The Legend of Jack Ruby
by Eve Fisher Actually, this story is primarily by Gary Cartwright, and was published Texas Monthly in November, 1975. I think it's an appropriate column for the week, give or take a month, that he was born back in 1911. Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin, who in turn, assassinated John F. Kennedy, was born Jacob Leon Rubenstein on or around March 25 and April 25, 1911, in Chicago. From then on... it's legendary, mythic, and damned uncertain what happened and why. But one thing is certain, he played his part: "If there is a tear left, shed it for Jack Ruby. He didn’t make history; he only stepped in front of it. When he emerged from obscurity into that inextricable freeze-frame that joins all of our minds to Dallas, Jack Ruby, a bald-headed little man who wanted above all else to make it big, had his back to the camera. I can tell you about Jack Ruby, and about Dallas, and if necessary remind you that human life is sweetly fragile and the holy litany of ambition and success takes as many people to hell as it does to heaven. But someone else will have to tell you about Oswald, and what he was doing in Dallas that November, when Jack Ruby took the play away from Oswald, and from all of us. Dallas, Oswald, Ruby, Watts, Whitman, Manson, Ray, Sirhan, Bremer, Viet Nam, Nixon, Watergate, FBI, CIA, Squeaky Fromme, Sara Moore—the list goes on and on. Who the hell wrote this script, and where will it end? A dozen years of violence, shock, treachery, and paranoia, and I date it all back to that insane weekend in Dallas and Jack Ruby—the one essential link in the chain, the man who changed an isolated act into a trend." Personal note: I still remember watching this on the news, and even at 9 years old, I knew there was something fishy about it: I turned to my parents and said, "But they stood back and let him shoot him!" ... "Twelve years ago, when the first announcement that the President had been shot was broadcast over the PA system at Richardson Junior High School, Gertrude Hutter, an eighth-grade teacher, began crying. Bob Dudney, who is now a reporter for the Times Herald , recalled the moment. She turned her back long enough to compose herself, then addressed her class with these prophetic words: “Children, we are entering into an age of violence. There is nothing we can do about it, but all of us must stay calm, and above all, civilized.”" Read it all here: Texas Monthly Gertrude Hutter was a prophet. But I doubt even she could have foreseen the seemingly endless death and destruction we have unleashed upon ourselves. 1963 seems quaintly peaceful: one assassination, and a nation horror-struck, but pulling together in mourning. Even 1975 - Watergate, the last year of the Vietnam War, Squeaky Fromme, a bomb at LaGuardia killing 11 people, - seems like an era of safety for most, if not all. But today...
