Oswald, Ruby, and Women

Here’s an obvious statement: Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald have countless differences. Not many people compare them at all and simply see Jack Ruby as the assassin of Lee Oswald, the assassin of JFK. However, with our past two in-class discussions, I started to see many similarities in the way that Ruby and Oswald interacted with people around them. Specifically, their interactions with the women in their lives were extremely ambiguous and confusing for me, so I write this in hopes that their reasonings for this ambiguity become clearer.

In the chapter “12 August”, we met Jack Ruby, who (we know because we are informed civilians) is the person who shot Lee Oswald. We first hear him mentioned by two of the strippers that work at his club, the Carousel Club. Lynette mentions that he has heard that he calls girls “dumb c****” and threatens them. Brenda/Baby LeGrand denies that he would ever physically harm his dancers. Later on, they see him outside the window throwing out a man for inappropriately grabbing one of his dancers, showing his willingness to step up for the respect of the strippers that work for him. Already, this is a confusing aspect of Jack. He calls his strippers awful names and threatens to harm them, which definitely is mentally detrimental to them. However, he makes an effort to protect these women against club visitors who seem to violate/physically grab them. Jack Ruby seems to be violent and maniacal with a quick temper but uses it for the protection of the women that work for him. To add to this, he has this strange affection for the police, bringing sandwiches and offering free drinks to the “boys in blue”, although he is constantly teetering the border between legal and illegal with his strip club. The ambiguity of his actions is extremely confusing.

However, Lee Oswald is also quite ambiguous in how he presents himself. As we discussed in the chapter “In Dallas”, it seems as though Lee’s perception of his and Marina’s relationship is ever-changing. He held back telling Bobby about Marina and “how much he missed her and needed her and how it made him angry” (page 271). However, he quite obviously abuses her when he does get time with her, hitting her in front of people “because the zipper on the side of her skirt was partly open” (page 286). He made her write to the Soviet embassy in Washington in hopes that she would get sent back to the USSR (in hopes to achieve “pure revolutionary” perspective?? Oswald, what?). Oswald shows that he is able to show his control over Marina as one part of his life that he can control, even if his plans don’t follow through (like only brushing General Walker with the bullet or getting fired from his job).

Putting these two characters together, we see that they both have some sort of longing for control in their lives, which they are able to find in objectifying the women around them. However, they both also hold some sort of affection for these women, Lee “needing” Marina when she is away and Jack throwing out male club visitors who grab the strippers. But even in these instances, we never are able to see reasoning clearly - the meaning of “need” for Lee is never clarified; is he really missing Marina as a human being and his soulmate or is it him being away from sexual intercourse that makes him “need” her? And for Jack - is he throwing them out because he actually cares about the strippers’ safety and moral values, despite calling them names and threatening them at times, or is he showcasing his masculinity to the general public by using and acting upon uncomfortable situations in which his workers are grabbed inappropriately?

If anything can be concluded, it’s that both Lee and Jack’s ambiguity in their actions towards the females in their lives must create mental instability for these women, and that they care more about the public presentation of their own reputation than the women themselves. Oswald hit her in public because her fly was partially down, showing strangers that he had control over her. Ruby threw out a man in public to (seem like he needed to) protect a worker. They both seem to care about how other people perceived their "handling" of these women's situations... And to address a question brought up in class today of “who’s the good guy” - I think it’s safe to say that the answer is neither when it comes to basing it on their understanding of morality towards females.