March 14, 2007
Jack Ruby Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:00 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the conviction of Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and that is the subject of today’s lead piece on this website. Jack Ruby is also the source of one of my few disagreements with the editor of this magazine, who some years ago was very briefly but deeply interested to learn that a company founded by my grandfather was several times mentioned in testimony given to the Warren Commission. One of Jack Ruby’s associates, a salesman named George Senator, had lived with Ruby for five or six months in 1962 and had worked for my grandfather’s company for half a dozen years in the 1950s. Startled by this, my editor printed out a few hundred pages of Warren Commission testimony and dropped them off at my apartment. I made my way through part of this interminable document, and then packed it in. Nothing in it had shaken my conviction that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone, and George Senator seemed as dull as dishwater. My friend and editor, surprised by my perfect indifference to this connection to one of the great events of our childhood, seemed disappointed in my want of curiosity, and in consequence I began to feel a bit ashamed of myself. Since it is always more pleasurable to feel annoyed with someone else than with oneself, I called up my father, and asked him if it was true that he had once employed Jack Ruby’s roommate. Yes, it was. Had my father known this man? Yes, he had. Armed with these admissions, I pounced: Why had my father never mentioned these astonishing facts? My father briefly pondered this question. Well, he said, the man had never been much of a salesman.
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