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Why Did Ruby Kill Oswald?

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Authors: Burt W. Griffin

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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Winter 2024 | Volume 69, Issue 1

ruby before the shot
Jack Ruby liked to kibitz with cops and had easy access to the main Dallas police station when Oswald was to be transferred to the county jail. He shouted "You rat son of a bitch, you killed my president!" before shooting Oswald in the gut. Wikipedia Commons

Editor’s Note: On November 22, 1963, 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from his sixth-floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository at John F. Kennedy as the president’s open-roof limousine was moving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. The first shot missed. The second went through Kennedy’s upper back, then out his neck and into the body of Texas Governor John Connally. The third fatally hit the back of the president’s head. Two days later, as Oswald was being escorted through the basement of the Dallas police headquarters en route to the county jail, Jack Ruby, the 52-year-old owner of two local strip clubs, aimed his .38 Colt revolver point-blank at Oswald’s gut and killed him. 

In the nearly 60 years since those two murders, a majority of Americans have believed that JFK and then Oswald were murdered as the result of a complex conspiracy, possibly involving the CIA, the Mafia, Cuban exiles in Miami, agents of Fidel Castro, and/or sundry other nefarious men in the shadows. 

Who was Jack Ruby and why did he kill Oswald? We asked Burt Griffin, an investigator and legal counsel for the Warren Commission and a longtime judge in Ohio, to explain. The following material appears in his recent book, JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth.

The world needed to know why the charismatic president had been killed. But Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald precluded a trial of Kennedy’s assassin. Normally, the question of why the crime occurred would have been pursued in a thorough examination of Oswald’s life in the days and months before Kennedy died. But Ruby’s action diverted public attention to a search for conspirators. The long-term consequence has been decades of public doubt as to whether the truth has been found.

I made every effort to find evidence of Ruby’s involvement in a conspiracy. I found none.

I was one of the early searchers for the truth. Less than two months after President Kennedy’s death, I became a lawyer for the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (popularly known as the Warren Commission). Ultimately, I was given primary responsibility for presenting evidence of whether Jack Ruby was part of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, or both. 

I made every effort to find evidence of Ruby’s involvement in a conspiracy. I found none.

I did find, however, considerable evidence of a motive that conspiracy theorists prefer to ignore — that Ruby, who was Jewish, killed Oswald because he feared that Jews would be blamed for Kennedy’s death. He hoped that, if a Jew killed Oswald, Jews would not be blamed for the Kennedy assassination. 

Jack Ruby’s family and his