JFK: The Ruby Connection

[Jim Root]

Hi Pat

I'm not interested in entering into a dicussion about your thoughts on Gary Mack, they seem to be very clear, but I would like to share my own experiences with the man for what it is worth.

Gary Mack has taken the time to respond to every question that I have asked of him. He has been both gracious with his time and his encouragment in my research efforts. He has never offered opinions and has been clear that he attempts to refrain from dealing speculative opinions. Mack instead makes available a huge cache of materials and willingly provides both access and help in attaining that access by making suggestions about related materials that may be of interest to the areas that I have researched. From several hours of one on one discussion with him I believe he is sincere in his efforts to provide researchers with access to the hugh amount of materials available within the facility he opperates and is helpful in providing access to and direction toward materials beyond the walls of his own facility as well.

While this is only my opinion, I also believe that Gary Mack would be very interested in a proveable theory that would expose a conspiracy in the death of John F. Kennedy (elusive over the past 46 years). It is also my own opinion (from my exchanges with him) that Gary Mack is not interested in another conspiracy theory that is held together by opinion and speculation rather than bonded together with documented facts.

Gary Mack seems, once again in my opinion, to set a very high standard for the "facts" that he accepts and the penetrating questions and helpful information he has provided to me has led me to become very careful in deciding what I accept as a fact as opposed to what I understand is speculation within the theory that I continue to develop. Supporting speculation with provable, documented facts is a difficult stantard but one that must be maintained if we ever wish to uncover a "real" truth behind the assassination of JFK.

Although I have not done so recently, in the past, it has been a joy to "bounce" information off of Gary Mack and in having to defend the information that I have gathered, test the credibility of my own research.

I look forward to and hope to be better prepared for the next opportunity I have to meet with Gary mack and share my newest documented research.

Jim Root

[Pat Speer]

Hi Pat

I'm not interested in entering into a dicussion about your thoughts on Gary Mack, they seem to be very clear, but I would like to share my own experiences with the man for what it is worth.

Gary Mack has taken the time to respond to every question that I have asked of him. He has been both gracious with his time and his encouragment in my research efforts. He has never offered opinions and has been clear that he attempts to refrain from dealing speculative opinions. Mack instead makes available a huge cache of materials and willingly provides both access and help in attaining that access by making suggestions about related materials that may be of interest to the areas that I have researched. From several hours of one on one discussion with him I believe he is sincere in his efforts to provide researchers with access to the hugh amount of materials available within the facility he opperates and is helpful in providing access to and direction toward materials beyond the walls of his own facility as well.

While this is only my opinion, I also believe that Gary Mack would be very interested in a proveable theory that would expose a conspiracy in the death of John F. Kennedy (elusive over the past 46 years). It is also my own opinion (from my exchanges with him) that Gary Mack is not interested in another conspiracy theory that is held together by opinion and speculation rather than bonded together with documented facts.

Gary Mack seems, once again in my opinion, to set a very high standard for the "facts" that he accepts and the penetrating questions and helpful information he has provided to me has led me to become very careful in deciding what I accept as a fact as opposed to what I understand is speculation within the theory that I continue to develop. Supporting speculation with provable, documented facts is a difficult stantard but one that must be maintained if we ever wish to uncover a "real" truth behind the assassination of JFK.

Although I have not done so recently, in the past, it has been a joy to "bounce" information off of Gary Mack and in having to defend the information that I have gathered, test the credibility of my own research.

I look forward to and hope to be better prepared for the next opportunity I have to meet with Gary mack and share my newest documented research.

Jim Root

Jim, I have defended Gary many times over the years, so much so that people have actually created threads questioning my credibility, reasoning that anyone defending Gary must be a disinformationist. I thought such talk was nonsense until last year. In Inside the Target Car, Gary shot down speculation that the fatal head shot came from the front by claiming it would have hit Jackie. This wasn't true. Most everyone who's researched this case more than a minute knows it isn't true. After the program aired, Gary admitted this mistake, but tried to pass it off as the innocent mistake of an underling. It was HIS mistake. He's the one who announced, on camera, that a shot from the fence would have killed Jackie. A few months back, someone contacted him about this and the story got even more bizarre. Now he claimed he caught the mistake before the program aired but that it was too late to get it changed. He failed to see that this was actually worse.

I mean, think about it. The producers of a supposedly objective program examining certain issues discover that the reason cited on air for rejecting a popular scenario is completely bogus, but choose to LET IT RUN ANYHOW. They have thus made the choice to KNOWINGLY DECEIVE people, rather than honestly explore the issue, just so they can wrap their program in a neat little bow, and SELL that the head shot came from behind. (A conclusion I pretty much agree with, BTW.)

And yet Gary did nothing to warn the research community that this conscious deception was going to occur, and continues to defend the program.

As far as your suggestion that Gary is a careful researcher, I wish this were true. He has claimed on air that the first shot missed, a la the scenarios pushed by Posner, Myers, and Bugliosi. The first shot miss is a completely preposterous proposition entirely at odds with the evidence. Anyone pushing this on the public is not a careful researcher.

[Greg Parker]

Here is another well reasoned review:

http://www.ctka.net/2009/ruby_mack.html

[Michael Hogan]

Vince Bugliosi on Gary Mack:

"And then there is Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas and a student of the assassination since 1975. Gary carries in his head an enormous wealth of knowledge about the case - much of it not the type one would find in the Warren Report or the report of the HSCA - which he is generous to share with whoever asks. If I called Gary once in the past years, I called him thirty times, always for his input in some arcane issue and nearly always he was able to help me, for which I am, of course, very appreciative and indebted. I also want to thank Gary's research colleague, fellow Texan David Perry, a former insurance investigator from Grapevine, Texas, who was also very helpful to me on the many occasions I called him for assistance. Dave has made a specialty out of debunking (sometimes in league with Mack) people like Ricky White and Madeleine Brown who come out of the woodwork with their phony assassination-related tales. The story I like to tell about David is the time I found a reference to a nut in a conspiracy book, one I had never heard of before and about whom there was no reference in any other book on the assassination that I was aware of. I called Dave to find out what he knew about the kook and his allegation, but a small part of me was hoping that Dave, too, had never heard of him, enabling me to say to him, 'I finally found a nut you've never heard of.' But before I could even get the second syllable of the man's name out of my mouth, Dave started bombarding me with a blizzard of information on him. He knew all about this guy and his allegation and had already debunked the man's story."

and

"One of the most bizarre stories that has emerged in assassination literature comes from a respected conspiracy theorist (there is such a species, although rare), the aforementioned Gary Mack. The former program director of radio station KFJZ in Fort Worth, Mack, since 1994, has been the curator at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Although Mack, who has been an assassination researcher since 1975, tends to believe in a conspiracy, he is respected by both sides in the debate, and as opposed to 95 percent of his colleagues, you can engage in a spirited give-and-take exchange with him with neither side becoming incoherent."

From Pat Speer's post:

PS: NO mention of Ruby's assertion to Warren that the truth would not be known unless Warren brought him to Washington, and that Warren refused to bring him to Washington.

GM: Had you been an expert, you’d know that that old excuse was exploded decades ago. So he goes to Washington, spills the beans, THEN goes back to Dallas? How does that change anything? It doesn’t save his life. It doesn’t do anything.

Exploded years ago? By whom? Mack offers not a scintilla of evidence for that claim.

In his book Moment of Madness (Follett Publishing 1968) Elmer Gertz could only weakly offer that Ruby was "mentally incompetent" and "delusional" when he testified.

Years later, Bugliosi could do little better than claim that "Ruby's mental infirmity seemed to deteriorate quickly into a pathological paranoia following his arrest and incarceration for Oswald's murder.

Being 'deprived of the Preludin and Benzedrine that he had come to know so well added to the decline of his mental state.'

That's the best Bugliosi could do to explain Ruby's pleas to Chief Justice Earl Warren. Perhaps he should have consulted Gary Mack one more time.

Mack seems to believe that JFK: The Ruby Connection was a fair and unbiased documentary debunking possible conspiracy angles pertaining to Jack Ruby.

Weakly defending the show via private emails seems to be the best he can do.

Mack reminds one of a presidential historian that can name every President's birthplace, the date when they were born, how they died and other esoterica,

but has no idea about their foreign policies.

Edited December 5, 2009 by Michael Hogan

[Don Jeffries]

Great post, Mike. In the last email exchange I had with Gary, I explained that since he is now really the only critic who has a public forum (as witnessed by his extensive on-air involvement with so many t.v. specials over the past few years), he has a responsibility to question some of the more impossible tenets of the official story, since he has spent so much time questioning various aspects of "conspiracy theories." Gary still maintained (at least then) in private that he believed there was a conspiracy. As I told him then, if that's the case, why does everything you utter on air dismiss "conspiracy theories" and support the official version of events?

This latest television fiasco should remove any doubt from anyone's mind that Gary Mack is now a full-fledged lone nutter, with a clear agenda to defend the lone assassin fairy tale. As Jim D. pointed out so well in his review of the program, how can a documentary about the shooting of Oswald ignore all the countless indicators that Ruby acted in order to silence him? Is the "Ruby acted on impulse, not on orders" theory now going to become part of the neo-con platform?

[Pat Speer]

Great post, Mike. In the last email exchange I had with Gary, I explained that since he is now really the only critic who has a public forum (as witnessed by his extensive on-air involvement with so many t.v. specials over the past few years), he has a responsibility to question some of the more impossible tenets of the official story, since he has spent so much time questioning various aspects of "conspiracy theories." Gary still maintained (at least then) in private that he believed there was a conspiracy. As I told him then, if that's the case, why does everything you utter on air dismiss "conspiracy theories" and support the official version of events?

This latest television fiasco should remove any doubt from anyone's mind that Gary Mack is now a full-fledged lone nutter, with a clear agenda to defend the lone assassin fairy tale. As Jim D. pointed out so well in his review of the program, how can a documentary about the shooting of Oswald ignore all the countless indicators that Ruby acted in order to silence him? Is the "Ruby acted on impulse, not on orders" theory now going to become part of the neo-con platform?

Jim D has added to his review of The Ruby Connection a reaction to Gary Mack's email.

The Ruby Connection Part 3