . and we will have dinner together and he said okay . . .
MR. GRIFFIN. . . . the FBI has quoted you as saying that one of the things that Ruby told you in the conversation was, “I have got to do something about this.” Do you remember that?
MR. MEYERS. Definitely.37
We can interpret that remark in two ways: I, on my own, have to do something about this; or, I have been told to do something about this.
He slept in one or another fashion that night and awoke in a terrible mood:
MR. SENATOR. . . . He made himself a couple of scrambled eggs and coffee for himself, and he still had this look which didn’t look good . . . how can I express it? The look in his eyes? . . .
MR. HUBERT. The way he talked or what he said?
MR. SENATOR. The way he talked. He was even mumbling, which I didn’t understand. And right after breakfast he got dressed. Then after he got dressed he was pacing the floor from the living room to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the living room, and his lips were going. What he was jabbering I didn’t know. But he was really pacing.38
In the telephone conversation the night before, Meyers, referring to Jackie Kennedy, had said: “Life goes on. She will make a life for herself . . .”39
It was the worst thing Meyers could have said. By now, Jack Ruby and Jackie Kennedy are one—two suffering souls who have merged. Ruby does not want to make a new life for himself—he wants his old one back.
It is so painful. Ruby cannot ask directly for sympathy, but his self-love is pouring out of him. He is bleeding for Jackie Kennedy as if she is that beautiful element in his soul that no one else knows about, and soon it will all be lost.
He is distraught in still another fashion. When he woke up on Sunday morning, he must have been living with what he had learned the night before—Oswald was scheduled to be transferred at 10:00 A.M. If he wasn’t at City Hall for the transfer, he might never have as good an opportunity at the County Jail.
Ruby, however, had decided not to be present. During the night, he had made up his mind. He would take whatever consequences would come from the Mob. Fuck them. He would not be their hit man.
Events, however, intervened.
Posner: At 10:19, while still lounging in the apartment in his underwear, he received a telephone call from his dancer Karen Carlin . . . ?
??I have called, Jack, to try to get some money, because the rent is due and I need some money for groceries and you told me to call.” Ruby asked how much she needed, and she said $25. He offered to go downtown and send it to her by Western Union, but told her it would “take a little while to get dressed . . .”40
Then he went out. It was a little before 11:00 A.M., and on his way he drove past Dealey Plaza and began to cry once more.
Of course, if you have been debating with yourself for close to forty-eight hours whether you are or are not going to pull a trigger, and either way death or utter ruin stands before you, you might cry too at every reminder of where you are. Which is that you didn’t take your last opportunity at 10:00 A.M.
Oswald, however, has not yet been transferred. Fritz has decided to let the press have one more look at him. A photo opportunity!
Meantime, Ruby is at the Western Union office sending $25 to his stripper. If his life is going to be smashed, he can at least do one last good deed.
Posner: . . . he patiently waited in line while another customer completed her business . . . When he got to the counter, the cost for sending the moneygram totaled $26.87. He handed over $30 and waited for his change while the clerk finished filling out the forms . . . Ruby’s receipt was stamped 11:17. When he left Western Union, he was less than two hundred steps from the entrance to police headquarters.41