Jack Ruby
by Garry Wills, Ovid Demaris
Category: Trials (Assassination)

"You all know me, I'm Jack Ruby." That's what the killer shouted when police grabbed him a split second after he had pumped a bullet into the stomach of Lee Oswald. Who was Jack Ruby? Madman? Superpatriot? Conspirator? Two top writers achieve a gripping portrait of the complex and contradictory character of Jack Ruby - a man who grew up in an immigrant home with a drunken father and an insane mother, who climbed out of the ghetto to become the owner of a popular Dallas nightclub. The authors let his friends and employees describe the Jack Ruby they knew. He was a punch-happy scrapper who fought before he thought because "I might lose my nerve." Ruby could "cuss straight on like saying his prayers" but didn't allow dirty talk in front of his lady strippers. He could fire an employee seventeen times and pay for her kid's operation. A bachelor, he "respected" his fiancee of twelve years too much to marry her. He sought the company of cops, newsmen, anyone he thought important. Jack Ruby had many acquaintances but his only real friends were his dogs. Living in the fringe-society of hucksters and hustlers, Jack Ruby longed to be a big man in Dallas. Until the day he died he had a childlike awe of "class," respectability, and the law. Wills and Demaris get completely inside the mind of this complex man. They recreate the day Jack Ruby woke, got an SOS call from one of his girls, shaved, dressed, said good-bye to his dogs, drove downtown, parked his car illegally, walked over to the crowd and shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. The reader understands. He did it "for Jackie and the kids" and because he was Jack Ruby. With the same graphic immediacy the authors describe those first stunned minutes of disbelief after the murder, Ruby's incomprehension of his position, his grotesque camaraderie with his old friends on the Dallas police force ("You all know me..."). The authors move jail to courtroom, catching the carnival atmosphere of Ruby's trial--with brilliant portraits of defense attorney Belli and prosecutor Alexander--and finally to the hospital room where Ruby died. This book reveals Jack Ruby as no other has. It is a story of a marked life, of a man whose precarious sanity was destroyed by the events he created--who spent his last mortal strength trying to persuade the world that he did his duty as an American, a Texan, and a Jew when he killed the man who killed Kennedy.--From jacket flap