JFK conspiracy theories never die…but they should, eyewitness tells Morristown audience

By Robyn Quinn

The Governor’s wife leans over to JFK and says, “Have you ever seen anything like this? You can’t say Dallas doesn’t like you”… and the next moment, shots are fired and the President is killed.

Who knows what happened in Dallas 50 years ago? Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone at the Texas School Book depository? Was there a “magic bullet”?

Everyone has a theory.

There was a “lone gunman.” There were three shooters. It was a mob hit. It was the CIA. Castro called the shots. LBJ ordered the assassination. Kennedy wasn’t the intended victim; it was Texas Governor John Connally, for denying Oswald’s request to erase his dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

Veteran journalist Maurice “Mickey” Carroll, author of  Accidental Assassin: Jack Ruby and 4 Minutes in Dallas, has heard them all.

And he’s sticking with the lone gunman.

Carroll witnessed the assassination of JFK’s suspected assassin, as a young reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. Speaking at the Morristown & Township Library on Sunday, he re-created the shocking scene in which Oswald was gunned down, in police custody, by strip club owner Jack Ruby.

Carroll’s book covers his experiences in November 1963 and also details what he discovered in the years that followed, as he reported about the investigations and the wild speculation surrounding President Kennedy’s murder.

So many people attended Sunday’s talk that the crowd spilled over into a hallway. Everyone was eager to hear a firsthand account of one of the crimes of the century.

In 1963, the Herald Tribune sent Carroll to Dallas to help two senior reporters cover the Kennedy assassination.

Expecting to add a sentence or two to their unfolding story, he went to the police station where Oswald was being held. He hoped to obtain some comments from Oswald.

Instead, he watched in disbelief as Ruby, a character who liked hanging around cops, rushed through a phalanx of police, reporters and TV cameras and shot Oswald point-blank.

In the aftermath, Carroll was assigned to cover Ruby’s trial–a “tawdry” tale of “cheap little people doing cheap things”–and to write about 25 unanswered questions from the JFK assassination. He found his answers by wading through the Warren Commission report.

“The Warren Commission was sloppy. Not wrong, but sloppy,” said Carroll, a former resident of Greater Morristown who now serves as director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Hamden, Conn.

Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, the report was so disjointed that it left room for conspiracy theories to blossom, he said.

But why is Carroll’s book titled Accidental Assassin? And which four minutes in Dallas is he referring to?

As he explained it, Ruby was at a Western Union office at 11:17 am on the day that Oswald was to be transferred. Seeing the commotion at the police station, Ruby walked in and came upon police escorting Oswald through the police garage.

The encounter was not planned, according to Carroll. At 11:21 am, Ruby fired at Oswald. Carroll contends Ruby had stumbled upon a situation that would make history. He even had left his dog in his car; people who knew Ruby doubted he would done so if he knew he would not be coming back.

“Ruby was a dummy” and Oswald was “just on the edge of schizophrenia,” Carroll maintains. By his calculations, 1 psychotic + 1 dummy = 1,000 conspiracy theories.

During a lively discussion, Sunday’s audience appeared pretty well divided on the question of lone gunman vs. conspiracy/cover up.

And Carroll predicted the controversy still will be churning in 2063, at the 100th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

Another journalist whose career was made in Dallas, Dan Rather, will speak at Drew University on Nov. 12, 2013. The talk starts at 8 pm.  Tickets are $32 each, from the box office or at  973-408-3917.