60 years on, Warren Commission witness testimony adds intrigue to story of JFK death

On the rural outskirts of Dallas potentially just weeks or even days before he shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby met at a hotel with his friend, the hotel’s manager, who ran what would become the confidential safehouse used by the Secret Service to protect Oswald’s wife starting only hours after her husband’s murder.

Former Columbus resident Ruth Paine said she kept curtain rods wrapped in brown paper in her garage near where Oswald allegedly had hidden his rifle on the floor wrapped in a blanket. Oswald told a witness the brown paper package he carried into the Book Depository the morning of the shooting were curtain rods, but investigators concluded the package really contained a sniper gun.

These are just a few of the odd plot twists gleaned not from the legions of conspiracy books, documentaries and films that have dissected the John F. Kennedy assassination, but directly from the more than 16,000 pages of sworn testimony, exhibits and FBI investigatory reports compiled by the Warren Commission. The official government panel on the JFK shooting released its findings to President Linden B. Johnson 60 years ago today.

After six decades of cold storage — and with two recent assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump — The Dispatch spent months poring over thousands of pages of direct Warren Commission testimony to glean a first impression look at what people saw, heard, and knew about the JFK case.

“Whether it’s today or 60 years ago, we’re talking about people who are kind of unstable people,” said retired Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Burt Griffin, 92, who in 1964 served as a 31-year-old assistant counsel to the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly called the Warren Commission.

“And these are the kind of people at a time of political intensity and lots of politicking, like the people doing what they’re doing today — making all sorts of accusations, saying derogatory things about people — it sets off these individuals. And in this country, we’ve probably got hundreds of them, if not more.”

After LBJ reviewed the commission’s official conclusions for three days, the commission’s report hit the front page of the Columbus Dispatch on Monday Sept. 28, 1964: Oswald fired all three shots; Jack Ruby killed Oswald two days later in the Dallas Police Station garage; and the commission found no evidence that either Oswald or Ruby “was part of any conspiracy, foreign or domestic.”

But six decades later, the commission’s 888-page report finding Oswald a crazed lone gunman who had no help from anyone, and Ruby a self-acting killer seeking revenge for Oswald’s brutal act, has done little to put to rest doubts on the part of the general public.

And that may be because buried in the sworn testimony from 552 witnesses, 94 of whom were interviewed before the actual commissioners, 395 by commission legal staff, 61 through sworn affidavits and two through statements, are loads of incongruencies that didn’t become apparent for years later.

“Commission hearings were closed to the public unless the witness appearing before the commission requested an open hearing,” the commission report explained, noting only one witness testified publicly, New York City attorney and lone-gunman skeptic Mark Lane. The rationale for secrecy was to protect Ruby’s right to a fair trial and to protect the innocent.

A recorded telephone call from LBJ to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shows that the newly sworn-in president formed the commission to head off congressional and Texas investigations, and that LBJ understood that the FBI’s early conclusions only a week in were that Oswald was “the one who did it,” Johnson said. “He’s the man who was after the president,” and “there was no connections between him and Ruby.”

“I think that’s correct,” Hoover responded on the recorded call.

The commission’s final report ultimately backed up the early conclusions LBJ had discussed with Hoover, hitting the papers just before the presidential election of 1964. But the thousands of pages of sworn witness transcripts, supporting exhibits and police reports would not be released for another two months, well after the election. It was contained in 26 unsearchable paper volumes.

Today, the records are electronically searchable, and the information in the detailed oral history paints a much more complex picture than the commission’s final report, revealing strange coincidences that appear to have gone largely unexamined by the blue ribbon seven-member panel, which included Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and a would-be future president, Gerald Ford, as members.

“I think what we tried to do is identify everybody who knew Oswald and then question everybody who knew Oswald,” said Griffin, whose new book “JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth” has been described as an account of how the commission tried to “sift truth” from those who concealed, withheld or exaggerated evidence.

“Another way to investigate it might have been to investigate everybody who might have had a motive to assassinate Kennedy, and to track them down. And to some extent we did that, but I don’t think we had a complete list of that.”

Ruby visits safehouse used to protect Oswald’s family

James H. Martin, the manager of a hotel on the rural outskirts of Dallas that began being used by the Secret Service as a secret safehouse to protect Oswald’s wife, children and mother just hours after Ruby shot Oswald, testified before the commission in February 1964 that he had known Ruby for years. Martin said he was on a first-name basis with Oswald’s killer, and had taken unknown visitors from New Orleans to visit Ruby in 1962.

Ruby had even been to the hotel for a meeting with Martin sometime before the Secret Service tapped the location to protect Oswald’s family members. While the transcripts of Martin’s testimony show that the commission never asked when Ruby visited what would become the safehouse, Martin’s testimony and an FBI report seem to place it no earlier than August 1963, and more likely sometime between late October 1963 and the Kennedy shooting weeks later in late November.

Roy Truly’s rifle

Roy Truly, the superintendent of the Texas School Book Depository and the man who hired Oswald in mid-October 1963 on the unsolicited recommendation of former Columbus resident Ruth Paine, admitted to the FBI to holding a high-powered military rifle with a telescopic sight in the Depository building less than 48 hours before JFK was assassinated. But he was never questioned about that incident until almost half a year later, when a single commissioner, John J. McCloy, began demanding that it be investigated.

The gun was owned by a publishing executive with an office in the building, who told the FBI his intent was to hide it there.

Truly first to peg Oswald as main suspect

Only 15 to 20 minutes or so after the JFK shooting, “it’s hard to say,” Truly became the first person to peg Oswald as a potential suspect, testimony shows. After Truly returned to the Depository’s first floor from guiding the first police officer to arrive at the scene to the building’s roof, Truly noticed that Oswald wasn’t in a group of “some of my boys.”

There were 15 warehouse workers employed at the building, and Truly couldn’t say how many others also were missing — although he acknowledged at least a couple of others were, as the building was “a complete madhouse” of cops and reporters.

Nevertheless, Truly immediately made a phone call to an adjacent building to have Oswald’s personnel file pulled so he could give police a suspect description, including height and weight, hair color, as well as home address and other details. Truly’s hunch proved almost clairvoyant — it wasn’t until more than an hour later that police would surround the Texas Theatre and arrest Oswald for shooting a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippit, and begin strongly considering him also to be a suspect in JFK’s assassination.

“What prompted you to think that Oswald was not among them?” commissioner and would-be president Gerald Ford asked Truly.

“I have asked myself that many times,” Truly replied. “I cannot give an answer,” noting that he didn’t even think the shots had come from the building when he witnessed the assassination from the sidewalk, but rather from the grassy knoll nearby.

A commission attorney would strongly press Truly to later change his story, testimony shows, making the time he reported Oswald as a suspect to police from around 12:45 p.m. or thereabouts to sometime after 1:22 p.m. Truly acquiesced to his newfound time estimates on his second round of sworn testimony — which largely dealt with the contentious issue of him having held the high-powered rifle in the Depository building two days before the JFK shooting.

“It could be — it could have been,” that he was mistaken, Truly testified under intense questioning.

“You have no exact memory as to the time you discovered he was not there?” commission attorney Joseph Ball prodded.

“No, sir,” Truly responded. “… After retracing my trip to the roof and the time delay and back, I would have to say that it was farther along in the day.”

Ruth Paine wraps curtain rods in paper

One of the pressing questions facing the commission was how did Oswald get a rifle into his workplace with no one noticing or discovering it. The commission determined that he did it by wrapping the 40-plus inch long military gun in brown paper, and telling a coworker who gave him a ride to work the morning of the shooting that the package was curtain rods.

So the commission seemed taken aback when Columbus native Ruth Paine, whose suburban Dallas house Oswald visited the night before the assassination to retrieve his rifle, testified that she kept curtain rods wrapped in brown paper in her garage, near where the rifle had been stored wrapped in a blanket.

“In the Paines’ garage, along with many other objects of a household character, there were two flat lightweight curtain rods belonging to Ruth Paine, but they were still there on Friday afternoon after Oswald’s arrest,” the commission final report concluded.

But Paine’s testimony was much more complicated — and she never said they were in her garage the day of the assassination. She didn’t know if they were still there almost four months later, she testified.

In an email with The Dispatch, Paine said she didn’t wish to discuss the issue further.

Reporter claimed Ruby was at Parkland Hospital

A White House correspondent for a large newspaper chain, Scripps-Howard, claimed to see Ruby at Parkland Hospital just after the fatally wounded Kennedy died there, but the commission concluded he simply was mistaken.

Seth Kantor had flown into Texas with the Washington, D.C. press corps and was an 18-year news veteran who was on the press bus in the presidential motorcade about 11 vehicles behind the president when the assassination happened. He and other reporters made a beeline for Parkland Hospital to chase the unfolding story.

He was inside the main hospital entrance hurrying to the press conference where it would be announced that Kennedy had died when someone tugged on his jacket. It was Jack Ruby, he said.

Kantor knew Ruby from having worked as a feature writer for the Dallas Times Herald from September 1960 to May 1962, having worked with Ruby on six stories about local personalities — including entertainers appearing at Ruby’s clubs.

So when Kantor felt the tug on the back of his jacket, “I turned and saw Jack Ruby standing there,” he testified. “He had his hand extended. I very well remember my first thought. I thought, well, there is Jack Ruby.”

They shook hands, and within 30 seconds Kantor excused himself to hurry into the news briefing, he said.

Kantor didn’t think anything of the meeting until two days later, as Kantor watched Oswald being transferred from the police station to the jail, and Ruby shot Oswald right in front of Kantor, on live national television.

The commission determined that Kantor was mistaken, noting video tapes of the scene at Parkland don’t show Ruby, while Kantor can be seen.

wbush@gannett.com

@ReporterBush