Chapter Ten

The Weekend

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The priests and the pulpits

Father Oscar Huber was the pastor of a Catholic parish in Dallas and he had gone out that lunchtime like everybody else to watch the motorcade go by. An hour later somebody came for him. He was driven to Parkland with a younger priest, taken through the corridors, and shown into the room. The President of the United States was on the table with a sheet drawn up, and his wife was standing there in the pink suit.1

He pulled the sheet back and made the sign of the cross on the forehead, and he said the words in the conditional form the Church keeps for exactly this. If you are living, I absolve you from your sins. Then the prayers, and she said them with him, and afterwards he told her he was convinced the soul had not yet left the body. Whatever anybody believes, it is the only thing anybody did for that man in that room that was not medicine.2

Hold that next to something this book has already told you. He was the first Catholic ever elected, three years earlier, against an argument that a Catholic president would take orders from Rome, run seriously and openly by people who meant it. He had answered it in Houston in 1960 by insisting his faith was his own business. And it ends with a Dallas parish priest anointing him in a trauma room, in Latin, with his widow answering the responses.3

And what the country did that weekend, besides watch television, was go inside buildings and pray. Churches that would normally have been locked on a Friday afternoon opened and filled. Synagogues held services. Congregations gathered on a Saturday and again on Sunday with nothing scheduled and no idea what would be said. In a nation that was already arguing about religion in public life, the response to a political murder was almost entirely liturgical, and that is difficult to imagine now.4

What was preached is worth knowing, because it was not mostly consolation. Again and again that Sunday, from pulpits of every denomination, the theme was national responsibility. That a climate had been made in which this became possible. That the handbills and the advertisement and the shouting had a consequence. Clergy who had said nothing political in years stood up and told their congregations that the country had done this to itself, and a lot of people did not want to hear it.5

There is one more reaction and it belongs in this book. When it emerged that the man who shot the prisoner in that basement was Jewish, there was real and immediate fear among Jews in Dallas and beyond that the act would be laid at their door in a city already being blamed for everything. Rabbis were telephoned. People stayed home. Nothing came of it. But for a few days in 1963 a lot of American families were quietly afraid of what a single man’s name might cost them.6

And on the Monday, while a cardinal said a requiem Mass in Washington for one man, the other one could not get a minister. The clergymen who had been asked to take the graveside service in Fort Worth did not come. In the end a man from the local council of churches heard about it, drove out, and did it himself, on the grounds that somebody had to. He said afterwards that the mother had asked and that was enough. Reporters carried the coffin and a stranger said the words.7

Jack Ruby

He was born Jacob Rubenstein in Chicago and came to Dallas after the war, where he ran a downtown strip club. He was a familiar figure to the police department. He let officers in, bought them drinks, turned up where they were. That is the fact that makes what happened later so hard to argue about. Nobody had to arrange for him to be recognized in a police building. He was always in police buildings.8, 9

The club was upstairs off Commerce Street in downtown Dallas, a striptease room over a delicatessen, a few minutes’ walk from police headquarters. It was not a mob operation and it was not doing well. He ran it himself, argued with his own performers about money, and threw people down the stairs personally. The room at the center of sixty years of conspiracy writing was a struggling burlesque bar with a bad-tempered owner.8, 10

†Several people have said over the years that they saw the two men together in that club. If any of it held, it would be the most important claim in the case, because it would connect the shooter to the suspect before the shooting. Both the Commission and the House committee went at it directly. No employee, no regular, no receipt, no photograph. The best-motivated claim in the whole story, and there is nothing underneath it.8, 11

On the night of the assassination he was inside police headquarters, in the crowd of reporters, and he is on film there. At one point he corrected the district attorney on the name of an organization, out loud, in front of the press. Two days before he shot the prisoner he was standing in the same building, close enough to be recorded, and nobody found that strange, because he was always there.8, 12

On the Sunday morning one of his dancers telephoned him at home. She was short on rent and needed twenty-five dollars. He said he would wire it. He got dressed, put his dog in the car, and drove into town to a Western Union office one block from the police station. That errand is the reason he was standing where he was standing, and it is the most ordinary sentence in this entire story.13, 14

The money order carries a time stamp. Eleven seventeen. Four minutes later he shot the prisoner in the basement. The transfer had been due at ten and was running late because the questioning overran. A delay nobody outside that building could have known about. To send him deliberately, you would have to arrange for a man to be at a counter posting a small sum at the exact minute an unpredictable delay put his target in front of him.15, 16

His dog was in the car outside, where he had left her, with the windows up. He was devoted to that animal and had brought her everywhere for years. A man who has planned to shoot somebody in front of the world’s cameras and be arrested on the spot does not leave his dog in a parked car. It is not proof of anything. It is the kind of small thing that a plan does not usually produce.8, 9

He was tried in Dallas in March 1964, convicted of murder with malice, and sentenced to death. Two and a half years later the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw it out. His statements had been improperly admitted, and the trial should never have been held in Dallas in the first place. He was awaiting a new trial, in a different city, that would have reopened all of it.17

In June 1964 the Chief Justice of the United States came to a Dallas jail to take his testimony. In the transcript he asks, again and again, to be taken to Washington. He says he cannot tell the truth in Dallas. He says his life is in danger where he is. Earl Warren tells him it cannot be arranged. You can read the whole exchange. It is a man asking to be moved, and being told no.18

He never got the second trial. In January 1967 he died of a blood clot on the lung, from a cancer found weeks earlier, in Parkland Hospital. The same building where the President had been brought, and where the man he shot had died. Three of the central figures of that weekend ended in the same emergency department within four years, and the last one took whatever he knew with him.19, 20

Did they know each other

There is a question you have been holding since the section on Jack Ruby, and it is time to answer it. Did the two of them know each other. It is the first thing anybody asks, because if the answer is yes then almost everything else in this case rearranges itself around it. So here is the answer, and then here is why the answer is unsatisfying.21

No. Nobody has ever established a connection between them, and this is not a case of nobody trying. The Warren Commission went at it hard, because a link would have been the most important thing they could possibly have found. Fifteen years later the House committee, which was far more willing to believe in conspiracy and far more critical of the Commission, went at it again with fresh subpoena power. Both came back with nothing. Not a thin connection. Nothing.22, 23

There were witnesses who said they had seen the two men together, usually at Ruby’s club, and they all fell over the same way. They surfaced after the faces were on every television in the country, so the identification is contaminated before it starts. None had a companion who saw it too. Several changed the story between tellings. And Oswald did not drink, had almost no money, and was not a nightclub person by any account of anyone who knew him.22, 24

There is also a numbers problem people underrate. Dallas in 1963 had a downtown you could cross on foot in twenty minutes, and Ruby knew a startling number of people in it, because that was his entire method of being alive. He knew police officers, reporters, strippers, lawyers, hangers-on. In a town that size, run through a man that gregarious, you can build a chain of two or three handshakes between almost any two residents. That is not a connection. That is a small city.21

And now the fact I would want thrown at me, because it is a good one. On the night of the assassination, before he shot anybody, Jack Ruby was inside Dallas police headquarters. Not outside in the crowd. Inside the building, in the corridor traffic, on the same floor as the man being interrogated, carrying a pistol, as he generally did. He was a nightclub owner with no business there at all, and nobody stopped him, because everybody knew him.22, 25

It gets stranger. At the midnight press conference the District Attorney of Dallas told the room that the prisoner belonged to something he called the Free Cuba Committee. He had the name wrong. And a voice from the back of the room corrected him with the right one. Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The voice was Jack Ruby’s. A strip club owner, at midnight, knew the exact name of the organization the accused had been handing out leaflets for in another state.22, 26

Which sounds enormous until you sit with it. The name had been on the wire for hours by then. Ruby had spent the day and the evening around reporters and police, doing what he always did, which was hovering where the news was. A man who reads three papers a day and has been in a building full of journalists since the afternoon could absolutely have picked it up. Striking is not the same as significant. It is only the beginning of a question.21

†Here is where I think the question has been aimed wrong for sixty years. The House committee did not find a link between Ruby and Oswald. What it did find, and what it criticized the Warren Commission for waving away, was Ruby’s telephone record in the weeks before the assassination. A sharp rise in calls, several of them to men connected with organized crime, from a man who had not been calling those numbers before. The interesting association was never with the prisoner. It was with the people Ruby owed.27

One more thing, and I have never known what to do with it. When the Chief Justice of the United States came to Dallas to take his testimony in a jail, Ruby asked repeatedly to be taken to Washington. He said he could not tell the truth in that city, that his life was in danger where he was, and that if he were moved he would say things he could not say there. The Chief Justice explained that it could not be arranged. Ruby died of cancer in a Dallas hospital two and a half years later.18

So: no, they did not know each other, and I would say that under oath. But notice what the honest no costs. It does not explain a man wandering armed through a police headquarters, or knowing a name at midnight, or telephoning people he owed money to in the weeks before, or begging a Chief Justice to move him three hundred miles so he could speak. None of that requires him to have known Oswald. All of it still wants explaining, and none of it ever got it.21

While I am admitting things, one more. I met Mary Ann Moorman. She was out in the plaza on a weekend, across the street where she had stood, answering questions from anybody who wandered up, which she did not have to do and could have spent the day anywhere else. And I barely spoke to her. All the things I could have asked, the ones I have spent years on, seemed beside the point standing in front of her. She was a nice lady being generous with a Saturday. That is what was actually happening, and it did not need me interviewing her.28

The trial

The man who killed Oswald was defended by Melvin Belli, who was the most famous trial lawyer in America and knew it. He arrived in Dallas in a city that had just been called the place that killed a president, defending the man who had shot the accused on television, in front of a jury drawn from that city. Almost every choice he made from that point on has been argued about by lawyers ever since.29

His first fight was over where. He argued that no jury in Dallas could be impartial about a man who had shot the President’s alleged killer inside the Dallas police headquarters, in a city that was being blamed for the whole thing by the rest of the country. The judge refused to move it. Two and a half years later the appeals court would say he had been right about that, but by then it did not matter to his client.30, 31

Then came the strategy. Rather than argue that a distraught man had acted on impulse, which is roughly what the evidence looked like, he put on a medical case. Psychomotor epilepsy. The claim was that his client had a seizure disorder, that he had shot Oswald in a blackout state, and that there was therefore no intent at all. He brought in specialists and brain readings. He asked twelve people in Dallas to acquit on the grounds of a fugue state.29

The jury was out for a couple of hours and came back with murder with malice and a death sentence. And his lawyer, in the courtroom, lost his temper completely. He called the verdict a victory for bigotry, told the press that Dallas was a city of shame, and said the jury had done exactly what the city wanted. He was fired by the family almost immediately. It is one of the more remarkable scenes in American legal history and it did his client no good whatsoever.32

Three months later the Chief Justice came to the Dallas jail to take his evidence, and what happened in that room is on the transcript. He asked, repeatedly, to be moved to Washington. He said he could not tell the truth in Dallas. He said his life was in danger where he was and that if they took him to Washington he would explain everything. Warren told him it could not be arranged. He asked again. He was told no again. Then he answered the questions he was asked, in Dallas.33

I want to be careful here because it is easy to make that sound like a cover-up and it may simply have been a man reading the room and deciding a frightened prisoner was performing. But hold the shape of it. The one person alive who had definitely committed a crime connected to this case offered to talk somewhere else, and was told no, and was dead within thirty months. Whatever he would have said, nobody will now hear it, and the decision not to hear it was made in that room.21, 34

†Earlier I mentioned the most cited name on the mysterious deaths lists without giving it. It is Dorothy Kilgallen, a well known New York columnist and television panellist who covered that trial and who obtained something no other journalist did: a private interview with the defendant, alone, during a recess. She told friends she had material that would blow the case open. In November 1965 she was found dead of alcohol and barbiturates, and the manner of death was recorded as undetermined.35

Three years in a cell

Jack Ruby lived for three more years after his verdict, in custody, and he talked the entire time. To lawyers, to psychiatrists, to reporters who got in, to a Chief Justice, and to a television camera in a corridor. This is the most quoted material in the entire case and the least usable, and I want to walk you through why both of those are true at once.21

The famous one first. Asked whether the full story would ever come out, he said the world would never know the true facts of what took place, his motives. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting him in the position he was in, would never let the true facts come above board to the world. That is on tape. He also said, in a jail corridor with cameras running, that the man who would know the truth about it was in a high position, and would never let it be known.36

Here is what almost never gets quoted alongside it. In the same period he told people that a pogrom was under way outside, that Jews were being slaughtered in the streets of America and it was his fault for what he had done. That his own brother had been tortured. That he could hear the killing from his cell. He tried to take his own life more than once. He was examined and found to be suffering from a psychotic depression. That is the same man, in the same months, in the same conversations.37, 38

So look at the trap that puts you in. You cannot take the sentence about people in high positions and leave the pogrom in the next paragraph, because there is no principle that lets you keep one and discard the other. They came from the same mouth on the same afternoon. Anybody who quotes the first without the second is not reporting Jack Ruby. They are editing him, and they are editing him toward a conclusion they already had.21

†One thing he did that people forget: he asked for a polygraph, and in July of 1964 the Bureau gave him one, for hours. He was asked whether he knew Oswald, whether anyone had helped him, whether he was part of a conspiracy. He denied all of it, and the examiner found no deception. Which would be conclusive if polygraphs were conclusive. They are not, they were less reliable then, and the Commission itself hedged the result. It is worth something. It is not worth what either side wants it to be.39

‡At the end he was found to have cancer, and he said he had been injected with it to silence him. That claim has kept a small industry going for sixty years, so here is the medical reality. He had lung cancer that had already spread widely by the time it was found, which is a disease that takes years to reach that state, not months in a cell. Nobody in 1966 could have given a man cancer by injection. It is not a thing that could be done then and it is not a thing that can be done now.40

But I will give the other side the thing that is actually unsettling, because it is not the injection. It is the calendar. In October 1966 an appeals court threw out his conviction and ordered a new trial outside Dallas, which is exactly the thing he had been begging for, in a venue where he might have spoken freely. He was diagnosed weeks later and dead in January. He never got the new trial. That is not evidence of anything. It is just very hard to look at.41, 42

So what do I do with all of it. I think he was a man of no great steadiness who did something enormous on an impulse he could not afterwards account for, and then spent three years in a cell trying to find a reason large enough to fit what he had done. A grand explanation is easier to live with than an impulse. And the terrible possibility, the one nobody likes, is that he was telling the truth about the world never knowing, because he did not know either.21

Four days of television

The first the country heard was a voice over a caption card, because the cameras in a television studio in 1963 needed about twenty minutes to warm up. So Walter Cronkite read the wire copy over a slide that said bulletin, and America listened to the radio with the television on. When the picture finally came, he was in shirtsleeves at a desk, and the newsroom behind him was audibly still working the telephones.43

The announcement of the death is thirty seconds of television that people who saw it never lost. He reads the flash, gives the time, puts his glasses back on, and there is a pause where a professional broadcaster does not entirely make it. Then he goes on. It is the most watched moment of composure failing in American history, and it is roughly a second and a half long.43

What the networks did next had never been done. They canceled everything. No programs, no commercials, continuous coverage from Friday afternoon through Monday night. It cost them tens of millions of dollars in a year when that was real money. Nine in ten American homes with a television watched, and the average household had it on for something like thirty hours across those four days. The country did not read about this. It sat in front of it.44, 45

And then on Sunday morning, live, on a network feed, a man walked out of a crowd in a police basement and shot the prisoner in the stomach while the country watched. It is the first homicide ever transmitted live on American television. One network had it as it happened. Millions of people saw a human being killed, in real time, without warning, in their own front rooms, on a Sunday. Nothing like that had occurred before and there was no vocabulary for it.46

Monday was the funeral and it was designed for cameras whether anybody admitted that or not. The drums. The caisson. The riderless horse with the boots reversed in the stirrups, which is a cavalry tradition for a fallen commander and which most of the people watching had never seen before. The widow in the black veil. The small boy on the steps. Satellite carried it live to Europe, which had also never happened for anything.47

Earlier I said everybody in my mother’s generation could tell you exactly where they were standing. Here is the reason, and it is not sentiment. For four days an entire country was doing the same thing at the same time, in the same room, watching the same pictures. That had never been possible before. Television stopped being the thing you watched in the evening and became the place where the nation was, and it happened in one weekend in November.21

There is a consequence that runs through everything after. The country did not receive this story from an investigation. It watched it, unedited, with its own eyes, including the part where the only suspect was shot to death inside a police station in front of the police. Then, ten months later, it was handed a report explaining what it had seen. Asking people to accept a document over their own eyes is difficult in any circumstance. In this one it was never going to work.21

What the world said

The day after the shooting, Nikita Khrushchev went to the American Embassy in Moscow and signed the book of condolence himself. To understand how strange that was you need the last chapter in your head. The leader of the Soviet Union walked into United States diplomatic premises, in person, to sign his name in a book of mourning for an American president. There was no precedent. Whatever it was, it was not nothing, and it was noticed everywhere.48

For the funeral itself Moscow sent Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy premier, one of the most senior men in the Soviet government and the same man who had flown to Havana during the missile crisis. He stood among the mourners in Washington with the leaders of about ninety countries. Two nations that had spent thirteen days the previous fall preparing to destroy each other buried the American President in the same churchyard hour.49

In print the line came fast and it never really moved. Soviet newspapers said the killing was the work of racists and reactionaries inside the United States, an American conspiracy against a president who had been willing to talk to Moscow. That was convenient and it may also have been sincerely believed. What matters is why they wanted it so badly. Any story in which the shooter was a lone communist who had lived in Minsk was a catastrophe for them.50, 51

Behind the newspapers the reaction was closer to panic. The KGB material that surfaced decades later shows a service urgently reconstructing everything it had ever held on the man, terrified of what would be found. Their fear was not being caught. It was being blamed for something they had not done, by an American government that might respond with weapons. A man they had considered unstable and not worth recruiting had just become the most dangerous person in the world to them.52, 53

Now the part almost nobody knows. When the news reached Cuba, Fidel Castro was at lunch with a French journalist named Jean Daniel. Daniel had met Kennedy in Washington weeks earlier, and Kennedy had given him something to carry: an opening, a suggestion that the two countries might talk. Daniel was in the middle of delivering it. The telephone rang, and the man taking the message and the man delivering it heard together that the President had been shot.54

And the journalist was not the only line open. That autumn an American diplomat at the United Nations had begun quiet contact with the Cuban ambassador there, arranged through an American television reporter who knew both governments. It was exploratory and deniable and the President knew about it. By late November they were discussing where a proper meeting might be held. Two separate channels to Havana, running at the same time, in the last weeks of his life.55, 56, 57

What he gave the journalist to take was not a negotiating position. It was closer to an admission. He talked about what the United States had tolerated in Cuba before the revolution, the poverty and the corruption and the American businesses that profited from both, and said that in a sense the country had helped create the thing it was now fighting. Then he asked what Castro would want. A president saying that, through a foreign reporter, three weeks before Dallas.55, 56, 57

Daniel wrote down what he saw. Castro stood up, and said it three times. This is bad news. Then he sat back down and said that everything was going to change. Not grief exactly, and certainly not triumph. The reaction of a man who had just understood that whatever came next would be worse for him. Within hours the Cuban government was bracing for the accusation it knew was coming.58

Now hold the two afternoons of the twenty-second of November side by side, because they are the argument of this book in one image. In Havana a French journalist is at lunch with Fidel Castro, delivering a message from the President of the United States about whether the two countries might talk. In Paris an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency is in an apartment with a Cuban official, showing him a pen with a poison needle in it, intended for the same Fidel Castro.55, 56, 57

†The uncomfortable question is how much of that he knew. The opening to Havana was his, personally, and he had approved the contact at the United Nations. What was authorized on the other track, and by whom, is exactly what no investigation has ever settled, and the case officer testified that nobody told him a President had signed anything. So I am not going to tell you he ordered both. What I will say is that his government was doing both, in his name, in the same hours.55, 56, 57

And that is the shape of the motive I keep arriving at. Not a president who was too soft on Cuba, and not one who was too hard. A president who was doing both at once and could turn either off. Kill Castro and the arrangement ends. Make peace with him and the island stops being outside the law. Either way somebody’s useful gray space closes, and the man who could close it was the one in the car.55, 56, 57

The next day Castro gave a long televised address, and it is worth knowing what he actually did with it. He read the American wire reports aloud and picked at them. He noted how fast a suspect had been named, and how quickly that suspect had been tied to Cuba. And he made a prediction: that people in the United States would use this to justify an attack on his country. He spent most of the speech arguing against being blamed.59

†There is one more Castro statement and it has been used against him for sixty years. In September 1963, at a reception in Havana, he told an American wire reporter that United States leaders who aided plots to eliminate Cuban leaders would themselves not be safe. It ran in American newspapers, including in New Orleans, while Oswald was living there. Read one way it is a threat that came true. Read another it is a man warning that assassination is a game with two ends.60

†Charles de Gaulle had survived several attempts on his own life, some of them involving people inside his own security services. According to a memoir written by one of his ministers, he did not accept the American account, and said so privately, comparing what had happened in Dallas to what had nearly happened to him. That is a recollection published years afterward, not a document, and I give it to you as exactly that. But it is a head of state, and he is not the only one who said it quietly.61

Close the list with the successor. Lyndon Johnson told people, more than once and over years, that he did not think it had been one man on his own. His idea was not a domestic plot. He thought it was retribution from abroad, tied to what the United States had been doing to foreign leaders. He said the country had been running a murder operation in the Caribbean and that Dallas was what came back. The President who created the Commission never believed its answer.62, 63

† disputed   ‡ theory   § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

63 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

  1. contemporaneous accounts of Father Oscar Huber at Parkland Hospital, 22 November 1963
  2. Father Oscar Huber's published account of the anointing
  3. Kennedy's address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, September 1960
  4. contemporaneous reporting of religious observance, 22 to 25 November 1963
  5. contemporaneous reporting and published sermon texts, November 1963
  6. contemporaneous accounts of community reaction in Dallas, November 1963
  7. contemporaneous accounts of the burial at Rose Hill Cemetery, 25 November 1963
  8. Warren Report, appendix XVI
  9. Warren Commission testimony of Jack Ruby
  10. Warren Commission testimony of Jack Ruby's associates and employees, volumes XIV and XV
  11. HSCA final report 1979, section on Jack Ruby
  12. NBC and local news footage, 22 November 1963
  13. Warren Report, chapter V and appendix XVI
  14. Warren Commission testimony of Karen Bennett Carlin
  15. Warren Report, chapter V
  16. Western Union money order timestamp, Commission Exhibit 2002
  17. Rubenstein v. State, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, 5 October 1966
  18. Warren Commission testimony of Jack Ruby, 7 June 1964
  19. Dallas County death record, 3 January 1967
  20. HSCA final report 1979
  21. the author's assessment
  22. Warren Report, chapter VI
  23. House Select Committee on Assassinations, final report, 1979
  24. Warren Commission testimony concerning alleged Ruby and Oswald sightings
  25. Warren Commission testimony concerning Ruby's presence at Dallas police headquarters
  26. Warren Commission testimony concerning the midnight press conference, 23 November 1963
  27. House Select Committee on Assassinations, final report, 1979, on Ruby's associations
  28. the author's recollection
  29. trial record, State of Texas v. Jack Ruby, 1964
  30. trial record, 1964
  31. Rubenstein v. State, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, 1966
  32. contemporaneous reporting of the verdict, 14 March 1964
  33. Warren Commission testimony of Jack Ruby, Dallas County Jail, June 1964
  34. Warren Commission testimony of Jack Ruby, June 1964
  35. contemporaneous reporting of the Ruby trial and of Dorothy Kilgallen's death, November 1965
  36. recorded statements of Jack Ruby in custody, 1965 to 1967
  37. psychiatric evaluations of Jack Ruby in custody
  38. accounts of Ruby's statements to counsel and family, 1964 to 1967
  39. Warren Report, appendix XVII, polygraph examination of Jack Ruby, July 1964
  40. medical records and contemporaneous reporting on Jack Ruby's final illness, 1966 to 1967
  41. Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decision, October 1966
  42. contemporaneous reporting on Ruby's death, January 1967
  43. CBS News broadcast, 22 November 1963
  44. Nielsen and network audience data for 22 to 25 November 1963
  45. contemporaneous industry reporting on lost advertising revenue
  46. NBC live broadcast, 24 November 1963
  47. contemporaneous broadcast records of the state funeral, 25 November 1963
  48. contemporaneous diplomatic and press reporting, Moscow, 23 November 1963
  49. contemporaneous reporting of the state funeral, 25 November 1963
  50. Soviet press coverage, November 1963
  51. CIA and FBI reporting on Soviet reaction
  52. KGB file materials on Oswald released via the Russian government
  53. CIA cable, 20 November 1991
  54. Jean Daniel, contemporaneous account published in The New Republic, December 1963
  55. Jean Daniel, contemporaneous account of his meetings with Kennedy and Castro, 1963
  56. William Attwood, memorandum on Cuban contacts, 1963
  57. Senate Select Committee testimony of the AMLASH case officer, 11 February 1976, RIF 157-10014-10017
  58. Jean Daniel, The New Republic, December 1963
  59. Fidel Castro, televised address, Havana, 23 November 1963
  60. Associated Press dispatch by Daniel Harker, Havana, 7 September 1963, published 9 September 1963
  61. Alain Peyrefitte, C'était de Gaulle, published memoir of conversations
  62. published recollections of Lyndon Johnson's aides and associates
  63. Johnson's recorded and reported remarks on the assassination