History Lesson 
Who Was Jack Ruby?
How a small-time strip joint operator ushered in America’s age of violence.
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If you believe that Jack Ruby was part of a conspiracy, a “double cutout” as they say in the spy trade, then you must also conclude that the conspiracy involved dozens or even hundreds of plotters, including Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas police department. Time and events make Ruby’s role in a conspiracy almost impossible. Oswald was to have been transferred from the city jail to the county jail at 10 a.m.—that was a solid commitment Chief Jesse Curry made to his intimates among the press corps. If Ruby had been gunning for Oswald, if he had premeditated the crime that 80 million witnesses saw him commit, he would have been at the police station at 10 a.m. But he wasn’t. There were several reasons for the delay in transferring Oswald, but the main one was Will Fritz’s insistence on interrogating the suspect one more time in city jail.
Ruby knew when the transfer was scheduled. He had covered the event like a reporter on a beat: Parkland Hospital, the assassination site, the press conferences. He was always at the center of the action, passing out sandwiches, giving directions to out-of-town correspondents, acting as unofficial press agent for District Attorney Henry Wade—who, like everyone else on the scene, simply regarded Jack Ruby as part of the furniture. Twice during a press conference Wade mistakenly identified Oswald as a member of the violently anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee. The second time a friendly voice at the back of the room corrected the D.A. “No, sir, Mister District Attorney, Oswald was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” The voice was Jack Ruby’s. How did he know that? Well, it was in all the news reports, but there is a more intriguing theory: an FBI report overlooked by the Warren Commission suggests that one of Ruby’s many sidelines was the role of bagman for a nonpartisan group of profiteers who stole arms from the U.S. military and ran them for anti-Castro Cubans.
Ten o’clock came and went, and still Oswald hadn’t been transferred. It was after ten when Ruby received a telephone call from one of his strippers who lived in Fort Worth. The girl needed money, she needed it right then. Ruby dressed and drove to the Western Union office in the same block as the police station. He couldn’t have missed the crowd lingering outside on Commerce and on Elm. At 11:17 Ruby wired the money. He walked up an alley, passed through the crowd, and entered the ramp of the police station, a distance of about 350 feet. He was carrying better than $2000 in cash (he couldn’t bank the money because the IRS might grab it) and his gun was in its customary place in his right coat pocket.
Three minutes after Ruby posted the Western Union money order, he shot Oswald.
If the world at large was shocked at that precise minute, consider the bewilderment of Jack Ruby as the Dallas cops pounced on him. What was wrong? Had he done something he wasn’t supposed to do? Didn’t everyone want to kill Oswald? What the hell was this?
“You all know me,” he said pathetically. “I’m Jack Ruby.”
Jack Ruby had to believe that he was guilty of a premeditated, calculated murder. The alternative—to admit he was crazy—was too awful to contemplate.
During the trial he told his chief attorney, Melvin Belli, “What are we doing, Mel, kidding ourselves? We know what happened. We know I did it for Jackie and the [Kennedy] kids. I just went in and shot him They’ve got us anyway. Maybe I ought to forget this silly story that I’m telling and get on the stand and tell the truth.”
The silly story that Belli, Joe Tonahill, and other members of the defense team were attempting to pass along to the jury was that Ruby killed Oswald during a seizure of psychomotor epilepsy. Belli and Tonahill still subscribe to this contention.
“The autopsy confirmed it. Ruby had fifteen brain tumors,” Joe Tonahill told me. Tonahill, a huge, deliberate, friendly man, maintains the Ruby trial “was the unfairest trial in the history of Texas.” Judge Joe Brown, exhibiting a classic downtown Dallas mentality, appointed Dallas advertising executive Sam Bloom to handle “public relations” and overruled the defense on almost every motion. Ruby himself considered hiring a public relations man—or that’s what he wrote in a letter to his intellectual hero, Gordon McLendon.
“Jack Ruby needed help long before Kennedy came to Dallas,” Tonahill said. He was seated at the desk of his law office in Jasper, in front of a four-by-eight-foot blowup of Bob Jackson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning photograph of the Oswald murder. “He was a big baby at birth—almost fifteen pounds. That could have had something to do with it. His mother died in an insane asylum in Chicago. His father was a drunk and was treated for psychiatric disorders. A brother and a sister had psychiatric treatment. Ruby tried to commit suicide a couple of years earlier. His finger was once bitten off in a fight. He had a long history of violent, antisocial behavior, and when it was over he wouldn’t remember what he had done. What provoked him? Maybe the flashbulbs—that’s a common cause in cases of psychomotor epilepsy—or the TV cameras, or the smirk on Oswald’s face.”
I asked Tonahill what he thought of Ruby as a person.
“He was a real object of pity,” Tonahill said. “Anytime you see a person overflowing with ambition to be someone, that person is admitting to you and the world that he’s a nobody. Ruby was like a Damon Runyon character—a total inconsistency.”
If Jack Ruby was not crazy when he gunned down Oswald, it’s a safe bet the trial drove him that way. Day after day in the circus atmosphere of Judge Brown’s courtroom, Ruby was forced to sit as a silent exhibit while psychiatrists called him a latent homosexual with a compulsive desire to be liked and respected, and his own attorneys described him as a village clown. He didn’t even get to tell his own story, and by the time the Warren Commission found time to interview him months later, Ruby was convinced that there was a conspiracy to slaughter all the Jews of the world.
“In the beginning,” Tonahill told me, “Ruby considered himself a hero. He thought he had done a great service for the community. When the mayor, Earle Cabell, testified that the act brought great disgrace to Dallas, Jack started going downhill very fast. He got more nervous by the day. When they brought in the death penalty, he cracked. Ten days later he rammed his head into a cell wall. Then he tried to kill himself with an electric light socket. Then he tried to hang himself with sheets.”
Ruby wrote a letter to Gordon McLendon claiming he was being poisoned by his jailers. Many Warren Report critics take this as additional evidence of a conspiracy. If someone did poison Ruby, it was a waste of good poison. An autopsy confirmed the brain tumors, massive spread of cancer, and a blood clot in his leg, which finally killed him.
The trial of Jack Ruby may have been one of the fastest on record. The crime was committed in November and the trial began in February. “The climate never cooled off,” Tonahill said. “He was tried as it was peaking. There was this massive guilt in Dallas at the time. The only thing that could save Dallas was sending Ruby to the electric chair.”
Though there are unanswered questions in his mind, Tonahill supports the conclusions of the Warren Report.
“If there was a conspiracy, and it was suppressed, it had to involve maybe a million people. That’s a bunch of crap.
“The worst mistake the Warren Commission made was yielding to Rose Kennedy and suppressing the autopsy report. There was something about Kennedy’s physical condition the family didn’t want made public. I don’t know what it was. Possibly a vasectomy—there was a story he had a vasectomy after the death of his baby. Being good Catholics, the Kennedy family wouldn’t have wanted that out.”
Once close participant in the bizarre happenings of Dallas who isn’t satisfied with the Warren Commission investigation is Bill Alexander, the salty, acid-tongued prosecutor who did most of the talking for Henry Wade at the Ruby trial. Alexander and former state Attorney General Waggoner Carr both urged the commission to investigate FBI and CIA personnel for information linking the agencies to Lee Harvey Oswald. There is no indication that such an investigation took place.
“I’m in Washington telling the commission to check out this address I found in Oswald’s notebook, in his apartment, the day of the killing,” Alexander recently told the Houston Chronicle. “None of those Yankee hot dogs are paying any attention to me.
“So I say ‘Waggoner, c’mon, let’s get a cab.’ We jump in an tell the driver to take us to this address. We get there and what do you think it is? The goddamn Russian Embassy. Now, what does that tell you?
“To this day, I don’t think anybody from the commission followed that up.” Although Alexander, known to members of the press as “Old Snake Eyes,” was the main reason Henry Wade got all those death penalties that the leaders of Dallas were convinced would deter crime, he is no longer on the DA’s staff. Shortly after his infamous declaration that Chief Justice Earl Warren didn’t need impeaching, he needed hanging, Alexander resigned to enter private practice.
When I telephoned Alexander for an interview, he told me he didn’t want to talk about the assassination.
“I’d like to kick the dogshit out of every Yankee newspaperman, club the f—ers to the ground,” he said. You can still see them, right up to this day, hanging around the Book Depository,” Alexander went on. “Fat-ass Yankees in shorts and cameras getting the roofs of their mouths sunburned. A carload of Yankees pulled up to my friend Miller Tucker and said [Alexander slipped into an Eastern accent], ‘Officer, where did Kennedy get shot?’ Ol’ Miller taps the back of his head and says ‘Right here, friend, right here.’ “
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