Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Two days later, at the Dallas police headquarters, officers escorted Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to an armored car that would drive him to the county jail. A man stepped out from the crowd and aimed a revolver at Oswald’s chest. It was Jack Ruby, a nightclub proprietor with connections to Cuban political groups and organized crime. He fired once at point-blank range, sending a fatal bullet into Oswald’s stomach. According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins’s, and again involving Lawrence Schiller—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.”