If you were around on November 24, 1963, chances are you were watching TV and might have seen the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald as it happened, that Sunday morning long ago.
It's probably one of the worst bungles in police history. The Dallas PD, having arrested Oswald as the assassin of John F. Kennedy and a Dallas patrolman, needed to transfer Oswald from their headquarters to the Dallas County jail. Did they do so in the night with no media or rogue nightclub operators hanging around the loading area? They did not. They attempted to move the killer in broad daylight in the eyes of the world, allowing Jack Ruby to step out of the crowd and shot LHO.
Why they even allowed a goofball like that in the building is a good question, and you can take it up with any conspiracy theorist.
My focus is on the man in the tan suit and the cowboy hat. He's someone I figured had gone on long, long ago, but actually, we just lost him last Thursday morning at age 99.
99!
His name was James Leavelle, and he had gone to Colorado to celebrate his 99th birthday with his family, said his granddaughter, Kate Griendling.
"We put 99 candles on his birthday cake and blew them all out and just had a great time," Griendling told WFAA TV in Dallas. "But he fell Monday and broke his hip. He was taken to the hospital and died from a massive heart attack this morning."
Bob Jackson is the photographer who was in place to take pictures of Oswald being moved, and wound up getting this unforgettable photo of the shooting.
No one could blame Leavelle for the amazing ineptitude of the Dallas PD, and he was always willing to recount the day in interviews.
"Actually, on that particular day I was supposed to have a day off more or less,” he told WFAA in 2007. "[Oswald] was very polite to me, answering my questions without fussing or anything. The only mistake he made was one question I asked about shooting the officer. He said, 'I didn't shoot anybody.'"
"I had to get him ready for the transfer,” Leavelle told WFAA. "He wanted to put on that black slip-over sweater that he had on. I let him put that on. As he was putting it on, I said to him, 'Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they're as good a shot as you are, meaning they would hit him and not me.'"
"He said, 'Oh, nobody's going to shoot at me,’” Leavelle said. "I said I'm going to handcuff myself to him. If anybody tries to take him, they've got to take me too and I'm not going to go quietly. They're going to have a little problem on their hands."
Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein in Chicago) ran nightclubs and strip joints and was known to curry the favor of police in his businesses. In return, he was granted tacit approval to indulge his habit of hanging around police stations and being part of the crowd there. Still, there was no sensible reason to have a petty thug like him in the place. But he was there with the photographers and reporters when Leavelle appeared with Oswald handcuffed to him. Ruby then stepped up and shot Oswald in the torso.
“He went completely blank," Leavelle said. "Instantly. He was out by the time he hit the floor" and "never regained consciousness."
Some might have thought that Leavelle would bear the blame for not protecting his prisoner, but of course that would be unreasonable: the blame went to the person who turned the move of a person who killed a president into an open-air free event. In fact, the DPD later created an award to honor their top detective of the year, and named it for Det. Leavelle.
And in one of the those Paul Harvey moments, history shows us that Leavelle was there at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and survived that attack as well. So he had brushes with both death and history, and went to to thrive for almost a century.
The stories he could tell are now being told elsewhere.
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