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crime at the time of the assassination of Kennedy, had stood around for hours waiting for Oswald to be brought out into the police garage. He told me there was no way to know exactly when that would happen, and Ruby—who had run some ordinary errands just before—happened to come into the garage when Oswald appeared. None of those who knew Ruby thought he was capable of a deliberate plan. He just reacted as he did when throwing a troublemaker out of the Carousel.
    Ovid and I were in Dallas in 1966 because Harold Hayes, the brilliant editor of Esquire in its glory days of the sixties, sent us there to write about Ruby. Ovid was a former police reporter who knew Dallas well. Hayes admired his ability to get interviews with elusive characters but did not think he wrote very well. Hayes believed that if anyone could arrange an interview with Ruby, it was Ovid. Hayes’s plan was that Ovid would set up an interview with Ruby and I would conduct the interview and write it up. None of us knew, when this article was conceived, that Ruby was about to be diagnosed with terminal cancer and the authorities would cut off all access to him.
    I was still teaching Greek at Johns Hopkins, so the interview was supposed to be arranged for my Christmas break. Ovid had spent several weeks lining up his old contacts in Dallas. It soon became clear to him that we would not get to Ruby, but he did not want to tell Hayes that, since he was collecting a vast body of material—from a colorful cast of people who had known Ruby: from the Dallas establishment; from the city’s strip-joint underworld; from those who had participated in Ruby’s arrest and trial. He felt that, if I agreed with him, he could justify the project in ways that Hayes had not envisaged. I went to Dallas from Baltimore at the beginning of my extended Christmas break (Hopkins had a “minimester” before the resumption of regular classes). This was the first Christmas I would be away from my family. (The next one would also be caused by Hayes.) Ovid sat me down to hear tapes he had made with the district attorney and city prosecutor, with some of Ruby’s defense attorneys, with a motley assortment of businessmen (including Stanley Marcus), with strippers, police pals of Ruby, and others. Though Ovid had not got to Ruby, he seemed to have set up cordial relations with everybody who had anything to do with Ruby’s club life and shady acquaintances. He suggested I go see any of these people I thought promising for an article.
    I called Harold to see if he wanted an article of this sort. He did. When I turned in the article, it had just reached the point where Ruby was shooting Oswald. Harold told me to do another article to get Ruby through his arrest and trial. For this second article, I interviewed the prosecutors and defense attorneys in Dallas. Then, back in Baltimore, I read the trial transcript and all the volumes of the Warren Commission testimony on Kennedy’s assassination. When Tom Wolfe assembled an anthology of articles for his book The New Journalism, he wanted to include my account of the Ruby trial. But he showed me his introduction, where he said that, for the New Journalist, it was “all-important to be there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expression, the details of the environment.” 1 I pointed out that I was not at Ruby’s trial. He thought from the vividness of my account that I must have been. When he learned I was not, he included instead my account of Memphis after the shooting of Dr. King, where I had been present.
    Bill Alexander, the bright and sadistic prosecutor of Ruby, took great delight in tormenting Ruby’s main defense lawyer, Melvin Belli, the so-called King of Torts, whose San Francisco office pioneered medical-claims cases. Belli was so used to handling medical testimony that he began to think of himself as a doctor. For his Dallas case he