Jack Ruby, Surviving Victim
From MURRAY KEMPTON
DALLAS, TEXAS
THE County of Dallas, in a last, painful clutch at some place in the tradition of common law, has begun to attempt the trial of Jack Ruby fur the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. There hod been Mr. Kennedy and then there was only Lee Oswald and suddenly there was only Jack Ruby who killed Oswald from the conviction, if never with the excuse, that he was disposing of the murderer of the President of the United States.
Perhaps it is only because he is the last of these three left alive that Jack Ruby's strongest effect is as victim. Almost anyone who comes to Dallas is seen last as a victim. This is not a society with much feeling for the protection of the citi- zen. Its real failure was not in being unable to protect John F. Kennedy; no man can be pro- tected from a really determined assassin in a city where the only universally admired aesthetic object is the gun. Where Dallas failed was in being unable to protect Lee Oswald from what he is assumed to have done and from what was then done to him and in being unable to protect Jack Ruby from what he did.
He sits now in an apple-green-washed court- room under two generation-old post-pre-Raphael- ite frescoes—one of the Lady Justice and one of the Lady Freedom. They have—the poorest artist is prophet—the pinched mouths and the sad eyes we associate with the Dallas women who spat on Adlai Stevenson. The Lady Freedom's torch seems to wait for a school to burn. Jack Ruby is being tried by Judge Joe R. Brown whose notions of aesthetics, dignity and humour were summarised in the moment when he looked at the proportions of these two desiccated vestals and observed to the international press that 'Justice is better built than Freedom.' Jack Ruby is defended by Mr. Melvin Belli of San Fran- cisco. At the recess, poor Ruby, so pinched by confinement as to be almost invisible, is led back to his cell and his place is taken by television cameras focused on Belli, a subject already so swollen as to drive out every thought of his client. It was Jack Ruby's dream to manage a show all of whose entertainers were successful and established; he has that show, but he is its occasion and not its manager and he is being tried by an actor and defended by an actor. The case for his conviction and execution is being pressed by District Attorney Henry Wade who, under no pressure except from journalists in need of hard news, had made the statement that he had persuaded juries to execute murderers on evidence no stronger than what he already had in hand against Lee Oswald. The District Attorney provided Jack Ruby with the assurance of his victim's guilt and the Dallas Police left open to him the target of his impulse. The law of Dallas was more anxious to protect its good name against the slights of the journalists than against the shots of the lyncher. So now a licensed saloon-keeper has been called to press the punish- ment by death of a man who, crazed by drink, had killed another customer on his premises.
Mr. Wade will contend that Jack Ruby killed Lee Oswald in the hope that the deed would make :iim rich and famous. We cannot eliminate that motive entirely; the need to be rich and famous is part of Jack Ruby's vulnerability. Every city gets the immigrants it deserves; Dallas has grown from immigrants drawn by the promise that it is the place to become both rich and conspicuous. They fail, in most cases, and Dallas is peculiarly cruel to anything not visibly success- ful and not shockingly up to date.
Jack Ruby came here from Chicago. When he tried to go into business for himself, he began with the Interlude, a restaurant to which he hoped that established and successful citizens would bring their wives. And, when that did not do so well he started the Carousel, where he hoped that at least upward-mobile junior executives might find a place to pursue their office infideli- ties; and, when that failed, he was reduced to putting in the strip-teasers. It is said that things are different in Europe—a culture perhaps less dominated by amateurs—but, in the American enterprise of entertainment, there is no rung below that occupied by the strip parlour. No one who has experienced the transient loneliness of being a customer in one of them could ever think without a pang of the permanent loneli- ness of being its proprietor.
Most persons who knew Jack Ruby here think it is impossible for him to have killed Lee Oswald from any other impulse but his own advantage. As an instance of his character, they point to his habit of pressing money on policemen and free drinks on journalists. But he had been doing this for years; and he must have learned that police- men never stay bought in a crisis and that journalists who can be bought aren't worth the effort; still he went on making these tenders and one has to believe that the impulse was for love more than for gain. But it would have been his nature to tell himself that this was money spent for a material purpose; to have spent it other- wise would have been to confess himself a sucker. The mind of the urban slum is a mixture of the wildly sentimental with the determinedly tough, wandering between a curse and an entreaty. Its cducation comes from street gossip and the ex- hortations of radio editorialists; its heroes are the celebrities of entertainment. It weeps in com- pany; its real life is too terrible to allow it to weep for itself or child or parent; it is far easier weeping with everybody else in America. Mr. Kennedy was an extraordinary figure because he
was at once a man of charming personal dignity and a figure almost out of show business. Per- sons who think themselves refined felt his death as intensely personal—and made more painful by Mr. Kennedy's private qualities—and persons they think of as vulgar felt the occasion as a collective lament—made more intense and fulfill- ing by Mr. Kennedy's star quality. The observa- tions of Mr. Disraeli on Abraham Lincoln re- main the best thing that has been said about what happened here last November; it was a domestic sorrow more than an historical one. It ig painful to weep in family; but how awful it is to weep only in history.
Jack Ruby does not belong to the American family; he sits outside by the barrier of origin and it has grown higher by his failures. The only place for him to rage and grieve was on tele- vision; the place for him to act was not in the family, but in history. His trial will be pro- tracted; no juror, once accepted, will be per- mitted to see wife or child; a function 1N bleb is never a convenience will become in this ease a dreadful confinement. Yet an unexpectedly high number of the prospective jurors fight with stubborn cunning to be found acceptable, cling- ing by rote to the forms by which a juror asserts his detachment, his freedom from any knowledge of the matter before the court, his innocence of either emotion or strong opinion about these events. Never have these forms seemed emptier than when applied in a country whose children saw Jack Ruby kill Lee Oswald on television.
Yet these people struggle to have them be- lieved; some of them, I trust, make this show from duty and conscience, but there have to be others who cling only for the one chance they will have to live in history, as jurors over the only living body left since November. They have respected models. There was talk of transferring the trial from Judge Brown to another judge with a larger courtroom; the standard for ser- vice to justice being, as it has been in every emergency, the standard of service to us journa- lists. Poor Judge Brown is said by one observer to have almost wept as be begged to keep the case. It is dreadful how many people there are, Ilk! Jack Ruby, so starved in the family that they are reduced to no hope except being fed in history.
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