The Disposable Jack Ruby
AMERICA —2
From MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK
general tone of the journalism which re- sponded to Jack Ruby's death was that he had achieved what he had always wanted, which was to be someone of whom everyone had heard. It was a curious notion; what little had been re- ported of Ruby's 'conversation in the last year indicated that he had gone quite looney and pretty far beyond any knowledge that he was famous. It seems continually to have been his trouble that he went through life unrecognised except as an example: and here at the end he was only an example of the difficulty we Ameri- cans have in writing obituaries which bear any particular resemblance to the party deceased. One could as well say that a paper handker- chief became famous because the president of the United States had blown his nose upon it. Jack Ruby had been a piece of disposable tissue ever since he shot President Kennedy's putative assassin.
Just after his arrest, Jack Ruby told a Dallas policeman that he would ansWer all questions 'if we would not make a fool out of him.' That may not have been the last effort he made for his dignity, but it would be the last permitted him. His trial was managed without dignity from the bench, without concentration from the defence table, without even unusual effort from the prosecution, which used its natural advantages skilfully enough but had altogether so easy a time that Dallas district attorney Henry Wade intended to petition the governor for a com- mutation of the death sentence because 'he felt that Ruby had not received a proper defence.'
We may explain most of Jack Ruby's disasters as the result of his delusions about his own im- portance; but the final one seems to have been the consequence of the actions of persons deluded that he was of no importance at all. From the day he murdered Oswald, everyone involved with Jack Ruby seems to have been thinking of some- thing else.
His family raised the money for his defence by selling his autobiography for 25,000 dollars, and the advertising man who had found the ghost writer also found as his defence counsel Melvin Belli, California's most famous personal injury lawyer. Belli had already remarked, 'I want the case so badly I can taste it.' Initially he suggested a 50,000 dollar fee; when Ruby's brother pointed out that the family had only 25,000 dollars, Belli replied, 'Okay, I'll take it. Don't worry about the rest. I'll probably make it up by writing a book.' Belli's first act on taking the case was to con- tract with Alvin Moscow to write the definitive history of the Ruby defence. Moscow's recollec- tion of the experience is an inttructive insight into the atmosphere of peace and concentration in which the tactics of the struggle to save Jack Ruby's neck were devised: 'Moscow protested that he was not getting much more information than the working press in general. Belli con- stantly held press conferences at which he in- formed members of the press generally how his case was proceeding and was almost always available for interviews in which he discussed details of his strategy. For Moscow, the last straw was Belli's agreement with an independent film producer, Sam Galin, of Hollywood, to film a documentary on the defence of Ruby. [Mos- cow's] exclusive access to the defence prepara- tions would be shared by a television crew.' And then, another key figure seemed similarly distracted by the profit and glory deserved by being also attached to history. Belli began his defence by crying that it would be impossible for Ruby to get a fair trial in a Dallas whose shame at the death of a president on its streets had been compounded by the shame of having a defendant murdered in the hands of his jailers. Judge Joe Brantley Brown seems to have been ready enough to permit the trial to be moved somewhere else in Texas so long as he could preside over it. When no other judicial district would consent to allow him to go along with the show, Judge Brown insisted that it remain in Dallas. He also was writing a book.
Melvin Belli's other purpose was `to bring the law of insanity up to date while also helping - Jack Ruby.' In the possession by a cause larger than his client, he seems to have pursued this defence well beyond the point at which his two ,major psychiatric witnesses stopped. At the end, in the interests of speed, Judge Brown insisted that the defence sum up at one in the morning; when Belli came to the jury rail, he 'noticed that one of the women jurors was asleep.'
It seemed curious afterwards that, in his final appeal, Belli made no effort to talk the jury out of the death penalty. That, Belli said, would have been 'demeaning' to his client: 'Would it,' he asked, 'have been moral to take this sick man, this mental cripple, and have him grovel "I'm just a Jew boy and I'm sorry. Please forgive me"?'
And yet this awful scene may have been just the one Jack Ruby wanted played. More than in the places where he was famous, he seems to have found some understanding in The Trial of lack Ruby, by John Kaplan and Jon R. Waltz, an account less noticed than it deserved because nothing somehow could elevate Jack Ruby into a figure in a great state trial. In their epilogue, Kaplan and Waltz remember the Jack Ruby whom the other actors so soon and so decisively forced off his own stage: Although Oswald may have died undisturbed with whatever illusions led him to his deed, Jack Ruby, before a crowded courtroom and the press of the world, was stripped of both his self-respect and his illusions. He heard himself analysed by his psychiatrists as a latent homosexual with a compulsive desire to be liked and respected, de- scribed by his own lawyer as the village clown, damningly quoted by members of the police de- partment in whose reflected prestige he had been happy to bask, and forced to sit as a passive wit- ness, while the attorneys, the judge and the jury fought over and decided his fate.
Ruby seems to have begun with a proper sense of his own dignity and a wild illusion of his own importance—the first of which was destroyed and the second of which was shunted aside by men with better-certified licences to feel im- portant. Repenting on the witness stand, he would not have demeaned himself but reasserted himself, because he would have been visible. We owed this unfortunate man his public degra- dation; the alternative was for him to have no presence at all, but to be only the occasion for other men to think about themselves. He came and went a stranger, infected 'by us, destroyed by us, and henceforth to be talked about by us as though it made no difference that never, once, had we really looked at him at all.
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