You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby), Part 6

It is somewhat bittersweet to say it, but we’ve come to the end of the line with old Jack Ruby, and in this episode, we close out his saga in style with returning guest and Ruby expert Max Arvo. This episode really has it all: CIA mind control experiments, psychopathic psychiatrists, visions of an American Holocaust, a machine-gun-toting rabbi, and much more.

We pick up where we left off after Jack’s conviction and death sentence. He fires Melvin Belli and hires the lawyer/psychiatrist Hubert Winston Smith to take his case on appeal. He tries to fire the mountain of a man, Joe Tonahill, too, but Joe refuses to go and sticks around. The first order of business after Jack is put on death row (besides filing his appellate papers) is to put him under hypnosis. And who better to do that than the CIA’s favorite super-shrink, Mr. MKULTRA himself, Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. Coincidentally or not, Jolly just so happens to show up right after Jack suffers an acute psychotic break, including vivid audio-visual hallucinations. Thereafter, everything Jack says - including (and especially) all of Jack’s talk of a larger conspiracy - is taken with a heaping portion of salt and largely discarded by everyone around him. 

This is important because, as we’ve previewed heavily in past episodes, Jack’s Warren Commission testimony raises a lot of eyebrows. We walk through his testimony, his subsequent polygraph examination, his successful appeal of his conviction, and his deep connection with Zionist Haganah militant-turned-rabbi Hillel Silverman, who became Jack’s closest confidante and confessor in his final years. 

Finally, we reach Jack’s tragic end. Just months after his conviction was overturned in October 1966, Jack was beset with a sudden and rapidly spreading form of cancer that would kill him by January 1967 before he got the new trial he had won. Meanwhile, his strong intimations of a conspiracy were muddled amidst his psychotic ramblings about a honky-tonk Kirstallnacht rampaging through the streets of Dallas. One thing Jack got absolutely right, though, was that the country he grew up in and served in uniform had been taken over by Nazis. He’d never get the chance to speak his truth except as a novelty, and we hope that we’ve done him some justice, warts and all.