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Authors: Garry Wills

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Jackson impressed on his own son the need for study. When Jesse Jr. entered Congress, he took his oath of office in Spanish. When a journalist asked him why, the new representative said, “My father told me he was embarrassed to travel the world and be unable to speak any language but English. He had studied French in college, but not enough to command the language. He made me promise I would learn at least one other language.” I remembered the teacher who had told me her students studied harder after Jackson warmed up her classroom with the chant “I
am—somebody
!” The country is full of people who stood a little taller in their youth because of Jesse Jackson.
3
Dallas
O
vid Demaris said that he never saw me looking more out of place than when I sat on the floor of a stripper's changing room, under a rack of scanty clothes, while “Tami True” came offstage and threw a robe over her pasties. We were soon joined by Bill Willis, who had been underlining Tami's bumps and grinds with his drums. Tami pouted that Bill “takes limits,” which meant he forgot his rhythms while composing plays in his head. We were in Barney Weinstein's Theater Lounge, one of the rivals to Jack Ruby's Carousel strip joint, and Weinstein had inherited Tami and Bill, with other entertainers, after the police closed the Carousel. These Carousel veterans loved to tell Jack Ruby stories—he was a clumsy but lovable clown in their eyes. He was too impulsive and undisciplined to be a trustworthy member of any conspiracy.
Bill Willis, a bodybuilder who won the title Mr. Texas, was supposed to be a bouncer as well as the club's drummer, but he said that Jack often got to a troublemaker and threw him out before Bill could get off the stage and do the job. Ruby cultivated the police, haunted their headquarters, taking them coffee, giving them free tickets to his club. He often carried a gun because he took the money from the club to the bank every day. My friend Ovid, who was in Dallas writing about organized crime at the time of the assassination of Kennedy, had stood around for hours waiting for Oswald to be brought out into the police garage. He told me there was no way to know exactly when that would happen, and Ruby—who had run some ordinary errands just before—happened to come into the garage when Oswald appeared. None of those who knew Ruby thought he was capable of a deliberate plan. He just reacted as he did when throwing a troublemaker out of the Carousel.
Ovid and I were in Dallas in 1966 because Harold Hayes, the brilliant editor of
Esquire
in its glory days of the sixties, sent us there to write about Ruby. Ovid was a former police reporter who knew Dallas well. Hayes admired his ability to get interviews with elusive characters but did not think he wrote very well. Hayes believed that if anyone could arrange an interview with Ruby, it was Ovid. Hayes's plan was that Ovid would set up an interview with Ruby and I would conduct the interview and write it up. None of us knew, when this article was conceived, that Ruby was about to be diagnosed with terminal cancer and the authorities would cut off all access to him.
I was still teaching Greek at Johns Hopkins, so the interview was supposed to be arranged for my Christmas break. Ovid had spent several weeks lining up his old contacts in Dallas. It soon became clear to him that we would not get to Ruby, but he did not want to tell Hayes that, since he was collecting a vast body of material—from a colorful cast of people who had known Ruby: from the Dallas establishment; from the city's strip-joint underworld; from those who had participated in Ruby's arrest and trial. He felt that, if I agreed with him, he could justify the project in ways that Hayes had not envisaged. I went to Dallas from Baltimore at the beginning of my extended Christmas break (Hopkins had a “minimester” before the resumption of regular classes). This was the first Christmas I would be away from my family. (The next one would also be caused by Hayes.) Ovid sat me down to hear tapes he had made with the district attorney and city prosecutor, with some of Ruby's defense attorneys, with a motley assortment of businessmen (including Stanley Marcus), with strippers, police pals of Ruby, and others. Though Ovid had not got to Ruby, he seemed to have set up cordial relations with everybody who had anything to do with Ruby's club life and shady acquaintances. He suggested I go see any of these people I thought promising for an article.
I called Harold to see if he wanted an article of this sort. He did. When I turned in the article, it had just reached the point where Ruby was shooting Oswald. Harold told me to do another article to get Ruby through his arrest and trial. For this second article, I interviewed the prosecutors and defense attorneys in Dallas. Then, back in Baltimore, I read the trial transcript and all the volumes of the Warren Commission testimony on Kennedy's assassination. When Tom Wolfe assembled an anthology of articles for his book
The New Journalism,
he wanted to include my account of the Ruby trial. But he showed me his introduction, where he said that, for the New Journalist, it was “all-important to
be there
when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expression, the details of the environment.”
1
I pointed out that I was not at Ruby's trial. He thought from the vividness of my account that I must have been. When he learned I was not, he included instead my account of Memphis after the shooting of Dr. King, where I had been present.
Bill Alexander, the bright and sadistic prosecutor of Ruby, took great delight in tormenting Ruby's main defense lawyer, Melvin Belli, the so-called King of Torts, whose San Francisco office pioneered medical-claims cases. Belli was so used to handling medical testimony that he began to think of himself as a doctor. For his Dallas case he claimed that the flickering lights in the garage where Oswald was shot had triggered an epileptic fit in Ruby. He went through great rolls of encephalograms with the jury. Alexander asked Belli's expert witness on radiology if all things do not give off radiation. The man said yes. Even the railing around the jury? Yes. Even the wall of the courtroom? Yes. Alexander was delighted to hear from the police guard that when the jury went into its deliberation room that day, some of its members rushed over to the wall and put their ears to it, trying to hear the radiation.
Alexander knew how to get Belli's goat. He called the girdled man “Mr. Belly.” When Belli complained to the judge that the prosecutor was mocking him, Alexander sardonically pronounced his name Mr. Bell-EYE. The short Belli wore shoes with uplift heels, which Alexander, talking with reporters, referred to as “fruit boots.” Joe Tonahill, the Texas attorney Belli recruited as his local colleague for the trial, told me that “Mel was at his wit's end over Bill's treatment of him.” Tonahill was a study in himself. He had a wheezy Christmas cold and cough when I interviewed him in a coffee shop. Since he had brought no handkerchief with him, he first blew his nose on the paper napkins at the table, then on the doilies placed under our coffee cups, then on the little paper envelopes holding sugar for the coffee, leaving a soggy pile of these materials on the floor beside his chair.
When the Ruby articles appeared, an editor at New American Library asked me to expand them into a book. But others were not pleased with them. I was threatened with three lawsuits. The first one was silly. I had quoted Ruby's cleaning lady in a way that suggested he was not planning any great act on the fatal day. A Dallas lawyer, perhaps wanting to discredit exculpatory evidence on Ruby's part, asked the cleaning lady if she had given me an interview. When she said no, he wrote
Esquire
to say he was suing me on her behalf. Actually, I had taken her words from the Warren Commission volumes. She had not only said exactly what I quoted, but had said it under oath when testifying before the commission.
The second suit was pursued further, into the deposition-taking stage, and it was filed by Mel Belli, who claimed that I had defamed him. Everything I had said about him I had on tape, was in the trial record, or was from the Warren testimony.
Esquire'
s lawyer asked if I had further derogatory material that I had not used, to prove that I was not just throwing any old charges at him. I said yes. I had got from another of Belli's lawyers a letter written to the Texas bar by Ruby's sister, who was supposed to be Belli's employer. She complained that he would never report to her, or even see her. He was always too busy. Finally, she went to Belli's hotel during an afternoon break in the trial, knocked on his door, and was admitted on the assumption that she was picking up the room service trays. She found Belli in a circle of reporters, including the famous Dorothy Kilgallen. He was stripped to his jockey shorts, and was taking butter patties from the room service, putting them on a bread knife, and flipping them up to stick on the ceiling. The lawyer said Belli would never go to trial, where that letter could be introduced.
The third suit came from another lawyer, Mark Lane, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that Ruby was part of a plot to cover up the assassination of President Kennedy by removing any possibility that Oswald could talk of it. One of Lane's arguments was based on the testimony of a woman to the Warren Commission. Though her testimony was included in the voluminous record, it was not even referred to in the report written as a summary of the commission's findings. For Lane, that was a proof that the Warren Commission was also party to a cover-up.
The name of this woman was given by Lane as Nancy Perrin Rich. Her testimony was of a type familiar in the long line of witnesses before the Warren Commission. In her thirties, she had been everywhere and known everyone. She once worked for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. She had been an FBI informer. She was married to a man who had run guns into Spain for Francisco Franco. She had worked as a bartender in Jack Ruby's club but left when he roughed her up; when she tried to file charges against him, the police protected him.
She next saw Ruby at a meeting with a military officer where her husband was asked to run guns into Cuba as he had into Spain. Ruby showed up at this meeting, glared at her, and went into an inner room. At another meeting with the same people Ruby also appeared—but so did the son of organized crime lord Vito Genovese. She recognized him from a picture, not of him but of his father. This was a little hard even for Lane to swallow, so he fudged her testimony, saying simply, “A person was present whom Mrs. Rich thought she recognized as someone associated with syndicated crime.”
2
This testimony convinced Lane that Ruby was connected with military, pro-Castro, and mob plots. He attacked the Warren Commission for not following up on the testimony, talking to all the people Mrs. Rich identified (though she had often forgotten their names). And he was suing me for defamation, since I had ridiculed his charges.
Because I had read all the Warren volumes, I knew not only that the Rich testimony was internally inconsistent but that it did not match similar stories told by two other witnesses. Lane should have cited these as corroborating the Rich story, since—despite differences—much of what was alleged in the other two places resembles what Rich was saying. There was a good reason Lane had to neglect those two tales after rebuking the Warren people for neglecting Rich's evidence. The reason is that the two other witnesses were Nancy Perrin Rich under two different names. Ovid, with his tracking skills, found Rich's husband, and I asked him if he had talked with Lane. He said yes. Did Lane know about the other two times she testified before the commission? Yes. Why did she tell three different stories under three different names? Because she was mentally disturbed. She was under treatment when I called the husband. Lane knew all these things and did his own cover-up in order to accuse others of cover-up. I told all this to
Esquire'
s lawyer, and asked why Lane would bring a suit when he knew all these things about the Rich story, and that they would come out at trial. The lawyer said it was a nuisance threat, meant to intimidate me and make me stop talking about him.
The Lane case brings out a problem with all the conspiratorialists who fish around in the many volumes compiled by the Warren Commission, finding “evidence” that the commission did not use in the report. The commission was open to anyone who felt he or she could contribute to its knowledge. It suppressed nobody's testimony. But it did not knock down each false allegation. It did not, for instance, embarrass the poor disturbed woman Lane exploited by showing that she babbled three different accounts, all equally and wildly implausible. There were many nuts, fanatics, and obsessed people who volunteered to speak to the commission. I know this because I was acquainted with one of the fanatics, Revilo Oliver.
Oliver was a very learned classicist at the University of Illinois, whom I met on Bill Buckley's yacht before Buckley stopped using him as a book reviewer because of his growing anti-Semitism. After that, Oliver helped found the John Birch Society and wrote ever more extreme stuff. He not only thought fluoride in the drinking water was a Communist effort to poison Americans—he foiled the plot by keeping a water cooler in his front room full of unfluoridated water, to drink himself and to serve to his guests. Oliver told the Warren Commission that the International Communist Conspiracy had trained Oswald in Russia and dispatched him to kill Kennedy, “who was doing so much for it,” because “the job was not being done on schedule.”
BOOK: Outside Looking In
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