Why Do They Hate Us So Much?
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Dallas was my hometown. For twenty years my neighbors and I have suffered the world’s blame. Now it is time to lay our burden down.
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Eventually Jack Ruby would come to the same conclusion that many other Americans reached when they looked at the White House and saw Lyndon Johnson. “If Adlai Stevenson had been vice president,” Ruby told a reporter, “there would have been no assassination.” Johnson, for his part, always thought there was something fishy about the conclusions of the Warren Commission—which he appointed—and he never satisfied his own doubts about a conspiracy.
For me, Johnson’s presidency was a long embarrassment, part of the shame of being Texan. Suddenly everyone was better than us. In those days Texas plates on your car were an invitation to rudeness, if not worse. When news of the assassination came over the radio, one Texas driver was paying for gass off the Pennsylvania Turnpike; the attendant threw his change in his face. That reaction endured, in less spontaneous fashion, for years, even after Memphis and Los Angeles had their own tragedies. Dallasites always begrudged the fact that those cities were never taken down, the way Dallas was, and made to feel at one with Birmingham and Selma.
Our family made a trip to Florida that summer. We stopped at a service station for gas and Cokes. It was blisteringly hot; auto air conditioning was still a rich man’s privilege, unknown in our family, so we sat in a sweat and drank our Cokes while my father paid for the gas. The attendant looked at us, and for a moment I was afraid the change-in-the-face-routine was going to make an encore.
“Where from in Texas?” he demanded.
“Dallas,” my father admitted.
The attendant nodded and stuck his face up to the window to get a closer look at us. His face was deeply tanned and cracked, like a dried-up creek bed. What strikes me now is the liberty he felt he could take with us, staring at us like that; I felt like a slave at auction. “You all killed our president,” he said in a wondering tone, as if he had surprised himself by catching us red-handed.
Daddy hit the accelerator in disgust.
After that I seldom told people where I was from. I had come to understand what discrimination meant, now that it was focused on me. Years later, when I thought the world might have forgotten, I was riding on the Orient Express en route to Istanbul. With me in the coach were two Greeks, two Turks, a Spaniard, and a Frenchwoman. We were trying to fill out the Bulgarian transit cards, which were written entirely in the Cyrillic alphabet. One of the Turks claimed experience in the matter and was filling out our cards. He interviewed us in Turkish while his companion translated his questions into Greek; one of the Greeks spoke Spanish, the other French. When they got to me the Spaniard asked in English, “Where you from?”
“United States.”
The Turk nodded and said something else, which passed through the chain of tongues and came out, “What city ouy?”
“Dallas, Texas.”
I was universally understood. Everyone in the coach looked at me, and one by one they pointed their index fingers at me and said “Bang, bang, bang.” It’s the same word in every language.
In December 1963 Melvin Belli came to Dallas, ostensibly to defend Jack Ruby, but soon after his arrival it seemed that the real reason he had come was to indict Dallas for the murder of Kennedy. He wanted a change of venue, and he should have gotten it; eventually Ruby’s conviction would be reversed because the judge refused to let go of the case. Jack Ruby died with his guilt unproven.
It’s true we didn’t want to lose the tiral. After the embarrassment of Oswald’s death we wanted to show the world that we were competent, that we knew how to administer justice. Besides, we had Henry Wade, the prosecutor who had asked for the death penalty 24 times and been denied only once. We looked forward to the trial as we might have a heavyweight fight. We were going to try, convict, and execute Jack Ruby; it was an open-and-shut case, even with Melvin Belli in charge of the defense team.
Belli was a short, flamboyant man in elevated “fruit boots”—as a member of the prosecution referred to them. He had a polysyllabic vocabulary and a taste for extravagant clothing—an easy mark for the hard-boiled country boys on the county side of the courtroom. Dallas was plainspoken and suspicious of fancy outsiders. Its style was glassy, modern, utilitarian, whereas Belli’s was rococo; they were bound to detest each other.
And Bellie brought the accusing finger. He charged Dallas with killing Oswald. In particular he charged Henry Wade, who had made a number of poorly considered statements about Oswald’s guilt soon after his arrest. “I am convinced that after the official chorus, Wade in the forefront, already proclaimed him a fit subject for execution, Oswald became fair game for any crank who wanted to kill him,” Belli later wrote. His book was called Dallas Justice, and he wrote it (with Maurice C. Carroll) “to help Dallas face up to his failures.”
At first Jack Ruby was delighted to have the fmous Melvin Belli defending him. After all, Ruby was himself a celebrity now; his cell was filled with congratulatory letters and telegrams. He was making plans for a public career, working on his diction and improving his vocabulary by playing Scrabble with his guards. “He would sit there dreaming absentmindedly and comb his hair for hours,” one of the guards told Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris, for their biography of Ruby. “He didn’t think we were going to do anything to him,” said Bill Alexander, Henry Wade’s chief prosecutor on the case. “He believed we were just going through the motions, because we had to. He was enjoying all that attention, just like a pig in slop.” It was only appropriate, from Ruby’s point of view, that he should be defended by a slick and glamorous California lawyer. “It made him feel good,” Belli related, “that I not only knew my law but was a sharp dresser and a great cocksman.”*
Belli’s defense was to depict his client as a village idiot, a latent homosexual, an epileptic with possible brain damage (Ruby’s autopsy showed more than a dozen tumors in his brain). Bellie produced a parade of psychiatrists who testified about Ruby’s “psychomotor epilepsy,” which they demonstrated in a six-hundred-foot chart of Ruby’s brain waves. The jury wasn’t interested. After hearing eight days of testimony they took less than two hours to decide Ruby’s guilt.
“What was the key that turned those friendly and polite people,” Belli wrote in revenge, “into a jury that could impassively reject testimony by some of the nation’s most brilliant medical men and, in an insultingly and unfeelingly brief one hour and fifty minutes decide that Ruby must die in the electric chair? In some fashion…the people in whatever passes for the Kremlin of Dallas could figuratively press a button and, as if it had signaled transistors in their brains, direct the thinking of this great city’s people.”*
Ruby was devastated, not so much by the verdict as by Belli’s defense. He was ruined in Ddallas, the city he loved. “I’m so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had in Dallas,” he had written. “I’m a Jew from the ghetto of Chicago. I came to Dallas and made a fine success.” Now he was a laughingstock, a village idiot, a queer. The worst blow was delivered before the trial even began, when Mayor Earle Cabell, who hand known Ruby for four years, testified in a change-of-venue hearing that Ruby could not get a fair trial in Dallas because he had hurt the city too badly. Six weeks after the trial was over, Ruby backed up in his cell, lowered his head, and tried to brain himself against the concrete wall.
That day he met my cousin Don. Don was seventeen, newly orphaned. My father had gone to his brother’s funeral in Kansas, and at the ceremony he saw his nephew and his namesake standing alone, without prospects, like him in so many ways at that age. After the funeral he brought Don home with him, to the new world. Don was grateful but also independent. He got a job as an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant, and in the latter capacity he rode to the county jail to ferry Jack Ruby to Parkland Hospital.
They became friends, after a fashion. Ruby made frequent trips to Parkland, and he used those occasions to send additional messages to the outside world, through Don. “They’re killing me, Don,” he confided. “I know what they’re doing. They’re feeding me cancer.” Ruby was the first to diagnose his illness. Soon he began to deteriorate, and Don watched him waste away. It was sad, but Don had an orphan’s attitude toward death, and he wouldn’t waste his sentiment on a man he couldn’t save.
In the end Jack Ruby was swallowed up by the innumerable conspiracy theories linking him to the man he had killed. With the loss of weight caused by his disease, he even came to look like Oswald. Conspiracy was quicksand, and Ruby was trying desperately to extricate himself. He demanded lie-detector tests and truth serum, and he told his story again and again, but he was also struggling with conspiracies of his own imagining. He heard them torturing Jews in the basement of the jail. The country had been overthrown by Nazis. They know I know. I know they know. They know I know they know.
Jack Ruby died in January 3, 1967. He was buried in Chicago.
I was desperate to get out of Dallas. I hated Dallas for what it was (though it would never again be what it was), for its smugness (now shattered), for its politics (now discredited), and most of all for the burden of guilt that was my heritage as a Dallasite.
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