16-04-2009, 09:12 PM
Paul Rigby Wrote:Daily Mail, 25 November 1963, p.2
In a hat
By Bruce Rothwell, Sunday [Extract]
“A Dallas police officer said after the shooting of Oswald: “If I had seen Ruby I would have thrown him out.”
The official police version, to a Press Conference, is that Ruby had been waiting in a parked green convertible outside the headquarters, leaped over a barrier and shot Oswald.
But millions watching TV saw Ruby standing among reporters long before Oswald was brought to the basement to board an armoured car.
More from the same period:
Quote:Daily Sketch, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.6
The Ugly Questions Mount
By Louis Kirby
As they prayed yesterday for a deeply mourned leader and man, the citizens of America also began to search their hearts over the unsolved mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald.
On the evidence produced by the detectives of Dallas, the 24-year-old warehouse worker seemed guilty.
The moment he died on the operating table, Captain Will Fritz, the local police chief, abruptly closed the file.
As he confidently claimed to know about that Oswald had acted carried out the carefully-planned assassination alone.
But troubled voices raised yesterday may finally have made it plain to Dallas, city of oil, cattle and violent death, that the bizarre behaviour of its police force cannot be allowed to corrode the conscience of a nation.
Serious doubts in influential quarters yesterday made FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover lead a new investigation on the direct orders of President Lyndon Johnson.
Until he gives his verdict after reopening Captain Fritz’s file, a number of towering question marks will hang over the affair.
The New York Times has protested in an angry editorial: “The primary guilt for this ugly new stain on the integrity of our system of order and respect for individual rights is that of the Dallas police force and the rest of its law enforcement machinery. But none of us can escape a share of the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence.”
It is now the task of the FBI chief to answer the flood of ugly rumours and produce the truth of the case against the late Lee Harvey Oswald.
Deep
His enquiries will probe deep into these major questions being asked across the world:
ONE: Could a man of Oswald’s limitations plan the assassination so expertly without a single accomplice?
TWO: Was Oswald a pawn in the hands of an extremist organisation?
Because of his liberal policies, President Kennedy angered right-wing elements such as the John Birch Society.
Because of his attempts to help coloured people he earned the enmity of anti-Negro racial groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
THREE: Was the assassination encouraged by a foreign power or known to it in advance?
Oswald, a self-confessed pro-Castro Communist, was said by a Mexican newspaper yesterday to have seen the Soviet and Cuban consuls in Mexico two months ago in an attempt to get a visa to travel to Moscow via Havana.
FOUR: Why did the FBI, who already had plenty of reasons to detain Oswald during the President’s visit, fail to act?
A Customs investigator reported yesterday that Oswald’s journey to Mexico was watched “at the request of a federal agency at Washington.”
FIVE: Why did Dallas police take the unusual step of announcing the precise time at which Oswald would be moved from their city hall jail to the county jail?
SIX: Was Oswald personally known to his killer, and if so, could they have been linked in the plot to kill the President – or Governor Connally?
An entertained named Bill DeMar who has a “memory man” act at Jack Ruby’s club in Dallas, has reported that he saw Oswald there last week.
Irony
SEVEN: Or were Ruby’s motives simply as he told a police officer, to spare Mrs. Kennedy from returning to testify at Oswald’s trial?
For this would be the final irony. There was no intention of calling the President’s widow to the witness stand.
Again:
Quote:Time & Tide, 5-11 December 1963, pp.11-12
The questions to be answered
Anonymous
Washington – The decision by President Lyndon Johnson on Saturday to set up a special committee of enquiry, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, into the assassination of President Kennedy and Lee Oswald, which will ‘report to me, the American people and to the world,’ has been welcomed at all levels.
Oswald’s death at the hands of Dallas night club owner and ex-Chicago hoodlum, Jack Ruby, has so far left too many questions unanswered. Since 98 years ago the murderer of President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, was shot by one soldier of a troop told to take him alive, mystery and suspicion have surrounded the circumstances and motives of Lincoln’s death. Obviously, it is in the interests of America that everything this time be cleared up.
To do this, three official investigating bodies, the Dallas police, the FBI, and Earl Warren’s joint Congressional committee, will have to account for several query-prompting facts:
• Where did Oswald get his money from? Ever since he returned from Russia he had found it hard to get a job, as nobody liked to employ a man who had gone over to the Communists. As a result, he had a hard time keeping his wife. Yet he is reported to have had a flat in a neighbourhood where the rent was £42 per month. He also went on expensive travels. And when he was picked up after the murder of policeman Tippit he had £50 on him.
• What did he do on his seven-day visit to Mexico, two months before Kennedy’s death, apart from see the Cuban and Russian Consuls? Why did he cross the Mexico-Texas border dressed in naval uniform? And why did the US Customs have a file on him? How did Oswald, out-of-work since July, pay for the trip?
• Who sent Oswald the supplies of Communist literature? Who sent him regular cheques?
• Was it entirely without sinister implications that Mrs. Paine, with whom Oswald’s wife lived, spoke Russian?
• What, if anything, was the connection between Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, and Oswald? Was it true that just before Oswald’s death, a look of recognition for Ruby came over Oswald’s face? Had the two men had next door flats, as had been reported? Was it coincidence that the two men frequented the same YMCA club? And why should Jack Ruby, a small-time gangster, suddenly have a fit of burning patriotism that caused him, so he claimed, to kill the President’s assassin?
• And what was the truth about the rifle found in the room whence the shots had been fired? Could it have fired three bullets in the time stated? Was Oswald a good enough marksman to hit the President in a car moving at 20 mph, at an angle of 45 degrees, at a distance of 75 yards? And was there another rifle?
To find the answers to all these questions, Earl Warren and the FBI are going to have a hard time.