In the morning I went out to get the News and found on our doorstep a flier that looked like a wanted poster in the post office. It was John Kennedy, full face and profile, and the flier said he was WANTED FOR TREASON. Below that his crimes were listed:
1. Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold): He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the Communist controlled United Nations.
He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
2. He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations—Berlin Wall—Missile Removal—Cuba—Wheat Deals—Test Ban Treaty, etc.).
3. He has been lax in enforcing Communist registration laws.
4. He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
5. He has illegally invaded a sovereign state with Federal troops.
6. He has consistently appointed anti-Christians to Federal office; Upholds the Supreme Court in its anti-Christian rulings.
Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
7. He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones, like his previous marriage and divorce).
I brought the flier in with the paper and read it on the way to the breakfast table. I had heard most of it before—who hadn’t? It was the same old right-wing tirade, except for the charge of Kennedy’s “previous marraige and divorce,” which was new to me. I was already running late to school, so I didn’t read the News that morning, but later in the day one of my first instincts would be to save the paper (as did many other people in Dallas, including eight-year-old John Hinckley, Jr.). It was November 22, 1963.
My sister Kathleen recalls seeing that date written on a blackboard several days before—she had a school assignment due that day—and feeling an instantaneous surge of horror, a buzz, almost an electrical shock. There were other premonitory currents in the city. Later, the guilt we felt for Kennedy’s death would have less to do with his assassination by a man only slightly associated with our city than it would have to do with our own feelings of anticipation. Something would happen—something. We expected to be disgraced. It had happened with Lyndon Johnson, it had happened with Stevenson, it would happen again. There was a low-grade thrill in the city such as there might be in a movie audience when a gunfight is about to occur—it was that kind of secondary excitement, not the fear that someone would really die, but an expectation that something dramatic would appear to happen, that we would see it or hear about it, certainly talk about it later, but that it would pass with no harm done. Political theater, in other words.
My father was one of the city leaders invited to the Trade Mart for Kennedy’s luncheon speech. He had gone there with his friend Jack Evans, who would later serve as mayor. As they were driving down Irving Boulevard they saw Air Force One just above them, approaching Love Field. It was 11:40 a.m. They remarked on the close timing of these presidential occasions, and how brief they were; Kennedy would be here and gone in a couple of hours.
Although schools were let out in Houston and San Antonio when the President’s motorcade passed through, in Dallas we could be excused only in the custody of a parent. So like most of my classmates I was in school when it happened. It was right after lunch. I was in Algebra. Mr. Irvin Hill was describing a parabola on the blackboard when the three tones came over the public-address system and the principal started to speak. We knew something was wrong before he said a word. There was a choked pause. We could hear a radio playing in the background.
“The President has been shot.”
It was only a fraction of a moment before he gave us details and then played the radio commentary into the PA for the remainder of the hour. But in that instant the world we knew shattered and collapsed. It happened—the something we had been waiting for. It happened! We were dazed and excited. We turned in our chairs and looked into each other’s faces, finding grins of astonishment. Later, when reports appeared about Dallas schoolchildren laughing at the news, I wondered if I hadn’t laughed myself. It was such a release of anxiety. At that point in my life I knew no more about the nature of tragedy than a blind man knows about the color blue. All I knew was that life could change, it had changed at last. Hadn’t we known? Hadn’t we been scared of exactly this? We asked ourselves these questions with our eyes, looking for some fixed response to this new flood of circumstance. We were giddy and frightened, and as for me I was grateful for the loss of innocence.
Meanwhile, in the Trade Mart, my father and the other guests waited and waited and began to grow impatient. Finally the first course was served. Then Eric Jonsson, president of the Citizens Council, arose and said in a quavering voice that there had been an “accident”—he wasn’t more specific. “The President has been hit,” someone reported. My father supposed there had been a rowdy demonstration of some sort. Another friend of mine stayed in the Trade Mart until the nature of the tragedy was revealed. Kennedy was his hero, but in the fumbling moments that followed the announcement, my friend, aged fifteen, went boldly to the dais and stole the salt and pepper shakers from Kennedy’s place setting.
“… shot in the head, Governor Connally wounded …”
My father overheard these words on a police radio as he passed by a motorcycle outside the Trade Mart. It was the first time he ever heard the term “grassy knoll.” Shocked, confused, he drove back to the bank and watched television with his tellers.
Some of the details were off base. We heard that Vice President Johnson was shot too, that he was seen entering Parkland Hospital holding his arm. Who else? Were they killing everybody? I never paused to think who they were. It was Dallas, of course—faceless assassins but essentially Dallas pulling the many triggers. I supposed we were in the middle of a right-wing coup.
As we sat there, gazing crazily at each other and at the PA box on the wall, I finally noticed Mr. Hill and saw tears streaming down his wrinkled cheeks. His chest began to heave, then he sobbed in great barks. Everyone was watching him now, studying him as if he had some simple formula for this new hypothesis, but his grief was a private thing, and he picked it up like the greatest burden he had ever lifted and carried it out of the room. As he left, I felt the first prodding overture of shame.
“The President is dead.”
It was a shock how much the world hated us—and why? Oswald was only dimly a Dallasite—he was a Marxist and an atheist—you could scarcely call him a product of the city. He was, if anything, the Anti-Dallas, the summation of all we hated and feared. How could we be held responsible for him? And yet the world decided that Kennedy had died in enemy territory, that no matter who had killed him, we had willed him dead.
The truth is we had drawn closer to Kennedy even as the rest of the country grew disenchanted. The disgrace of the Bay of Pigs actually helped Kennedy in Dallas. My father admired the way the President shouldered the blame. The missile crisis in Cuba showed Dallas that Kennedy had learned the use of power; it also showed us the danger of Ted Dealey’s bluster. Kennedy was tough after all. We liked him. We wanted him to like us. When he came to Dallas we gave him the warmest reception he received in Texas. It was the perfect confrontation between Kennedy’s vaunted courage (walking into crowds, stopping the motorcade to shake hands) and our new willingness to make friends with him.
The crowds and the cheering were real responses. In fact the last words Kennedy heard in life were spoken by Nellie Connally, the governor’s wife, who turned and said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” It was a true observation, but also history’s damnedest irony, for an instant later Jacqueline Kennedy had to respond, “They’ve killed my husband. I have his brains in my hand.”
She said they—meaning Dallas, an assumption the whole world shared.
Dallas killed Kennedy; we heard it again and again. Dallas was “a city of hate, the only city in which the President could have been shot”—this from our own Judge Sarah Hughes, who swore in Lyndon Johnson as president aboard Air Force One.
But Dallas had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death. The hatred directed at our city was retaliation for many previous grievances. The East hated us because we were part of the usurping West, liberals hated us because we were conservative, labor because we were antiunion, intellectuals because we were raw, minorities because we were predominantly and conspicuously white, atheists and agnostics because we were strident believers, the poor because we were rich, the old because we were new. There were few of the world’s constituencies we had failed to offend before the President came to our city, and hadn’t we compounded the offense again and again by boasting of these very qualities? In any case we were well silenced now.
Oh, we felt sorry for ourselves, all right. The city’s display of self-pity was another reason to hate us. The impression we gave was that Oswald’s real crime was not murder but libel—of our reputation, our good name. We were not penitent, we were outraged. We were the victims.
The final words of the speech the President would have delivered in the Trade Mart were the Psalmist’s injunction: “Except that the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” He had meant to be speaking of his generation of Americans, who were charged with keeping peace in the world. But, as my father thought, Kennedy might have been speaking of Dallas as well, because all the watchmen of our city had not been able to protect him from one fey killer. It seemed an awful prophecy for Dallas that, despite our piety, God had let it happen here.
In church that Sunday, November 24, my father, Kathy, and I heard our minister preach a sermon entitled “Let’s Change the Climate.” The word “climate” already had acquired a supercharged meaning in Dallas. Where it once had been used only to describe the abundant opportunities for business growth, now it was appropriated by the newscasters and magazine writers as a sort of net that could be tossed over the entire city, implicating everyone in the crime. Yes, there were fanatics in Dallas, but weren’t we all responsible for creating a climate in which fanaticism could take root? a climate of hate? a climate of intolerance? a climate of bigotry? It was an unanswerable charge. My father’s jaw set as we heard the minister accepting the blame on behalf of the city—his sermon was being broadcast nationally on ABC radio—the blame for the climate that was responsible for Kennedy’s death. At the end of the sermon, when we had sung the doxology and were standing to leave, someone walked to the pulpit and handed the minister a message.
“Oswald’s been shot!”
The congregation slumped back into the pews. The police were telling us to leave downtown, to evacuate the area. What now? What was going on?
It was simply too much—a psychological breaking point for many of us, who, like my father, had held out against the insinuations of the press, who had refused to accept blame for the climate in Dallas. But the more we learned about the circumstances of Oswald’s death and the background of his killer, the more we had to acknowledge our responsibility. A local nightclub operator named Jack Ruby had wandered upon Oswald being transferred from the city jail, and shot him down in front of the whole world. Unlike Oswald, Jack Ruby was one of ours, he did his deed in the very bowels of our own city hall, and he did it in a spirit of horrified civic-mindedness. Our incompetent police force let him do it. The defense we had established for our city in the death of the President didn’t apply in the death of the President’s killer. Dallas didn’t kill Kennedy, but in an awful, undeniable fashion it did kill Oswald.
A phenomenon remarked on by psychiatrists after the assassination was the dearth of dreams. The normal functions of the unconscious mind seemed to have been displaced by unending hours of television viewing. Commercials disappeared—that was itself a weird and ominous phenomenon. From the moment of the President’s death at noon on Friday until after midnight the following Tuesday, the broadcasts virtually never stopped, and as they are played back in my mind now—the death march, the half-stepping troops, the riderless horse, John-John’s salute—they have the quality of a remembered dream, haunting, full of meaning, experienced but unlived.
Americans have always had a secret love of pageantry, unfulfilled because of the absence of royalty, and this massive grandeur was new to us and thrilling. I remember being struck by the vocabulary of the occasion, words like “bier” and “caisson” and “catafalque,” which had a sound of such solemn importance that they could be used only a few times in one’s life—like rare china dishes one sets out only for the king.
My mother and Rosalind stayed home on Sunday morning to watch the Mass for the dead President. Cardinal Spellman called him “the martyr of this century,” a designation we accepted without questioning what cause he had died for. Kennedy was lying in the East Room of the White House, where Lincoln had lain nearly a hundred years before. This was a parallel, Lincoln and Kennedy, we would never quite shake off, although the assassination of President McKinley might have drawn a closer analogy. McKinley had been a popular president, but he was not a martyr like Lincoln—except perhaps to the cause of laissez-faire capitalism. Kennedy’s claim to martyrdom was based on the belief that Dallas had killed him. But even I wanted to believe that his death had meaning, and so I allowed myself to think that he was a martyr to something—perhaps to my own evil desire for something to happen.
After Mass, the procession to the Capitol began to form, and the networks switched their coverage to the Dallas City Hall. It was a scene of confusion and anticipation. Before now we had had only a brief glimpse of the accused assassin. He had spoken briefly to the press in a wild, impromptu press conference. He didn’t sound like a Dallasite; despite his years in Russia he retained his gumbo New Orleans accent—he said “axed” instead of “asked.” He had a spooky composure about him, although according to our district attorney he was as good as convicted, so few of us doubted his guilt.
Finally Oswald appeared in the doorway, dwarfed by the beefy detectives on either side of him but still looking cool and at peace, while all around him chaos raged. I suppose this was the supreme moment in Oswald’s unhappy life. He had always been the outsider, unaccepted, unloved, but he had turned the tables on us. He was suddenly the man with the answers, his secrets were locked in his skull, and we were all outsiders now.
And as he entered the basement of the city hall, Oswald’s defiant glare fell directly on Jack Ruby. Was it an illusion, or was there the surprised look of recognition between conspirators at that moment, replayed a million times by now, when Ruby stepped into Oswald’s path and gunned him down?
Since Oswald’s death we have learned very little more about that or the event of the assassination, but we have learned unimaginable things about our country. The assassination sent a shaft through our society, throwing unexpected light on creatures used to the dark—spies, mobsters, informers, mistresses, all of them surprised in strange alliances. It was not the assassination itself but this vivid exposure that would forever change our understanding of how our country worked. We would become ashamed of our naïveté. Simple explanations would never satisfy us again.
It is odd that a single moment of reality—Oswald’s assassination of John Kennedy—can be folded and refolded into infinite origami constructions. Was it a plot on the part of H. L. Hunt to protect the oil-depletion allowance? Was Oswald a secret agent for the Russians? for the Cubans? for us? Was he a part of a larger conspiracy? Was there really only one Oswald? Some theories suppose there were three, perhaps even five. Not a single assumption goes unchallenged; perhaps Kennedy is not even dead. (For years we heard the rumor that he was still alive in some vegetable state in Parkland Hospital, that another body had been smuggled out and buried at Arlington.) It is a way of explaining everything, of giving meaning to events. Reality is twisted into art. Is there such a thing finally as truth? (If there is not, there must be a God.)
I think what each of us believes about the assassination says something about the kind of person we are, what we are willing to believe about our country and ourselves. I believe Oswald acted alone. Perhaps it is easier for me to locate evil inside the single human heart than it is to believe in broad conspiracies. Also, killing has come easy for me. I once took a potshot at a red-tailed hawk that was circling below the clouds, and to my astonishment he folded his wings and fell out of the sky like a sack of mail. The year of the President’s death I went hunting with my father and some of his business friends on a South Texas deer lease. I had experienced, I thought, enough of killing by then, but as I was walking across an open field carrying one of the hunters’ guns, a stag broke out of the brush, nearly 175 yards away. I knelt and fired, then watched him cartwheel and fall on his side, his feet pointed at me. I’ve always had good luck in killing.
Why did I shoot the deer when I told myself I wouldn’t? For one thing, I was licensed to kill (my father had taken that precaution). My action had been approved in advance. At the heart of the Dallas-killed-Kennedy argument is a similar presumption about Oswald: the community hated Kennedy so much that Oswald felt licensed to act out our fantasy.
There is another reason I killed the deer. I was there, I had a gun, the deer appeared. He came to me. It sounds mindless, I suppose, but I don’t believe that thinking has very much to do with instinctive responses. Oswald must have felt something like this when he read in the newspaper that Kennedy’s motorcade would pass directly in front of the School Book Depository, where Oswald was a warehouseman. He’s coming to me. “He” who? Did it matter—any more than the identity of the deer in the field? Oswald had already tried to shoot General Walker. On another occasion he told Marina that Richard Nixon was in town, and he was “going to have a look” at him; Marina locked her husband in the bathroom and hid his pistol until she was certain Nixon was safe. However, Oswald never stalked Kennedy; Kennedy came to him. He said on several occasions how much he admired the President. After his arrest he told police “My wife and I like the President’s family. They are interesting people” and “I am not a malcontent; nothing irritated me about the President.” I don’t think Oswald would have chosen to shoot Kennedy if the President had made different arrangements, if he had not come to Dallas, if he had not ridden in an open limousine, if he had not passed by the School Book Depository. In a similar way I don’t think Jack Ruby would have shot Oswald if he had not been carrying a gun anyway (because he had gone to the Western Union with a wad of money to wire to one of his strippers), if he had not been downtown at that moment and seen a commotion at city hall, if he had not wandered down into the basement to see what was going on (“Curiosity got the best of me”), if he had not stumbled at that very moment into the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald. Conspiracists sneer at coincidences such as these, but I think coincidence can be a powerful, irrational spur to violent response. One opportunity—act now or else!
The paradox of Jack Ruby’s life is that he would be the one to stop forever Oswald’s answers to our many questions, for Ruby was himself both a lone nut (in my opinion) and a conspiracy buff. He came to the same conclusion many other conspiracists reached when he looked at the White House and saw Lyndon Johnson. “If Adlai Stevenson had been vice president,” he told a reporter, “there would have been no assassination.” Ruby was a shady character with mob connections, associations with anti-Castro Cubans, and a brief, ineffective history as an FBI informer. And yet he found it bizarre that people included him in a conspiracy—especially a conspiracy with Oswald. He did what he did “for Jackie and the kids.”
Ruby was a compulsive glad-hander, a Big D booster who prided himself on knowing everybody in town—and on being known, especially to reporters and cops. He was always reminding them, “You know me, I’m Jack Ruby!” and giving them free passes to his strip joint, the Carousel Club. Psychiatrists at Ruby’s trial would testify to his “voracious need to be accepted and admired … particularly by individuals in positions of authority and great social prestige.” He knew the mayor. He knew the disc jockeys and sportswriters and entertainers in town. He once talked himself into a club sandwich with actress Rhonda Fleming at the Dallas airport. He longed to be well known.
When Ruby fired his gun, he was taking celebrity away from Oswald and giving it to himself. Hadn’t Oswald done the same to Kennedy? Oswald had been nothing only a day before, now he was universally known and recognized; he already had that aura of fame. Ruby’s first impression of Oswald was that “he looked like Paul Newman.” Another irony of Ruby’s sad life is that people would later say he looked like Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald was television’s first real death. Until then TV had been almost exclusively a medium of fantasy, so that part of the shock of Ruby’s action was simply that it was real. It was as if one had touched a statue and found it made of flesh. Suddenly we understood television in an entirely new way, in a manner that prepared us for the many murders to come, for the “living room war” of Vietnam, for the constitutional lessons of Watergate, and finally, monotonously, for the local murders of the ten o’clock news. To my father, television had been a most incidental piece of furniture, something one turned to in idle moments, which he seldom had. With Kennedy’s death, the completely new realization came over people like my father that the thing to do was to turn on TV. By itself, the assassination and the televised ritual that followed would have signaled a new age. Television gave us our first universally shared experience. From now on, rich and poor, black and white, Northerner and Southerner, would live a portion of their lives in common. But it was Oswald’s death on television that galvanized the country. We could not leave the set after that—it was too powerful, anything might happen now!
They buried Kennedy on Monday. The drum corps was at the lead, and then came the bagpipers, and six gray horses drawing the caisson; then the riderless horse, a brilliant black animal who pranced and skittered and who seemed, at that moment, the only really alive creature on the planet. The Kennedys came next, a family that had only begun to live out its tragedies. And then, en masse, the princes of the earth, a mob of presidents and premiers and sheiks and kings. At the head of the line I recognized Charles de Gaulle towering over Haile Selassie—de Gaulle dressed plainly as usual, Selassie burdened under the many medals he had awarded himself—and it made me wonder about the conceit of men who would live important lives. What kind of person was John Kennedy that his death could bring the world to a stop? Was his life so important? It was as if a god had died.
Everyone was superior to us now. In those days Texas plates on your car were an invitation to rudeness, or worse. When news of the assassination came over the radio, one Texas driver was paying for gas off the Pennsylvania Turnpike; the attendant threw his change in his face. That reaction endured, in less spontaneous fashion, for years, even after Los Angeles and Memphis suffered their tragedies. Dallasites have 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.
That year the University of Texas football team went unbeaten and played Navy in the Cotton Bowl. Texas won, 28–6, but the New York Touchdown Club voted Navy the 1963 collegiate champion. A friend of Rosalind’s became Miss Teenage Dallas, but the pageant officials told her there was no chance she would be chosen as the national queen. We were outcasts, and we knew it. We stopped singing “Big D.”
Our family made a trip to Florida the next summer. We had been there once before, and what distinguished that previous trip was a confrontation between Kathleen, then no more than seven, and a hatchet-faced waitress at a truck stop on Highway 90. Kathy had been to the rest room marked WHITES ONLY, and she asked the waitress where it was that colored folks went. “Why, darlin’,” said the waitress, “they don’t go ’round here at all.” Kathy, who has all of her life suffered from an inability to bite her tongue, said, “You ought to be ashamed.”
Now we were back in Florida with Texas plates, and even Kathy understood we had been morally neutered, that we had no standing. We stopped at a service station for gas and Cokes. It was blisteringly hot. We sat in a sweat with the windows down while Daddy paid for the gas. The attendant took the money and looked in the car.
“Where from in Texas?” he demanded.
“Dallas,” my father admitted.
The attendant nodded as if he already knew that, then he stuck his face in the window to get a closer look at us. His face was deeply tanned and cracked, like a dried-up creek bed. What frightened me was the liberty he felt he could take with us, staring at us like that; I felt like a slave at auction. “Y’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. Once, at a restaurant in Mexico, some Americans at the adjoining table overheard us talking about Dallas and they just got up and left—left their dinner sitting there.
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 to have experience in the matter and was filling out our cards. He interviewed each of 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 you?”
“Dallas, Texas.”
I was immediately, universally, understood. The others 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.
Perhaps an outsider can understand how each new assassination was greeted with relief and resentment in Dallas—relief, of course, that it hadn’t happened in our city, and resentment that no other town would ever know the opprobrium Dallas had endured. Political murder has been a feature of American life since 1835, when Richard Lawrence tried to shoot Andrew Jackson, and between that time and Oswald’s murder of Kennedy, three presidents were killed and three others had been the objects of assassination attempts. And yet there was a common assumption, frequently stated, that it all started in Dallas. The Dallas-killed-Kennedy theory swelled into metaphysics, until Dallas became responsible for assassination itself. We were the motive force that toppled the first domino in the murderous chain; the trail of bodies that have since fallen all across the continent could be traced back to the School Book Depository. You could walk through the world announcing “I’m from Los Angeles,” or “Laurel, Maryland,” or “Memphis, Tennessee,” and receive an occasional dim acknowledgment that something tragic had happened in your town, but even then you would not expect to be held responsible. Waiters would not be reluctant to give you service because of your origins. Telephone operators would not refuse to place your calls. But for years after President Kennedy’s murder, saying you were from Dallas was like saying you were from Nazi Germany.
To be from Dallas meant, in the eyes of the world, that you were inherently more inclined toward murder than the next fellow. The assumption was unconscious, a stereotype, no different really from a racial prejudice. It’s no wonder Dallasites were defensive and angry. And yet behind our anger was the fear that there must be a whisper of truth in the lies people were telling about our city.
In December 1963 Melvin Belli came to Dallas to defend Jack Ruby. His first order of business was to get a change of venue. He should have gotten it; eventually Ruby’s conviction would be reversed because the local judge refused to surrender the case. Jack Ruby would die with his guilt unproven.
It’s true we didn’t want to let go of the trial. After the embarrassment of Oswald’s death we wanted to show the world that we were competent, that we knew how to administer justice. We looked forward to the trial as we might a heavyweight fight. In our corner was Henry Wade, our district attorney, who was a legend in Dallas. He had asked for the death penalty twenty-four times and been denied only once. Wade was tough, cagey, pitiless. He chewed on unlit cigars and said “day-id” for “dead.” Belli called him a “country bumpkin,” which was exactly the impression Wade hoped to create.
Belli appeared in court as a small, flamboyant man with a polysyllabic vocabulary and elevator shoes. He was an easy mark for the hard-boiled prosecutors on the country side of the courtroom, who called him “Mr. Belly” and ridiculed his wardrobe. 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 Belli brought the accusing finger. He charged Dallas with killing Oswald. In particular he charged Henry Wade, who had made several prejudicial 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 its failures.”
At first Jack Ruby was delighted to have the slick and glamorous California attorney defending him; it certified his celebrity. “It made him feel good,” Belli related, “that I not only knew my law but was a sharp dresser and a great cocksman.” Ruby was making plans for his own public career, and he loved the way Belli talked. He began working on his diction and tried to improve his vocabulary by playing Scrabble with the guards. “He would sit there dreaming absentmindedly and comb his hair for hours,” one of the guards remembered. His cell was filled with congratulatory letters and telegrams. “He didn’t think we were going to do anything to him,” said Bill Alexander, 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.”
Belli’s defense, however, was to depict his client as a village idiot, a latent homosexual, an epileptic with possible brain damage (here he was on the mark; Ruby’s autopsy showed more than a dozen tumors in his brain). Belli produced a parade of psychiatrists who testified about his client’s “psychomotor epilepsy,” which they demonstrated in a six-hundred-foot chart of Ruby’s brain waves. The jury was not 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 into a jury that could impassively reject testimony by some of the nation’s most brilliant medical men and, in an insultingly brief one hour and fifty minutes, decide that Ruby must die in the electric chair?” Belli wrote in retaliation. “The people in whatever passes for the Kremlin in Dallas could figuratively push 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 Dallas, 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 queer, a mental failure. The worst blow was delivered the day before the trial even began, when Mayor Earle Cabell, who had known Ruby for years, testified in a change-of-venue hearing that the defendant 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 was the day he met my cousin Don. My sisters and I had always loved Don best among our relatives. He already had been wounded by his mother’s early death, and at the age of sixteen he lost his father as well. At the funeral, my father had noticed his nephew and namesake standing alone, without prospects, his hair blowing in the endless wind of the Kansas prairie. Don was so like himself at that age, stuck in Seward on the two-lane blacktop that led to Hudson, Stafford, Turon, Penalosa, Kingman, Murdock, Cheney, Garden Plain, Goddard, and at long last, Wichita. After the funeral my father brought Don home with him, to the new world. Don was grateful but also independent. He got a job as an apprentice mortician in a funeral parlor on Harry Hines Boulevard. I used to visit him there, and he would take me into the viewing rooms to see death. Don also served as an ambulance attendant, and it was in this capacity that he rode to the county jail to ferry Jack Ruby to Parkland Hospital.
They became friends, after a fashion, because Ruby would make many trips to Parkland once his illness was diagnosed. “They’re killing me, Don,” he confided. “They’re feeding me cancer.” Soon he began to deteriorate, becoming markedly thinner, more Oswald-like. Don watched him waste away with every successive ambulance ride. It was sad, but Don had an orphan’s attitude toward death and wouldn’t waste his sentiment on a man he couldn’t save.
In the end Jack Ruby was swallowed up by the numerous conspiracy theories linking him to the man he had killed. He demanded lie-detector tests and truth serum, and told his story again and again, but he was also, by now, struggling with conspiracies of his own imagining. He heard them torturing Jews in the basement. He believed the country had been overthrown by Nazis. He knew. They knew he knew. They knew he knew they knew.
Jack Ruby, defender of our city’s honor, died on January 3, 1967. He is buried in Chicago.