Mr. SENATOR. I woke up before he did.
Mr. GRIFFIN. You woke up before he did, and that Jack always keeps
Sheba——
Mr. SENATOR. Always brings Sheba home every night.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Is it customary also for him to take Sheba down to the
club every day?
Mr. SENATOR. Both forth and back, forth and back.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Is Sheba with him wherever he goes?
Mr. SENATOR. Yes; the dog is always with him. This was his pet. This
was his favorite of a few dogs that he had.
Mr. GRIFFIN. OK; I think the record is clear enough on that; that we
don’t have to make any entry on the page.
Mr. SENATOR. Of course, the other is what we discussed before about the
signs that you have on this page.
Mr. GRIFFIN. There is nothing in there about the signs, is there?
Mr. SENATOR. None. Elmer Moore has the one about the signs. This is
page 299. I forgot to tell you. I went to this restaurant, it says,
to eat. I just had that coffee. The morning when I went down to eat
on Main Street, it says I went down to eat. I only had coffee. “He
estimated as he arrived there at approximately 11:30 and as he walked
in the door he overheard one of the waitresses saying Oswald has been
shot.” This is not so.
Mr. GRIFFIN. This was after you sat down?
Mr. SENATOR. I had been sitting already.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Is that on page 300 or page 299?
Mr. SENATOR. 299. Now he got this twisted.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Would you read the part that is twisted.
Mr. SENATOR. Yes. “Shortly thereafter the waitress told Senator that
Oswald had been shot by a local tavern operator, and a short while
after that he learned the name of this individual to be Jack Ruby.
He said he was dumfounded, and did not know what to do, but after a
short while he went to the telephone and called Jim Martin on Gladiola
Street, Dallas, as an attorney whom he knew.” We went through that. Do
you want to go through that again?
Mr. GRIFFIN. Well, I want to know if you say now, of course, that that
is not what happened. Now, what did you tell the agent? Could you have
told the agent that?
Mr. SENATOR. No; when the waitress said that she heard Oswald had been
shot, I called Jim Martin, but nobody knew who. The daughter answered
the phone and said her daddy was in church, and that he would be home
in a short while.
Mr. GRIFFIN. It is your recollection that when you called Jim Martin,
you couldn’t get ahold of him, but you talked to his daughter.
Mr. SENATOR. Yes.
Mr. GRIFFIN. How old is his daughter?
Mr. SENATOR. He had three of them, and I don’t remember which one
answered. Of course, one is too young. I don’t know which one he went
to church with. One is 15 or 16 and the other is, I think, 10 or 11.
Mr. GRIFFIN. And is there one even younger than 10 or 11?
Mr. SENATOR. Well, an infant. Maybe she is 2 or 3 years old; something
like that.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Did you tell the daughter who you were; who was calling?
Did you leave word?
Mr. SENATOR. I am not sure if I told her to tell her daddy that George
called. I am not sure if I did or not. I don’t want to say I did and
I don’t want to say I didn’t, because I don’t remember. No; I didn’t
leave right after that. I still had a cup of coffee yet. It says I left
right after this call.
Mr. GRIFFIN. This is incorrect; is that what you are saying?
Mr. SENATOR. “He said this attorney was not at home, so he got into his
car and drove to the attorney’s house to wait for his return.” This
I did not do. What I did was I still sat there and I had two cups of
coffee, when this girl hollered out again, “the Carousel, Jack Ruby,”
which words were sort of mispronounced the way she said it; this is
when I went. Of course, I sat there for a little bit, not knowing what
the hell to do. This was stunning. I sort of froze right to the seat
when I heard that. Page 300. I read too slow, don’t I?
Mr. GRIFFIN. That is all right. Go ahead.
Mr. SENATOR. Let me run this through. I don’t catch the last part of
this: “He never heard Ruby say Oswald had ever visited either one of
the clubs in which Ruby was interested.” Does that mean, in other
words, the clubs that Jack owned?
Mr. GRIFFIN. That is right.
Mr. SENATOR. All right; OK.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Let me ask you a few questions. You have had a chance to
read that all over. Now on page 298 the FBI reports you in this fashion:
“Senator has no accurate idea as to where Ruby had been all day.” That
refers to Friday.
Mr. SENATOR. November 24.
Mr. GRIFFIN. November 22.
Mr. SENATOR. Twenty-second; yes.
Mr. GRIFFIN. “But does know that, because of the shooting of the
President, Ruby has had many businessmen in Dallas close his business.
Senator has some recollection Ruby said he had been at his sister’s
home for awhile.” Is it fair then to draw the conclusion from that
statement that, when you talked with the FBI on November 24, you did
know what Ruby had done on Friday night, on Friday other than that he
had closed his business, and that he had been at his sister’s?
Mr. SENATOR. Yes. He went to the police station with sandwiches, I
heard.
Mr. GRIFFIN. But, you see, you told the FBI on November 24, when this
presumably was as fresh in your mind as it is ever going to be, that
you had no accurate idea where Ruby had been all day, and the only
things that you could remember were that he closed his business and he
had some recollection that he had been at his sister’s home for awhile.
You didn’t mention, I take it, to the FBI on the 24th——
Mr. SENATOR. As a matter of fact, I probably forgot to mention it now,
come to think of it, the synagogue and things like that.
Mr. GRIFFIN. You didn’t mention the synagogue. You didn’t mention that
he had been to the police station. You didn’t mention——
Mr. SENATOR. You must understand, like I told you before, you know,
when a man is in a shaken-up condition, it is true that you might say
that this should be fresh in my mind, but when a man is in a shaken
condition and nervous—and you can’t help but be nervous—so I may have
slipped up on some of the things that I probably couldn’t think of
momentarily when he was questioning me.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Is it possible that the fact is that on the 24th you
really didn’t know, that it was sometime after the 24th that you
learned that Jack had been to the police station with sandwiches, and
that he had been to the synagogue, that Jack didn’t even tell you this
on Friday or Saturday?
Mr. SENATOR. I didn’t see him Friday.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Saturday morning, that he didn’t tell you Saturday morning
that he had been to those places? Is it possible that Jack never told
you that?
Mr. SENATOR. No, no; he did tell me that. How else would I know? How
else would I have known that?
Mr. GRIFFIN. You might have learned it since November 24, by talking
with somebody or reading something.
Mr. SENATOR. Why would I want—let me ask you this—why would I want to
leave out that he went to the police station—if I were able to think of
it—or bringing sandwiches? Why would I want to leave out that he went
to the synagogue?
Mr. GRIFFIN. That is why I am suggesting that you didn’t know that on
the 24th, that it wasn’t until later.
Mr. SENATOR. I didn’t know it on the 24th. I didn’t know it. I didn’t
see him. I didn’t know it.
Mr. GRIFFIN. All right, on November 24, up until the time you were
interviewed by the FBI on November 24, you did not know that Jack had
been to the police station, and you did not know that he had been to
the synagogue.
Mr. SENATOR. Oh, yes; I did.
Mr. GRIFFIN. You learned about that sometime after the 24th.
Mr. SENATOR. No; I think I learned it before that.
Mr. GRIFFIN. See; what I am suggesting is that if you did learn
it before the 24th, this would have been something you would have
remembered.
Mr. SENATOR. You asked what makes something slip a man’s mind.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Wouldn’t you be more likely to remember he had been to the
police station than he had been to visit his sister? If a man had told
you on Saturday morning right after the President had been shot that
he had been to the police station, and had said anything about what he
had done there, wouldn’t that have been something that you would have
remembered as being important? You would have been curious, wouldn’t
you? You would have asked the man “What did you see down at the police
station? Who did you talk to down there?” After all, that was right
down there where Oswald was, and where the investigation was going on.
Mr. SENATOR. It is befuddling. I still think it was Saturday. There is
an incident I just happened to think of.
Mr. GRIFFIN. All right.
Mr. SENATOR. After he had woken me up on Saturday morning, there was a
bunch of sandwiches still wrapped that hadn’t been distributed, and—I
don’t know—I had no idea how many he bought or how many he had made,
but he still come home with maybe 6, 8, 10, or 12 of those sandwiches.
Mr. GRIFFIN. What kind of sandwiches were they?
Mr. SENATOR. I think they were corn beef and pastrami on rye, if I
remember right, on rye bread. This I do remember, and they were still
on the kitchen table, and as a matter of fact they were in two bags, if
I remember right. They were in two bags. I think he had some cake too,
that he bought in the delicatessen.
Mr. GRIFFIN. You saw that Saturday morning when you got up?
Mr. SENATOR. Yes.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Does that recall anything further to your mind?
Mr. SENATOR. No; now this here I never even told anybody. I never even
told this to anybody. This is the first time that I have ever exposed
this. It don’t matter who is questioning me, this is the first time.
Now why didn’t I think of this?
Mr. GRIFFIN. This is not so extraordinary.
Mr. SENATOR. No; you may say it is trivial or it may be trivial to me.
Mr. GRIFFIN. That is the kind of a thing that you might forget and that
is also the kind of thing that as you look back from this period of
time——
Mr. SENATOR. I have been trying to think as much as I could. Now I
gather I can remember this part, this one here.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Do you remember any discussion with Jack about those
sandwiches?
Mr. SENATOR. Yes; he had been to the police station and he had passed
out a lot to various policemen or plainclothesmen. I don’t know who. I
don’t know who he passed them out to.
But it seems like I gather that he must have had an awful lot of these
made, or whatever it might have been. He must have had a slew of them
made. Now why I did it I don’t know.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Is this possible, that all you would have learned from
him, you asked him “Where did you get these sandwiches” and he said “I
got them for the men at the police station but they didn’t eat them”?
Could that have been the conversation?
Mr. SENATOR. No; he passed out some; I know. He said he had passed out
some sandwiches. As a matter of fact he even took some to his sister.
Mr. GRIFFIN. He took some sandwiches to his sister? When did he take
the sandwiches to his sister?
Mr. SENATOR. That was sometime Friday.
Mr. GRIFFIN. Where did you learn that?
Mr. SENATOR. From Jack.