WHO WAS JACK RUBY?

Atlanta Constitution reporter Seth Kantor was in Dallas in 1963 covering President Kennedy, but he adds little to an already extensive bibliography on the assassination. The material is a jumble of names and places presented in a style that is directionless and sometimes repetitious. (Several times we are told that the Warren Commission tried to learn how Jack Ruby got into the basement of Dallas police headquarters, but not why.) Kantor also tells us that ""It has become fashionable among aficionados of the Warren Commission's investigation"" to assume that when Ruby testified about the ""Fox"" brothers of Miami, he really meant underworld figures Jake and Meyer Lansky. But Kantor's exhaustive search of old Miami phone directories revealed that there were indeed Fox brothers at the time specified by Ruby. The ""significance"" of this exercise, says Kantor, is to show that Ruby was ""rational"" during the investigation and should have been given more credence. Kantor points out Ruby's extensive underworld ties, his trips to Cuba, and the fact that links with exiled anti-Castro forces were ignored. In summation, he quotes from Robert Sam Anson's They've Killed the President, neatly describing ""the peculiar overlapping of interests that existed among the anti-Castro exiles, organized crime, and the Central Intelligence Agency"" in 1963, all opposed to Kennedy's Cuban policy. Unfortunately, Kantor's book substitutes verbiage for hot clues or sharp insight.