Jack Ruby changed history with one bold, violent action: killing
accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV two days
after the November 22, 1963, murder of President John F. Kennedy. But
who was Jack Ruby--and how did he come to be in that spot on that
day?
As we approach the sixtieth anniversaries of the murders of Kennedy and
Oswald, Jack Ruby's motives are as maddeningly ambiguous today as they
were the day that he pulled the trigger.
The fascinating yet frustrating thing about Ruby is that there is
evidence to paint him as at least two different people. Much of his
life story points to him as bumbling, vain, violent, and neurotic; a
product of the grinding poverty of Chicago's Jewish ghetto; a man barely
able to make a living or sustain a relationship with anyone besides his
dogs.
By the same token, evidence exists of Jack Ruby as cagey and competent,
perhaps not a mastermind, but a useful pawn of the Mob and of both the
police and the FBI; someone capable of running numerous legal, illegal,
and semi-legal enterprises, including smuggling arms and vehicles to
both sides in the Cuban revolution; someone capable of acting as
middleman in bribery schemes to have imprisoned Mob figures set free.
Cultural historian Danny Fingeroth's research includes a new, in-depth
interview with Rabbi Hillel Silverman, the legendary Dallas clergyman
who visited Ruby regularly in prison and who was witness to Ruby's
descent into madness. Fingeroth also conducted interviews with Ruby
family members and associates. The book's findings will catapult you
into a trip through a house of historical mirrors.
At its end, perhaps Jack Ruby's assault on history will begin to make
sense. And perhaps we will understand how Oswald's assassin led us to
the world we live in today.
