New book on Jack Ruby offers insights into his life and events after JFK assassination
By R.J. Morgan
What is the Truth, and where did it go? Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know…
“Murder Most Foul” by Bob Dylan (2020)
Last summer, while driving through the never-ending sprawl of interstate highways that make up the modern Republic of Texas, I chose to listen to the audiobook version of Danny Fingeroth’s new book, Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin.
What I found was an extremely well-researched accounting of Ruby’s life, knowledge of which is relegated in most Americans’ minds to a few minutes in the fall of 1963 when he, for reasons Danny tries to explain but no one quite can, shot the man who shot the man who had saved the world from nuclear disaster the previous fall.
That’s an extremely simplified summation of the story of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and, ultimately, Jack Ruby, but then again, I wasn’t there.
As a child of the 1980s, I grew up with no firsthand understanding of Kennedy’s assassination or the long shadow it cast on all that came afterwards. I don’t remember where I was that day, because I wasn’t anywhere. I didn’t watch the whole thing play out on live television, and I don’t remember the embarrassingly celebratory cheers that erupted from a junior high gymnasium in rural Tennessee the way my father does.
I picked up the main gist of things in junior high and high school. The rest I “learned” from watching Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK film, just like the rest of my friends did.
Whether in print, film or some other medium, just about any source you seek out will distill Jack Ruby’s role in the tragedy down to a few short sentences: A local strip club owner and small-time gangster, Ruby murdered presidential assassin-cum-patsy Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters two days after Oswald killed Kennedy. Ruby died shortly thereafter of natural causes, forever shrouding the true events of Nov. 22, 1963, in mystery.
If that pretty much sums up your understanding of Jack Ruby, I encourage you to read Fingeroth’s book. What you’ll find is as fascinating as it is, at times, unsettling.
Danny takes great pains to flesh out for his readers the totality of the man born Jacob Leon Rubenstein in Chicago in 1911. He interviews friends and family who knew Ruby’s softer, more generous side as a younger man. He recounts Ruby’s move to Dallas and his various dabblings in nefarious business ventures. He interrogates Ruby’s devout Jewish faith through extensive insights from Ruby’s rabbi, the venerable Hillel Silverman.
The book offers a blow-by-blow summary of the [sometimes-conflicting] reports of Ruby’s movements in the days leading up to and after Kennedy’s assassination and Ruby’s subsequent shooting of Oswald. He also recounts Ruby’s trial(s) and steady descent into madness over the intervening years. It’s a remarkably vivid portrait of someone whose relevance to the greater world lasted just a few short seconds.
Fingeroth knows a thing or two about heroes and villains. He’s a veteran of the comic book industry and enjoyed a long stint as a writer and editor at Marvel Comics, particularly on the Spiderman franchise. I’ve gotten to know Danny tangentially over the last few years, mostly through our mutual appreciation of Bob Dylan, and have always found him to be a storyteller of the finest caliber. This book is no different, laced with his classically wry wit and flare for the fantastic, all of which make it that much more enjoyable.
As I was listening to the book in my car, I passed through Dallas. Unable to help myself, I took a quick detour through downtown, past the old police headquarters and through Dealey Plaza.
A couple of weeks later I was headed in the opposite direction, through rural Georgia, on the afternoon a young man in Pennsylvania tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump at his campaign rally. Earlier in the day he had Googled, “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?”
The whole thing reminded me of America’s analog days. Oswald slipped through the cracks, and so did Ruby. Neither had an Instagram account.
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R.J. Morgan is instructional associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, director of the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.