A problem with the headline news about Jack Ruby and the JFK Files and an FBI informant

What follows is Jack Ruby’s movements from three hours before the assassination until an hour after the murder itself.   It is from pages 411-12 of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (Random House, 1993) and is based on contemporaneous FBI interviews of witnesses at the Dallas Morning News, as well as some of their subsequent testimony to the Warren Commission,  (all citations are listed in Case Closed)

The unequivocal conclusion: Jack Ruby was in the second floor of the Dallas Morning News offices through the assassination.  The News building was five blocks from Dealey Plaza.  Ruby could not have been standing at the corner of the Postal Annex Building facing the Texas School Book Depository Building, as claimed almost 14-years after the assassination by an FBI informant, Bob Vanderslice.

[[[On Friday, November 22, Ruby was up by 9: 30 and at the Dallas Morning News shortly before 11: 00, in order to place his regular weekend advertisements for his two nightclubs.  On his way into the building, he saw two newspaper employees, waved at one across the ground floor while yelling, “Hi. The President is going to be here today,” and spoke to the other about some diet pills he had recommended.  He then stopped by the office of Tony Zoppi, the newspaper’s entertainment reporter, but he was not in. Ruby next went to the second-floor advertising department, where he met with Don Campbell, the sales agent he had seen at the Cabana Hotel the night before. Campbell worked with him as he wrote his weekend advertisements. Ruby complained about how “lousy” business was and that he was tired of having to act as the unofficial bouncer, even though he was a “very capable fighter.”

Campbell was with Ruby from 12: 00 to 12: 25 P.M., just five minutes before the President was shot. The News building was five blocks from Dealey Plaza. From several second-floor windows of the News building, it was possible to observe the Texas School Book Depository, but Ruby apparently never went to those windows. Before 12: 40, John Newman, another advertising-department employee, observed Ruby sitting at the same desk where Campbell had left him.  He was reading the Morning News and had the paper open to page 14. The entire page was a black-bordered advertisement, headed in large block letters, “Welcome Mr. Kennedy,” and the text accused the President of being a Communist tool. It was signed by “The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman.”  Ruby was very disturbed that the News should have run such a demeaning advertisement and was dismayed that it was signed by someone with a Jewish name. It was the second time he had focused on the ad that day (earlier he had called his sister Eva to complain about it).  “Who is this Weissman?” Ruby asked Newman, and he complained about the ad’s “lousy taste.”  “What the hell, are you so money hungry?” Ruby asked Newman. “He was upset that a Jewish name should be part of something he thought was so insulting to the President,” says Earl Ruby. “It was something that got under his skin the wrong way.”  

A few minutes after Newman saw him staring at the ad, two News employees ran into the office and announced that shots had been fired at the motorcade and the President may have been hit. Pandemonium erupted. Newman said Ruby had a look of “stunned disbelief,” and he was “emotionally upset.”

“I don’t recall what was said,” Jack Ruby later testified. “And I was in a state of hysteria, I mean. You say, ‘Oh my God, it can’t happen.’ You carry on crazy sayings.”

Within minutes, several advertisers telephoned Newman to cancel the ads they had placed for the weekend. Ruby believed the cancellations were motivated by the offending Weissman ad: “The phones were ringing off the desk,” said Ruby, “and they were having a turmoil in the News Building because of a person by the name of Bernard Weissman placing that particular ad … criticizing a lot of things about our beloved President.… I heard John Newman say, ‘I told him not to take that ad.’”

Ruby asked Newman if he could use his phone, and he again called Eva. She was crying over the news about Kennedy. “This is my sister and she is hysterical,” he said, holding the phone out for Newman to hear. Newman said Eva “sounded very upset,” and he listened for a moment, without saying a word, while Ruby tried “to calm her down.” Jack was distraught that his sister was “crying hysterically.” He turned to Newman. “John, I will leave Dallas. John, I am not opening up tonight.” According to Newman, Ruby left the News no later than 1: 30. “I left the building,” Ruby recalled, “and I went down and I got my car, and I couldn’t stop crying …” He said he then drove back to the Carousel.]]]