Accidental Assassin: Jack Ruby and 4 Minutes in Dallas

By Maurice Carroll

Rumors of a conspiracy started as soon as Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy and were re-doubled when Jack Ruby murdered Oswald in the heavily guarded basement of Dallas police headquarters. This is a story by a reporter who was in that headquarters basement and then worked on the final formal acts of the assassination chronology -- Rubys murder trial and the investigation by the Warren Commission. Unlike the Commissions tedious, detached and disorganized report, Accidental Assassin: Jack Ruby and 4 minutes in Dallas tells what it was like during those tumultuous times. It follows Ruby on his journey to the murder scene and dismisses the thought that he might have been part of a conspiracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479763207

Maurice Carroll

Before becoming director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute (which does public opinion polls) in Hamden, Conn., Maurice Carroll worked for nine newspapers, starting at the Rutherford (N.J.) Republican, in the town where he grew up, and culminating at the New York Times (still there) and New York Newsday (now defunct). At mid-point in his half century of journalism, he worked at every reporters favorite paper, the New York Herald Tribune, which sent him to Dallas after the Kennedy assassination, the topic of this book. With defense attorney Melvin Belli, he wrote Dallas Justice, about Rubys murder trial, and he worked with Bob McFadden and Joe Treaster on No Hiding Place, about the Iranian hostages.

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Copyright © 2013 by Maurice Carroll.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012923182

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4797-6319-1

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4797-6318-4

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4797-6320-7

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Contents

PRINCIPIUM

CHAPTER ONE      The Other Murder

CHAPTER TWO      The New Journalism

CHAPTER THREE      When Dallas was Big D

CHAPTER FOUR      The Unhappy Life of Lee Harvey Oswald

CHAPTER FIVE      Four Minutes on Sunday Morning

CHAPTER SIX      Oh, Dallas!

CHAPTER SEVEN      The Single Bullet

CHAPTER EIGHT      The Conspiracists

CHAPTER NINE      Afterwards

ADDENDUM

PRINCIPIUM

Two tragic events almost 40 years apart—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center—are the story of this book.

Doesn’t everyone remember where they were on those two awful days?

Walking up Broadway in New York City on the way to the Herald Tribune office, I heard the news of the assassination from the clusters of stricken people gathering around the open windows of parked cars, listening to their radios. Soon, I would be off to Dallas, to watch two days later when Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald. It was a bright and sunny day in New York that November 22, 1963.

It was bright and sunny, too, on September 11, 2001, primary election day in New York, and, in my latter-day role as a public opinion poll commentator, I did a television interview on Park Row, next to City Hall Park. Afterwards I strolled to the World Trade Center subway station and took the Eighth Avenue train north to vote, then to go home, where my daughter telephoned to tell me to turn on the TV; an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.

Soon, we learned that this had been a terrorist attack. Like every American, I felt anger at the terrorists. Compassion for the victims. And some apprehension; I leaned out the front window of my apartment and smelled the burning, burning, burning of the destroyed buildings a couple of miles away and the sky resounded with the roar of patrolling jet airplanes. But also—this is selfish, of course, but it’s inevitable among us once-upon-a-time news reporters—I felt jealous to see so many of my friends working on a story that I once would have been reporting myself instead of watching on TV.

Two of those friends, an Associated Press reporter and photographer who had worked the 9-11 story, came to our Quinnipiac University campus to tell about it and, when we got together afterwards, the Kennedy assassination came up in the conversation. You were there when Ruby shot Oswald, right?, the reporter asked. (The news business isn’t all that big. We all know this and that about the people we cover stories with).

The AP team sympathized with my anger at the Warren Commission’s inept telling of the assassination, a study that was supposed to put to rest all the conspiracy talk and instead re-kindled it.

Then came the report by the commission that investigated the 9-11 attack. The chronology was complex—four separate terrorist attacks, two on the World Trade Center, one on the Pentagon, one that ended in a field in Pennsylvania because of a heroic band of passengers who fought the terrorists. But the commission told it neatly and compellingly, not bothering with the side issues and the technical details of the sort that had pre-occupied the Warren Commission, which had a much simpler story to tell, the succeeding narratives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.

Reading the 9-11 report stirred again my long-standing frustration with the Warren Commission, which got the facts right and everything else wrong. We’ve had almost half a century of conspiracy-story foolishness plus one answer—Gerald Posner’s brilliant legal brief that takes all the conspiracy stuff and, claim by claim, demolishes it. But as good as Posner is, he tells what didn’t happen. No one has ever told what did happen, what it really was like.

Look at the difference between the two investigations, I protested to a friend who said he had his doubts about Dallas. It’s not your fault, I said, all the reporting about Dallas that most people like you have seen has been the clutter of the conspiracy nonsense. The Warren Commission reported all the facts, but it’s simply unreadable. It’s incredible that no one has ever written what actually happened. Even at this late date, the story should be told right.

Well, if you think it’s so important to tell what it was really like, my friend said, why don’t you write the story, stripped of the far-out speculation and the accumulated detritus?

All right, I told him, I will.

CHAPTER ONE

The Other Murder

Sunday morning, November 24, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, was clear but cold. The world was still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas two days earlier. The city was shocked and shamed. Dallas churches were crowded.

But our job that chill Sunday morning was basic journalism. The violent weekend would end with a simple tidying up of the assassination chronology. This was shoe-leather stuff that we had done in courthouses and police stations all of our reportorial lives.

Attention had turned to Washington and the gathering for President Kennedy’s funeral. Most of the press pack that had swarmed to Dallas on Friday had left, some for Washington, a few for the new President’s Texas ranch. Some of us stayed to put the final touch on the Lee Harvey Oswald story, his transfer to the Dallas County jail.

We settled into the comfortable coverage of police routine. The headquarters elevator that would take Oswald to the basement garage was creaky and slow, so three reporters waited on the third floor to shout again at Oswald some of the meaningless questions we’d been shouting all through that chaotic weekend. We knew we could run downstairs faster than the elevator would get him there.

They treating you all right, Lee?, one of us asked as detectives led him along the third floor corridor.

He ducked his head and mumbled something in reply.

You satisfied your rights are being protected?

I say I’d like to contact a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Anything against the governor, Lee? (John Connally, who was wounded in the shooting).

No response.

Anything to say in your behalf, Lee?

It was our favorite question, repeated again and again. Oswald turned as if to answer but then the door to the elevator swung shut. The Assassination Museum pictures show him with that same look we remember of belligerent defiance.

We hurried downstairs. The garage was low-ceilinged, with fat pillars between marked-out parking spaces. It was empty now; the police had cleared it out. Two ragged lines of reporters waited outside the elevator door. Politely, the police had asked them to open a path to a car that was backing up. There were television cameras, attached by coiling cables to broadcast trucks outside. Police officers, most in uniform, some in plainclothes, some wearing the white cowboy hats that seemed to be a required uniform adjunct for Dallas detectives, stood watchfully by.

Credentials. Let’s see your press cards, a uniformed police officer said.

We showed our New York City cards and he waved us along.

Oswald and the detectives emerged from the elevator. He blinked in the TV glare. The only sound was the click-click-click of news camera shutters. Ike Pappas pushed his microphone in front of the prisoner. He asked again: Do you have anything to say in your defense, Lee?

The next sound on Pappas’s tape—to hear it now, it sounds so innocent—was a tiny pop, Jack Ruby’s gun firing.

Then two muffled groans, Oswald’s.

Then chaos. A chunky man in a dark suitcoat, Ruby had lunged forward and jabbed a gun into Oswald’s abdomen. He was tackled to the floor by a swarm of police officers. A detective, L. C. Graves, grabbed his gun to stop any more bullets from being fired. Another police officer, D. R. Archer, heard Ruby shout son of a bitch. The wounded Oswald and J. R. Leavelle, the detective in the white cowboy hat who was cuffed to him, were shouldered away. Guns drawn, police officers darted about, looking for another shooter.

Confused and frightened, reporters dodged behind pillars. Momentarily stunned, I looked around and saw people all about with guns in their hands. Could there be another gunman? I ducked for cover. Ike Pappas played his tape for me days later and, in the midst of his colorful, mellifluous radio report, he suddenly wondered—as did everyone else there—if there might be more shooting and he interrupted his report with a muttered, Holy mackerel!

Ruby, hustled into the same elevator that had brought Oswald down, was taken up to the homicide floor. Within an hour, police officers told us they knew him. He was a familiar character around headquarters, the sort of hanger-on who is seen around most police stations.

Swiftly, Oswald was put into an ambulance and taken to Parkland Hospital where, two days earlier, President Kennedy had been pronounced dead. At 1:30 p.m. Police Chief Jesse Curry, an amiable, baldish, plump man who seemed to dwindle as the weekend wore on, led the ever-swelling crowd of reporters to the assembly room in the basement and told them briefly that Oswald had died without ever regaining consciousness. We shouted questions. Curry just shook his head.

Now there was a new, deeper, darker mystery, the renewed suspicion of a complicated plot, on top of the assassination mystery that had begun the weekend.

It seemed to be an impossible coincidence. The assassin was murdered—silenced; the chance to interview him wiped out—inside police headquarters, surrounded by police guards. What might he have told us? How had his murderer gotten in there? How could Oswald and Ruby, two of life’s losers, planlessly perpetrate a mystery on top of a tragedy? The questions persist.

-0-

A half century has turned the assassination of President Kennedy into a history lesson, complete with a museum for visitors. The pictures are familiar. The story is complete. Everyone believes they know now what happened.

But when the museum was the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald stood and aimed his rifle at the presidential motorcade, the world was shaken and mystified. Two days later, when Ruby shot Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, the mystery deepened. It was a story that, after torrents of re-telling, has never died, to an extent because of the way it has been re-told.

Remember the world that we lived in then. The Cold War, now a phrase in history books, was an international reality. Racial segregation was still in place through most of the south, including southwestern places like Dallas. Until the black-bordered stories of the presidential assassination took over newspaper front pages, we were reading about some things that now are history, others that survive only with new names for the players. Martin Luther King’s leadership of civil rights demonstrations would culminate under the next President in the Selma march that led to the voting rights act. The Vietnam war would culminate in the ouster of a President. A changing political landscape would culminate in the shift of the Democratic solid South into an equally solid Republican south.

The year saw the death of Pope John Paul XXIII, the emergence of the Beatles. President Kennedy’s administration had converted the civil rights March ON Washington into the March IN Washington, on the same day that we in the New York City news business focused on a particularly gaudy crime, the killing of two Manhattan roommates that came to be called the career girls murder. Show business made Vaughn Meader’s affectionate spoof of the Kennedy family the record album of the year.

But the front page headlines that we read in the New York Times that late-November week touched only peripherally on big issues. Mostly they were the stodgy gray stories of the sort we read every day. The South Vietnam government’s control of two rice rich provinces was threatened by the Vietcong. Kennedy would give an award to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic scientist who a few years earlier had been labeled a security risk after a squabble over his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, a would-be Republican candidate for President, would not seek Presidential delegates in Pennsylvania in the interest of party unity.

And the President mixed a strong defense of his space program with some old-fashioned earth-bound politics in his political trip to Texas.

Presidential travels are reported by people who know what they’re doing and who, the way journalism works, are given all sorts of official assistance, despite the frequent bleats of complaint from the cosseted people who cover the White House. It was a seasoned pack including Doug Kiker from the Herald Tribune and Tom Wicker from the