November 24, 1963: JFK's Apparent Assassin Is Killed On Live TV

November 24, 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested 2 days earlier for having assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit, is himself murdered in downtown Dallas, by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Oswald was 24 years old. It is the 1st murder ever shown on live American television.

A native of New Orleans, when Oswald was 12, a psychiatrist judged him to be "emotionally disturbed." He dropped out of school at age 17, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was twice court-martialed, but did receive a sniper's badge, and was honorably discharged in 1959. At that point, he defected to the Soviet Union. He married a Russian woman, Marina Prusakova, but became disillusioned with life under Communism, and returned to America, and settled in Dallas.

Presuming he was the lone assassin of JFK, we will never know what his motivation was. He was arrested at 1:50 PM Central Time (2:50 Eastern), an hour and 20 minutes after the shooting. He denied being the shooter, and said he was a "patsy."

Two days later, on November 24, he was being escorted from the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters to an armored car to the Dallas County Jail. At 11:21 AM (12:21 PM Eastern), he was about to be loaded into the back of the car, when a man in a suit and a hat walked up to him, shouted, "Oswald!" and fired one shot into his abdomen. One of the detectives recognized the shooter immediately, and yelled, "Jack, you son of a bitch!"

The crowd outside the Headquarters cheered when they heard Oswald was shot. He was taken to the same hospital where JFK was taken, Parkland Hospital. He was even pronounced dead at almost the same time: 1:07 PM, 7 minutes later than JFK was 2 days earlier.

The shooter was Jack Ruby, born Jacob Leon Rubinstein. The Jewish Chicago native owned a local nightclub, which featured strippers. He had organized crime contacts, which helped further conspiracy theories that the Mob was involved in the assassination, and that Ruby was sent to silence Oswald.

By his own admission, Ruby said he wanted to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the agony of sitting through a trial of her husband's killer. For that reason, or even just for killing Oswald, many Americans considered Ruby a hero. 

He was found guilty of the murder, and was sentenced to death. The executioner never got his chance: Ruby died of cancer on January 3, 1967 -- also at Parkland Hospital, under police guard. He was 55 years old.

Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald took the photo above, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for it.

As of November 24, 2022, Oswald's widow is still alive, living in Rockwall, Texas, having remarried, and using the name Marina Porter. Having previously testified to her husband's guilt before the Warren Commission, she has since said that she believes he was innocent.

Lee and Marina's elder daughter, Rachel, born in Moscow while her parents were living there, is a nurse. She once said, "Probably the only other people in America who have to routinely see film images of their father being killed are the children of President Kennedy. Kinda strange, huh?"

Their younger daughter, Audrey, was all of 35 days old when her father died. She was born at, you guessed it, Parkland Hospital. I can find no record of what Audrey does for a living. Both daughters have said that they have no memory of Lee Harvey Oswald, and consider Marina's 2nd husband to be their father.

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November 24, 1963 was a Sunday. When the announcement that JFK was dead reached us at 2:35 PM Eastern Time on November 22, it was a Friday afternoon, and decisions had to be made to play or postpone the following Sunday's professional football games.

The New York Giants and the New York Jets (known as the New York Titans from 1960 to 1962) were, from 1960 to 1969, in separate leagues. American Football League Commissioner Joe Foss was the leading Marine Corps flying ace of World War II (26 shootdowns), a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a Governor of South Dakota. His political career ended in 1958 when, rather than run for a 3rd term as Governor, he ran for Congress, and was defeated by another WWII pilot, bombardier George McGovern. After his tenure as AFL Commissioner, he became the President of the National Rifle Association. He died in 2003, age 84.

In 1993, interviewed by CBS Sports on the 30th Anniversary of the assassination, Foss made it clear: "The vote of the owners was unanimous: The show must not go on." Although he was a Republican (being rich guys, sports owners tend to be Republicans, even nice guys like Pittsburgh Steelers founder Art Rooney and his family who now run the team), Foss was an American first, and decided that the right way to honor the fallen President was to postpone that week's slate of AFL games.

The owners of the 8 teams the League then had all agreed: Lamar Hunt of the Kansas City Chiefs, Billy Sullivan of JFK's hometown Boston Patriots, Ralph Wilson of the Buffalo Bills, Gerald Phipps of the Denver Broncos, Bud Adams of the Houston Oilers, Wayne Valley of the Oakland Raiders, Barron Hilton of the San Diego Chargers, and Leon Hess and Sonny Werblin of the Jets.

So the 4 games scheduled for November 24 were pushed back to the next Sunday after the regular season ended, December 22. The Patriots and Bills were set for a bye week anyway, and finished their season on December 14. The Chiefs walloped the Jets, 48-0 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. The Raiders won a shootout with the Oilers, 52-49 at Frank Youell Field in Oakland. And the Chargers smacked the Broncos, 50-28 at Balboa Stadium in San Diego. The Chargers would annihilate the Patriots for the AFL Championship on January 4, 51-10 at Balboa Stadium. It remains San Diego's only major league sports title.

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The National Football League was a different story. Having less than 48 hours to decide, Pete Rozelle, in only his 4th season as Commissioner, made a phone call to Pierre Salinger, who had been his roommate at the University of San Francisco, and was now the White House Press Secretary and thus close to the Kennedy family. Salinger told Rozelle that JFK wouldn't have wanted the games canceled just because he was dead. So Rozelle announced that the games would go on.

Rozelle and Salinger were both still alive when CBS did that anniversary piece on the games that went on in 1993. Sam Huff, then one of the NFL's top defensive players with the Giants, soon to join the Washington Redskins, and later a longtime broadcaster for them, also sat for an interview for that piece. He still thought that letting the games be played was a mistake.

As the most famous living athlete in the State of West Virginia (even more, at that point, than basketball star Jerry West), he had campaigned with JFK in the 1960 West Virginia Primary, which was so crucial to his winning the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. In that CBS retrospective, Huff said, "I think it should have been Jackie's call."

Jacqueline Kennedy was truly remarkable in how she put her husband's funeral together under the most trying of circumstances. But, at that point, I don't think she would have given a damn whether football games were played that Sunday or not.

And in that retrospective, they included an interview done with Rozelle upon his retirement as Commissioner in 1989. In it, he admitted that letting the games be played was his biggest mistake on the job. Rozelle died in 1996, age 70.

For his role in refusing to postpone the games, for his suspensions for that season of superstars Paul Hornung and Alex Karras for gambling, and for his ability to make the NFL more popular than ever in spite of the rise of the AFL, Rozelle was named Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated. He remains the only chief executive of one of the "big four" sports so honored by SI.

Most of these helmets are still recognizable.

The red one near the top is for the Washington Redskins.

The Los Angeles Rams' helmet is barely visible at the bottom.

On the 50th Anniversary of the decision, I did a "Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame" on the subject for my regular blog, Uncle Mike's Musings. My reasons were:

5. Timing. Rozelle had under 48 hours to make the choice. He said that some of the teams were already on, or getting on, the airplanes that would take them to the cities where their games had been scheduled. Had the shooting happened the day before, Thursday, it might have been a different story. Rozelle had to make a decision on the fly -- almost literally.

He also said that, had either the Redskins (of the city where the funeral would be held) or the Cowboys (of the city where the assassination took place) been playing at home, he might have thought differently. Instead, the Redskins were in Philadelphia to play the Eagles, and the Cowboys were in Cleveland to play the Browns.

4. The Kennedy Mystique. Football had been the Kennedy family's game. From Bobby and Ted making the Harvard varsity to the touch football games at Hyannis and Palm Beach, they reveled in the sport. It was a tribute to them.

3. Official Recognition. Sam Huff had a point: Jackie Kennedy giving Rozelle the go-ahead would have been better, having more moral authority, than Pierre Salinger giving it. Nevertheless, word had been received from the White House, from someone that JFK trusted.

Indeed, the next season, Bobby visited the locker room at an Eagles game, and quarterback King Hill, a Texas native, remembered, "He came into our locker room, and went around shaking our hands. He said he appreciated us playing the games that weekend." If that's how RFK handled it, that makes it quite hard to imagine JFK, or Jackie for that matter, saying, "Don't play the games."

2. The Games Weren't Televised. CBS, then the NFL's sole carrier, went all-Kennedy-all-the-time, and didn't even send broadcast crews to the stadiums. When Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby, it was caught live on TV, when the pregame show would otherwise have been on the air.

The games were filmed by NFL Films, which caught a banner outside Yankee Stadium saying, "Kennedy dead, the game goes on, shame." But anybody who was watching TV that weekend was watching funeral coverage, not football.

1. People Wanted a Distraction. I talked to someone who was a senior at East Brunswick High when it happened, and he told me that playing those games was the best thing that could have been done. For 3 hours, people could think about something other than the saddest thing that had ever happened to their country in their lifetimes.

Under a million people actually went to the games, but a few million listened on the radio, including many around here who listened to the Giants on WNEW, 1130 AM. The actual funeral would be the next day, Monday, November 25, and the people could pay proper respect that day.

Here's the results of the NFL games for November 24, 1963:

* The Giants were upset by the St. Louis Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals), 24-17, at Yankee Stadium.

Giants players, and the Yankee Stadium flag at half-staff

* The Redskins upset the Eagles, 13-10, at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. Hall of Fame Redskin flanker Bobby Mitchell later said the sound of the game was weird, very muted, and that the players on both sides seemed to just be going through the motions.

* The Browns beat the Cowboys, 27-17, at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. In a gesture that may shock Northern Ohioans, used to seeing him as a rotten person, Browns owner Art Modell asked the public-address announcer to refer to the visitors as simply "the Cowboys," and not mention the name "Dallas," for fear of retribution against the representatives of the city where the President had been murdered.

* The Steelers and the Chicago Bears played to a 17-17 tie in Pittsburgh. The game was sold out, although that wasn't hard, as Forbes Field only had 35,000 seats. The Bears would go on to beat the Giants in the NFL Championship Game, 14-10 at Wrigley Field on December 29.

* The Green Bay Packers beat the San Francisco 49ers, 28-10, at Milwaukee County Stadium, where the Packers played 2 home games a year from 1953 to 1977, and 3 a year from 1978 to 1994. Perhaps because the Packers were 120 miles from their Green Bay base, this was one of 3 games not sold out that day.

* The Los Angeles Rams beat the Baltimore Colts, 17-16 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Because the Coliseum then seated about 100,000 people, this one was not a sellout. Jack Pardee of the Rams, a Texan, would later say that his car, which had Texas plates, had been vandalized.

* And the Minnesota Vikings beat the Detroit Lions, 34-31, at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota. This was the other non-sellout.

There were 2 games played in the NHL on this day. The New York Rangers and the Toronto Maple Leafs played to a tie, 3-3 at the old Madison Square Garden. And the Chicago Black Hawks beat the Montreal Canadiens, 7-3 at the Chicago Stadium. The Boston Bruins and the Detroit Red Wings were not scheduled.

And 1 game was played in the NBA. The Cincinnati Royals beat the St. Louis Hawks, 122-113 at the Cincinnati Gardens. Oscar Robertson scored 32 points.