Ruby and the Rangers

   

           In September five years ago a box arrived in my mail from the Texas Rangers. It was their file on the Kennedy assassination or so they said.

           The last of the four principals who rode in the President’s car that day, Nellie Connally, widow of Governor “Big John” Connally had died a few months earlier in a nursing home in Austin and there were all those official promises through the years that all the facts had been revealed. So, like—after payment of $238 for copying costs and “staff overtime”—a little over 1,000 pages, the whole file according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, aka the Texas Rangers—arrived in the mail just like memorabilia from a long-lost aunt.

            There was a copy of Lee Harvey Oswald’s application for work at the Schoolbook Depository, his academic records in Ft. Worth (good at sports, bad at spelling) and a list of everything seized in a search of his home. There were the FBI notes of the interrogation of Jack Ruby as well as transcripts of police radio traffic the day the president was shot and witness statements taken on the street by the Sheriff in and around Dealey Plaza. There were even statements by those present when Jack Ruby murdered Lee Oswald. One detective who knew Jack Ruby personally said he shouted out when he first saw the gun, “Jack, you son of a bitch, don’t do it!”

The scope of the documentation was wide—including the duty stations of every one of almost 500 cops working security that day, in the Big D. As well as super-detailed, with even a statement from the medical student summoned to the jail to put his finger in the suspect’s ass, in a late search for weapons. There was a letter a month afterwards from a representative of Oswald’s widow asking that her late husband’s things be returned to her, “the property I speak of includes . . . his rifle, pistol and other personal items.” But what wasn’t in the file was more interesting than what was. Not a single piece of paper written by a Texas Ranger. It was as if the files had been meticulously scrubbed to remove any trace of the Rangers and troopers who worked security in Dallas that day, waiting at the Trade Mart for the president who would never arrive. No intelligence reports about what took place after the killing either, that first tentative search for “subversives,” maybe Oswald but more likely Ruby who lived and prospered as a law enforcement groupie, giving free cover and drinks in his night club to anyone carrying a badge.
             There weren’t any Texas Ranger reports on a case that involved not just the murder in Dallas of the President of the United States but the serious wounding of the Governor followed by an investigation—statewide, national and international—that lasted a year and has never really ended.

So, like, what’s up with that?

 

            When the police searched Oswald’s home they found Russian literature from his time in the Soviet Union and his Marine dog tags and sharpshooter medal—and his library, all the books he owned, which tells us something about the presumed assassin.

            Each page of the inventory was stamped by a Dallas police officer before being turned over to the FBI: something gloomy by Sartre, the anti-government bible 1984 and Revolution Must be a School of Unfettered Thought, by Fidel, along with enough pro-Cuba pamphlets to paper a protest march. Oswald also owned The Spy Who Loved Me and You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming. Like the president he killed he was a fan of James Bond. The only missing title was From Russia With Love.

            A clerk at the Department of Public Safety noted in a nice letter, in response to my puzzled inquiries, that he was also curious how there could be no documents by the Rangers and he had on his own initiative contacted Rangers Company B, stationed in Garland, that covers Dallas, then as now. The clerk was told there were no files, he said. No one documented anything. That was the Rangers’ story and they were sticking to it. Confronted with this discrepancy, this Texas-sized hole in the Lone Star narrative: a later letter from the same guy in the Department of Public Safety’s legal affairs office explained, in a slightly-less helpful manner, that the Rangers file may have once existed but may have once been given to Texas Christian University—perhaps in 1968, nobody at headquarters was making any promises.

            “The Department does not know,” the gentleman in legal affairs reported the Rangers’ new position, “if these documents did or did not pertain to any investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. There is no record to indicate that these documents were or were not returned to the Department.”

            Huh?

            A spokeswoman for the State Library said they had files on the Kennedy Assassination. This particular archive just arrived from, you guessed it, the Texas Department of Public Safety, but only like what they sent me—none of the documentation appeared to actually have been produced by the Rangers themselves. Nobody from Company B wrote anything down. Colonel Thomas A. Davis, Director of the Department of Public Safety, and boss of the Rangers, suggested in a letter that the files might have been destroyed as part of a “records retention schedule,” but the State Archivist said his office had never approved the destruction of any records of historical value, much less on the crime of the century. Certainly nothing on the Kennedy assassination, the Archivist said.

            So, like, a question came to mind. Not to be suspicious or anything, not to be an amateur detective. But who was more likely to know what really happened in Dallas than the Rangers? Who was more familiar with the figures present, the state’s top political leadership including Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Governor Connally? Who would have known the “atmosphere” in North Texas better than the Rangers stationed in the Big D? If there had been a conspiracy who was more likely to know about it? Again, not to be suspicious or anything.

            After the assassination the Attorney General of Texas decided to look at the bigger picture, the question of conspiracy, just as the Warren Commission was doing in Washington. At the time the attorney general was Waggoner Carr.

            If General Carr was no legal scholar that’s not what the Attorney General of Texas does but he wasn’t a bad lawyer either. He was a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, a self-described “Connally Democrat,” Carr himself would later be charged by the FBI during the historic Sharpstown scandal and defend himself and be acquitted. He was that kind of guy. For whatever reason—not the least of which may have been publicity—General Carr was not ready to hand over the case to federal prosecutors. Instead he hired two special counsels to help him find out what really happened in Dallas. He called his investigation a “Texas Court of Inquiry.”

            

             Half a century later, that was a lucky break for me. The files from the Court of Inquiry were released to the State Archives just after my request to the Rangers and Attorney General Carr’s notes, written just after the assassination, offer a different take on the crime of the century, one that makes the silence of the Texas Rangers through the decades so deafening today.

            In an entry dated November 26, four days after the shooting of President Kennedy, Attorney General Carr wrote in his journal, “I talked with Colonel Garrison on the phone”—Colonel Homer Garrison, founding Director of the Texas Department of Pubic Safety, the man who sat in the top cop’s chair in Austin for 30 years and was big daddy of the Rangers—“and asked him to determine who went to Mexico with Oswald at the time he was there from September 26 thru October 3, 1963. He was advised to check all points of entry on the border. Several hours later Colonel Garrison made a preliminary report stating that two blonde women and another man either went from Texas into Mexico with Oswald or came back with him and they would make a more complete report later.” In other words they didn't know shit. But within a week after the assassination the Rangers had checked all passengers on flights in and out of Dallas, per General Carr’s note, determined that the same Jack Rubinstein who had previously been investigated by the Un-American Activities Committee was not the Jack Ruby who owned strip clubs in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and reported, according to Attorney General Carr’s notes, “Oswald did not have a telephone during this period of time and they cannot check his calls. They are still checking Ruby’s calls.” The follow up led to a correction from Colonel Garrison: “Oswald entered Mexico at Laredo crossing on September 26. His transportation is not known and he entered Mexico alone. He returned from Mexico on October 3. He returned by private auto, apparently alone. His visa shows that he just went to the interior—no destination stated.”

            The first special counsel the Texas Attorney General hired was Bob Storey, former dean of the law school in Dallas. Storey’s job was administrative, to keep the notes and do all the bureaucratic tasks that drive investigation of the Kennedy assassination along.

            The second special counsel who General Carr hired was tasked with solving the crime: To look at the witness statements and find the discrepancies to run the traps that would ultimately answer the question whether Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby each acted alone and, just as important, independently. That man’s name—the second “Texas special counsel”—was Leon Jaworski. Yes, that Leon Jaworski—the man who would one day be chief Watergate prosecutor and took Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting and dismantled a presidency.

             In 1963, two months after the assassination, Jaworski was a lawyer in Houston, a former Army colonel who like Bob Storey made a name for himself prosecuting Nazis. Leon Jaworski was the man picked by Attorney General Carr to break the case—to find out if there was a conspiracy and if yes, what kind. He apparently formed his own ideas about the assassination. You have to read between the lines but Jaworski's preliminary take on the case echoes the suspicions that were already rampant among members of the public. From his office in Houston, on January 27, 1964, two months after President Kennedy's murder Jaworski wrote a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL” to Attorney General Carr about how to get to the bottom of certain “rumors” they heard about the assassination—rumors which also help explain what may make the Rangers so nervous today.

“In order to keep aftermaths from placing you in a position of possible criticism,” Special Counsel Jaworski wrote to the Attorney General, “[and] to the end of being of the maximum assistance to the Warren Commission,” he suggested that Gen. Carr send a letter to Washington. “Of course, it is to be assumed that the ferreting out of this matter,” Jaworski told his boss, “will be resourcefully and completely done. On the other hand if this is not done and something should show up at a later date, even a year or five years from now, there would be a clamor.”

            The letter that Colonel Jaworski was suggesting be sent to Washington referred to a meeting that had just taken place between Washington and Texas prosecutors about the course of the investigation. Regarding “the subject of the discussion of last Friday at which Chief Justice Warren, you, my special counsel and I, [Dallas D.A.] Henry Wade and his assistant, Mr. Alexander, were present, I respectfully suggest that the Commission consider taking the following steps.” Jaworski’s plan was to find any connections the killers might have with others, yes—but the targets of the search that Col. Jaworski was suggesting were not the usual suspects in the deaths of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. Not the mob, or right-wing extremists, not Cubans or Communists.
            The suspect was a member or members of Law Enforcement.

            “The ferreting out of this matter,” Jaworski described to the attorney general, required three steps, each in sequence after the other. He already had two suspects in mind.

            First he wrote: “From the director of both agencies involved, there should be obtained the names of every agent and representative in service in the Dallas area between the months of August and December. This information must be complete so that every single representative who acted for these agencies in that area, whether only a few days or for several months, is to be included.” Second: “Each of the men on these two lists should be examined under oath to determine whether he has any knowledge of the subject matter under discussion.” Third: “The director—the number one man of each agency—as well as the district director of each agency, being the district in which Dallas lies, each should similarly be examined to ascertain whether any of them has any knowledge of the matter under inquiry.” The attorney general’s file doesn’t specify the nature of “the matter under inquiry” or who the suspects were by name. But in another letter, on May 12, 1964, from Gen. Carr to Colonel Garrison, the attorney general makes an odd plea.

            Waggoner Carr tells Colonel Garrison that Texas law enforcement has been “most helpful” up to that point but that the Warren Commission needs to know if there’s anything Washington hasn’t seen.

            “’The Commission,’” Carr quotes a communication from Chief Justice Warren, “’would like to know whether any law enforcement agency in the State of Texas possesses any information not hitherto disclosed to this Commission concerning the association of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby with any Communist or subversive organizations in the United States or abroad, or with any criminals or criminal groups either in the United States or abroad.” The second part of the letter probes further. “The Commission would also like to know whether any law enforcement agency in the State of Texas possesses any investigatory reports, police records, or other official data not hitherto disclosed to the Commission concerning the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of Lee Harvey Oswald.” In his letter to Waggoner Carr, and the proposed letter to Chief Justice Warren, Colonel Jaworski mentioned two government agencies “rumored” to have been somehow involved in Dallas, possibly running Oswald, or Ruby, as informants or agents, assassins or thugs. The FBI is presumably one. The other, well—conspiracy theorists have always liked the CIA as accomplice in the crime of the century. But there’s a better suspect. The agencies that Jaworski describes in his letter have district offices that cover Dallas. Of course the CIA would be a possibility—if the CIA had a North Texas office. Perhaps they do.

            As it turns out there was a hint at the mystery agency’s identity in the records that came from the Texas Department of Public Safety. In the box was another list of seized evidence—just like the one detailing what was taken from Oswald’s home. Jack Ruby’s car was his office and after his arrest the Dallas cops found the vehicle parked not far from police headquarters. In it was everything Ruby used to run his business and do what he did, whatever that was—the hustling, small-time thuggery, the booze and the girls. The inventory from the car lists more than $1,000 in cash, his clubs’ receipts. There was a pair of brass knuckles, a tool of his trade. The only reason Ruby’s gun wasn’t in the glove compartment where he normally kept it was because he had taken it with him to shoot Oswald.

            In the car there was also a stack of free passes to his shows that Ruby gave out as promotions, and a collection of business cards collected as connections. One card was from a local justice of the piece, asking any police officer to please render assistance to Ruby—a get-out-of-jail-free card, the kind of thing you show to a cop when you get stopped for speeding. But one of the business cards was for a man named “W.M. Naylor,” showing the address P.O. Box 4087 in Austin. That was interesting. If you’ve ever made an open records request of the Texas Rangers, Box 4087 would be familiar. It’s the address of the Texas Department of Public Safety headquarters.

            “W.M. Naylor,” according to the Department’s own personnel records, was in November 1963 the chief of the DPS narcotics squad—in other words, Texas’s top narc. But Naylor actually transferred to narcotics from the Texas Rangers where—also according to Department of Public Safety records—he was in the “Bureau of Intelligence,” whatever that was. Historically, investigators have always tried to make a connection between Ruby and Oswald, or failing that, Oswald and the FBI. A better connection is Ruby and the Rangers.

            Unfortunately the exact nature of the relationship is unclear because the Rangers report they have no records on the Kennedy assassination. But the month after my request for the Kennedy material, an intelligence analyst in the Texas Department of Public Safety contacted the State Archives about delivering some old files for safekeeping.

            According to an internal email sent soon after by the archivist’s office, “DPS Criminal Intelligence Service has called about records that fall under their series, Criminal Investigation Report . . . . Over the years they've kept reports of cases with historical significance, like JFK's assassination, and Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. They recently had an open records request for the JFK material and found out how much work goes into reviewing records and making them available . . . . Before they start shredding, they wonder if we have any interest in selecting any cases with perceived historical value for the State Archives. The records include police reports, evidence submitted (objects like money plates in counterfeiting cases), polygraph tests, affidavits, audiotapes of interviews. . . . [Texas Public Information Act] and privacy issues likely abound. The most voluminous case is the JFK assassination files . . .”

            The list provided by DPS included the most famous Ranger cases: Sam Bass, the 1969 University of Texas Tower massacre in Austin and a file called “Corruption in Texas,” which sounds like a possible page-turner. A month later, the promised material still had not been delivered to the Archives, and a Department of Public Safety intelligence analyst named Victoria Sungino, assigned to facilitate the transfer, wrote an email to the State Archives staff that there was a delay in deciding what to send over because, “I am waiting on my commander to view the list first. He said there are some cases that I will just have to shred because of the sensitivity of the case.”

            There's no way to know what pages did not survive the trip from the Rangers headquarters in Austin to the State Library five miles away. But the Kennedy file had obviously been thinned. Originally described by the Department of Public Safety as the largest part of the papers, measured in cubic feet, when the papers arrived at the State Library the file on a murderer named Henry Lee Lucas was the biggest, followed by the University of Texas Tower shootings. The Kennedy file was a distant third which may help answer the question about the second agency under suspicion by Colonel Jaworski. It was the Rangers and they had just cleaned house.

            Not that there's anything wrong with that.

          

           

             After his arrest Lee Oswald was given permission to use the telephone.

            He was kept under surveillance by a Lieutenant Lord who was in charge of the Dallas city jail the night after the president was shot, a day or so before he would be very publicly whacked by Jack Ruby. To set the scene. The accused assassin Oswald was actually escorted to the phone by a guard named J.L Popplewell, of the Big D's PD.

            The prisoner’s first try at reaching his party in New York was unsuccessful. Most assassination experts believe that Oswald called John Abt, the general counsel of the Communist Party USA, to ask for legal assistance. Abt testified later to the Warren Commission that he never spoke to Oswald, that in fact he was out of town the night the accused assassin had tried to reach him, which seems highly unlikely. In any case, who Oswald wanted to talk to at first wasn’t home.

            Later that evening Lee Harvey Oswald was taken back to the jail phone to try again. “Popplewell put Oswald in the telephone booth and was standing nearby,” Lt. Lord said in a statement that he gave to the FBI and which is included in the box of Rangers papers that the Department of Public Safety says doesn’t exist but ended up at the State Archives. “I called to Popplewell and told him that Oswald was allowed to make his call privately. Popplewell was advised to keep Oswald in view but to stay back a reasonable distance. Oswald was in the telephone booth about thirty minutes, making his call and then talking to his party. After Oswald completed his call he was returned to his cell by J.L. Popplewell.”

            If that were any time since 9/11, imagine how different the scene would be. Concerns for Lee Oswald’s privacy would be minimal at best. Certainly we would know who Oswald telephoned because the call would be recorded in Dolby. There'd be video too. The telephone operator who connected Mr. Oswald with his party in New York would be followed home and John Abt or whoever Oswald spoke with would be investigated down to the fillings in his teeth. The transfer Oswald was awaiting would be Guantanamo.

            Fast forward. Lt. Lord and Officer J.L. Popplewell. Neither couldn’t find work at the Department of Public Safety today or Dallas police. By the time of the 9-11 their kind of innocence was no longer in demand, due in part to what happened in the Big D so long ago.

            So, like, why is what the Texas Rangers knew still important?

            Because it's the way we were and it’s a way we will never be again.