A Last Wish

Another chapter in the history of John F. Kennedy's assassination drew toward a close last week. Jack Ruby, whose conviction for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was struck down in October by the Texas Court of Appeals, lay incurably ill of cancer in Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital, to which he had been transferred from the Dallas County jail. The chances seemed remote that he would ever face his retrial, which is scheduled for February in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Coughing, vomiting and experiencing chest pains, Ruby at first received treatment for a virus at the jail, was hospitalized only after he assured Sheriff William Decker that he was feeling "not worth a damn." Though the precise source of Ruby's cancer remained undetermined, tests showed a malignancy in a lymph node in his neck and a cluster of nodules in the chest and lungs. So far advanced is the cancer that doctors ruled out surgery and radiation, instead gave Ruby regular intravenous doses of 5-fluorouracil, a drug that starves cancerous cells and, when successful, slows the deadly spread of the disease.

A pale, sunken shadow of his once robust self, Ruby continued to look back on the assassination even in his final illness. Though his claim has already been corroborated by two lie-detector tests, he wants to take another test, says his brother Earl, "so that people will be convinced that there was no plan on his part, or conspiracy of any kind," to kill Oswald. "There is nothing to hide," Ruby said last week. "There was no one else."

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