History Lesson 
Who Was Jack Ruby?
How a small-time strip joint operator ushered in America’s age of violence.
(Page 4 of 4)
That afternoon I met Alexander in his law office and he told me about his Manchurian Candidate theory.
“I worked a solid two years on this,” he began. “I read the entire twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report just to protect myself, and tracked down every lead I could get my hands on, and I don’t have any evidence that anyone acted with Oswald.
“Now,” he said, raising a finger and slipping into third person singular so that it would be clearly understood he was speaking hypothetically, “Who knows how a person has been brain-washed—motivated—hypnotized?
“A man is cashiered out of the Marine Corps—he moves to Russia—he marries the niece of the head of the OGPU spy school—he stays a certain amount of months, then turns up at the American Embassy and says, ‘King’s X, fellows, I want to go home. Do you think you people might could pay my way back to New York?’ Wouldn’t somebody debrief that man? Hell, the FBI knew he was in New Orleans. They sent his folder to Dallas before the assassination.
On the other hand, Alexander has not the slightest doubt that Ruby acted alone in a legally sane, premeditated manner. Alexander and Dr. John T. Holbrook were among the first to question Ruby after the shooting.
“I’m paraphrasing now,” Alexander said, “but it was like he wanted to open the Jack Ruby Show on Broadway, get a TV show, write a book. He asked me if I thought he needed an agent.”
Alexander spat tobacco juice in a can and said: “Jack Ruby was about as handicapped as you can get in Dallas. First, he was a Yankee. Second, he was a Jew. Third, he was in the nightclub business.
“That’s horseshit about him being a police buff. He didn’t think any more of a policeman that he did a pissant. It was just good business. The vice squad kept plus and minus charts on the joints ‘cause the licenses came up for renewal each year. The vice squad can kill a joint if they get in the wrong mood. Who wants to drink beer with a harness bull looking over his shoulder?
“Quit kidding me about how much Ruby loved people. Or how much he loved the Kennedys. Hell, where was he while the motorcade was passing through downtown? In the goddamn Dallas News, placing an ad for his club.”
The ex-prosecutor sat back and sighed.
“It’s a real experience to see how real, factual history can be distorted in ten years so that people who lived it can’t recognize it.”
And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, from Little Gidding
On a warm day twelve years removed from that time of Ruby and Oswald, my son Mark and I walk the streets of downtown Dallas and know the place for the first time.
The Blue Front where you could eat the world’s best oxtail soup and watch Willie sweat in the potato salad is gone. The Star Bar is gone. Hodges, Joe Banks, the Oyster Bar, the musty little book stores with their dark volumes, the mom and dad shops, the smell of pizza, of chili rice, of peanut oil, of stale beer, of perfume, lost now in the tomb of our memory. What you smell twelve years later is concrete. What you see are the walls of a glass canyon.
The corner of Commerce and Akard, which used to bustle with beautiful women in short skirts and quick men with briefcases, is nearly deserted, except for a few Hare Krishnas and some delegates to the Fraternal Order of Eagles. The Carousel, the Colony, the Theatre Lounge, the Horseshoe Bar, the whole Strip has been leveled and turned into a gigantic parking lot for the invisible occupants of the glass skyscrapers. The big department stores and the theaters and the good restaurants have gone to the suburbs. Twelve years ago you could have dropped a net sixteen blocks square from the Republic National Bank tower and have been fairly sure that you had caught a quorum of the Dallas oligarchy. There is still a feeling of affluence, but the vortex of power has moved to the suburbs, out Stemmons, out Greenville, out Northwest Highway, out to Old Town—whatever Old Town is.
There are blacks on the city council, and the mayor is a former grapefruit hitter for the Old Scotchman. The Old Scotchman long ago sold KLIF and is seldom seen anymore; he is a Howard Hughes figure, dabbling, so it is said in multinationals and worldwide real estate. When the sun disappears behind the canyon walls, what you see in downtown Dallas is blacks with mops and brooms, waiting for an elevator. Slack-faced office workers wait for a bus in front of the old Majestic Theater, and black hookers with beehives appear to show the Fraternal Order of Eagles the sights.
I wonder: could there be a Jack Ruby in 1975? Where would he go? What would he do? The Dallas Jack Ruby knew is gone.
That Dallas was a city of shame, but it wasn’t a city of hate. It was ignorant, but it wasn’t mean. Its vision was genuine and sincere, but it had the heart of a rodent. In the subterranean tunnels of those proud spires of capitalism and free enterprise crawled armies of conmen and hustlers, cheap-shot artists and money changers, profiteers and ideologues, grubbers, grabbers, fireflies, eccentrics, and cuckoos. Dallas was just like every place else, except it couldn’t admit it. It was not Lee Harvey Oswald and the murder of John F. Kennedy that proved what Dallas was really like, but Jack Ruby and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.
We drive out Turtle Creek past General Walker’s prim gray fortress. On the front lawn, a crude, hand-lettered marquee said DUMP ESTES, a reference, I suppose, to the Dallas superintendent of schools who apparently wasn’t resisting integration fast enough. Like downtown Dallas, the General is quieter these days. Ken Latimer, a resident actor at the Dallas Theater Center, tells us,” General Walker and his people used to picket us fairly regularly, but they’ve been quiet for some time now.” Latimer played the lead in the DTC production of Jack Ruby, All-American Boy, a drama that attempted without much success to answer the question: Was Jack Ruby a typical American?
“Ruby wanted to be liked, to be respected, to be successful according to the value system of our society,” Latimer says. “He was a cheap success, but in his own mind he had class. Violence was admissible to his system—toughness—let no one push you around.
“You asked me was it the climate of the times that made Ruby do what he did? No, Jack Ruby would do the same thing today.”
We talk to stripper Chastity Fox, who played the role of Jada. Chastity had never met Ruby or Jada; she was a junior in an all-girls Catholic school in Los Angeles when Kennedy was assassinated. She is fascinated that I had known them and asks me four questions for every one I ask her. Chastity looks something like Jada, except better.
She refused to do Jada’s tiger-rug hunch in the play. “Her show was nasty,” Chastity says. “I’m more of a dancer.” Chastity’s best act is belly dancing, a subject she teaches at the University of Texas at Arlington. But like Jada she’s come through some tough places—she remembers stripping in the Lariat Bar in Wyoming while a three-piece Western band played “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon?”
“The club action in Dallas is different now than it was in Ruby’s time,” Chastity says. “There are still a few clip joints like Ruby ran, and there are three, maybe four, traditional strip places where you can go watch a show and not get hustled. The big thing now is topless. The traditional strip show—we call it parading—is dying out. It’s sort of sad. It is an American tradition, but it dates back to the Forties and Fifties when you couldn’t see ass or boobs walking down the street.”
Although she never knew Jack Ruby, Chastity had heard of him for years from her agent, Pappy Dolsen. Pappy was one of Ruby’s contemporaries, an old-time club owner and booking agent, a gentleman tough from a truly tough time. Pappy had told the story many times how Ruby telephoned him the day before Oswald was killed and said: “I know I did you wrong, Pappy, but I’ll make it up to you. I’m going places in show business, and when I do, you’re going with me.”
Pappy has had a heart attack and is in the intensive care ward at Baylor Medical Hospital, but Chastity shows us a letter that Ruby had written to Pappy years ago. It said:
We regret, at this time, we are unable to book the “act” you have for us—I’m sure its as wonderful as you mention but the price is too f—ing high. Hoping to confront you on a more senseable base in the future. I remain.
Jack Ruby
There is one more thing to do. Mark was six years old, a Dallas first-grader when Kennedy was murdered. He doesn’t remember much of it. But there was an article in Look, written by a Fina Oil Company executive named Jack Shea, which mentioned that at one public school in Dallas, children cheered the news of the assassination. Jack Shea was a good Catholic and a top-level businessman, but his gut feeling that Dallas was big enough to hear the truth from one of its own was a serious miscalculation. Shea was fired. He is now a partner in a Los Angeles ad agency.
Jo and I named our son Shea after the Fina executive, and I was curious to read the article one more time. Funny, I had never told Mark or his sister Lea how Shea got his name. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. Too many things had happened.
Twelve years ago, when the first announcement that the President had been shot was broadcast over the PA system at Richardson Junior High School, Gertrude Hutter, an eighth-grade teacher, began crying. Bob Dudney, who is now a reporter for the Times Herald, recalled the moment. She turned her back long enough to compose herself, then addressed her class with these prophetic words:
“Children, we are entering into an age of violence. There is nothing we can do about it, but all of us must stay calm, and above all, civilized.”
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