The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (44 page)

THE FBI RECEIVED numerous credible reports from witnesses that Jack Ruby was in Houston on the afternoon of November 21, a couple of hours before JFK was scheduled to arrive there. Ruby was sighted one block from the Rice Hotel, where President Kennedy would deliver a speech, before flying to Fort Worth, where JFK and Jackie Kennedy would spend the night. Ruby also called a Houston booking agent while he was in town. According to one account, Ruby didn’t leave Houston until after JFK’s arrival. If Ruby was in Houston, he might have been there to observe security preparations for JFK, or to meet someone else involved in the plot, or both. Just two days earlier, Ruby had seen his tax attorney and Ruby “said he had a connection who would supply him money to settle his long-standing government tax problems,” which totaled $40,000 (almost $300,000 today).
On that same day, Seth Kantor notes that “Ruby’s Carousel checking account” had $246.65 in it, about the usual amount.

Back in Dallas on Thursday evening, November 21, Ruby had dinner at Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant with one of his friends and business associates, Ralph Paul. It was Paul who apparently fronted the money from Marcello’s organization to Ruby and who theoretically owned 50% of the Carousel Club. According to Anthony Summers, Paul was “associated with Austin’s Bar-B-Cue,” where one of the part-time security guards was Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit. Congressional investigators determined that the married Tippit had been carrying on a long-term affair with a waitress at Austin’s. Author Henry Hurt talked to the woman, who confirmed that, at the time, she thought she was pregnant by Tippit. This would have made Tippit subject to pressure or blackmail by one of Paul’s associates—like Ruby. It could have simply been a matter of Tippit’s being told to be in the right place at the right time on November 22 to make a big arrest, with no advance indication to Tippit of what was going to happen to JFK.

Joe Campisi Sr. verified Ruby’s presence at his restaurant that night, though he later claimed to Congressional investigators he had not been there that day. Given the fact that Marcello has stated that Campisi was hiding the shooters at his restaurant that night, it’s clear why Campisi would deny having been there. It also puts Ruby’s visit to Campisi’s in a whole new light, since it would have given Ruby an opportunity to make plans with Campisi for the following day, in one of the restaurant’s secure back offices. Ruby would later call Campisi one of his “three best friends,” but theirs was much more of a business relationship, with Campisi calling the shots. Campisi, on the other hand, was very close to Carlos Marcello.

After leaving Campisi’s, Ruby spent time at the Carousel Club and the Bon Vivant Room restaurant in the Teamster-financed Cabana Hotel with Lawrence Meyers, from Chicago. As noted earlier, Meyers—who also had contact with David Ferrie—appears to have been a low-level mob messenger or courier.

AFTER JFK AND Jackie arrived at their Fort Worth hotel, many in their Secret Service detail took time to relax. After the Fort Worth Press Club closed, at least six off-duty Secret Service agents showed up at Fort Worth’s Cellar Club, which Warren Commission files describe as a “night spot that poses as a beatnik place,” a coffee shop where customers could bring their own liquor or drink what the Commission called “fruit drinks” (Kool-Aid spiked with high-proof alcohol). After the recent stress of the Chicago and Tampa threats, it’s not surprising that the agents would be ready for some relaxation, especially since no threat or warning had emerged for the next day’s Dallas visit. According to CBS anchor Bob Schieffer—then a reporter for a Fort Worth newspaper—a major attraction for the club was that its waitresses wore only “underwear” while serving drinks, though another report says they wore bikinis.

The owner of the Cellar club, Pat Kirkwood, knew both Jack Ruby and mob associate Lewis McWillie. Kirkwood claimed in a filmed interview for Jack Anderson in 1988 that several strippers who worked for Jack Ruby had come to the club late that night, and he indicated that Jack Ruby might have sent them over on purpose. Kirkwood also claimed that some of the agents “were drinking pure Everclear [alcohol].” Warren Commission documents confirm that some of Ruby’s strippers knew Kirkwood. Whether or not the women were sent by Ruby on purpose, the fact that Secret Service agents were out so late the
night before Kennedy’s visit was important information for someone like Ruby. Their presence indicated that the Mafia’s plan for Dallas hadn’t leaked, as it had in Chicago and Tampa. None of the Secret Service limo drivers were involved, though several high-profile agents from the next day’s events were. The agents’ recent accounts of their exploits in Dallas usually leave out or gloss over this well-documented incident. Though the agents’ names are all listed in the Warren Commission volumes, along with their time spent at the club and the drinks they say they consumed, I’ve decided not to name them here.

The agents left at various times, but the last agent didn’t leave until 5 a.m., even though they had to report for duty at 8 a.m.

NOVEMBER 22, MORNING, WASHINGTON, DC

Harry Williams began his RFK-arranged meeting with CIA officials in Washington, DC, at an Agency safe house. Writing about that meeting twenty years later in the
Washington Post
, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Haynes Johnson said that Williams’s work for the Kennedys about “the problem of Cuba . . . had reached an important point.” As a result, on that day Williams “participated in the most crucial of a series of secret meetings with top-level CIA and government people.” Haynes confirmed in his article that Williams was the Cuban exile leader closest to JFK’s administration.

As reported by
Vanity Fair
and former FBI agent William Turner, those at the meeting included Harry Williams, E. Howard Hunt, James McCord,
*
and CIA Executive Director Lyman Kirkpatrick (the number-three official in the Agency, who outranked Richard Helms).
Helms and Desmond FitzGerald have also been reported as having attended at least a brief part of the long meeting.

Harry Williams said that Lyman Kirkpatrick asked many probing questions about the coup plan with Almeida. Apparently, Kirkpatrick was anxious to make sure the operation didn’t become another Bay of Pigs disaster for the United States. However, no problems surfaced and the plan looked ready to go forward. They would break for lunch around noon, Eastern time, with Williams eating separately from the CIA men.

That same morning, at CIA headquarters, Director John McCone sent a memo to the head of the Miami CIA Station, Ted Shackley, confirming that the “general uprising scheduled for 1 Dec” 1963 was “planned as [a] result of [the] Mil[itary] Service Act” because “in [the] opinion of” the coup “Leaders [the Cuban draft] would tremendously” impact the “clandestine movement in Cuba.” McCone’s memo was withheld from the Warren Commission and from all of the government investigating committees of the 1970s. It wasn’t declassified until 1993, when it slipped through in a mass release of files, and wasn’t published until 2005.

AT THE JUSTICE Department, Robert Kennedy was in a meeting about organized crime with forty of his attorneys from the Racketeering division. According to John H. Davis, “major items on the agenda were the investigations of” Rosselli’s boss “Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Jimmy Hoffa, and Carlos Marcello.” RFK was told that the verdict in the Marcello case in New Orleans could come as early as that day. The last subject before they broke for lunch was Sam Giancana and corruption in Chicago. RFK would go home for lunch, to his Hickory Hill estate in Virginia.

TO COVER AS many important facts as possible on this critical day, I will describe brief passages in approximate chronological order. Where times are given, they should be considered approximate, as are dates when events happened very late at night or very early in the morning. Since most of the key events occurred in Texas, Central time is used unless otherwise indicated. JFK’s assassination occurred at 12:30 p.m. CST. Some meetings or incidents that we’ve covered extensively in earlier chapters are mentioned only briefly here, to place them in the context of other important events.

Most witness accounts in Dealey Plaza are from early, official Dallas Police, FBI, and Secret Service reports, supplemented by interviews conducted by noted journalists. I’ve chosen to focus on reliable accounts that the Warren Commission largely overlooked or ignored, because they ran counter to the Commission’s conclusions. There are far more such accounts that can be noted here, but the Annotated Bibliography provides numerous sources to find them.

NOVEMBER 22, FORT WORTH AND DALLAS

7:30 a.m.:
JFK woke up in the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth. JFK told Jackie and aide Lawrence O’Donnell, “If somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?” JFK added, “Last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president. I mean it—the rain and the night and we were all getting jostled,” as JFK acted out the shooting scenario for Jackie. It’s now clear that JFK was talking about assassination because of the recent threats he dealt with in Tampa and that made him cancel his Chicago trip.

After giving a breakfast speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, and greeting crowds outside the hotel, JFK and Jackie flew from Forth Worth to Love Field, in Dallas.

11:38 a.m.:
Air Force One landed at Love Field with JFK and Jackie aboard. On the presidential wavelength of the Secret Service radio net, JFK and Jackie were referred to by their code names, Lancer and Lace. An open limo driven by Secret Service Agent Bill Greer—age fifty-four, with thity-five years of experience—was waiting to take them through Dallas.

11:40–11:45 a.m.:
Oswald asked another employee why a crowd was gathering outside, and when told the President was visiting, Oswald replied, “Oh, I see.” When his co-workers went to lunch, Oswald remained on the upper floor, where he was working.

11:50 a.m.:
A foreman “saw Oswald near the telephone on the first floor” at ten or fifteen minutes before noon (just thirty minutes before JFK was shot). It’s not known what calls Oswald might have made or received that day.

11:50 a.m.:
JFK’s motorcade left Love Field.

12:00 p.m.:
Four witnesses say that Oswald was downstairs, around the lunch room, at this time. Book Depository employee Bonnie Ray Williams returned to the sixth floor to eat his lunch.

AT THIS POINT, it’s important to describe the area around the Book Depository. Dealey Plaza is a funnel-shaped area composed of Houston Street at the top (the wide part of the funnel), with Elm Street as the left of the funnel, and Commerce Street as the right side. Main Street runs through the middle of the funnel, and all three streets converge at the bottom of the funnel, going under a railroad bridge that is called the “triple underpass.”

The Book Depository sits at the top left of the funnel, near the corner of Elm and Houston. Just in front of the Depository is the Elm Street extension, which runs straight into a parking lot and railroad tracks that flow into a railroad yard. Between the parking lot and Elm Street is a park-like area which includes a picket fence, a concrete monument, and the “grassy knoll.” The “grassy knoll” area is at the lower left of the funnel.

11:55–12:25 a.m.:
At 11:55, an important witness named Lee Bowers was in the tower in the railroad yard behind the grassy knoll. He saw a dirty 1959 Oldsmobile station wagon enter the parking lot behind the picket fence. The driver, a middle-aged white male with partially gray hair, drove around slowly, then left. The car had out-of-state plates and a sticker touting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in the rear window.

According to his statement to police, completed on November 22 and in Warren Commission Volume 24, “at about 12:15 another car came into the area with a white man about 25 to 35 years old driving. This car was a 1957 Ford, black, 2-door with Texas license. This man appeared to have a mike or telephone in the car. Just a few minutes after this car left at 12:20 p.m., another car pulled in. This car was a 1961 Chevrolet Impala . . . color white, and dirty up to the windows. This car also had a Goldwater . . . sticker. This car was driven by a white male about 25 to 35 years old with long blond hair . . . he left the area about 12:25 p.m.”

12:15 p.m.:
A witness saw a man—dark-haired, maybe Caucasian or a Latin with a fair complexion—with a rifle and scope on the westernmost end of the sixth floor of the Depository (toward the grassy
knoll). A dark-skinned man was visible at the easternmost end (near the apparent “sniper’s nest” found after the shooting). One of the men was described as wearing a very light-colored shirt, white or a light blue, open at the collar, unbuttoned about halfway, with a regular T-shirt beneath it. (Oswald said he was wearing a red or reddish shirt at work that day; a neighbor described his shirt that day as “tan.”) At 12:23, another witness saw “two men standing back from a window on one of the upper floors of the Book Depository,” and she noticed that “one of the men had dark hair . . . a darker complexion than the other.” At the time, she felt the man “might have been a Mexican,” and “she had the impression the men were looking out, as if ‘in anticipation of the motorcade.’”

12:15 p.m.:
Mrs. R. E. Arnold, a Book Depository secretary, saw Oswald standing in the hallway between the front doors leading to the warehouse, on the first floor. She puts the time at 12:15 or a little later. Oswald claims he ate his lunch in the first-floor lunch room, alone, except for a black man named Junior who walked through with a short black man. Both of the men were later identified, and were in the lunch room at times between noon and 12:25. The short man, Harold Norman, later said “there was someone else in there,” but he couldn’t remember who.

Oswald made a point of eating his lunch in the first floor lunch room, which was used by minority and disabled employees in that time of segregation. Such an act helped to burnish his reputation as having far-left sympathies in a very conservative city.