As my family was coming home from church 60 years ago today, Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on national TV. If not for Jack Ruby, there would be little controversy today about the assassination of President Kennedy; a trial by jury, not the imperfect Warren Commission, would have determined Oswald’s guilt or innocence and whether anyone else was involved. Because of Jack Ruby, the Kennedy Assassination case will NEVER be closed.
On Saturday evening, 23 November, the Dallas FBI office as well as the Dallas Sheriff’s office received identical telephone calls. The caller warned, “I represent a committee that is neither right wing nor left wing. Tonight, tomorrow morning, or tomorrow night, we are going to kill the man who killed the President. We want to warn the FBI, the Police and the Sheriff’s department so that none of them are hurt. In any case, however, we will kill him.”
This call was almost certainly made by Ruby. He was on a first name basis with a lot of Dallas Police officers, including Detective Jim Leavelle who is in the tan suit to Oswald’s immediate right in the photo above. For a short period during 1959, Ruby was also a criminal informant for the FBI. So, he would not want to hurt any of them.
As threatened, at 11:21 AM, Sunday morning, 24 November, inside what was supposed to be a heavily guarded area in the basement garage of Dallas Police Headquarters, Ruby simply walked down the garage ramp, saw Oswald coming into view, and shot him.
Oswald died 1 hour and 46 minutes later at Parkland Hospital in Emergency Room #2, the same room that had been used two days previously to treat Governor Connally. The attending doctors decided it would have been sacrilegious to treat Oswald in the adjacent Emergency Room #1 where President Kennedy had died exactly 48 hours earlier.
What We Will Never Know
Forewarned, how did the Dallas Police allow Ruby to get close enough to murder such an important prisoner? Nobody knows. Ineptitude or conspiracy, take your pick.
Why did Ruby murder Oswald? Nobody knows. Anguish over the assassination of President Kennedy or conspiracy, you judge.
Upon witnessing Ruby murder Oswald on the TV in his Georgetown mansion, senior CIA official Des Fitzgerald broke down in tears and told his wife, “Now, we will never know.”
What We Do Know
While it seems unlikely that we will ever know whether there was or was not a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy, there is no factual doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the two shots that hit and killed the President. Any conspiracy theory - to be tenable - must realistically account for the role of Oswald.
Regardless of the role of the accused, what occured at Dealey Plaza was a covert intelligence operation designed to deceive, as any spy should know.
Still So Sad...60 Years Later.