And what of some of the other people drawn, whether or not by their own design, into the assassination of President Kennedy and its aftermath? In the intervening year, the lives of most of them have changed dramatically.
MARINA OSWALD, 23, the assassin’s Russian-born wife, was a pitiable creature, beaten and burdened by a psychotic husband who was a flat-out failure in every way. After Oswald was killed, sympathetic people sent Marina some $60,000. She moved into a $15,000, three-bedroom, air-conditioned brick house in a Dallas suburb. She had her teeth fixed, now affects fashionable coiffures and Neiman-Marcus clothes. She bought her own membership in Dallas’ Music Box, a private club, and she turns up frequently with dates. Marina tosses down shots of vodka, chases them with 7-Up. She often outdrinks her escorts, despite the fact that when Oswald was alive he forbade her to drink hard liquor. She chain-smokes, though Oswald once slapped her for smoking a cigarette in his presence. So far, she has refused to change her name, although she worries some about the stigma affecting her children, June Lee, 2, and Rachel, 1. She has had mountains of marriage proposals and other bizarre propositions (a man from Kentucky offered her $50,000 if she would let him exhibit Oswald’s body in a sideshow, another $100,000 if she would accompany the display). She still broods about last Nov. 22, and she feels particularly bad about Jackie Kennedy’s loss. “It’s hard enough to lose a bad husband,” said Marina. “I wonder how it is to lose a good one.” As the assassination anniversary rushed at her last week, Marina Oswald became increasingly tense and morose. At week’s end she checked into a hospital. The cause: nervous exhaustion.
JACK RUBY, 53, the strip-joint owner who killed Oswald in the Dallas police station, often kneels in beady-eyed terror on the floor of his jail cell, and babbles that he can hear the screams of U.S. Jews who are being killed or castrated in the streets because of his crime. Such are his demented dreams that previously friendly guards have all but stopped playing dominoes with him, and Ruby spends hours hunched over on his bunk playing solitaire. Ruby has tried three times to kill himself—by battering his head against a wall, ripping up his trousers to make a noose, and poking his finger in an electric light socket. Ruby’s onetime pride and joy, the tawdry Carousel Club, has been sold, and Mrs. Grant says the family is nearly broke. Ruby’s attorney, Phil Burleson, last week filed a 6,341-page appeal and transcript of Ruby’s trial in hopes that the state Court of Criminal Appeals would grant another hearing—possibly in February or March.
MARGUERITE OSWALD, 57, the assassin’s mother, lives in Fort Worth and wallows in woe and self-pity. She still insists shrilly that her son did not murder Kennedy alone, says: “I think Lee was a patsy. I think President Kennedy was a victim of people in the State Department.” She complains that she has been taken by money-grabbing writers who gleaned information from her, then “didn’t even send me $10.” She asks, “Why shouldn’t there be as much sympathy for me as the President’s family? After all, my son was murdered.” Mrs. Oswald frequently visits her son’s grave in Fort Worth’s Rose Hill Cemetery, sometimes lays bouquets of plastic flowers at the headstone. Fort Worth police still maintain an all-night guard at the gravesite to prevent vandalism.
MRS. J. D. TIPPIT, 36, wife of the Dallas policeman Oswald killed, received sympathy contributions totaling $643,863.08. She has spent almost none of the money, still lives in the same modest house in a Dallas suburb (a Philadelphia banker has paid off the mortgage), has the same 1961 station wagon (which still has generator trouble). Half of her fortune is in trust for her two sons, 14 and 5, and her daughter, 11. In the dining room of her home there is a photograph of the Kennedy family, with an inscription from Jackie Kennedy saying: “There is another bond we share. We must remind our children all the time what brave men their fathers were.”
GOVERNOR JOHN CONNALLY, 47, who was wounded in the same limousine in which Kennedy died, was uneasy in large crowds during his winning gubernatorial campaign this fall, often jumped nervously at sudden noises. His right wrist, smashed with one of Oswald’s bullets, still gives him trouble. He must eat lefthanded, has difficulty brushing his teeth, cannot handle small coins with his right hand. Obviously scarred by his involvement, he sobbed recently during a television interview about the assassination. At a press conference last week, he said: “More than ever before, I have tried to keep uppermost in my mind what things are of lasting value and to be grateful for the time I have, to be more aware of the things you really hold dear and to be constantly grateful for the things you really know in your heart to be of lasting value and strength.”
JESSE CURRY, 51, chief of the Dallas Police Department, drew volcanic criticism for allowing reporters and cameramen at police headquarters to all but dictate his handling of Oswald and for setting up security standards so lax that it was easy for Ruby to shoot Oswald while the U.S. watched on television. Curry suffers from high blood pressure, seldom appears in public now, but his job is considered safe, for if Dallas officials fired him they would be in effect admitting the city’s responsibility for the shameful affair.
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