‘Kennedy’s Avenger’ Review: The Assassin’s Assassin
There’s a shot! Oswald has been shot! Oswald has been shot! A shot rang out . . . mass confusion here. . . . The dark stocky man with the hat on . . . put the gun right in his belly. One of the wildest scenes I have ever seen. . . . The man rushed up and jammed the gun right into Oswald’s stomach and fired one shot. Oswald was carried back in the hallway . . .
That was radio reporter Ike Pappas from the basement of Dallas police headquarters just after 11 a.m. on Nov. 24, 1963. The man in the fedora was Jack Ruby, the febrile strip-club owner and cop buff. Oswald was Lee Harvey Oswald, the ex-Marine with ties to Russia who had murdered President John F. Kennedy two days before using a mail-order rifle fired from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the route of Kennedy’s motorcade.
More than 57 years later, the Kennedy assassination has lost little of its resonance as one of the most horrific episodes in American history. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone, and ever since no one has produced any real evidence to refute that. Ruby’s execution of Oswald ensured that Kennedy’s killer could never be thoroughly interrogated and stand trial, adding impetus to the conspiracy theories—a communist plot? a right-wing vendetta? a Mafia hit?—still embedded in the nation’s consciousness. Four months after killing Oswald, Ruby himself was in the dock for a circus trial in a city desperately trying to erase the stain of having the nation’s president slain on its streets.
Now the whole shambolic extravaganza has been revived by Dan Abrams and David Fisher in “Kennedy’s Avenger: Assassination, Conspiracy, and the Forgotten Trial of Jack Ruby” (Hanover Square, 400 pages, $27.99). Mr. Abrams, the chief legal correspondent for ABC News, and his collaborator have written three other books about trials involving American presidents, and their latest is a fascinating blend of courtroom drama and legal analysis.
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